[weby]

Originally Posted by lachimba

Thanks for the tips.

Is it ok to allow the summon animals spell to summon the animals from DF5? Edit: I guess not if they are IQ 6.


I still don't want annoying hordes of 'useless' animals

Beast summoning specifically calls existing animals and that they move normally so it can only call what is available in the area even if you use the mass version.

So it can usually fairly easily be used to summon a swarm of small things or very few larger things. Swarms are easy enough with the swarm rules and anything large enough to threaten a human or similar is not likely to exist in large numbers inside a 10 mile radius. Any annoying horde of useless animals is thus likely a swarm with stats according to what they are like.

Create animal is also limited to known things and one creature/swarm for each spell.

If you are concerned with the player repeating the thing again and again to get many creatures you should remember that the things are animals so they tend to wander off to get food and similar.

I would really likely use reaction table a bit differently and treat most basic summoning as being very simple or average request for aid as the animals do not really have a concept of time, but see how well the request succeeds to see how many penalties they can take until they no longer help. And then I would increment the penalty by time and give a big penalty if the animal is wounded.

I would allow the player summon several swarms of critters of appropriate type for the location. So as example in most cities they could get several rat swarms. But if they were in a seaport town and tried summoning both seagulls and rats then seagulls would likely start to pick on the rats immediately and the rats would likely leave...

In the country side they could try for a bear and if lucky get one or a try for wolves and get a pack if lucky and so on. But in general the types of creatures that are useful either came as swarms, singles or small packs. In most situations the swarms are likely the most useful ones.

As for the druid: Protect Animal is a really potent spell but really slow to cast. A pack of wolves with dodge 12 instead of 9 (and DR 6 instead of 1) is suddenly much more effective.