Is summoning creatures to spring traps an evil act?

[Fauchard1520]

At some point, you need to draw a line between Good and good, or Evil and evil. Dungeons & Dragons assumes a cosmology where the concepts of Good and Evil are primal forces that permeate reality, and certain magic stains your soul. If you cast too many Evil spells, then you become Evil for the purposes of magic, regardless of whether you do good or evil things.

One of the very first characters, in one of the very first D&D games that I played in, was an Evil necromancer who used the undead to perform manual labor and to take the place of living soldiers on the battlefield. If someone needs to suffer, then it might as well be the mindless undead who can't feel anything, right? The necromancer was definitely a good and noble person, even though he was considered Evil for the purposes of magic.

I think that the way it's supposed to work is that the stain on your soul should influence your behavior. Even if you have good intentions, summoning a bunch of undead will make you magically Evil, which will then make you more inclined to perform evil acts. Or if you're a good person, who commits the evil act of summoning a Good creature to suffer on your behalf, then the magical stain of Good (from casting a Good spell) will counteract the non-magical creep toward becoming evil (from committing evil acts). I think.

So in the case of my evil summoner who kept summoning Good creatures to watch them die, repeated castings of that Good summoning spell should have eventually corrupted her over toward not being evil anymore. (At which point she would stop casting that spell, because it no longer seems like a fun thing to do.)

Awesome summary, Saelorn! That is indeed where I'm coming from. I've got to wonder though: Does the intent of watching good things suffer counteract the Good influence of the spell? In other words, is using that kind of magic explicitly for evil acts enough to counteract the Good act? Because if so, your long-ago noble necromancer was A-OK.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Sometimes I have thought about using psionic astral constructs to explore dungeons with tramps. Other option is using summoned creatures "trained" to search traps, or maybe they are too small and light, to active the traps, or too fast to be hit.

Druids summoning natural allies in a underground most of times only get cockroaches and other vermins, and who will miss them if they are killed by traps?

And what if using cannon fodder is useless, because there aren't lethal traps, but alarms to call sentinels? Or the trap is to free a "living spell" from a cage (a special ooze from 3.5 Monster Manual).

 

[Sunseeker]

I would say it is. But then, that's also a great use of summoned creatures. I know I've used Animate Objects to essentially do the same, but realistically they may not trigger some traps that depend on weight or life.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This is a very Gary Gygax solution, not one I would use -

If the so-called 'heroic' adventurers persist in abusing spells of magical conjuration then gently remind them: THEY TOO CAN BE SUMMONED!

 

[Doug McCrae]

"Such & such obvious abuse of a spell is 'Evil!'" is an old stand-by for DMs with too-clever-for-their-own-good players. D&D has always encouraged players to be 'clever' and DMs to alternately reward & punish them for it. It's just part of the dynamic that keeps the game so wildly popular after 40 years.


Seriously, though

That's a joke? I honestly thought it was a solid analysis of D&D. Earseekers are a good example of punishing clever players.

 

[Kaodi]

I think I tend to assume that summoned creatures are general extraplanar in some way. Even the "nature's ally" ones. You summon Badger McBadgerface to check for traps and he gets squished and he sort of dissolves and goes back to where he was in some primeval forest in the Beastlands or some other plane. Even if you want to assume you actually someone the nearest physical specimens to do your bidding then it is probably a bit like astral projection for them: your magic creates an ephemeral body that their spirit inhabits. Otherwise summon nature's ally's best use would be "summon provisions" .

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's a joke? I honestly thought it was a solid analysis of D&D. Earseekers are a good example of punishing clever players.

Just the last bit: attributing the game's 'wild popularity' to the dynamic of alternately rewarding and punishing 'clever' players.

Though keeping any criticism of old-school D&D, however, solid, phrased lightly can be a good idea...

 

[Greenfield]

If you look at the Summon Monster tables in the MM, everything is either Celestial, Fiendish or some kind of elemental. So yeah, they're all outsider/extraplanar.

Summon Nature's Ally, on the other hand, specifies that you're summoning a "natural animal"

Summon Planar Ally is self explanatory.

<Small tangent>I recall a friend telling me about her Elf finding himself on the Plane of Air, having been summoned by a Djinn with a Ring of Elf Summoning. And the Djinn wanted his Wishes, and he wanted them now! Turned out that in the DM's interpretation (1st Ed.), it was the ring/summoning that gave the target the power to grant Wishes, not the creature itself.</tangent>

Over all, summoned creatures run the gamut. In the Sandstorm environment book they introduced Summon Desert Ally, which called up Dustform monsters.

 

[Celebrim]

No. Or rather, at least not in my campaign.

Summon spells make use of spirits who are pretty much always on standby looking for some excuse to meddle in the natural world. They willing come to fight on behalf of magic wielders in order to further their ends. It's basically like calling a temporary staffing agency and leaving out a magical calling card. Anyone that answers the card would already have decided to be perfectly willing to run across a trap filled floor, knowing that they can't sustain any lasting harm from doing so, and the ends of Good, Evil, or whatever would be advanced thereby.

There in is the catch in my campaign. If you choose to summon up say a group of Celestial Hounds, they'll balk at say being used to tear a part say an orphanage or kill an innocent old woman that represents no threat. Conversely, a group of infernal creatures will balk at being used to advance some obviously good end or perform some obviously good deed, such as saving a good temple from destruction. And, because (among other things) evil summoned creatures will generally only do evil deeds, and good summoned creatures will generally only do good deeds, it's Evil or Good to summon up creatures of the corresponding sort.

Q: Where does the creature go when it dies?
A: It doesn't die. It relinquishes its temporary physical form and its spirit goes back to wherever it came from. It was in a sense never really here in the first place, any more than someone who engages in astral projection is truly on the astral plane.

Q: Is there a celestial or infernal waiting room somewhere full of creatures waiting to get summoned?
A: More or less, yes. Actually many such rooms. The spirits that get summoned are typically those frustrated by their inability to effect the material world, and who are anxiously waiting for an opportunity to do so.

Q: Is taking a turn in that room like community service for extraplanar creatures?
A: Well, define 'community'. If we're talking a chaotic creature, then "No", there is certainly no community compelling them to serve. But in the case of lawful creatures, it could very well be they get delegated the task for some reason.

Q: But then why would the creature take time to reform?
A: Because it hurts. Getting even your temporary body banished violently from the material plane hurts, and it takes a day for the spirit in question to collect itself (quite literally). This doesn't mean that the spirit necessarily minds - it afterall volunteered for the job. It recognized the pain as a possibility and considered the gain to be more important. In some cases, the spirit might be effectively masochistic anyway - even a Lawful Good spirit might see the pain incurred as some sort of proof that it was engaged in more than the usual devotion to its duty. In the case of Chaotic Evil spirit, to the extent that it is capable of 'enjoying' anything, it might relish the pain or at least the inability of the pain to harm it and the opportunity it had to spread the pain around.

Q: Does that mean I can request Broseidon the Celestial Dolphin every time I cast summon monster?
A: Yes. If you know Broseidon's name or if Broseidon decides that you are a particularly trust worthy customer and worth working with, then this is a very likely result. However, doing so multiple times in the same day requires Broseidon to have returned at the end of the spell duration peacefully. If Broseidon was mangled by a trap, that might not convince Broseidon he doesn't want to come back (afterall, if you are engaged in some worthy endeavor, he'd rather he gets mangled than you), but it would mean he couldn't come back in the same day.

Q: And how do you live with yourself knowing that you’re putting all those cute little critters in harm’s way?
A: If these were a bunch of innocent little creatures violently ripped from somewhere, then yes that would definitely bother me. But there is nothing innocent about a summoned creature. They also have their own agenda.

 

[Deset Gled]

In 3.5, it is generally not an evil act.

A spell that is Conjuration, Summoning type is governed by this text: "A summoned creature also goes away if it is killed or if its hit points drop to 0 or lower. It is not really dead." So you explicitly aren't killing them. Also, note that they aren't completely real; they "die" at 0 hp rather than -10, any they lack certain abilities of normal creatures. Some sections of the rules explicitly refer to summoned creatures as manifestations rather than real: "Conjurations bring manifestations of objects, creatures, or some form of energy to you (the summoning subschool)".

However, as noted by others, the Summon Monster spells can gain a Good or Evil (or other) subtype: "When you use a summoning spell to summon an air, chaotic, earth, evil, fire, good, lawful, or water creature, it is a spell of that type." So, paradoxically, summoning an Evil creature just to kill it is an Evil act, and summoning a Good creature just to kill it is a Good act. I'm perfectly okay with that.