| Henning Røigaard |
I am trying to reach some kind of well-informed decisions regarding the reasonable actions of a creature summoned via Summon Natures Ally.
The rules state that you can somewhat control a summoned creature 'If you can communicate with the creature'. So what can a summoned creature resonably be expected to do, when the caster cannot communicate? The answer varies alot with the intelligence of the summoned creature, but right now, i am most interested in creatures with animal intelligence (e.g. dogs)
First of, my team and i has agreed that whatever natural behaviour would be expected from a real animal (such as running away in panic) is superseded by the explicitly stated behaviour: 'It attacks your opponents to the best of its ability'.
However it is not clear to any of us, what could reasonly be expected of such a creature other than that.
1) If you cannot communicate with a creature, how does it know whom to attack? It seems reasonable, that anyone attacking the caster can be considered an enemy, but other than that, how does a summoned creature distinguish between friend and foe? The easy solution would be to say that "it just does", which does not seem so unreasonably, as the spell might otherwise become close to worthless (summon natures bystander?)
2) Given a choice of enemies, who does the creature attack? The one closest to itself? The one closest to the caster? The one that the caster finds most dangerous?
The closest enemy seems to be the logic choice. If not, would the creature be willings to put itself in danger (attacks of opportunity) to reach the target?
3)Does the creature have any kind of self-preservation instincts? I would personally rule against the creature doing anything that would obviously result in death, but other than that, does it in any way react to its own possible injury or death? Would it reatreat if down to few Hit Points? Would it refuse to run through a wall of fire to attack the its target?
4) Can the creature be used for utility-purposes, such as transport (yo octopus, transport me to the shore)?
5) A special case from our own gaming session:
The bad guy swims into a cave via an underwater entrance. The druid, being outside the cavern, summons a water-creature (an octopus in this case) and expects for it to swim into the cave, locate the bad guy and attack him. How would you rule on that expectation?