| Alleran |
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Planar Ally is calling a servant of your deity that's generally going to match your alignment, and needing to pay them for their services.
Planar Binding is magically trapping any outsider and essentially bullying/compelling them to do what you want. You can be polite if you like (such as if you're Binding good-aligned outsiders as a good-aligned caster), but at its core the spell is designed as a trap, not a request.
| Douglas Muir 406 |
Planar Ally kinda sucks. Planar Binding is much more complicated and can backfire, but is still better.
Why Planar Ally kinda sucks: (1) You can only get an outsider that your deity sends you. So you only have access to outsiders of one alignment (your deity's). (2) You have to pay the outsider for its services. Planar Ally does have one benefit, in that the outsider arrives friendly and ready to help. It still kinda sucks.
Planar Binding requires you to jump through a lot of hoops with drawing a diagram, Magic Circle, Dimensional Anchor, blah blah blah. And it's more dangerous because the outsider usually arrives pissed off at you, and is likely to scheme against you for revenge. But on the other hand, it gives you access to ALL the outsiders of the multiverse, of any alignment, as long as you can fulfill the HD requirement. And it costs NOTHING. The designers attempted to balance this by making it complicated and dangerous but, honestly, they failed -- if you're careful, you can use this spell to summon a ridiculous number of outsiders to work for you.
For more details, check out "DMDM's Guide to the Diabolist", found in several threads on this forum -- there are three long posts on planar binding.
Doug M.
| deuxhero |
Worse still for the Evil deities actually, as you'll almost certainly only have a a subset of outsiders from your alignment (I highly doubt Asmodeus will send you Oni or Kyton)
Planar Ally is completely awesome for a Sacred Servant though, as he gets to cast it for free and doesn't need to pay tribute.
| Douglas Muir 406 |
Worse still for the Evil deities actually, as you'll almost certainly only have a a subset of outsiders from your alignment (I highly doubt Asmodeus will send you Oni or Kyton)
Bingo. You get a devil with the appropriate number of hit dice (and, let me add, not necessarily the devil of your choice -- Asmodeus/the DM decides). If what you really needed was a Daemon or an Inevitable or an Aeon? Too bad -- you get a devil.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, once you reach Greater Planar Ally it starts to suck less, because the fixed cost per hit die becomes less of an issue at higher levels. A 9th level cleric summoning a CR 5 creature with 6 HD is going to wince at paying 3,000 gp per day for it. A 15th level cleric summoning a CR 14 creature with 16 HD is going to be a lot less bothered at paying 8,000 gp/day... both because he has probably a lot more money to throw around, and because he's getting much more bang for the buck. He's paying less than three times as much, but a CR 14 creature is equal to about twenty CR 5 creatures.
Doug M.