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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6982921" data-attributes="member: 4937">It does what it intuitively does, allowing you to summon small crowds of low powered creatures.  I have a homebrew feat in my game called 'Summon the Legion' that automatically empowers (for free) any Summon Monster spell.  As you note, since low CR creatures are generally only of small utility, I judge this feat useful but not broken, as it makes summoning 'Wall of Wolves' (as the players jokingly refer to it) more of a thing worth doing and you only get a couple extra low CR monsters.In standard RAW, it's basically NEVER worth empowering a summon monster spell, as you'd always be much better off casting the version two levels higher.  Summon Monster V, using the Summon Monster III list, is vastly better than getting a few extra creatures from the Summon Monster I list.  And indeed, since the creatures you get are random, without something like my 'Summon the Legion' homebrew, why would you ever risk getting 1d3 creatures from a lesser list (ending up with perhaps 1 weak creature) rather than summoning 1 strong creature.  No, I would not accept this as valid interpretation.  Summon monsters are always normal stereotypical examples of their species.  They never have unusual stats.   You never roll for these stats.  (I personally never even roll for hit points on summoned monsters.)  Nothing in the rules implies that a monsters standard array is actually the average of generated by 3d6 rolled randomly.  That's a demographic interpretation not born out from how D&D normally played.  It is by no means certain that NPCs generate stats at all, much less that they do so randomly.  And unless the random stat generation was explicitly mentioned in the spell-text, Empower Spell wouldn't apply to it anyway.</blockquote>

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