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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 1901975" data-attributes="member: 13966">Thanks for helping clarify my point, KarinsDad.  I ramble sometimes. {:^D  This is the last time, I promise.Storyteller01 and company....  Your points about a summoned creature suffering when it is injured or slain while summoned are moot and illogical, if you take a moment to look at what that would mean in the imaginary multiverses of D&D.  The summoned creature is only a psuedo-real magical robot that mimics an actual creature who is going about their business unhindered on some Outer Plane.  The wording of the Summoning spells, the Conjuration (Summoning) description in the PH's Magic chapter, and simple logic all show that it would make no sense for summoning to work as you think in D&D.  No celestial creatures would be summonable, because most do not generally cause enough of a difference in battle to justify the suffering you assume they would endure for it, and benevolent deities like Pelor and Yandalla would never allow such summonings if your assumptions were right.  Summoned creatures are unfeeling, unthinking, partially-real constructs of pure magical energy created to duplicate the appearance of an existing creature somewhere on the Outer or Elemental Planes.If it were immoral to summon a celestial creature for the sake of it being cleaved by an allied warrior in order to get in an extra hit against the party's main enemy at the time, then it would also be immoral to summon a celestial creature to dash in and attack any enemy who would surely slay it; sending a Celestial Badger to attack a Kyton would be just as morally-incorrect as summoning it for the purpose of this thread's topic.  Either way the CB would die before the round was over, most likely disappearing the instant it touched the Kyton because of Spell Resistance.  Whether you summon it to die in that way or to die from drawing one attack from the Kyton, it matters not, and is no more moral than summoning it to be cleaved by the party's fighter.  You are nonetheless summoning that critter for the sole purpose of charging in and dying immediately to achieve absolutely no effect against the forces of Evil; if you at least use it as fodder for the fighter's cleave-attack into the bad guy, it's serving a purpose for the sake of Good.Now if the Celestial Badger were a real body inhabited by the soul of the summoned creature, feeling pain and such normally, it would certainly be evil to kill it in this way, but again, no more evil than summoning the CB to charge in and die upon the briefest contact with a Demon's or Devil's Spell Resistance.  Thus it follows that the summoned badger could not possibly be a real body with real feelings and life, otherwise no forces of Good would allow its summoning under any circumstances; therefore the summoned badger is no more real than an illusion, merely controlled 'by remote' from its real body on the fields of Bytopia or Elesium or wherever, which feels no pain from the manifested psuedo-body composed of nothing more than magical energy; not true flesh.  A monster chewing on summoned Celestial Badgers is not ingesting any flesh, the bitten-off parts just dissipate into their constituent nonliving magical energies immediately.Manifestations are not necessarily real; they are clones of the creature's body, made purely of magical energy, susceptible to winking out of existence due to Antimagic Fields, Spell Resistance, etc.  The creature's soul may control the magical-clone of its body, but its true body isn't summoned, that stays put right on its celestial/fiendish/elemental/whatever homeplane.  The soul of the creature feels no pain or the like while controlling this magical puppet that looks like its own body, and the summoned creature obviously doesn't rebel against the control; it's just a temporary observer, operating this flesh-puppet about as directly as you would control a video game character.  For all we know, the summoned creature could be controlling its real body at the same time back in its homeplane, no inconveniance at all because it's an extraplanar being and more in tune with the universe than the mortal who summoned its manifestation.  The summoned body is no more than a magical construct that closely mimics flesh and allows the creature's soul to use its own magical abilities normally through the life-like puppet.D&D does not distinguish living cells and such; in D&D, everything is made up of nonsentient elements only (fire, air, earth, water).  They may form living cells, but those cells are not themselves sentient or living creatures.  Does Remove Disease have the Evil descriptor since it destroys bacteria, viruses, and other assorted 'diseases'?  Of course not.  Cells in D&D are not necessarily creatures themselves.  The magically-created puppet-construct of a summoned creature's body does not feel pain, as it does not think or feel anything really.  The summoned creature's soul thinks for it, and directs it as if holding the puppet strings, but nothing more.  I already described the logic earlier about how no Celestial creature would ever be summoned if good-aligned deities didn't want the summoned bodies to suffer; they do not suffer, they are no more susceptible to pain than an Iron Golem's or Flesh Golem's artificial body.The summoner isn't pulling an actual Ghaele Eladrin or whatnot from Bytopia or wherever, he's creating a construct of pure magical energy that mimics that Eladrin's form and then coaxes the Eladrin's soul to control the psuedo-real puppet for a few seconds or so, pulling its metaphorical strings to direct it at the summoner's bidding so he can more effectively fight evil, no matter how the summoner goes about that.  The Eladrin is happy to guide the puppet that looks like her, directing it to attack villains or move just so and allow the summoner's ally to cleave through the psuedo-real puppet in order to get in another solid hit against a villain.  The only inconveniance for the soul of the summoned creature is perhaps a momentary distraction from whatever they were doing at home or whatever, as they turn their attention to their mind's eye where they see the magical puppet and move it around.  No pain or death, just a brief moment of controlling the magical equivalent of a robot by remote control.</blockquote>

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