Send in the animals

Last time I talked about the DnD spell Animate Objects, where you attack your enemies with chairs.  This time I want to look at Conjure Animals to see how that spell stacks up.  Conjure Animals is a *lot* more complicated because it gives a similar choice betwen a few big summons or a ton of small ones, but there is a lot of variety in the summons.  Animated objects always have the same stats, but a wolf is not the same as a giant wasp!

The two spells share the same fundamental flaw - the game is balanced around the idea that attacking once for 15 damage is about the same as attacking twice for 10 damage, which is about the same as attacking 8 times for 6 damage.  This idea is patently absurd, but all the summon spells and indeed the entire Challenge Rating system is based upon it.  Yesterday we saw that animating a ton of small objects is vastly superior to a big one, and with animals it is the same.  Pick the big one, you get a huge, tough critter than hits for 10 damage / round.  Pick 8 small animals though, and each of them hits for 5 / round.

Conjure Animals lets you summon 1 CR 2 animal, 2 CR 1 animals, 4 CR 1/2 animals, or 8 CR 1/4 animals.

Animal              CR     Dmg/animal   Total damage

Giant Elk             2             11                11

Brown Bear         1             9                  18

War Horse           1/2          7                  28

Wolf                    1/4         5.5                 44

You see the problem.  Sure, swarms of animals are at risk of being Fireballed, but they deal preposterous damage.  A fighter at level 5 swinging with a big sword probably does about 20 damage a round, and we don't want summon spells to completely replace fighters.  Given that, I think summoning a Giant Elk that is worse than a fighter but has a ton of health is a reasonable thing.  It lasts a full hour, has as many hitpoints as any characters in the group, and some animals have special abilities like flying, tracking, swimming etc that you can leverage.  It is a spell I would happily cast.

However, summoning swarms of weak animals is a huge problem.  If you max out on stuff like wolves your fighters are going to feel utterly useless.  The wolves do several times as much damage as they do, and if the enemies do decide to start chopping through the wolves that is *great*.  The wolves have 88 HP total!  They will still do a ton of damage and save your group a huge amount of incoming damage too.

The solution here is simply to nerf the number of animals you get when you go for lower CR ones.  Instead of doubling the numbers each step down, I would change it from 1,2,4,8 to 1,2,3,4.  Nice and easy, and it actually works out well with the damage numbers.  The CR 2 is the worst still, but at least the others all deal similar overall damage.

The other issue with this spell is that it is extremely overpowered when cast at higher level.  If you level up Fireball from 3rd to 5th level, for example, the damage goes up 25%.  However, if you level up Conjure Animals from 3rd to 5th level, you get *double* the animals.  This is a problem!  It makes all higher level summoning spells a joke compared to Conjure Animals, and uplevelling spells is supposed to be a way of filling in spots, not invalidating high level spells.  The way I would fix this is to make the spell summon 1 more animal of CR 1 at level 5, or one extra CR 2 animal at level 7.  This is still worth doing, but leaves room for actual high level summon spells to compete.

Even after both of these nerfs Conjure Animals is still better than any other summon spell in the book, I think.  At 5th level it deals more damage than the Bigby's Hand or Animate Objects spells, and it makes Conjure Elemental and Mordenkainen's Sword look like ridiculous jokes on multiple fronts.  Even after my suggested nerfs, I think you have to make the types of animals that are summoned be determined by the GM, and have the GM pick weak animals.  I tried to pick the best animal types for my numbers above, but if you instead pick randomly the spell is a lot more fair.  Many of the animals have worse attack routines than the optimized ones above, and that would reduce its power level reasonably.

I like the idea of summoning animals to attack your enemies.  It is also cool that their abilities are based on the abilities of the base creatures.  As usual, the theme is good, but the math sucks.