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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 1901141" data-attributes="member: 2268">I have to agree with Storm Raven in the moralic part of this discussion. A summoned creature is as real and physically present as your player character, it will be hurt, feel pain and it certainly can be reduced to 0 HP or lower, which means it can be killed. It won't leave blood and a sad corpse because as soon as it is dead, it vanishes to where it was called from. There, it will take 1 day to reform it's physical presence.Seeing as all creatures summoned by a Summon Monster I will have at least an Intelligence rating of 3, which effectively pushes them in the range of humanoid intelligence, attacking one of them to gain the advantage of the discussed AoO+Cleave combo is comparable to AoO a humanoid being that is on your side in a fight to gain a personal advantage in your next attack.The rules for Attack of Opportunity as written allow this, as they only name combatants when they talk about who can provoke an attack of opportunity, as such naming everyone involved in a combat scene.Now the biggest problem is, as always, adjudicating the moral of certain acts. In my opinion, attacking an ally that fights at your side against an enemy with the intent to kill, because that ally gives your attack an opening and killing it with one stroke will give you an advantage against your enemy is, if it's not the very last possibility to stop something extremely evil and your ally is okay with it, evil. It doesn't matter if you have the means to raise that ally later, or if that ally will take only a day to reform itself. There's only a very limited amount of situations in which an action like that would be even considered good, from a moral point of view. There's a heap of situations where the summoned creatures could be viewed as something else than the fighter's allies...like when the wizard is taking the chance to summon them to attack the fighter, against whom he harbors some resentments for weeks already. Or when he summons creatures that he can coomunicate with and specifically orders them to attack the fighter.The point is that it can be damn complex to adjudicate the moral value of an action...but that a lot of blanket statements done in this discussion simply would lead to an alignment shift, if the same tactic would be used with the same disinterest about causing pain and killing an ally for a few times, at least in my game. Which is not  how others would handle it, I'm aware of that, but we've been asked our opinions. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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