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First and foremost, if you're not familiar with the discovery, here's the text from the srd.
Benefit(s): You maintain balance by calling on opposing forces when summoning. Whenever you cast a summon monster spell, you can summon two creatures from a single list 1 or more levels lower than the level of the spell. The two creatures must have alignments that are opposite along at least one axis (chaotic and lawful or evil and good).
For example, if you cast summon monster III, you could summon a celestial wolf and a fiendish hyena from the 2nd-level list.
So, here's my question. When you're using this arcane discovery, does it essentially move down the possible summons, allowing me to summon double the amount?
Let's take a look at say...Summon Monster IV.
This spell functions like summon monster I, except that you can summon one creature from the 4th-level list, 1d3 creatures of the same kind from the 3rd-level list, or 1d4+1 creatures of the same kind from a lower-level list.
Essentially, without the discovery, you're looking at 1d4+1 creatures of the same kind from either the 1st or 2nd level list. Could this then, in essence, pull 1d4+1 creatures, twice, still following the rules for the discovery? Say...1d4+1 Fiendish Dire Rats and 1d4+1 Celestial Fire Beetles? I would even go so far as to argue that per the discovery, you would have to summon the same amount, ie 1d4+1 rolled once, and as per the example above, you'd summon that amount of Fiendish Dire Rats and Celestial Fire Beetles. Just my own opinion on that, though. I haven't been able to find any errata or other threads on this topic, though, and was thinking of using it in my own game.
Getting two different kinds of creatures at the same time is pretty interesting, and rolling 1d3 inevitably gets me 1 creature...
