You know what gets me excited for conjuration? Grand Theft Auto. And not just any flavor of GTA. I’m talking about the highly specific flavor known as “Can you drive across GTA 5 if Twitch Chat controls YOUR MODS?” There’s just something inherently hilarious about watching objects poof in from elsewhere, land on your head, and generally ruin your day. And that remains as true on the tabletop as it does in city of Los Santos. The only question is how many of these shenanigans you’re willing to put up with in the name of a laugh.
As with the recent “Nonlethal Fireball” comic, today’s topic is all about GM leniency. Consider the following. If you happen to be a 5e D&D mage, and if you’re in the mood to chestburster your opponent with a pair of wolves, you’ve got to contend with some restrictions. Namely the phrase “they appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range.” That’s pretty clear-cut. No stuffing hedgehogs inside your BBEG’s spleen.
Happily, no one said anything about dropping monsters from the stratosphere. At least if you’re in Faerûn. If you’re in Golarion, however, then you’ve got more restrictions to worry about. As per the PF1e conjuration rules:
A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it.
That means you explicitly cannot bury your enemies in ponies. If you’re playing by the rules, that tactic requires a different supplement altogether.
Like we talked about with our recent “Nonlethal Fireball” comic, this is a question of letting players get away with something. The rules I’ve quoted are designed to prevent exactly the sorts of goofy tactics that gamers (GTA players incuded) seem to love. So in that spirit, what do you say we trade tales of conjuration? Have you used our old dolphin-based trap detection system? Spammed enough summons to create a defensive sheep barrier? Tied explosives to your woodland friends and pointed them at the enemy? Whatever weird uses you’ve invented for your disposable minions, let’s hear all about it in today’s comments!
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I wonder … Could one design a deliberately unsafe conjuration spell that would allow the transportation of one living entity into another?
It needn’t even be anything big.
Just, you know… a single-celled organism or two. Something from the “exciting, but deadly” petri dish.
Isn’t that just the spell Contagion?
Not if you’re breeding diseases that aren’t in the spell’s list of possible diseases. Also? You don’t need to get in range of touch. 😉
I wonder if you could do a deliberate shunt, as per the teleport spell?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/teleport/
Mishap: You and anyone else teleporting with you have gotten “scrambled.” You each take 1d10 points of damage, and you reroll on the chart to see where you wind up. For these rerolls, roll 1d20+80. Each time “Mishap” comes up, the characters take more damage and must reroll.
I was looking at wizard spells the yesterday and saw “Treacherous Teleport” https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/treacherous-teleport/
I must say, it’s very decent of Cleric to treat Warlock’s self-inflicted “oopsie”, given their previous history.
… Is one wolf destructive and the other vain?
As a lawful good rules lawyer, Cleric is obliged to honor his Hippocratic Oath.
Huh. I saw Cleric more as Lawful Neutral.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-high-ground
I’ve told this story here before, but I was once a player in a party that battled a certain snake lamia boss atop an abandoned clocktower. As her HP got low, she ruined my heroic charge to end her with a trip attack of opportunity and jumped off the building, planning to Feather Fall to safety. As the boss dodged our feeble crossbow shots, the party’s non-Enchantment Sorcerer attempted to drop a Summon Mount on her. The GM pointed out Pathfinder’s restriction on empty-space summoning. The Sorcerer then cast the spell on the edge of the roof and told the rest of the party to help him push the pony off to try and hit her. The boss used the extra turn to cast Invisibility. I forget if we actually shoved the mount off and missed, or if we just gave up at that point, but I don’t think the GM was all that inclined to let this particular finishing move stand. (He had previously let the Sorcerer use Summon Mount to generate cover for himself, though.)
You’d think someone would just write a “conjure anvil” spell and be done with it. Hmmm…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/c/conjure-deadfall/
And there it is. Figured it must exist!
I bet Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner co-created it. 😉
So it wasn’t a summon. We were playing Only War and my players knew enough military history to get sneaky,or so they tried. Ever heard of how soviets tried to train dogs to run mines towards german tanks? Kinda like that, but with a dog like species native to the planet they were on and a partial success as both sides had same tanks in use. The guy playing tank commander didn’t even have to order his crew to abandon vehicle, lucky for them the dogs I randomized destroyed the comissars tank too along theirs so no *BLAM*ing occured for abandoning their post. Spend next half an hour rolling checks to try to get working tank from all the wreckages.
Come to think of it the people I have been playing reqularry with don’t really use summoning spells, and I don’t usually play spellcasters.
Funny enough, that dog thing also works well with mandrake roots:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/77e1e183d951de67358bdf03ff22bcc5/3bf1966cbf2b8c09-dd/s500x750/80510ed86a6cf9e5d3abb882282183a762093072.png
Just get ’em to run toward the enemy!
I seem to remember the one brush I had with Pathfinder 1e, one of our players who enjoyed the crunchiness of the system got real excited when I mentioned possibly playing a character that could cast ‘communal mount.’ I thought it would be handy, but was confused at why he was so excited.
He then explained using it as ‘Wall of Horse,’ which was pretty amusing.
…he then explained that he would have a monk build capable of using horses as throwing weapons, and was excited at having the heavy-duty ammunition on hand.
…I ended up playing an Alchemist instead
I’ll refer you to this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/throw-anything
😛
xD A-mazing! No notes
the limits of the spell are still range based, but if you add flying to the mix… dropping a whale down from 1000 feet in the air gets very Douglas Adams.
And out party literally did that in our last campaign (as well as polymorphing giants into turtles and dropping them from similar heights)
Now if you are just using the standard rules for fall damage, then big monsters don’t take that much actual damage because not only does that one single rule not cover things like different terminal velocities and potential terrain alterations on impact, but it also maxes out at honestly a pretty low margin for how much damage one might expect.
Even a wizard of sufficiently high level could survive a fall at max damage and that it just unacceptable.
So our DM (and proud to say myself) came up with alternate D&D based rules for fall damage that is still relatively simple, but plays with the idea of fall damage based on both different sizes and different heights with different terminal velocities.
for those interested, here is our little table (configured for Discord, so the formatting makes sense there and I’m not editing it all for this format ;P )
**Modified Fall Damage**
11-100 ft fall = 1d4 per 10 ft
101-300 ft fall = 1d6 per 10 ft
301-600 ft fall = 1d8 per 10 ft
601-1000 ft fall = 1d10 per 10 ft
1001-1500 ft fall = 1d12 per 10 ft
– note: roll only the largest dice value for the highest terminal velocity
– ex: if the creature is medium and falling from a height of 420 ft, you would roll 42d8 to determine fall damage
—–
***Terminal Velocity*** is the maximum fall speed per round
– *terminal velocity* differs based on creature size as follows:
miniscule creatures take no damage from any fall height as they are so small the effects of both gravity and air literally cushion their fall
tiny or smaller = 100 ft
small = 300 ft
medium = 600 ft
large = 1000 ft
huge or larger = 1500 ft
– when a creature reaches their terminal velocity, they can take no more fall damage, but modify based on *impact surface*.
– creatures larger than huge take no additional damage as their massive size alone absorbs additional damage from impact (modifiers below are still applied)
—–
***Impact Surface*** determines total damage output as follows:
**hard, solid, jagged:** critical hit (double damage dice).
**pliable, breakable:** roll a CONstitution save, if success, damage can’t reduce less than 1 HP (if a breakable surface would be considered to be *jagged* after breaking – such as glass – use that as the surface modifier instead)
**liquid, “soft”:** roll a DEXterity save, if success, half damage taken and total damage can’t reduce less than 1 HP.
Injuries from impact may be incurred at DM discretion.
Simple Injury Idea:
if d4’s are rolled for damage then gain 1 exhaustion level
if d6’s are rolled for damage then gain 2 exhaustion levels
if d8’s are rolled for damage then gain 3 exhaustion levels
if d10’s are rolled for damage then gain 4 exhaustion levels
if d12’s are rolled for damage then gain 5 exhaustion levels
looking at the above, the ex is not as good as it could be, here is an alteration
– ex: if the creature is medium and falling from a height of 800 ft, you would roll max 60d8 to determine fall damage (same medium creature falling from only 100 ft would roll 10d6)
Any time you get 60d8 damage for a repeatable attack, I think it’s a good idea to look at damage from similarly leveled spells. That gives you an solid baseline for the expected damage at that level.
You’ll see this biz with “I drop 100 flasks of alchemist fire from my bag of holding” and similar. This mess is generally hilarious, but I’m not sure shoving a turtle off a cliff is supposed to be stronger than Meteor Swarm. Like I said up top though, it’s a matter of gauging your love of shenanigans against game balance.
in the above example, the turtle would max at 10d4 probably (we are talking a pet turtle size here so probably tiny) and even with carry over damage, that is only an average of around 25 damage… I should however clarify that when we dropped the turtles from 500 feet up, we let them unpolymorph back into giants on the way down XD
THAT being said, we don’t do these kinds of shenanigans all the time, but we did have fun doing it the once XD
And to be fair to our DM, he plays HARD on us as well. We play in a high damage game with slow healing (so we are always saving healing spells for the END of a fight rather than “wasting” them during. It changes the dynamics of combats! And also we have learned to LOVE Healing Spirit!)
but yes, all of this is just what each table can put up with XD
for example, we have all heard horror tales of the conjuration party and the DMs that have to put up with the 500 summoned minions.
For all our own groups many possible faults, none of us have ever shown an interest in playing that kind of way… so far XD
“Even a wizard of sufficiently high level could survive a fall at max damage and that it just unacceptable”
If you were aiming at “that’s not realistic, we need this to be more realistic” you should base fall damage of off the creature or objects Hit Points.
That way if there is a height you determine that “regular people” should be able to survive 1/2 the time and heights of “and no one should survive”, it can be used for lvl 0 Peasants as well as lvl 20 max CON Barbarians.
Each falling height wold scale to doing a percentage of the falling victim’s HP, so “and no one can survive” heights would do 101% of their HP, thus ensuring a fall will kill someone if they get no assistance (I don’t know if 5e goes into negatives, if so, good, if not adjust).
except that I can’t stand percentage based damage systems of any kind 😉
and also people DO survive falls from massive heights as well as die from seemingly tiny heights in reality. People have broken every bone in their body from similar heights as someone that survived “without a scratch” (probably inaccurate as I imagine the person that survived “without injury” had a few bruises and scratches, but still, it proves luck is definitely a factor as well).
It is not about absolute realism, it is about a sense of realism and what sounds like it works within the system presented. That is the altered form we worked out for our table.
My favorite witnessed use of summoning was a druid who was fond of summoning bison:
a) An unstable floor in a ruined mansion– the party had made their skill checks to determine that while the leucrotta they were facing knew its terrain well enough to avoid the damaged floor spaces, the PCs might take damage or fall if they tried to charge. The druid dropped a bison *right* next to the monster, arguing that over a ton of tatonka added to the monster’s 800 lbs. should collapse the floor in the room. I rewarded his ingenuity by letting the monster fall to its death, taking the room and treasure with it. (The party was safe in the hallway.)
b) Orcs on top of a tower operating a ballista. Add one bison in the clear squares that were *just* enough space RAW for a large critter to fit. Regardless of the outcome of the mayhem produced, there would be no covering fire coming from that tower in the foreseeable future.
Buffal buffalo buffalo ballista buffal buffalo buffalo. 😛
Energy Transformation Field feels like one of the most least thought-out spells I’ve seen published. The idea is that it absorbs spells and SLAs used in the area to automatically cast a predetermined spell – they even use a Summon Monster spell as an example.
The problem is, many summonable monsters have their own SLAs, and the way the math works, each summon can use enough SLAs to fuel several additional summonings. You can see where this is going…
Summonings summoning summons seems silly.
My only real dabbling into conjuration went for a quantity-over-creativity approach. Pollyanna, The Littlest Nightmare, could cast *shades* as an at-will SLA (it was her Epic Warlock Invocation), letting her spam most 8th level or lower conjuration spells as a standard action. This was flavored as her pulling matter straight out of the Plane of Dreams to warp reality, and let her do basically anything she could imagine (summon dragons, trap opponent’s soul in a gem, teleportation, plane shift, oh my!)… but only 80% real, and only one thing at a time.
I should add that this was an NPC intended to challenge level 20 well-optimized characters.
Was the versatility of “any conjuration spell” strong enough to stand up to regular 9th level magic?
My brother is fond of summoning the maximum number of monsters that his spell of choice allows with the specific purpose of annoying his DM.
I’m glad I don’t DM for him.
I am also glad I don’t DM for him.
If Sorcerer and Warlock are both half-elves, why is Warlock way more buffed?
Also in Golarion try: Fragile Levitating Wooden Plank + Very Heavy Conjured Elephant. It’s two spells but still less problem than getting Meteor Swarm to have your very own killsat 😀
Warlock works out.
And it shows XD
Perhaps “Buffed Hunk” could make for a good Eldritch Invocation 😀
He put his +2 racial bonus into Str instead of Cha. Obviously.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/core-races/HALF-ELF/#standard_racial_traits
“So what are we doing here? Just a routine wolfectomy? Or is it a radical wolfecto– aah!!”
https://media.tenor.com/nAztJaKyWXoAAAAe/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-radical.png
By the way that was a ref to an old comic called Lucid TV. The website is long dead, but the particular strip referenced has been archived on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/t3nnm/im_full_of_owls/
Relevant: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?402795-Ridiculous-Character-Concepts-2-Slam-Dunk!&p=18994487#post18994487
(Not my build.)
Dual-Plane Summons + Boost Construct is a pretty funky way to enhance one’s summons. Add flight, natural invisibility, and Pounce to anything you summon–for cheap!