Aug19
on August 19, 2014
On The Street
I can say a lot of good things about 5th Edition D&D. But what really stood out on my first read-through of the PHB was the lack of summoning.
One of my favourite characters from 3e was my conjurer wizard: Roderic Fallstaff. The Feral Badger Wizard. I thought 5e would be great for converting him, as he was a noble first and a wizard second, and the background system was tailor made for him. But no monster summoning.
If that campaign was still ongoing, he’d be a very different character after the laws of magic were rewritten.
I feel the same way about psionics. My favorite character is a Thri-Kreen named Scar. Sadly, not gonna happen for a few years if history is a good idea of what will happen.
What do you mean, no monster summoning in 5e? You can specialize in conjuration (pp. 116-117), and there are a bunch of spells that allow you to summon monsters (e.g., Conjure Animals, Conjure Celestial, Conjure Minor Elementals, Conjure Elemental, Conjure Fey, Conjure Woodland Being, etc.). Are you saying that monster summoning is not as good as before? That might be true, I haven’t looked at it closely. But there is certainly monster summoning in the 5e PHB…
That was pointed out to me some time after. A problem that resulted from looking for summoning spells under “S” for “summoning” instead of “C” for “conjuring”.
Still, the wizard only gets elementals and as a 4th-level and 5th-level spell, so you’re not making a “sumnmoner” wizard, you’re a conjurer that eventually gets some summoning ability. It’s certainly not a concept you could play from level one onward.