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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8138497" data-attributes="member: 6937590">But the flavor is bland, isn't it? Consider the summon undead and animate dead spells. They're the same level, they both create relatively long lasting undead minions. Animate dead has flavor in spades--to the point that people argue about whether using it makes you evil--but clunky and niche mechanics. Summon undead has some flavor but roughly the same mechanics as 8 other spells.I guess it the halfway-ness of these spells that bothers me.Make a mechanically cool spell with a lot of use. Cool, I like it.Make a thematically cool spell, with at least some mechanical utility. Cool, I like it.Make one mechanically cool spell and reskin it 9 times with slightly different quirks. Meh, I'm not impressed. It's not hard for me to take a mechanically cool spell and reskin it myself.You're absolutely right, that alternative isn't better.If I condensed the list down to one summon spell per level, I'd pick a flavor for each level and then give that level's summon spell a distinctive mechanical flair to support its flavor, i.e.: 2nd gets generic animals 3rd gets a choice of fey that charm & shadowspawn that fear 4th gets big elementals that smash and each has a novel mobility feature 5th gets glass cannon aberrations with multiple sweet spell-like abilities 6th gets tanky fiends with resistances, immunities, and aoe effectsThey could all have comparable CR when cast at the same level, but scale differently.That is an excellent Idea, especially for polymorph.Ya, 100% typo.</blockquote>

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