merxa wrote: ↑Tue Apr 26, 2022 6:47 pm
I spent some time going over the summoner class -- thanks for posting something substantial here.
I appreciate you taking the time to look it over.
Superficially, my max summons cr is much higher, especially at later levels, but you don't have any time limits from what I see on the summons
Correct, the summoner's summoned creature has no time limit. While a summoner could not have a creature out, my presumption regarding how it would be played is that they will always have a summon out in situations where a summon would be relevant. 5e concentration doesn't interact with the action economy in any way, you either are concentrating on something or not, so seemed a reasonable approach.
I'm not great at math so the function of your schedule isn't immediately apparent to me, starting at the level 3 | CR 1 ratio, you begin providing +1,+0,+1,+1,+0,+1,+1,+0 etc, I think that comes out to +~.67 CR per level.
I don't use strict math formulae for my progressions, I typically just eyeball things. In this case, the main drivers were balancing what felt like appropriate CR with a given level, and the desire for high-level summoners to be able to use charizard from the pokemon 5e conversions I wanted to use for this class in my games, as pointed out in one of the sidebars.
It is worth noting your Anima class feature can provide a significant boost to a summons, raising AC, hp, damage, speed, etc, which could conceivably bump a creature by +1 CR, and some strong interactions could bump that even higher, +2, maybe (and I think at most) +3 CR -- the anima adjustment is probably enough to say our scheduling is very similar, at least in some cases.
I highly disagree with your assessment here. While at lower levels, sure, the anima bumps to damage, AC, or HP may be enough to change a given creature's CR, it really doesn't have that much of an impact at higher levels. It still has an effect, of course, and given bounded accuracy the AC bonus is always relevant, but once you get past 5th or so I doubt the summoner can significantly alter a creature enough to jack its CR.
I think the most glaring and frustrating mechanical drawback of your class is here, in some situations it can be hard to maintain concentration, and there can be moments where a summon spends a bonus action to get control of its creature, then gets struct and loses concentration, meaning next turn they need to spend another bonus action, and their summons hasn't been able to act.
This is a good point. As stated, my general assumption is that the summoner will have a creature out and concentrated upon in situations where a summon would be useful, but in situations where control is lost, burning a bonus action to reassert control only for that to have no effect is shitty.
Requiring concentration seemed like a reasonable balance point, but the more I think about it, and some of the other thoughts here regarding just being able to recruit NPCs or animal companions, it may be too punishing. I'll need to ponder on it more.
Requiring concentration also ensure the summoner will practically never cast spells that require concentration.
Most cantrips don't require concentration, so a moot point.
The summoner can cast a few cantrips, and gets a very slow spell progression.
Only one subclass gets an actual spell progression, and it is misleading because I condensed spells from across 9 levels to 6.
There's some entries about fighting styles, and it implies people are multiclassing possibly with this class?
Multiclassing is dumb and a massive lie, I don't use it at my tables. The bit about fighting styles is included because (1) when these projects are complete I intend to release them into the wild, where people are stupid and think multiclassing is functional, and (2) because I am condensing in rules regarding ASIs from a couple different sources.
I'm not seeing too much the class can contribute on its own.
That is the general notion behind my pet classes: the character itself doesn't bring much to the table, necessarily, but is guaranteed to have some kind of interesting pet that might be able to do weird shit, and usually has a stable of them so can pick and choose the right tool for the job.
That said, this thread has made me begin reconsidering that position, and I an contemplating by default giving all my pet classes a minor spell progression.
in an extreme situation my subclass summoner could have all at the same time: a true companion that is always around, a summons thats around either a few rounds of combats or an hour, stay on the battlefield, and be concentrating on a summons spell for more creatures, and possibly have some undead from animate dead, which would in total be a rather large force if all those things aligned.
At the end of the day, I'm not interested in setting things up such where a character can have a bear companion, summon a bunch of bears, and (effectively) turn into a giant bear, all at the same time. Not only is it ridiculous, but it also fucks with the game in ways that are unpleasant, both in terms of mechanics and flow at the table.
Especially in 5e, where bounded accuracy means that just having more low-CR bodies around does have the potential to actually contribute meaningfully to a combat. All of my pet classes are restricted to one pet at a time, with one exception whose gimmick is the ability to have multiple creatures out, and that one is proving to be a bit of a bitch to balance because of it.
Overall, I think your class isn't powerful enough, I think if you had a better spell progression that would change, whether your class should be a full progression caster, I'm not sure, but I'd probably still start there though.
While I am considering making my pet classes partial casters, again largely because of the things brought up in this thread, I see no reason to make them full casters.
The other issue for me is the way in which you allow versatility encourages the player to go dumpster diving for this or that particular summons, and the wide creature types makes it more likely the summoner might find a combination that's more disruptive than intended or desired. For example, the stone warrior CR 4 (so comes online at 7) is immune to non-magical attacks that aren't made of adamantine, which could conceivably be disruptive at some tables or at a tabling running a particular module.
My summoner class is a bad example for this because, in my mind, it is specifically balanced with using 5e pokemon conversions, and nothing else. One of the sidebars even specifically calls out that if you use the class without that in mind, I'm not responsible for whatever stupidity happens. The guidelines I put in for limiting what you can choose as a summon were done admittedly haphazardly because there will always be random low-CR creatures that punch way above their weight class for no good fucking reason, and I'm not going to take responsibility for WotC doing stupid shit.
I explicitly let the GM decide what is summoned in a blind summons scenario and otherwise the GM would need to have set the monster down in some sort of encounter. A PC could also go questing for a particular creature, but that still hands it off to the GM to decide (which can of course cause its own problems).
For a pet class to be effective and fulfill the class fantasy, the character has to be able to just have whatever is thematically appropriate, full stop. Putting that sort of thing in the hands of the GM is asking for trouble, IMO.