Summoning the Summoner

Hey folks! The Summoner has already been tested internally a couple of times and been through a few revisions so we figured it was a good time to debrief you folks on how we got here, and where we're going with the Summoner.

We started with...a meeting! Kickoff meeting! Any time things go bad at MCDM it's almost always because we failed to start with a Kickoff Meeting.

We spent about an hour talking about all the different ideas we had for the Summoner. We want to make sure to get everyone’s ideas out on the table so, as we move forward with some design, we’re not surprised to find out someone had a very different idea for what the Summoner was about. There’s nothing wrong with people having very different ideas! We just want to know that before anyone starts working on anything real.

After we talked for a while and shook all our ideas out of our heads, I felt confident in laying out some arbitrary goals.

First, the summoner should automatically gain new minions every round. This has to do with the core fantasy of what the summoner is about and fundamentally the summoner is not “about” summoning. That may seem counterintuitive but I saw the Summoner as “the RTS class.” They’re not about summoning minions, they’re about commanding minions on the battlefield.

I knew, or I very strongly believed, that the summoner should not be using their actions to summon minions, they should be using their actions to tell minions what to do (or cast spells, stay tuned) and that means their minions should just “show up.” 

Along this same line, I thought it was critical that minions be the Heroic Resource. That was my original pitch for the Summoner: “I summon these guys,” or really they just show up, “I command them in combat, and I can sacrifice them to power-up my spells.”

I always imagined the Summoner as a caster-class. But they don’t cast spells to summon minions, they cast spells to buff their minions or otherwise do cool stuff related to their theme. So the Necromancer Summoner could sacrifice a bunch of skeletons and they turn into Bone Armor or a Bone Sword or whatever.

So they can cast spells but they are not about casting spells, it’s just a thing they can do.

Taking these two things together, it actually makes a lot of sense for the Summoner’s minions to just show up, because they’re the Summoner’s Heroic Resource! And you automatically get some of that on your turn! So you should automatically get minions on your turn! Though currently it happens “at the beginning of each round of combat” which I think is better, but it’s for Willy to talk about how he got there.

So, Minions are the Summoner’s Heroic Resource. No screwing around, you just get minions every round just like the Conduit just gets piety every round.

Willy, even before he worked here, intuited that we’d need some “medium of exchange” to allow minions to turn into spells, or even a minion-to-minion currency? If I can summon 8 skeletons…can I summon 4 ghouls? 2 Grave Knights? That makes sense so 1 Grave Knight should “cost” more than 1 skeleton right? But what is the currency you are “paying” to get 1 Grave Knight instead of 4 skeletons or whatever?

I had not thought of that, but we all saw the value in that immediately. Willy’s original idea was “hand” as in a hand of cards, you have a “hand size.” It’s also, especially in the Necromancer’s case, evocative of The Black Hand, which is a fun sinister kind of reference. 

I like “hand” for this, but thinking about it, now that we know what the Elementalist is about, I thought “Shouldn’t it be Essence?” Essence, or more accurately “quintessence” is the stuff of creation. Elementalists use it to cast Fireball or teleport people around, but Summoners use it to create new beings or imbue the dead with a brief semblance of life.

So, currently it’s Essence but that might change! All is temp right now! You’ll see folks in the community talk about Essence as though it’s the Summoner’s Heroic Resource, but I think it’s a mistake to view it that way. Essence is the currency the Summoner “gets” when they sacrifice their minions and it allows them to cast spells. 

Now, you might be wondering…why not just give the Summoner some Essence every round and they can spend it on whatever they want? Casting spells, summoning minions….

Good question! And the answer is: because then they’d stop summoning minions. 😀 If you have a choice on your turn: spend your action on a spell that resolves immediately, or spend your essence on summoning some minions who then need to act and might not have enough movement to get into position or who might die quickly, you’re going to tend to go for the spell that resolves immediately and then you’re not a Summoner, you’re an Elementalist.

It’s the same answer to: can I summon One Big Zombie? No, because then you’re not a summoner, you’re a beastheart. A very weird beastheart but you get the idea. The hook of the Summoner is summoning and controlling minions. That’s always been the vision for the Summoner going all the way back to our original 5E minion rules which is when we originally realized we might be able to use these minion rules to finally, finally deliver on the Necromancer fantasy in a TTRPG.

Well, minions have two basic traits: there are a lot of them, and they die quickly. One Big Zombie is not “a lot of them” and also not “they die quickly.” In fact, you COULD say it’s the exact OPPOSITE of that! 😀

So if you want to NOT summon and control minions, well we got a lot of options for you! But if you DO want to summon and control minions? Come play a Summoner. That’s the hook and that’s the promise. 

I said this in the meeting, but later I thought “Hang on, I hope Willy didn’t think I meant ‘you can only summon weenie skeletons.’” You SHOULD be able to choose to summon fewer, beefier minions (or fewer, equally unbeefy but more explody minions, or whatever, you get the idea). You just CAN’T summon “one big minion.”

Happily I needn’t have worried, Willy got it without my saying it.

So after an hour of talking about all the ideas we had for a summoner those were my directives. “Here’s what I would like to see.” And we knew Willy was going to be the lead on this so I was mostly talking to Willy. “I want to see a Summoner who can summon and control twelve minions at first level. That doesn’t mean summoning all twelve in the first round! But it might! I left that to Willy. 

I felt like “12” was the minimum number that would make the player think “holy moley that’s a lot of minions!!”

You know, would 10 work? Sure. But to my mind, 10 would be “holy moley that’s a lot of minions!” Same sentence! But one fewer exclamation point. And that second exclamation point was important to me. 😀

I also know 12 might not be doable! But if we could deliver that? That would be epic.

I added “And I don’t need to do anything. Minions just show up. And I can sacrifice my minions to cast spells.” And I think that was it? The rest was up to Willy!

We all knew “this might not work.” And it still might not! But Willy seemed confident, so I’ll let him take it from here.

—

Hello hello I’ve taken it from here! I’m Willy, and it’s good to see you!

A summoner in a tactics game is one of those concepts I’ve been chasing for a very long time. I’ve scribbled many rules and notes about different approaches over the years without committing a draft to a document, usually due to other work needing to get done. It’s also a daunting task to reverse engineer an existing game just to make my systems work.

But check this out check this out! When I was applying to join MCDM, one of our tests was to make the first level of a Draw Steel class. And one of the options we could choose from was the summoner! I got BOTH an opportunity to work through a design and the existing rules of the game were still in progress. This was golden.

I’ve attached my original submission for your review! If you saw the summoner test on stream, then you’ll notice a lot of the bones from this submission made it into the first draft. It wasn’t all that much work to extend what was here into what Matt had asked for, since I think we were on the same wavelength for what we wanted out of the class.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to break down a few of the considerations that went into what we’ve built so far for the Most Modern Day Draw Steel Summoner (MMDDSS). The itinerary looks something like this:

• References

• Minions Minions Minions

• Action Wheeling and Damage Dealing

• What Else Can It Do?

References

Summoner has referred to a wide variety of different fantasies in the “I have more than one guy” genre (and a few outside that genre, too! Big cost, “creature flavored” spells are pretty common in JRPGs despite feeling like they don’t really count). I had prepped this whole chart before our kickoff meeting trying to categorize summoners that we could capture in Draw Steel.

The Scale!

The scale goes from commanding a swarm, which is closer to an ooze or an ability sculpting class, to commanding one big unit, which we want to reserve for the Beastheart’s fantasy and gameplay. The goal after the kickoff was twelve minions on the field with interesting options for stronger units, so my focus sticks primarily to those center three: Diablo’s necromancer, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pikmin.

The Archetypal Necromancer

Right in the center is Diablo’s necromancer, where you steadily grew a larger army over time (about 20 units in the endgame?) with a few interesting big units peppered in. I believe this to be one of the most archetypal necromancer fantasies people imagine before starting up any game, which means that a full summoner class has to be able to support a mix of big and small units with ally support and environment control.

The MMO City of Villains also had The Mastermind, which handled summoning in a similar fashion to Diablo. You weren’t ever controlling more than seven summons (skeletons, demons, machines, human thugs) throughout your career, but you still had to learn macros and build routines to command and support them properly. It could become overwhelming in an MMO environment where you’re also coordinating with the rest of your party. For me, CoV set the scale we could work within: a smaller fixed number of units can still feel like an army without overwhelming you with more and more plates you needed to spin.

Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Upcycling Hand

But there still needs to be a sense of progression in the summoning system. If the number of summons stays fixed, then what you can summon needs to change over time.

Creature summoning card games run on a similar scale to Diablo but in a turn based environment (pretty handy, considering we’re making a turn based game). Among them, games like Yu-Gi-Oh! do something particularly interesting with their monsters: they’re the games’ main resource for summoning more monsters. You enter into an upcycling routine of putting monsters out on the field and then sacrificing them to bring stronger monsters into battle. At least in the early days of Yu-Gi-Oh!, you couldn’t go from 0 to 60 on turn one, nor was the goal to only have one big monster on the field–you wanted a few to respond to your opponent’s next moves.

You can immediately see a parallel to Draw Steel’s resource routine: build up your heroic resources, act true to your class to gain more resources, and then spend resources on bigger and better abilities. It’s a very simple system to grasp so that each class can spice it up in an interesting way. So if you combine this routine with a limited number of minions you can summon and control, then spending/upcycling minions for bigger units keeps your army changing rather than relying on more and more units as you level up.

Pikmin’s Expendable Army

The minion system we already have in the game is balanced in such a way that eight minions are the equivalent of the same level hero. If the summoner’s power (particularly stamina) was going to be split between themself and their minions, and we wanted 12 skellingtons running amok on the field, then the minions have to become much simpler without sacrificing what makes them interesting to summon in the first place.

This is where leaning into Pikmin’s army comes in handy. The Pikmin games have you commanding tiny nature sprites (the pikmin!). They don’t have complicated abilities, but they have very distinct properties and impacts on their environments. Forex, red pikmin ignore fire and ice pikmin freeze bodies of water. Most importantly, they’re expendable; they get eaten by enemies, you defeat the enemies, and you turn the enemies into more pikmin. We can make minions work at the same level of complexity, give them a clear role, and add traits that make them interesting to use.

Minions Minions Minions

Everything about the Summoner has to revolve around the minions. It’s in all of the above references. It was even back in that original design test, explicitly calling them the Summoner’s resource. So how do you make something plentiful like a resource, scalable with more challenging combats, containable to a single turn, and interesting enough to turn into an important decision?

I had a hunch.

Let’s summon some minions!

Minions as a Resource

A volatile, delicate resource that the Director is looking to take away from you before your turn even starts sounds like a thrilling experience for myself and maybe two other people. One of the biggest selling points of Draw Steel is being able to be reliably cool at the table, so you need to be able to do reliably cool summoner things no matter how many minions are on the field.

Essence, simulacra, anima, whatever we want to call it is the summoner’s Elected Official heroic resource, literally in name only. Minions are the thing you’re getting and spending every turn, but essence is how we enable that behavior. Your essence only goes up when you lose minions, and (this is the critical part) you can choose to instantly kill an inactive minion on your turn to gain more essence. This keeps you in control of your resources in nearly any circumstance while preserving the simplicity of automatically summoning minions round after round.

And I do mean round. Right now, the summoner gets their minions outside of their turn since their triggered actions primarily rely on them having minions to act. If they were gained at the start of their turn, then the summoner might feel forced to act at the start of the round to get into position instead of having that freedom to choose strategically like the other classes do.

“But Willy! I don’t care that my minions turn into magic juice! How can I start my turn with minions while the Director is trying to kill them all?” So so so I believe this is going to be a matter of preference for players as they get used to this class. Just like how the Elementalist gets Enchantments, the Summoner has Formations, and the “Emergency Formation” allows you to start with a few minions in case they all die before your turn starts. There are other formations you can tap into that increase your range of managing minions, increasing the number of minion squads you control (which means more maneuvers and damage), and improving you and your units’ speed and disengage values to have more precise control over positioning. They all sound good, right? I think so, for the time being!

Minion Squads?

Well, yes! Two big concerns while designing this class are the amount of time it’ll take to perform a summoner turn and the amount of influence on the action economy it’ll have. Right now with 12 minions on the field, you can have a max of three squads filled with minions of the same name. You can always sacrifice one squad of minions to make way for a different type of minion better suited for the job, but this system ensures you’re always limited to either three minion actions / maneuvers on your turn. Combine that with simpler minions, and you end up with a turn about as fast and impactful as a Director’s turn, which isn’t too far removed from any other hero’s turn if our math is right.

Minion… Bods???

Coming back to minion complexity for a second. The biggest part of simplifying minions was to make them primarily rely on their free strike. This meant that even though you were taking more actions during your turn, you were still only making 1-2 power rolls on your turn, which means fewer critical rolls and fewer additional actions to process overall. Right now, monster free strikes are flat damage, but the summoner’s minions sometimes come with unique damage types and traits that modify what happens when they hit a target. Peep the husk for instance:

Yes, all the husk is doing is a 1 damage free strike, but that free strike is a Rotting Strike. It inflicts corruption damage and has a chance of slowing the target under the right circumstances. No power rolls unless you decide to perform a maneuver, or you summon a stronger minion like the Grave Knight you won’t always have access to.

Action Wheeling and Damage Dealing

So everything up until this point was a part of the planning process. I knew how I wanted to execute most of the class draft even if the words and terminology weren’t in place yet. Meanwhile, class damage was something I wasn’t sure how to tackle until I was midway through the draft. It was clearly going to be an issue at the start, but I needed the reality to be in front of me before I could spit on it, you know?

The Free Strike

And that reality was the summoner having their own free strike on their turn. You’ll note that earlier I said your minion squads had their own actions / maneuvers during your turn, but so do you. At level one, twelve minions and you can choose to make an all out attack on your turn. At level ten, one hero’s melee free strike only deals up to twelve damage without modifiers. Do you see it?

Let me make the point a little clearer. Even if your minions are doing one point of damage each, if you can also free strike on your turn, you could effectively double the damage output of most other heroes in your party at level one. You can’t get rid of the summoner’s free strike, either, since the game needs to guarantee you have at least one attack in order to function.

It’s a funny little problem, right? Most of the time, the summoner wants to use their action to Summon, or use a supportive heroic ability that changes the field without doing a lot of damage themself. As long as the Summoner has an action for themself, they’ll have the option to attack alongside their army. Removing the Summoner’s Action whole hog causes many more problems with overlapping systems than I felt comfortable modifying–at that point, you might as well make a different game.

Flat Damage

If the summoner was going to attack alongside their army, then the trick was to make their free strike work just like the rest of their army. Flat Damage. The precedent was already there for all of the Director’s units. But how do you package a straight downgrade to the player? You aren’t going to be there in person to explain to them that this decision was made for balance purposes non non non. It’s gotta be an interesting sidegrade or bust.

Strike For Me

Strike For Me meant that you still got to make a power roll on your turn, the damage being dealt on top of your minions actions was limited to a few extra points but with better positioning and consequences (like using the Husk to strike an additional target for that slow effect), AND you got to do something cinematic when the tactician calls on your aid in a pivotal moment.

Originally this ability was limited to only being available outside of your turn, but that didn’t get communicated very well and ultimately (so far) isn’t breaking anything. This opens up the minions to getting increasingly more powerful instead of being weighed alongside what’s supposed to be the weakest tool in your arsenal. Strike For Me was critical to figure out early on to make everything work.

I think the alternative to Strike For Me was a temporary free summon that ran up to an enemy, poked them, and died. That was the Bone Rusher’s purpose from my test, but all that really amounts to is putting googly eyes on a magic blast and calling it summoning (like those “creature flavored” spells from earlier).

What Else Can It Do?

I don’t know yet! The Summoner can probably go fishing, right?

Hell Yeah!

The focus has been to primarily get the minion system working within Draw Steel. Managed to pull that off, so the next steps are to figure out the rest of the class. I’ve already got pieces in place for sending minions to complete simple tasks outside of combat like scouting and carrying supplies.

We have the other subclasses to figure out, too. In addition to undead, our current idea is fey (pixies and ephemeral sprites), elementals, and demons. It’s tough to figure out what roles they’re going to fill, since we don’t know what pocket the summoner will generally operate in yet! What does an elemental summoner bring to the table that the elementalist doesn’t already? Do demons bite you if you don’t keep them fed!? The necromancer is already starting to find its niche as the speed based subclass, raising enemies as additional minions on the field to increase their numbers as soon as possible–I don’t think the pixie summoner can do that unless you’re the tooth fairy.

The current iteration has some cool supportive heroic abilities at level one we haven’t seen in action quite yet. It’s tough to pull them off when you’re busy doing the summoner thing of… summoning minions. It might be that they need to become maneuvers, but then we’re back to figuring out how to limit the extra damage from the summoner’s action. I want to see a few more tests before making the call.

Just did a test, in fact! They’re really good at controlling chokepoints!

One bit that I’m personally fond of right now is the Minion Bridge maneuver. Whenever I’m working on a class, I need to know its personal method of locomotion and we need to make an effort to make it unique among the other classes. Movement is everything in expressing fantasy; the fury charges into battle while the shadow tiptoes along the periphery of your vision. And the summoner? They’re ferried along by the minions. The more minions you have lined up, stacked up, stretched across a gorge, the further you can go!

So this was a long post, but we’re still pretty early in the Summoner process. A lot of the solutions and insights that we came to here might work against us in the long run. So far so good though!

I’m very interested in seeing the other subclasses start taking shape, as well as the higher cost minions each Summoner eventually gets. Will the necromancer bring back Mother Macabre? Maybe some cool looking aspect of Death? The sky’s the limit, folks.