Wednesday's Game (Stupid Unicorns)

Picture is from the last time I made this mistake. Will I never learn?

Wednesday's Game was nice and educational for me as a DM, but its the same lesson I have sat through before. A Unicorn trashed the game as far as evil is concerned.... but the players had a nice big old epic battle. We all had fun, but once again, unicorns got out of control.

The major fight (only fight) of the evening involved the following:

1. Demon with a CR in the Teens, that successfully summoned another of the same type of Demon
2. An evil "melee-cleric" type with a lot of time to buff himself up before combat
3. Various Summoned creatures the cleric summoned while invisible (and finishing his buffing)
4. A pack of Shadow Mastiffs with a template on them

All of the above ended up being rolled into one encounter because of how over-the-top (in a good way) the encounter unfolded.

The First Demon was neutralized by a high level cleric spell. (Well done!) while the summoned demon companion started to close on the party while the cleric's summoned (via summon monster) spells came into play. Shortly after the Cleric's invisibility was destroyed by an invisibility purge and then I made a bad call. The bad call was "Sure, you can summon unicorns."

It turns out that in the Pathfinder rules, Unicorns had been taken off the list of creatures to summon. I thought I was making a good player friendly call by grandfathering them into play.

So, my brother summoned 1d4+1 unicorns. We got all 5 and laughed, because... well.. unicorns are silly.

Turns out their circle of protection against evil is no so silly.

The circle's affect on the party was

"prevents bodily contact by evil summoned creatures. This causes the natural weapon attacks of such creatures to fail and the creatures to recoil if such attacks require touching the warded creature." and when you toss in the AC + Save bonuses, plus how hard it is to get a mind affecting spell to stick, the spell was killer.

So many of the creatures in the fight were classified as summoned that the party could just focus on the non-summoned creatures and trivialize the fight. Will 5 mobile circle of protections in play, it was near impossible for me to neutralize the unicorns with the assets I had in play.

In conclusion, Unicorns... There is reason the party cannot summon them. I just have to remember it!

(In the picture attached, months ago I had a big monster represented by the black disc. The Unicorn's aura of protection really helped them beat an encounter sane players would have run from)