Summon Monster/Nature's Ally

[pirateking]

What's your ruling on how Summon Monster/Nature's Ally works with getting them to do what you want?

Do you simply control them with your mind getting them to do what you want? or do you have to say what you want them to do needing a language to talk to them (celestial or infernal? since most are celestial blank, or fiendish blank)

[darkalloy]

Well unless you can speak dog it states that it attacks your enemies to the best of it's ability and IF, if being the big word here, if you can communicate with it you can direct it. So if you had telepathy you could use that and if all celestial/infernal/abyssal beings understand celestial/infernal/abyssal then you could command them that way... Beyond that you'd have to have speak with animals on all the time.

[pirateking]

I was just wondering about it after seeing "Conjurer Varients" in (the book of many options) Unearthed Arcana pg60.

Tho I like psionics simplification of summon spells with Astral Construct, much easier to command, and easier to produce its stats. Might go that path with a back-up character.

[darkalloy]

Yeah Astral's are nice. I would suggest if you do make a Shaper to create sheets for the kinds of constructs you would create most often. I know when a friend of mine ran his shaper he had a document organizer he brought along with each of the constructs he would normally create sheets. Made things a ton easier cause he named them. Like instead of going I'll summon up a construct with yada from here and yadda from here, he'd just go I'll summon up Rufus and we all knew Rufus was the one that charged your arse into a wall pushing his horns in one side of your gut and out the other.

[deepfrey]

I can always translate for you being a wolf and all

[Andre]

( ... summoned celestial dog looks at Draug and says " Arf " .. Draug replies " Arf.." Draug looks at Udyr and says " Draug, your dog say he attack enemies like you want ... but only if you give him box of milkbones." )

Summon monster text for the first level spell is the same as that for the higher level spell versions of it :

www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/summonMonsterI.htm

" It attacks your opponents to the best of its ability. If you can communicate with the creature, you can direct it not to attack, to attack particular enemies, or to perform other actions. "

To be honest I'd probably just ask you each round " What's your summoned creature doing" to make things easier , that is which enemy is the creature attacking, where is the creature moving, et cetera ... you would need some magical means of communicating with creatures who don't share some sort of language with you if you wanted to engage it in conversation - say if you wanted it to scout up ahead and report back to you what it sees. If there's some wierd feat or class ability in the various WOTC books that lets you overcome potential communication difficulties let me know though so I can take a look at it ..

And darkalloy's suggestion is great, I actually have another player I recommended the exact same thing to ... a write up of the stats and a name for creatures you summon most often would be great, if you have a personality for them (if said creature is smart enough to have a personality in the first place) and physical description for them even better .. great for RP'ing and would REALLY help me out as a DM far as speeding along FG game sessions as opposed to having to look their special abilities and what not up mid game session