Summoner Shenanigans.

[dmitriR]

According to the rules of Summon Nature's Ally, RAW seems to imply that you can summon any type of elemental
Including Air, Earth, Fire, Water... and Aether?

Rules as Intended, i'm sure that its supposed to only be the four core elements, but I was wondering, was there an official ruling on whether or not the Elementals that a Druid can summon is restricted to the 4 elements, or are Aether elementals included in the list?

[Scrapper]

dmitriR wrote:

According to the rules of Summon Nature's Ally, RAW seems to imply that you can summon any type of elemental

Including Air, Earth, Fire, Water... and Aether?

Rules as Intended, i'm sure that its supposed to only be the four core elements, but I was wondering, was there an official ruling on whether or not the Elementals that a Druid can summon is restricted to the 4 elements, or are Aether elementals included in the list?

This caught me by surprise as well when the party druid summoned Positive Elementals to deal with an Anti-Paladin Death Knight, which turned an epic battle into an epic fizzle, it wasn't until the next day I found out they were 3rd party, I try to keep to books I own, but with everyone using smart-phones to look up stuff, game would crash to an end if I questioned every thing my players, Eight of them at the time, were doing in the fight.

So What Elementals can a Druid summon? Does a DM have to set limitation before a campaign begin? That is a lot of material to cover...

[Jeff Morse]

For PFS, it is set at core 4. For home games it is GM call. So no hard rules on it.

[lemeres]

While aether elementals can be used for Shenanigans.... that could always be done with elementals.

Before aether, the best two elementals to summon were air and earth. Not for damage- for movement speeds. Air has a really fast fly speed, and earth can earthglide. That made them both fantastic, expendable scouts (assuming you spend a couple of points in linguistics).

However, aether does blast air out of the water now. Earth keeps its spot- it can go get around doors, skip large parts of a maze system, and it can investigate for things like hidden passageways. But aether is actually useful besides being a scout- it has a decent ranged attack, as well decent enough stats. So it is actually worth it to summon them with higher level spells to get higher level versions (when doing simple scouts, you only summon the most basic so you don't waste spell slots).