Spell Redesign: Conjure Minor Elementals
We’re tackling a few different topics of consequence today. Special thanks to Particularist from Aaron the Pedantic’s discord for inspiration.
First, this is another spell which I personally love, and am also going to make substantially worse from a meta perspective, making it an oddity among most of our redesigns. Second, this spell summons creatures, making it a first among the redesigns and will significantly alter how I handle such spells later. Third, we’re introducing social components to the spell, which is related but partially distinct to how I’ll handle summoning spells in the future.
Conjure An Entirely Inappropriate Number of Dust Mephits
Man, 5e has so few summoning spells. I’m not just talking about the PHB either, the few supplements which include new spells (and notice, we’ve received no supplements dedicated to spells) still only introduce a number of spells you can count on one hand. Not only that, several of the summoning spells don’t summon a creature from a monster manual, but instead summon a generic statblock provided by the spell. The main purpose of summoning spells, which is to briefly enjoy abilities normally restricted to monsters, was intentionally ignored so as to provide stablocks so boring you could’ve simply paid a hireling or henchman or whatever to achieve the same effect, without wasting spell slots.
Conjure minor elementals precedes WOTC’s trend towards more boring summoning spells, but the subject of our redesign may have caused said trend. It’s a tremendous spell! While most monsters designed by the folks from Seattle are boring, elementals look to buck this trend with surprising frequency. What’s more, the majority of elementals available (especially during the game’s release) fit into the spell’s limits.
Emblematic of 5e’s low level elementals are critters called mephits. Mephits have the widest variety of subtypes in 5e (ranging from cr 1/4 to 1/2 in the monster manual and giving multiple options for damage types), a breath weapon (which usually inflicts a condition or status effect), innate spellcasting (so your summoning spell summons other spellcasters), and a death-burst (an effect which deals damage and/or a status effect similar to that of their breath weapon) which activates upon their death. Spellcasting monsters with variable damage types and resistances/immunities, breath weapons, who double as living explosives.
The spell allows you to summon a bunch of extra combatants, who have a disproportionate number of cool abilities and attacks, who are potentially also spellcasters, and can even serve a purpose by dying. If I were a lesser man, this is where I’d say the spell is too strong. In reality, the spell is comparable to the benefits and detriments of other spells at similar levels, in spite of how much more fun the spell is. It’s an important distinction to make, because lots of folks protest a spell being more fun than another as being in some way unfair or unbalanced. If the math checks out between conjure minor elementals and storm sphere, the fact one appeals more to a given playstyle or character theme has nothing to do with whether it’s balanced.
So, why then am I (as mentioned in the intro) toning down the spell’s power? Because the spell disproportionately loads on a DM’s ability to adjudicate the game. Unfortunately, 5th edition uses saving throws to adjudicate the effectiveness of features which inflict conditions or deal area of effect damage. This is one of the slower ways to adjudicate such features, and 5th edition combat suffers for it. However, if a spell allows you to summon creatures with such abilities, all but some of the fastest or resourceful DMs are going to get dragged down significantly. The longer you extend rounds of combat to focus on these summons, the more likely the DM is to forget their monsters’ turns, legendary or lair actions, and any environmental or spell effects. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the principle of summoning to begin with, the problem is with 5e’s adjudication and how it wasn’t even optimized to handle the base players and the monsters they’d fight.
Adding 8 critters to the battle, all of whom have spells of their own, and AOE breath weapons, and AOE abilities procced on death, most if not all of which rely upon saving throws from every creature affected adds too much of a mental load to the game even if only one player does it.
TL;DR: I don’t want a spell’s power to come from overloading the DM’s brain. Conjure minor elementals is fine before that consideration, but now I have to compensate for it.
My Version (Better)
Alright, so the primary cognitive load of this spell comes from adding a ton of creatures all at once. So, what if I let you keep the same number of creatures, but forced you to spread out their actual presence in the field? A lesser designer would’ve stopped at a restriction which prevented you from keeping more than one summon out at any given time. While sufficient for our goal of preventing too many summons entering combat at once, it would also undoubtedly restrict other uses for summons which didn’t involve combat.
The 1 mile restriction allows you to (if you wish) quickly deploy all of your summons, as quickly as you can get them at least a mile away from you. Congratulations! You may now use them as assassins, messengers, distractions for far-off places, etc, all because I didn’t stop at the bare-minimum restriction as a solution to our problem. Normally it might take a small elemental creature at least 10 minutes or so to get that far away from you, especially depending on your environment (moving a mile away might not be so easy a few hundred feet into a dungeon). Luckily, the folks best equipped to solve this sort of problem are mages, who may no doubt find reason to take more spells designed to transport other creatures around, thus saving their summons some potentially valuable time.
My Version (Even Better)
Alright, so I boosted the word count by a lot. Normally, I don’t do that. This is an important spell though, able to support several different modes of play, and we want it to work for those. Plus, there’s a few rebalancing items in order. Some notes to that effect:
The lack of concentration makes this a fairly potent spell, so a few built-in end conditions or countermeasures are appropriate, as are some additional benefits for a final balancing pass.
I specified creatures bonded follow your directions for the duration of the spell. Prior, the text about a summoner’s bond just implied this, but I made the text explicit to actually indicate these critters stayed past when the spell expired, and weren’t necessarily your friends. under those circumstances.
If we can’t end the spell by ending concentration, at the very least we can end it by knocking out the wizard. The critters come out, some of whom might be neutral, others might hate the wizard and try to finish them off, some might be bonded to the wizard in some other way or are just good old fashioned buddies. Yes, it reintroduces the chaos we initially avoided in our redesign, but it only occurs for a special event, which the mage will (under these conditions) do their utmost to avoid.
The idea of summoning spells routinely sucking extraplanar critters to their constant deaths is amusing, but maybe a little dissonant. Introducing a creature type restriction lets us get rid of that dissonance, but more importantly freshens up which summons the mage will employ on a regular basis.
Following from that last point, if the mage wants to repeatedly use the same critter, it must actually be the same critter, and must know a piece of arcana lost to tabletop gaming for far too many years; true names. Now the summons isn’t just anyone, it’s a person, an NPC, a weakness, a mechanical hook, a unique opportunity, a means of making the spell better, a whole pandora’s box of gameable content.
Creatures with true names are subject to a number of potential changes by the DM or player, especially by virtue of their special relationship. The player might offer items, favors, equipment, etc in exchange for the power to summon this creature, which can develop a unique statblock as a result. Even something as simple as a magic ring or spellcasting implement can offer the player even more power in exchange for their willingness to roleplay, and thus turns this spell into a veritable farm for named NPCs.