D&D 5E conjure spells are mainly either bad or broken

[evilbob]

Hopefully this will get better as new monsters are released, but at the moment some of the conjure spells are quite bad. Conjure fey has only one creature that can be summoned that couldn't already be summoned by conjure woodland being (a sorry CR 3 green hag), and conjure celestial has 3 targets (CR 2 pegasus, CR 4 couatl, and CR 5 unicorn for a level 9 spell).

Meanwhile conjure animal is pretty good especially when you get it - 8 wolves at level 5 seems useful - and conjure elemental is the only one that seems really to have gotten it right, probably because it only selects 1 of 4 specific things. Even conjure minor elemental can get kind of good with 4 - 8 mephits blinding your enemies and buffing you with blur. But the most broken one is conjure woodland beings, and only because it's completely useless other than to conjure 8 pixies, which are amazing. (Technically you could get 2 dryads to try to charm something, but they aren't as good as the pixies.) They can all 1/day (DC 12) cast confusion, detect evil, detect thoughts, dispel magic, entangle, fly, polymorph, phantasmal force, or sleep - polymorph, fly, and confusion being the stand-outs that scale well, although even 8 1-round entangles or sleeps are bound to be useful in some situations. However, you also have the idea that they won't actually help fight in battle, which can make them useless again. Unless you use half of them (if you have a party of four) to cast fly on your group and then the other half to polymorph your party into giant apes, a CR 7 beast (at level 7, mind you). Yeah, a party of 4 flying, giant apes at level 7 - basically making the druid's natural wildshape ability look pathetic compared to this one spell. Even if the giant ape thing doesn't fly (ha!) with your DM, the using a 4th level spell to mass-fly up to 8 creatures is a much tamer but still powerful and legit use of the spell.

Has anyone found anything in any of the additional published materials that can make any of these spells not suck so bad? And with all the other minor gotchas - certain creatures given slightly different types to keep them out of these spells - why do you think pixies made it through?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Blur is a self-buff, not castable on others.

The spell doesn't say you get to choose the creatures, only the HD range. Otherwise, "your DM has statistics" for what you get. No sane DM will opt to give you pure pixies every time. Maybe you get one pixie and the seven sprites who were vying for her attention. Or something else entirely.

 

[evilbob]

Blur is a self-buff, not castable on others.

The spell doesn't say you get to choose the creatures, only the HD range. Otherwise, "your DM has statistics" for what you get. No sane DM will opt to give you pure pixies every time. Maybe you get one pixie and the seven sprites who were vying for her attention. Or something else entirely.

Didn't remember blur was self-only - thanks!

It never even occurred to me to run these spells in any way other than you got to pick the creatures. Re-reading the descriptions, I still don't get that the DM would choose the specific creature and the player would only choose the HD range. (If it were up to the DM, you'd think it'd be a random chance or something like that.) I'll grant you it's possible to interpret the wording that way, but I still think it is saying the player would choose exactly what they'd want on both the minor spells and the big spells. In actual play, handing the choice over the DM would be a pretty hefty decision anyway; the DM is straight-up choosing whether your spell is 100% amazing or 100% useless each time, and that's a recipe for player unhappiness in my opinion.

 

[Tony Vargas]

conjure spells are mainly either bad or broken

Well they are spells.

If you have a bunch of spells (and 5e does), and more than a very few are broken (no comment), then the rest may just seem bad...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Honestly, when it comes to conjuration spells, there's a difference between what I ought to do and what I actually would do if my players cast Conjure X.

Ought to: come up with some kind of consistent rule, whether a ruling that "caster gets to choose" or creating random tables-by-terrain for each spell.
Would do/have done: wing it. Assign something from the DMG that feels dramatically appropriate for the current environment, or just ask the player what he wants.

I agree with you that DM ad-hoc is not the right way to run this, and if a player objected I'd probably assign him to create the random tables for me so I can vet it once and be done. Note that I'm biased toward random tables because when in doubt, I'll lean towards AD&D interpretations.

(Another example of leaning on AD&D: simulacrum doesn't make it entirely clear whether the duplicate has the same knowledge as the original or not, or what degree of volition it has. In AD&D it was a zombie-like creature with no volition unless/until you gave it one using Reincarnation, and it took a Limited Wish to give it 40-65% of the original's memories. Therefore, I won't let anyone use 5E Simulacrum as a foolproof way to steal all of someone's memories/knowledge/secrets.)

P.S. One further piece of evidence: Conjure Elemental doesn't allow the player to choose what elemental they get, but they do get to choose what area they cast it on, and then the elemental forms based on that. Water elemental for a river, earth elemental for a block of stone, etc. Conjure Minor Elementals has no such "choose an area" clause, only "choose a CR range", so it makes sense that you'd just get minor elementals that fit the ambient environment you're casting the spell in. It's certainly not an ironclad case for "player doesn't get to choose," but IMHO it's a better case than "player does get to choose just because it doesn't say he doesn't."

 

[Tony Vargas]

Ought to: come up with some kind of consistent rule, whether a ruling that "caster gets to choose" or creating random tables-by-terrain for each spell.
Would do/have done: wing it. Assign something from the DMG that feels dramatically appropriate for the current environment, or just ask the player what he wants.

Given 5e's rulings-not-rules philosophy, I think what you would/have done in this case has as much claim to being what you 'ought' to do as the alternatives. FWIW, 'winging it' has served me very well in running both classic D&D and 5e games.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Given 5e's rulings-not-rules philosophy, I think what you would/have done in this case has as much claim to being what you 'ought' to do as the alternatives. FWIW, 'winging it' has served me very well in running both classic D&D and 5e games.

"Ought to" has nothing to do with 5E's philosophy on rulings. It's for the reasons evilbob already outlined. 5E's designers don't come into it.

Another reason in addition to what evilbob already outlined: Conjure Animals doesn't have any material components. A PC should have a pretty good idea how the spell works, and if he isn't sure, he can cast it repeatedly to gain empirical knowledge. It shouldn't be a big mystery to him what he gets when he casts it.