Summon Monster - The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

hello hey twitch welcome back to the mic Merle’s happy fun hour I am your host Mike morals I am the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons and this week we have something kind of fun to talk about so they call me Tim you took dad to off took time off work early for this why hope it lives up to it because I think this is gonna be really fun so the last week we did some monsters before that we did some monsters and week before that we did psionics and as part of psionics we talked about doing class the shaper that could create like creatures kind of like something so the I was thinking a lot about summoning and if you remember right I was looking at the summoning spells like like the casting time is often like a minute and it seems kind of random what you get and so I decided hey would it be interesting to try to tackle somebody named there’s sort of a different route the we all said a bunch of announcements yesterday rabbinic and Oberon so that’s all I get me excited and I’ve got this so in chat if you guys have questions about ever on it in rabbika I don’t wanna try to hit them here because I want to focus on what I’m doing game design wise here feel free to get me on Twitter I’m at Mike Merle’s or if you have questions they go ahead and chat just talk amongst ourselves I’m gonna try not to dwell on those though because I don’t want I know some people they call me tomu took time walk off work early for this hopefully this being the design of summoning and pet stuff so I don’t want to like it too distracted and if you’ve watched the stream you know I’m easily distracted I am actually chaotic neutral that is my actual alignment so I don’t want to go wandering off too far but um yeah so if you’ve got questions feel free to hit me up on Twitter and obviously in Chad just just chat if you guys our questions answered back and forth I don’t want to go too uh we should we should probably do something on settings and stuff at some point but the I don’t want to go too far off so game Phantom DM we are back on the Sion somewhat indirectly because I think we’re going to spend the entire hour talking about summoning and then indirectly talking about pets and how those can work because I wanted the I wanted to make sure the soundex worked really well with this idea of summoning and creating you know creatures with sonic energy and it’s obviously sending them out your enemies having them do stuff you know a summoning approach it’s a bit more flexible than what’s in the players in book right now kind of tank with the idea of actually building a druid subclass the shaman to show this off but I don’t think we need to do that because I think we just need to walk through how I want to approach something lying faith question here will there be more key in warlock spell casting classes respects maybe um the probably those will just end up within those classes the monk using key the warlock using ink you know a short rest recharge on spell slots we definitely have a real compelling reason to build an entire new class when that chassis is already there often we can get that effect by using with subclasses even within other classes so and this is something here where this is gonna work within our spell slot system so I’m gonna address it purely with in terms of just a generic summoning spell and what that might mean so the game phantom this is more like a new spell that would just slot straight into the game it exists so it’s gonna be we’ll see it’s not really it’s not meant to replace what’s in there in the players handbook it’s make to complement because it’s gonna take a little bit of a different approach so you can see looming behind my head and coming into view is this spreadsheet I poked away at this last night because I had this really useful potentially we’ll see chat you might hate this then well no it’s not useful but this revelation about summoning and there’s a table the Dungeon Master’s guide that it’s this table right here coincidentally enough I happen to have a copy on my desktop the that tells you what I spell slot of a given level is worth in terms of damage and what is interesting here is that this doesn’t apply just damage it applies to healing and so I was stuck in traffic yesterday I’m thinking about this and it’s really hot up here in Seattle and I’m stuck in traffic cuz I completely screwed up and went the wrong way there’s a street shutdown and for some reason I’m driving toward that Street rather than away from it because I’m just being stupid and I realized wait a second these dimmers also apply to healing healing does just hit points coming back into the system and the characters who can think of it as a system of hit points they take damage hit points get knocked out we throw a healing spell we put it spit points back in your maximum hit points are sort of your ceiling you can’t get too many hit points pop a blob well these could just be the hit dice or hit points for a summoned creature and then some of those dice could just be the damage that that summoned creature does and since remember when we were talking about monsters we said look really we kind of expect a fight to last for three rounds three rounds is long enough that it can feature multiple abilities off work off a character or monster it’s short enough that it feels kind of predictable we can just take your top three most powerful things once a fight goes to four more rounds there’s enough randomness and you’re probably dealing with a big in a fight and big enough area that’s it starts to if you try to model that out too precisely you just end up with very very scripted feeling system so we just really look at your top three things and go from there well that’s actually kind of a nice thing because I only have to worry about those first three rounds of damage if you get more rounds that’s just bonus you know well played so what we’re looking at and rad like asks the question how do we use multiple summons love bogging down the action economy I try to think of that too and I think I have an answer but we’ll see we’ll see we’ll see so okay the what this revelation meant was you could take a first level spell slot and say hey this could summon a creature that has one D ten hit points that’s it’s hid died and over the course of three rounds does a total of one D ten damage no that’s a that’s like whoa hey that could totally work no that’s kind of a lame creature though right one D ten damage it’s like five point five on the average over three rounds that’s less than two points of damage great I summon something with like sixty points that if it hits those two points of damage hurray summoning right like that that’s not exciting then I thought of sanics we’ve talked about Sonic’s being able to label ladle on more slots on two one effect to change it make it more powerful so what if we instead said hey I want some of the creatures so I spend a first little spell slot to create that creature summon it it’s kind of weak it’s whatever it is it’s got one D 10 hit died and it’s doing two dansk around then I threw another switch first of all spell slot on it to augment it now maybe it’s doing four damage per round it has 11 hit points instead of five five or six and then it started to make sense to me okay so I have a creature I’m summoning and I can just put more spell slots into it to make it more powerful just like we talked about doing with psyonix right I have a if you’ve missed the sonic streams we talked about doing was having this set of can trips that required concentration and while you’re concentrating on that can trip you can expend spell slots to generate new effects either completely new effects or in this case I might have a canned trip level summon is my imaginary friend so I kind of thought of it shows up and then I spend my spell slots to get my imaginary friend more hit points and better attack give him special effects or benefits things like that so there we go yeah and Mad Hatter up yet and this is probably some sort of bonus action effect right like I just do it ladle it on top but also I’m doing my critter runs and does things and I’m still using spells because this takes concentration I’m not I don’t have the full access to everything I could do and there we go it starts to keep things a little bit simpler and then since I’m expending my spell slots there’s a clear cost for this if I just want to summon a monster in our creature whatever and say hey I just want you to block this door if remember we talked about this last week this is one of the over couple weeks ago the the real tricky thing about pets and monsters is battlefield control it’s not necessarily the damage output it’s not necessarily you know the effects they bring with them though it can be if there’s that does happen but the real thing that happens is you can summon a creature and then just block off part of an encounter area you can you know you can summon a creature to have a ghost scout ahead you can have it summon a creature have a ghost set off a trap and it’s a it’s a 10 D 10 damage trap well my three hit points summon creature goes triggers it gets killed whatever is just a personal spell side I don’t care I move on the and that’s kind of what okay so this is actually now there is more of a cost to it rather than what is maybe happen if something in the past so going back the trap example what you might do is I’m gonna summon eight little creatures now I’ve got eight little trap trigger guys I can deploy the next eight traps we are we have a get-out-of-jail-free cards for them so this is a way in which hopefully we can make summoning really fun and compelling but happy appropriately costed and then what I actually like about is I thought about it you know that emotional level of the design and playtesting will tell will tell us if this actually works but I like this idea that I summon a thing and then it’s like I have a relationship with it I can give it abilities its Politan really hurts well I’m gonna spend a spell slot to give it some more hit dice that’ll increase its maximum and current hit points that’s why I imagine so my summon creatures guarding the doorway and the orcs trying to batter through and he gets really beaten up okay great my turn bonus action either a third level slot on it give him five D ten more hit points and then I fire bolt the orc in the face is trying to get through you know things like that and then my summon creature takes his turn and smacks the orc you know things like that so that is kind of the idea here that could also apply to a pet creature though I’m not gonna worry about the pet right now I really want to focus on the summoning somebody and how that might work so what I think this is to start with I’m gonna make a spell so but I haven’t made a spell on stream before and I don’t like making us what I don’t like that only it’s not expensive I’ll be honest with you had only designing spells so that spells the game’s like hundreds of them why do I need more right the the incremental benefit of one spell when you’ve like 5,000 in the game is just tiny right compared to like adding a new class we only have like twelve so but we’ll do this and I’m gonna kind of write this out I have my word document here what I want to do is call up DNA beyond because when you’re designing something we never we never assume we remember we always assume we’re gonna forget so we always go back and we look at what exists and make sure we’re getting it right so what I want to do here is just look at all my spells I’m just gonna grab a summoning spell at random right well nice things on Deenie beyond is that I can go to my advanced filters go to tags and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a summoning tag handily and quite usefully added and then I’ll just come down here and go both my spells let’s see what we got all right and so I’m gonna grab now want this be a bonus action no there’s no bonus action summoning spells in the game right now so I’m just going to grab the closest element I’m gonna stay away from the the grave the demon spells just cuz I know those come with a cost the so I’m gonna throw up here and go hey look we got Condor animals is one action great boom so I’m gonna use this as my guide now make this at the actually wearing two columns so we should be fine okay I’m gonna try to keep an eye on where my head is so actually know what I’ll just reverse these because the spell is not as important as the so what I want I’m just gonna call this monster summoning or I guess we do like verb than thing that’s coming out of it so I’m now gonna murder our format because I forget what the actual format looks like the I’ll clean it up so summon monster this is when you spell that scales up just like a lot of our spells do we imagine miss a lot of that connect spells come in at low levels and scale up this would be the same thing the you know actually it’s really fun to consider like this format is not the permit we use in our book so I’m just gonna make something up the information is going up on screen will see it it’s it’s cool I’m a professional don’t worry the is I find it weird sorry the comic tome and see this is funny once i like call it someone like i keep seeing the thing yeah psychokinesis Terkel apathy those are act we did touch on those the question is why haven’t i touched those yet those when we did do the wizard one i touched on that a bit it’s interesting cuz it’s not really something that is like massively new but it gets into the what i want to talk in with sign axes like this solve summoning solve the things that are like we can’t do right now then everything else will fall into place so the only take a quick looks you have any questions so far so then make sure I’m not lying the fake up a question show the very to really be we work and said you should the Beastmaster me work that’s an interesting you know it might be the depend on this expiration we might find there’s a better way to approach the Beastmaster style design and just do a new subclass which would actually solve a lot of our the issues that we see monka for ailments rework I don’t you know I think it’s more likely and the chamber warlock – something falling under here what I would want to do let’s say I do this stuff and it’s amazing I never was like this is how everything should be done from beginning this is the most likely just to end up in new options you can add to the game we’re trying to avoid going back and rewriting the players handbook we’ve sold a lot of players handbooks and we don’t want to create a disconnect in the audience whenever possible we can solve a problem by offering you a new feature that can rest aside the existing features but that’s hitting the target of what people want that I feel is a good good path forward and as I mentioned went back we’re looking at the Ranger if we had something which we felt really was just a pure replacement we would try to get that out there for free right we wouldn’t expect you like hey you really like playing like you know the Beast Master Ranger you really like it but you’re really frustrated we’ll make it available to through DMS Guild and through DDD Beyond without charge because we that’s kind of a make good you know we kind of promised you you could play this and if you’re trying to play it and you’re frustrated by it we don’t you feel like oh now you have to go buy this book to make the game work you know that that’s never feeling we want people to have so the it is funny – they can we think of things that are broken one thing I will say I was making up some pre gen characters over the weekend and you know I know the champion is a design that I’m not necessarily crazy about and I know people have some issues with but I made like a half work champion and you know a half work on a crit gets an extra extra die of damage and that half work champion with a great axe like that’s funny up that’s a go okay this is where this could work you know it’s hard for us to just say like something just doesn’t flat-out work because might be someone out there playing that you know a character who’s built to do crits who’s playing a champion who feels like oh this is great it’s exactly I want I like creating a lot this is really working the but yeah so it’s that we don’t want to just erase things and put new things like putting things alongside then essentially letting the market place you players everyone watching includes me – I play the game and let them just kind of decide what they want so okay so looking down here would be possible some of the creature and just have a really high AC but no attacks like ten eight points it’s High Noon that is a great question because what we want to make sure in this system is we don’t let you change a weakness into a strength by that I mean often in games and we have this concept of hey you give up this to get that which can work as long as the this year giving up is something you value in competitive games what players will always attempt to do is say I want to give up something I don’t care about and get something I really care about so I’m always wary of that approach because it is easy to put yourself in a position of let’s go back my earlier example my summon creatures blocking a doorway I just want to max out it’s it’s AC and it’s hit points and pour resources into that I would want that to be something where you just are expending resources to get that not well normally this is the number of points I’d get for a third level slot but I’m I’m getting that with a first or second level slot because I’ve decided to not give it an offensive upgrade I prefer especially needy to just say this is what this costs and it just you know let’s not attach the drawback to it so try to avoid that because again then you just end up in situations where let’s erase the drawback now I’m ahead of the curve it makes all the sense in competitive games because that’s part of the puzzle but not necessarily doesn’t necessary fit into D&D so I prefer that to be more restrict acting like when you’re playing the game you realize hey we can normally this would be a weakness but because of the situation we’ve engineered through clever play we’ve been able to overcome this drawback so yeah things like you know turning the narrow hallway only one you know the only one monster can approaches at a time things like that it’s more tactical rather than it’s just baked into my character that I just I just have this button I press and this thing happens so okay so let’s talk about the spell so I wanted to be a first level conjuration spell get my formatting everything’s me off because I’m just taking notes here I’ll pretty it up and maybe posted to Twitter probably later on this week the casting time it’s going to be an action to summon and then bonus action Dogman and we want our range you know we don’t want the creature to be like just stuck next to you then it spends its first turn just running up things I think like 60 feets pretty reasonable that’s the range on Kandra animals components verbal and somatic that seems fine duration when the thing pops in I think I want this to be something the basic last 24 hours and it’s gonna be concentration schools give me conjuration get us just notes here attack save there’s nothing damage a factory it’s a summoning so I’m not gonna worry about that and so okay so here’s what we go what I want need to do is the you cast the spell you get a creature you’re going to get a basic creature based on the spell slot then when you add spell slots you get to decide what augmentation you want to give the creature the ICO is the question hell okay that’s I thought this question here the all about the eastwards thing Brian O’Brien gold the CEO of Hazzard was on I did an interview state time to eat sports waste eSports and D&D means more streaming so that’s not it’s just more when you’re on TV live TV give me an interview you’re not gonna take like hey let’s explain everything across the board though an east they will be kind of interesting we were talking about that this morning what would like a battle royale game look like for D&D what we settled on was you get to play as a bunch of monsters so the maybe you start out as a kobold and you level up to like him at should become a beholder or maybe just start as a beholder cuz that’d be fun and then you play all the crazy wacky monsters the anyways the yeah so it’s not like DNA like we don’t see competitive D&D you know it’s not something we see as we wouldn’t do they would just depend on the platform and where we’re trying to go for though uh yeah if people really want to do something along that line and there’s been events you know that people have brought that but yeah it’s not if we did something that it wouldn’t it wouldn’t change the role-playing game the role-playing game is what it is that wouldn’t you know I guess it was less we saw a demand for it people we really want to try this then we try to find a way to make it work so okay so this is basically my skeleton here and so I’m gonna bullet point out so there’s gonna be things you spell slot determines the few effects I’m not gonna start adding layers of bullet points buts gonna be size hit points protects the rest of the stuff will kind of get to will see but this is this is enough for the chassis to build the creature we want the when are the Matt question is this gonna be a concentration loss means monster goes poor a monster goes berserk good goal that’s and should me think okay I think it’d be this concentration I don’t want you just to lose the spell so oh maybe this shouldn’t be a concentration spell you know exercise I think about it I think making this not a concentration spell actually might make more sense because it’s got hit points and someone could just smack it and kill it so I’m gonna take concentration off you know what call me crazy chat go ahead type in I’m crazy but I’m gonna take that off cuz I think it’s unfair if I summon the creature I want to throw a Sheila faith on it why not why can’t I do that I’m not gonna say you can’t I’ll have to play dice to tell me we can the and so the what we got here so then basically what we need to do is take this table that I have in PDF format here and just again I’m just gonna rough out what these things might look like so let’s go over to here it’s your my head my heads clipping the level five and lower off so I’ll just so as a rough estimate I’m just gonna create create really I’m actually you know we’re in hack ville or just hacking around if we actually build a table using the MS or a table tool because those do not transfer over to our layout at all so I’m gonna go full screen so I’m trying to run with the table tool is here we go so obviously I want a table that’s gonna be for cross and let’s just do this number down so spell level sighs uh-huh cancel pit points and then tax and slash damage so what I want to do with this table is just really here I’ll do this oops very quickly translate over this now my head’s in the way so we’ll go over here my giant block yeah there we go so let me walk you through what this spreadsheets doing the I don’t take a quick look any questions in chat let’s see how many summons can I have a good question Beauty do be the UM I think I’m gonna limit you don’t want to start with we’ll start with one and then we’ll see can you do multiple summons the main thing is handling time and then just that area control I’d rather have you scale up a monster size and say now I control more of the battlefield of the counter area rather than say you get like eight summons because it also really can really slow the game down very quickly the be persnickety and I just want to bold this just my things so then we’ll just go hey one two three four five six let’s see it looks like okay cut off a little bit I’ll do the rest we get to it so I think what we want to start with is I just do here it’s gonna start it’s assumed size medium until I have a reason to do otherwise and so then this is our basic entry-level summoned creature so I summon a creature what do I get the augments will use a different table again this is just what kind of Hagin this thing together see what we end up with so looking at the spreadsheet this one I worked on last night I just took spell level I took that table earlier we said we saw how many D tens of damages spell is worth put that here these are our D tens I did not write 15 D 10 because I want to be able to write Excel equations without having to like wear what strip out the D 10 notation so I just threw in the number of D tens here we go we’ll do this this would be clear and then this was an estimate now these numbers are actually a kind of bogus because this is just the assuming all those get get got turned into hit points so it was a deed to D 10 creature it had 98 points I don’t want that I wanted to be 5050 so guess what you get to watch me very carefully right there very complicated Excel equation I know if you can see this what I’m writing is I’m going to multiply the D tens row the number of dice by 4.5 which is a d8 reserved size medium hit die and then I’m just going to divide it by two because basically what I’m doing is I’m splitting in half the value of the spell slot between attack and defense this is a bit bogus because I don’t think my damage I want my damage to scale up that way but it’s a good starting point and then I actually have to do the same thing over here I can’t just whatever we’ll just do this goals gonna take B to multiply it by 4.5 I’ll just use D eights cuz that’s no this is D tens loops look like that and then divide by 2 so this is a sort of total damage output you’d expect the spell to have now because we expect this thing to last three rounds the tip of a fight the we would have divided by three so this is just going to be equals this now that’s a really low number we’re not surprised that’s only a first of all swimming so this gives us our baseline the okay so what we’re looking at here is we’ve got given a spell of level X 1 to 9 if I was just to take the die expression from the dmg the number of D tens that this is worth and then say how many hit points for this thing have and how much damage should it do total and then per round for three rounds and in fact to be fair I should probably actually make this 5 it should just be equal so essentially use some of the creature and it’s going to have hit points and then it’s going to do damage equal to its hit points but we’re breaking that up for three rounds the nice thing about this though is you can see if I have a level one summon it’s gonna have about five or six eight points it’s doing two damage around so it’s like doing a one D for damage with no modifiers we’re got to kind of hack things up it’s not gonna be like a monster in full like minister I’m adding modifiers and whatnot to its damage just again I just want to get this thing a functional I’m not gonna try to get it perfect but that is not necessarily super exciting but it’s a starting point often just getting the first sort of pylons down your foundations there and I can start building on top of it that’s what you need what starts getting interesting to me though is again what I can do to augment these because what I imagine is getting a creature and having it hanging around 24 hours is really good it’s very useful so the and so I imagine is you probably don’t want to invest a couple spell slots into attacks to make this shine now one thing that the members with the keep an idea in context oh and I’m gonna just make it up myself leaning baseline AC speed etc so some point we have to decide what’s our starting point to give you a sort of preview we’d assume that AC should be something reasonable it’s not like oh it’s a c10 that does this expend a spell to make it not terrible it’d probably come in like what I would do is take a look at like what’s a C 15 or 16 to be good starting point that’s what an AC that a lot of characters can hit pretty easily at first level you figure a rogue with leather armor at a deck 16 is gonna have an AC 14 anyone heavy armor is gonna have AC 16 or out of the box 18 with the shield even a wizard or any caster with me armor can hit that so it’s not it’s not that super super crazy the and so with that in mind let’s take a look at the spell progression for let’s say a wizard or let’s say druid right cuz druids and something were a kind of a thing that feels kind of like that somatically feels like you know appropriate that doesn’t matter they all at the same spell progression I just we haven’t talked about the druid in the stream before so why not show the druid off can see this cool art the my head’s not in the way okay so let’s take a quick look at the spell progression so let me see if I can explode this up there we go yeah it looks pretty real so we see a first of all Germans gonna have to first level spell slots by the time you get a third level you for first level on to second level so if we assume that you’re gonna have to invest to spell slots at a minimum you know first of all spell slots just to kind of get something that’s not it can be a bit more active the that seems kind of reasonable around third and fourth levels when you first start actually doing this a lot I’m okay for not doing this at first and second level all that much because when we think of summoning it’s adding complexities of the game it’s giving the party more stuff to do we said it said we have more actions we have more battlefield control which having more people and just gives me more options right you can just get this thing can just it’s it’s another character you get the boss around the other nice thing is we do need have designed the game set first and second that will sugar by go by pretty quickly so I’m not too worried if a lot of casters are waiting now if you are really dedicated to seminole what I probably want to do is create a subclass that in augment your ability to summon and maybe you are the player at first souls just like no I’m spending both my first of all spell slots to summon something and then I might have a class feature depending on the class I’m playing that improves that but but I’m okay with you not being so great at it out of the gate it probably means something like a you know a healing class with summoning like there’s gonna be a natural tension there but that exists anyways you know we don’t assume people are healing we assumed they’re their cannon because they want to we don’t sort of make other things cheaper to encourage you to heal we just make everything cost whaa costs and you decide what you want to do so okay let me do a quick look of questions here the okay so there we go so I feel like that’s a half tease in place so I go back to here and my my table here oops my spreadsheet here and I put this over here if I was just to translate this over I could prop a cat at first level again just going straight by this have a creature with 11 hit points and that’s doing like 1b 4 damage per strike it’s not super good but it could be useful as soon as I get a second level spell slot I’ve got a creature with 90 points now the damage here this is probably a little too well it’s only 2.8 I think back the envelope but I’d want to do is that you’re getting about it know if this a second level spell slots probably get you a d6 we’d probably just round up I’m not too worried about over the course of three rounds or doing an additional 2.1 damage that’s not it’s not the end of the world we don’t we don’t get that finicky it isn’t until level fourth double slot this always throws me off by the way that the that’s a row five little four is getting a d-10 so what that tells me is I’m probably gonna make this you know what I think this is probably maybe even approach you the base summoning spell is gonna give you this things form its hit points and its size and then what I probably want to do then is have an augment to give it an attack because then even at low levels okay this thing’s kind of durable I can still use it to like defend I can still use it to like a lock down an area I can still have it scout ahead things like that the yeah magda but you can stick and drop will someone I just grab them and help out the rest the party grappling in fifth all it does is it reduces your speed to zero it doesn’t give it’s not until you get to the not entangled I was restrained that you’re actually giving out advantage so that’s actually something that could um that could work pretty well okay so here’s what we’re gonna do here we’re gonna blow this is we’re gonna add another column here who fancy when insert a column and then what I want to be able to do is just say total value so what I’m doing is I’m gonna make a column that just shows my total sort of hit point and damage value combined just for use a reference here keep that point duplicate that and rather than just have a raw calculation I want to that want I want a g4 of damage and I’m okay with that being 5.5 coming out of this and want the rest going into head points so I’m just gonna say this is five point five because I what I want to do then say is this equals c2 minus e2 there we go and now I’m getting numbers that look a bit more useful in terms of hit points so scaling up much quicker especially at low levels because I’m keeping my damaged static so this is my damage my total damage takes a big chunk out but then as I just everything else gets pushed over to hit points I see a nice quick bump here so my first of all spot my first of all summons stays the same but my second level summons has 11 hit points for that spell slot and a D for day and it so this is yeah so this feels pretty good if I’m coming with a base summoned creature this is the number of hit points I’m getting on that creature and it’s got a D for attack without a modifier it gets one attack if I want to make it offensive I had to put a spell slot into it if I wanna make a defensive about to put another spell slot into it and defensive imagine would be it has more hit points and maybe has an ability to protect people around it so yeah I kind of like that how do you guys feel about that the they call me tell me why is this someone looking so much phenomenally better than say fine grater steed this isn’t flying on if I remember right from fine grater steed that is flying is very expensive in 5th ed paranthas oom dunder so I can see everything here flying you you get charged a lot to fly that’s why there’s like some DMS really don’t like the Eric okra the they find out yeah it’s just too good at first so a creature that just at first of all can just fly that TRO a lotta DMS really just feels like it’s just – it’s two fleets it’s far too flexible for the party to have access to so when you’re going yes you get a pair eaten I mean you can get a Rhino like so here’s how this spell works you can choose a Griffon a Pegasus or Parrington or you can choose something else really because the flying creatures on the list here it pushes it up the now we look at the saber-tooth tiger this thing has 52 hit points and let’s see let’s actually look at its full step like this is our fourth level spell 52 hit points and it’s dealing 10 damage on a hit okay so 52 and 10 for level 4 let’s look at our spreadsheet level for spell so actually we’re getting this thing is actually coming up behind it so now the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is also a 1-minute spell casting time sorry casting time 10 minutes so you’ve got to be ready like you need a lot of time to bring this thing in the yeah now that is something that we have to keep in mind this is all sort of theory crafting then we have to actually look at the spells that are here the cossack 1:59 you can I summon a level 2 creature but with two levels added to it so here’s how I would want this to work going back to our spreadsheet I cast an initial summoning spell that’s summoning spell based on its level here and is that big enough yet it looks like it’s big enough to OPI chiming in shadow this is big enough cast a spell I pick the the spell slot I want to cast that gives me some initial values I can then expand further spell slots to augment its hit points it’s a it’s attack or them potentially give it other special abilities and I pictures being dynamic that I can probably expend spell slots to essentially yeah peel it there should be a healing effect I can basically replenish its hit points probably to discount because you’ve already committed to the creature to keep it standing so and these would be one action to summon and they act as soon as they show up so the so yeah and it might be beauty by approach it might be the idea ten minutes summon and then you keep it around and then Ahmad wenting is in action will see part of it’s going to come down to how these stack up to everything that’s out there because of the existing you know let’s just do that right now why am I sort of beating on bush let’s reset all our filters then let’s vote you are summoned tagged and let’s just see where we ended up all right I’m gonna choose I’m gonna go with well we have one actually ever Kandra animals its duration is an hour let’s just go challenge two so and challenge two giant boar let’s go the giant boar so an ax murder I forgot what’s fellas level to spell right little three spill some this is what Mike my level three summon currently gets me and hear what I’m saying is 28 hit points and one D for damage so here I’m pretty far by on hit points I’m at 28 verses 42 so this is this armor class is 12 which is lower than what I was looking at as the standard this thing can charge and it’s doing 10 damage on a hit so we’re not super far off we are a little bit behind but we’re not so far off and I’m like oh this is just a bad approach this just needs some more refinement what I suspect is happening here that I’m undervaluing the dislike I’m sorry overvaluing damage right now sticking you in a d4 in a in a vacuum makes sense because I’m just saying hey what’s the mathematical value of this but we have to keep in mind there’s a number of things going on in here this this could be killed so I’ve made an investment for three rounds worth of attacks and I got one we don’t worry about missing because we just kind of assume like we don’t try we don’t normally really like super penalize your offense like your accuracy to give you much bigger damage we do that sometimes it’s not standard typically we just assume a about essentially assuming a plus 3 or plus 4 ability modifier and then the appropriate proficiency bonus based on the character level of the effect so for instance a third level spell we’d assume like okay a fifth level character so proficiency bonus two plus three probably a plus four modifier from a stat so it’s acting its attack when it should be about plus seven so this is probably one thing that’s that I’m off a bit here with this dim it should probably be higher and I’m gonna arbitrarily because there’s nothing nothing more fun than just making arbitrary decisions you know this d4 is probably good here but it’s well but it’s it points are lower there’s a funny thing here it has lower hit points it’s more likely to get splattered but in theory it’s fighting weaker creatures so less likely to kill it one blow but that probably tells me these are probably like it might have to start higher and not scale up as quickly because even like me with 44 hit points for the fifth able spell there aren’t too many things unless you’re really focusing fire typically your tax get broken out rather than just being one big attack that deals 44 you’re dealing like four attacks that do 11 each at like you know see our nine creatures and that in that neighborhood so it’s gonna hit you with everything or two hits in a crit thereabouts so it’s a very long way of saying I think that this damage has to start higher and can scale up slowly because the threat of the creature getting struck down in one round does go down a little bit as I go up in level so I’m gonna get more reassured payback on my my investment for three rounds of damage so I’m gonna arbitrarily do this this is always this is a fun thing that’s when you’re like doing some real deep game design I do this I’m just gonna peg the damage at d6 to start with I mean sometimes you just sort of like you take an estimate and it you see where it goes let’s do one d6 let’s do one D 8 D 1 D 10 and let’s keep it at 1 d 10 for a few levels let’s go up to 2 d6 again this is just back the envelope right here it’s the Wild West but I had that to me starts to be more of a reasonable thing we might even want to add your caching ability mod to this because we might find it’s just not quite having the impact we want again we had while this is the strict map mathematical reflection of the value it’s not capturing the context again you could just kill the creature then you’ve lost your investment the and the important thing there is that’s an opportunity cost the monster has attacked the creature rather than attack a party member which is nice but that could also be an AoE that’s capturing the creature regardless so there’s really is no opportunity cost there and you have spent a spell slot on it so you should get some more reliable return on your investment unless the enemy is also using for instance a counter spell or a disability they’re burning a limited resource to deal with it so it’s not an exact thing you know this is gonna be kind of one of the things we get to kind of look at it and get a sense of the feel of how this is gonna play out what typically happens my experience is you kinda have this phase to start the math you go to this phase where chuckling dealing what feel then you’re gonna loop back to the map once you start actually playing and you just yeah this is kind of thing it’s gonna feel too good or too weak and then you’ll take a look at the math and you’ll see okay here’s where it’s happening we need to bump this up by a kadai or bump it down by a couple points so the okay so we have here a model we have here a creature that I can get with a third level spell I’m looking at my third level spell here and seeing one d-10 damaged it’s not too far off it’s like half the damage here again this guy might be a little inaccurate compared to where this guy is gonna end up but we are we are not home yet but we’re in the right neighborhood so I feel like that’s a pretty good starting point so then what I want to do is what I imagine how the spell will work is let us be a table you have a stop lock and then you have a table that’ll tell you here the pieces to drop in so any questions so far let’s see where we got here the well pokeballs comes an arcane focus our train Derek I guess they could write the over super you skip what you also can’t buff a conjurer element with other spells that’s right because you’ve got if I remember right these summons are concentration so that is also a benefit you’re getting with this spell so and again that’s one of those things that you can’t really put a hard cost on it too easily you’re you can’t put a hard cost on it that is it cost the system math tells you you have to kind of estimate it based on your field all right so the tennis Toto summoners con mod to hit point and in modded image yeah I think will do something like that I like the feeling of like that your ability scores matter and so I think it might just be casting stat all the way around because I just might be a little easier that is a bigger number it might distort the hit points here but we have ways which we can kind of if we’re using hit dies can kind of decrement those a little bit to account for a mod coming in that’s also why we wouldn’t well we wouldn’t a Sarah want to use two mods like say hey it’s your casting mod for this and your con mod for that because that’s less predictable and if this is something it’s me very signature for people we want the nature the effect to be fairly predictable in the sense of I just seem a summoning druid I just max on my wisdom I know my summons are gonna be as tough and is damaging as they need to be I don’t then have to because of a spell and start thinking of another ability score that’s why in fifth edition if you’re a wizard and you make an attack with a spell user intelligence modifier rather than your dexterity and three five used your dexterity but what it meant was kind of hidden within the game you had to figure out that if I was going to take scorching Ray that I needed a good dexterity to actually make that work the so we wanted to move away from that but just keeping things more straightforward so okay they call me Tommen would disavow magic and this yeah it actually it would the as written right now and you know I’d have to think about what we’d want to do the one where II there would be I stack multiple slots into it to some of the creature and then one spell counters act that might not be what we want so don’t think about it it is a little bit so alright so the what might be to speak you know I could this is something I could imagine easily is that what it might do is might dispel one of the effects on it and you have to like you take out each spell at a time the but that’s something which we do more in the refine in phase so this is a half-decent starting point I’m comfortable here using this I am just gonna throw in these numbers here for now my notes my spreadsheet to refer to needless to say this is something we require a lot of testing the it’s a great example of something where math well mathematical analysis of system is very good if you’re dealing with two existing practices because that’s a like versus like we’re dealing with something that’s doing something essentially completely new or the comparisons like the existing summoning spells are so different that you can’t be confident that that is a one-to-one relationship it gets a little bit harder to just sorta to theory craft that’s a theory crafting is very useful it gives you a very good starting point especially for what your issues might be but it doesn’t it’s more theory crafting is very good to determine what you’re now going to argue about then rather necessarily tell you what the answer is the but like I said it’s still it’s very it’s a useful tool to have I’m gonna keep this damaged these hit points where I’m just sort of charging you 5.5 total damage even though this is going up again that’s kind of reflecting my I think that this initial approach was under was attaching too much value was overvalued undone driving over valuing the damage output from the summon creature so I’m gonna let that slide I’m not going to try to try to tank with eight points so I’ve got my raw numbers up here still well I think I’m not too worried about this because I look at like the second double spell slot 11 hit points with one d8 damage that’s essentially a first little character get swatted down in one hit pull out of the time but I think I’m okay with this because I think I’m okay if the typical operating procedure is you want to put two spell slots into this to get something that’s gonna be really durable for your your group the so I think I’m okay with that so now I want to add another column here know what ten minutes okay good oh let’s see let’s insert a column to the right and I’m gonna call this points this is pretty simple what we want to say is how many if I expend a spell slot to buff my summon creatures hit points how many points are to get and that’s really easy cuz it’s this column right here right it’s just the numbers right there so I’m just gonna try this a little voodoo and I try to copy a page between programs and see what happens there girls just did it so that’s just how many points you should get we talked with buffing damage this is probably where we need to be a little more precise so I am once again I don’t need this what I’m going to do is I’m gonna change this so instead of dividing my my leftover damage by three I’m just gonna divide the total value of the spell by three and see what like that number okay and I’m seeing some numbers here that already make me pretty happy so the because they are and they are sort of human readable numbers I got a three point seven is great that’s a d6 so the sort of column to the right that’s really tiny because of my thing watching me resize do it this is why it tune in right to watch me move there we go let me buff damage and so if if it’s first level spell saw it gives me three points seven days per round that’s easy that’s plus twenty six it’s my tax in additional d6 damage five point five that’s easy that’s plus one need ten now we start getting these bigger numbers what I’d like to do is since I’ve got I know I’m doing I might start giving you extra attacks so I know that the let’s see 9.2 that’s still it’s gonna say plus 2 D 10 well now I can’t because it the next it’ll cost you 10 I don’t want to give you a tax a lot of extra tax until a higher level that’s to d8 so anyways that’s math we can go through the interesting thing will be once we get up to here when I’m doing 28 extra damage per round I probably want to start making this extra attacks and extra damage and that’s to avoid just the wif factor the one thing that would then say is I can’t throw in a buff that gives me a bunch of extra tax then thrown another buff that further increases my damage so we probably need a rule that says if you apply a buff you use the biggest buff rather than just you can stack all these up we wouldn’t want to do is say like I just pour a ton of low-level slots into a monster my summoned creature now it’s just doing ungodly damage you know it might overshadow the rest of the party so I think what I think we could do is also put it a spell level cap on it you could say for instance if the number gets too big over here we’ll just start saying look you can only go up to a fifth level it’s a little too good to give you this damage all the time because it’s gonna last I mean I’m projecting for three hours per fight but I know ideally if you’re playing smart you want to keep this around for a long time you’re good it’s an interesting thing we’re sort of plays skill we’ll get a better value return here I don’t want to let that return get out of hand so and once I’m seeing plus 2d ten damage on top place so it’s 3d ten damage per hit here that doesn’t feel noxious that feels like okay I feels pretty good I’ve invested a fourth levels two fourth of all spell slots to get this that feels okay but I don’t want these to start turning into this thing is just a you know the damn it starts to feel out of control so okay so let’s take a look at fifth that’s a fourteen point seven damage that’s plus 46 I wanna try to keep it to one attack to so I can avoid that stacking yeah okay I’ve just talked myself into an out of giving this thing multiple attacks especially for handling time I’m okay if you get a little unlucky and you get stuck with okay this thing just whiffed and did no damage I’m okay with that because you know this is something it’s gonna stick around for a while and you’ll have an opportunity next round to have it punch someone else so MD sir ah gee maybe limit limit the duration of the augmentation perhaps I do kind of like the idea that I just alter the stop block then I don’t worry about it again but yeah but that’s something that is actually good lever to have if we find it’s getting out of control we can we can flip that over so I had a fan question can other spells affect this yes enlarge reduce haste slow I’d expect this should be a creature that I can throw their spells on tower mirror thoughts on actual creature type summoned thinkin it might be you know I could see four druids at their beasts I could see four Wizards their elementals I really would want the flavor to drive that so let’s see this is oh yeah this was supposed to be for the shaper so that would yeah the sonic version a probably construct the yes and barracks silver bird this is the shaper Sion this is essentially the spell we’re building out that the shaper is gonna use and that we could potentially adapt to a summoning spell for other casters too let’s see um let’s see what that could think about here anybody questions um does this end on a long rest or can I sleep with it guarding and regain the slots probably I would do is specify that it ends with a long rest the Jessie you’re not carrying it over probably with the began the nice thing is you could have it just keep guard yeah so I’d probably if you if you take a long rest you regain your spell slots that that breaks the duration the yeah so this is okay cool oh it’s in my head to the way the bottom table you let’s swap these over so yeah okay you can see the full table here so yeah kind of think and stop here and it’s one thing which probably do is I thought I would let you buff hitpoints and probably I’m okay with you pouring lots of spell slots to increase its hit points because the what I often find for players in DMS things that feel broken to them are things with more extreme burst potential doing 100 points of damage in a single attack as opposed to the fighter model which is just consistency and giving you more hit points lends itself more consistency you know I can hold down this area I could block the story for a long while well the party hides behind the creature of things like that the saw I think I’ve earned the side of making it more durable rather than letting it just throw out tons of damage the oh and the I hit 24 yes okay probably iterations probably 24 hours or a long rest so whichever comes first the will it be able to go get talk about the Vienna document I think well that’s kind of funny things I think you’d want it to be like pretty independence you can have a go around and do stuff because in I feel like oh I’ve got my pot of summoned paddock and go do stuff for me you can clean my room right the so yeah the will the be any way to add special features monster with just basic attacks nothing else is pretty boring honestly yeah that is exactly what I’d want to do and that’s where I would see the shaper effects coming in we talked about things like I’m not giving people motion sickness by going up and down this file um like the vision I had the kind of the iconic thing was the shaper looks across the room into the eye of the you know the ogre chieftain and plucks out his greatest fear and then shapes a creature summon creature that looks like that thing and the ogre chicken screams in terror right so definitely and that’s where I see a lot of the additional spells on the spell list for the shaper being these augments what I wanted to build today was just the basic chassis to get a snap lock in your hands for summon creature so this is a pretty good starting point we’ve got our weight and I think that this spell comes with buffing damage and buffing hit points and I imagine when you throw a buff hit point on the creature you’re increasing its current in maximum it’s probably another column here that’s a healing column where you might get this at a bit of a discount it might shift up one column that might be too good the but you’re probably if you’re not increasing your maximum you’re just filling back up to it I think it’s me worth of it more than this the yum this might be something where you also you only take the highest one you’ve given like the damage I can’t do 46 then pop two for several slots ditional to d6 so that would make the healing a bit more useful the human owe to someone who’s is yeah I think this was kind of a fun thing is now as I’m thinking about it is there might be ways to like essentially put templates on these things and it might be you could learn them by class you can learn them at a spell you learn like there could be someone who’s there could be summon beast and then you get some basic flavorful elements like the use might be its basic attack is acid the beasts would be like your choice of bludgeoning piercing or slashing so I think it’s probably like this chassis would then get adapted yeah that might make a lot of sense where the shapers might be like some an astral construct and it gives you a construct with some basic thing maybe it’s doing a psychic damage with its attacks and then we can make one for Druids you can make for druids could have summon beast and like maybe summon totem wizards could get like summon elemental source wizards and sorcerers warlocks could get like summon fiend and then you get some other cool effects I really want this in my game now I really want this in my game that’s the fun thing about it is you could really gate access to the spell through subclasses or through choices so how do you feel about this everyone feel like this is making sense does this feel like a good place to start I mean obviously the math I just can’t I just want to get in the neighborhood it’s not necessarily coming home yet the zones fact meeting right who’s that ever again it’s not concentration barbarians okay now I want to make that we did that remember the disaster barbarian we had this idea that he could like summon creatures like I loved it the Barbarian radio is like a fire lentil appears around him it’s just someone oh and I actually want to I want to design that okay okay so I think we’re pretty good okay so this is something where we’re gonna play around with it yeah alder brain warlock could summon a gaze to see is a child our King Butterfree thanks always appreciate the compliments okay cool I think yeah I was to me this is something I get excited this at the stage in design when it’s like I want to make a bunch of things using this the danger is you don’t want to fall so in love with this that you just then start charging forward even as cracks start to appear so this is something where playtesting is really going to start giving us some proof points here and while I let’s say this is this is something I was working on like a product at this stage I’d want to just like stop make the simplest implementation of this table and the spell you see and do some testing with it just build out what are these stat blocks look like look at them compared to think this is when you have to don’t rush ahead don’t start getting the specific concepts of cause I’m in fiend 7 news someone this and that some and everything right we want to take a moment go duh is this a strong foundation let’s bang on this a bit do these numbers hold up does this feel good in play then put the energy indeed those flourishes don’t don’t start decorating the cake before it’s baked right you don’t want to like you’ve got your batter and it’s cooking you’re throwing the frosting and the decorate now it’s gonna be a mess so let give it time let it bake it’s you know if if you watch baking shows or you know it’s like baking it’s been more art than science or is it the reverse either way give it time give it time in the oven put the hard work into it test it out don’t what often I find was and designers have problems is they fall in love with an idea they throw a ton of work into it too early they haven’t proved out the basic foundation so they throw in all this flourish work and then they start throwing good good effort after bad it’s a path that really like no it’s time to fall back and take a new route beef like I put so much work into a nod I’m throwing all this stuff out you want to be cautious at the initial stages of this design it’s good that I’m feeling excited but it’s also a warning sign that I need to make sure I pump the brakes don’t get too far ahead of myself and make sure I’m doing the frankly it would be kind of boring work of verifying that this is functional it probably needs some more tweaks but before I start going hog-wild with it I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got a strong foundation of building on all right yeah shell off the magnanimous sunk cost fallacy but in design exactly so so that’s it for this week next week we’ll pick this up this coming actually I think I’m on the next segment for the stream we’re gonna talk about the founders of legends day this coming weekend on Saturday I’m going on to LA to stream another D&D game not quite following up with the same basic concept as the stream of many is we’re gonna be celebrating the legacy and memory of Gary Gygax and other folks who helped create Dungeons and Dragons so I’m super excited I’m gonna probably have to go next door to start streaming over there I try to get a lot of water first though I am partial as they say so um I will see you all next week and on Twitter if I have any more breakthroughs with this stuff I’ll tweet I’ll tweet them out I made a Mike mortal soul one word all right so until next week take care and I will see probably a few even just a couple six around I’ll just see you in a couple more minutes so take care

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