Thoughts on Summons

"How do you handle summons without taking away player agency" --Shinanoki, paraphrased

A long, long time ago, while I was busy with other things, one of my patrons posed this question in my discord. It was so long ago, in fact, that I certainly forgot exactly what he asked, and I might even have the identity of the questioner wrong.  I think the idea was just to spitball some ideas with the community, but nonetheless it caught my eye and it was something I wanted to discuss, but I never had time... until now!

The Problem with Summons

Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit

So, the specific context of the original question was unclear, but I can make some broad guesses and some broad observations.

In principle, we want our players to be the core focus of our game. If our game is about fighting monsters and taking their stuff, than the players should be doing the fighting and the taking.  If they started sub-contracting the fighting and taking, then our RPG would become Mercenaries & Management rather than Dungeons & Dragons.  But this is exactly what happens with combat summons in a combat oriented game: if you summon a monster to do all the fighting for you, and you sit back and eat popcorn, then your game gets really boring really quick.

The question then, it seems to me, is how can we allow for summoners while maintaining player agency?

The Summoning Game

The first way to handle it is to make the game about summoning.  If we accept the natural conclusion of our premise, then we do run the mystical equivalent of Mercenaries & Management.  Consider, for example, Pokemon.  In principle, the player runs the monsters directly, but if we ran it as a game where you played as a trainer, then the focus for player characters would not be the specifics of the fight between two pokemon, but on the finding, collecting, and training pokemon, and managing their fights (choosing the best match-ups, etc).  "Gameplay" doesn't turn on what the summons do, but on getting and using those summons.

A good example of this in practice might be a GURPS Cabal game. I find in most Cabal games (or Mage: the Awakening or Mage: the Ascension) that our hoary wizards don't generally engage in direct conflict with one another.  They don't knife each other in back alleys.  Instead, they study ancient secrets, try to learn one another's secret names for their death curses, and someone horrifying monsters and sic them on one another.  The cabalist's gameplay is about the summoning and about directing the summons to its particular goal, not about the actual meat-and-potatoes of what the summon does in combat.  You can just send your summon out, wait a spell, and then have it return to report success, or get a mocking phone call from your rival who criticizes the weakness of your summoned demons.

The Two Disciplines

Alright, so you're not playing a "summoning game," you're playing another game and you want to be a summoner in it.  For example, you're playing Dungeon Fantasy and your character is a summoner.  How do we handle that?

I generally find the best way to treat summoners is similar to how one treats shapeshifters: they represent a character who has found a way to master two different disciplines but with some sort of trade off.  In the case of a shapeshifter, the character has to choose which specialty he's "in" at the moment, while a summoner can have their cake and eat it too, but are vulnerable to other issues (such as counterspells).

Thus, the question here becomes "What are our specialties and how can they differ?" The obvious, of course, is that one of you is good at combat, and the other is good at something else.

The Combative Summoner

The problem here is that the assumption will be that the summon is good at combat while the player isn't, but this isn't necessarily so. Exalted has a very interesting set-up with its demons in that many of the demons aren't very good at combat.  This seems odd until you understand that the Exalted summoning the demons are fantastically good at combat, so good they don't really need a Blood Ape to do their fighting for them.  Instead, they might summon a Peronelle as their living armor, or a Stomach Bottle Bug to heal a target for them. When it comes to combat, they're more than good enough, and their summoned thing provides some other benefit.

If one steps away from the assumptions of wizards and demons, we'll find this sort of scenario surprisingly common.  A bullet hell game often has "summonable" allies who offer a little bit of extra fire power, or some additional shielding, or heals your ship, while the main ship does all the actual fighting.  The same is actually true of a lot of different genres as well, from the "hacker" whose "summons" are "Daimonic" AI that help him hack computers, or psychics who call upon astral allies to spy on their enemies.

If you want to take this approach, the best way to think of summons are as things that have access to some other "arena" on which to oppose your opponent, or to solve problems.  If all summons, for example, are insubstantial beings that can deal only with magical, mystical or mental problems, then your summons really allows you to handle two different realms of combat at once. The summoner does his own fighting, but his summons helps him spy on others, influence targets mentally, undo curses or place curses, and defeat other summons.

You could also treat summons as accessories.  You might have several possible summons, but only one is available at a time.  Or, alternatively, all summons have some sort of cost that becomes exorbitant if you have too many at once.  You can see each as a suite of advantages or options that you can layer over the top of your character: one summons might protect you from the interference of other summons and keep you safe from curses, a second one might spy for you and instruct you on the weaknesses of your enemies and warn you about ambushes, while the last might harry your enemies with curses or hallucinations.  You have to choose which to "bring" with you to battle, but the actual combat is up to you. They represent more like self-aware spell effects than combatants.

The Mystical Summoner

This fits more in line with what people expect from summoners, and inverts the above.  The summoned creature is death-on-a-stick, and the summoner is a mystical being who specializes in occult phenomenon.  You bring the summoner around to sense hidden doors, create occult barriers against curses and malign influences, to harry your enemies with curses and hallucinations, to solve riddles and know things, and the summons represents their ability to actually fight while being 100 lbs soaking wet and unable to wear armor or swing a sword. They don't have to do any of those things, because they have a two-ton blood ape that screams and hurls bone spikes at their enemies.

The problem here is that fights will take up far more of the game, and the GM, in principle, should play as the summoned ally, which means the majority of the game for the summoner will be spent summoning his Bloodthirster, then toddling off for a spot of tea while the rest of the group finishes off the fight, who then thank him when he returns because his Bloodthirster was the MVP of the fight and did the coolest things ever while the summoner was twiddling his thumbs.

Depending on your player, this can be okay.  I've seen a lot of people play as summoners because this part of the game interests them the least.  They're also the sort that might prefer to play as clerics, and go and hide during the fight, cast some healing when it's all done and soak up the praise of the party. If your player is that sort, then you don't need to change anything. They're the equivalent of a player who wants to play as a "princess who has a knight who does all her fighting for her." Those sorts of players are real, I've seen them, and if that's what they want, I say let them have it.

But a lot of people don't like that sort of gameplay: witness the arguments over who "has to" play as the cleric.  A lot of people want to be the star, to get "stuck in" and that's the opposite of what a summoner does.  You can go with the above, if you like, but if that's not an option, consider the following:

The summoner should be vital to the role played by the core, monstrous summon.  That summon exists only because of the character, and without the character, goes away.  One-way sympathy ("If the caster dies, the summon is banished") already goes a long way to helping that, though it can also create an argument for bundling the summoner off somewhere safe to preserve the summons, so we need some reason to keep the summoner around to be a target for the attacks of the bad guys, such as the summon cannot "leave the summoners side" by more than a particular distance.

We can also give the summoner some ability to manage their summon.  Rather than treating the summon as a "fire and forget," the summoner acts, by some measure, through the summons.  This could be the summoner directly deciding the actions of the summon and rolling for them, like a second character, though GURPS generally discourages this.  But it might also represent "magic" that the character can express through the summons.  For example, a summon might have different aspects or abilities that the summoner needs to activate and feed.  For example, perhaps your Blood Ape has a berserk mode that you can activate, which makes it truly harrowing but dangerous to everyone around it.  There may be times you want to activate that, and times you want to dampen it.  You'll need to be around, supervising its actions, dampening its collateral damage, and deciding when best to switch mode. You might also be able to cast spells that only affect the summons, such as giving the blood ape a fire blast by casting the spell "through" the summons, or enchanting the summons directly. If this costs fatigue, then you're engaging in not just supervision, but also resource management.  At this point, the summoner and the summons become a team, and you can't afford to toddle off and get a spot of tea, and its victory legitimately becomes your victory.

The Strategic Summoner

One interesting approach is to make the summon fight in a fundamentally different way than the summoner. That is, of course, the strategy of all the above suggestions, but it can be the case that both summoner and summon can fight, but in different ways.  

I think the classic necromancer is the most iconic example of this.  Their summons tend to be relatively weak, but they can have a lot of them, which really changes the dynamic of play.  The necromancer himself often specializes in single-target damage, such as "bone spears" or "death spells," while his horde of zombies focus on quantity over quality, and this creates an interesting "combined arms" effect that most other characters don't have.  The necromancer also encapsulates a lot of the "mystical summoner" options above: this zombies and skeletons tend to be dumb as rocks and need his guidance; he can manipulate them with his spells (empowering them, etc), and if he dies, they die, but if he's not around, they're not around, so the necromancer is very much present in the fight, even if he's not necessarily directly fighting.

The problem with a summoner who focuses on hordes of weaker summons is handling the horde.  GURPS is already mechanics intensive, and when the GM has to handle, say, 5-10 mooks per summoner, that can be quite a load, especially when a fight boils down to a necromancer's horde vs, say, an orc horde.  Then you're rolling for 10 skeletons fighting ten orcs, and while it's obvious to everyone that the Necomrancer is important and needs to remain present, he (and everyone else) toddles off for a spot of tea simply due to the sheer time it takes to resolve the fights between the summons and their opponents.

What you need in this case is a way to speed up the fights.  I tend to think Necromancers and the Masterminds of City of Villains work better as Mass Combat characters than as direct, front-line combatants (and we're back to Mercenaries & Management).  You can also use aids that speed up combat, such as the Horde rules from GURPS Zombies, or the computerized assistance of a virtual tabletop.  Or you can run a game that has less intensely involved combat (but that tends to bore the players of other sorts of characters).

Final Thoughts

So, that's all the solutions I can think of.  The core of running a good summoner is focusing on making the summoner interesting, not just in the core gameplay of the game, but in their core summoning gameplay.  Adding elements like the collection and management of summons can make for a more engaged player outside of "combat" or whatever your core mechanic is.  In combat, the summoner and summon should have fundamentally different gameplay models that play well off of one another to allow both to be present, though ideally balanced so they're not fundamentally better than everyone else (something GURPS struggles with, it must be said). It also helps to find some way to speed up combat, at least for the summon, so they don't become unwieldy.  Finally, if you find that your game is increasingly about summons doing the fighting for the PCs (armies of skeletons, giant demon champions fighting other, giant demon champions) consider shifting the focus of your game towards a more managerial game, as the characters are effectively acting more like generals than frontline combatants.