Sunday, June 26, 2022

Calculating the CR of the Summon Spell Creatures

 In the Player's Handbook, most of the spells where you conjure creatures to fight for you (or raise them from the dead if you're using necromancy) have you pick out (or have your DM pick out) creatures from the Monster Manual.

This, as it turns out, is a real pain in the ass. (I mean, to each their own, but I find it grinds the game to a halt). Thus, the "Summon X" spells introduced in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, along with Summon Draconic Spirit in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, which follows a similar formula, are a great alternative if you want to be able to summon creatures but have a more consistent and reliable thing to throw into the mix.

One of the things I like about these spells is that they scale up quite nicely when you cast them at higher levels. Each attack does more damage as you upcast the spell, and every two levels, they get another attack. They range from the 2nd level Summon Beast to the 6th level Summon Fiend.

Most earlier conjuration spells grab you a creature of a certain Challenge Rating from within a particular creature type. So, what I figured I'd do is get a sense of the challenge rating that a summoned creature would have if they were a standalone monster.

We might then use this as a point of comparison with other conjuration spells to find their relative values.

Now, there are a lot of these spells, so I'm going to limit what we're looking at.

In this case, I'm going to actually start with the highest-level summoning spell, because there are some reasonable spells to compare it to: How, then, fares the Fiend?

Summon Fiend can give you a Devil, a Demon, or a Yugoloth. These determine the fiend's hit points, their movement speeds and styles, and a few other features, along with the damage of their attacks.

We should also make a few assumptions about the character casting these, because this will have an impact on their power.

For the sake of argument, we're going to assume we have a level 11 Warlock with a +5 to Charisma and a +1 Rod of the Pact Keeper. This means that the warlock, and its summoned fiend, will have a +10 to hit.

Summon Greater Demon is a 4th level spell, so if upcast to 6 (to match it with Summon Fiend,) you can get a CR 7 demon. Thus, we'd love to get a fiendish minion that comes out to about Challenge Rating 7 (though if slightly lower the spell still might be better given that you're at no risk of losing control of the fiend). Likewise, Infernal Calling is a 5th level spell, upcast to 6th level would give us a CR 7 devil, though again, Summon Fiend is safer and more reliable, so if we're a little under, it still might be ok.

All right, now we have to choose a fiend. In general I'd probably typically summon a devil, because their flight and ranged attacks (that deal fire damage) would be quite useful for pure damage dealing. However, the devil also has the least HP of all the options. The Yugoloth has the most HP, but their melee-only attacks deal less damage and are non-magical slashing.

I think, then, to calculate this, we're going to use the demon's stats, which is the middle on HP but then does nearly as much damage as the devil, only in this case it's necrotic, which is the least likely to be resisted.

So, let's look at our statistics:

Defensively, the fiend has an AC of 18 with its natural armor when cast at 6th level (12 plus the spell's level). The demon has an HP of 50. Now, with an expected challenge rating of 7, the presence of fire resistance would boost its effective HP by 50%, though its immunity to poison damage should give it a full 100% bonus. Poison is not unheard of among foes that players face, nor is fire. I think it would be overkill to combine these EHP bonuses, but I think that fire is a little more common, so I'm going to kind of average it out and say we've got a 75% HP bonus, which means that the demon effectively has an HP of 87.

Our DCR, then, is a bit wonky. The HP level is only in the CR 2 range (just barely over the minimum) while the AC if in the 13-16 range. Given that the HP is only one over the minimum for CR 2, we're going to count the AC as being in the 13 range, and thus we get a DCR of around 7 or 8. Actually not bad - the AC helps a lot.

Now, we look at the OCR.

The attack bonus is, of course, borrowing from the player, and as we established, that's +11 to hit. That actually puts it in the range of CR 21 to CR 23.

The demon's bite attack deals 1d12+3+the spell's level in necrotic damage. At base level, that's 1d12+9, which comes out to about 15.5 damage on average. The number of attacks the fiend makes is half the spell's level (rounded down,) and thus is 3 attacks. So, it's doing a total of about 46.5 necrotic damage each turn. That puts its damage per round pretty solidly in the CR 7 range - maybe slightly on the lower end of it.

Thus, we'll say CR 21 is what represents its attack bonus. Averaged with its CR 7 damage output, we get an OCR of 14.

Thus, even conservatively, our Fiendish Spirit is the equivalent of a CR 10 or 11.

And given how there's no worry of the fiend turning on you, you've got to say this spell seems way better than those others.

Now, I'd originally intended to do a bunch of the other spells, but that was a lot.

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