Personalized SM Lists

[Twowolves]

I really like the idea of personalized Summon Monster lists, but I was unimpressed with the variants presented in UA. I came up with an idea, and thought I'd run it past everyone to see what you all think. But first, I must give a little background on the world I'm running. I'm running a pretty straight up Scarred Lands game, and in it, the elemental planes were more or less turned into a prison for the elemental-ish critters to get them out of the way of a Divine War between the Gods and Titans. Now the only way to breech the barrier between worlds is through Conjuration spells. Thus, I have chose to expand the lists of summonable monsters by using the elemental templates from the Monster Handbook (with a little tweaking) rather than MotP, as well as the Axiomatic/Anarchic templates.

The idea is for the number of creatures on a given list be limited based on the caster's ranks in a skill. Specifically, the number of creatures equals the caster's rank in a certain skill minus the level of the spell used to summon the monster. The skill used is based on the type of caster: arcane casters use Knowledge/Planar, clerics use Knowledge/Religion, and druids use Knowledge/Nature for SNA spells. For example, a wizard with 5 ranks in Knowledge/Planes would have 4 creatures on his SM1 list, 3 on SM2, etc. I feel this gives a real, tangible benefit to these skills above and beyond qualifying for a PrC or the occasional trivia check. Also, the type of creature you can summon is based on your class, with arcane casters getting elemental templated monsters, clerics getting alignment templated creatures, and druids keeping their list as is, or perhaps adding elemental templates.

Any thoughts or suggestions anyone?


Twowolves

 

[Terraism]

I like the idea, though my one concern is that it's mildly unfair to wizards. Druids and clerics are generally 'directly associated' with Knowledge (nature) and (religion), respectively. Wizards, however, usually relate to Knowledge (arcana,) not (planes.) I understand what you're getting at, with the elemental'd creatures, but still...

On the other hand, most characters that do a large amount of summoning are conjurerers, and they generally ought to have a good amount of knowledge about the planes.

 

[Nifft]

I've got a large table for building "elemental constructs", which casters can summon instead of regular critters. The way I've incorporated it into my rules has been:

- At character creation, pick a theme. If I like it, you get access to one or more elemental summon categories.

- Druids automatically get Wood. One Druid became focused on Ooze (Acid IMC), so he got to also create Ooze Elemental critters. He enjoyed making his own critters to use tactically in conjunction with his spells -- the "Immune to Entangle" feature was popular at low levels.

- One Wizard helped a Phoenix, so he can now summon Fire Elemental critters. He hasn't bothered to ever summon anything, though.

Anyway, here's my table:
http://klimt.cns.nyu.edu/~fishman/DnD/DHE/summon-tables-3.5.shtml

If nothing else, it gives you enough options that you can cut down your spellcaster's lists without denying them flexibility and power. (Each element is balanced against the others, but has its own unique flavor, and each has different strengths. Fire, for example, deals more [Fire] damage than Ooze deals [Acid] damage, but then every darn thing resists [Fire].)

Hope this helps, -- N