Post/Author/DateTime	Post
DoveArrow 04-18-08, 10:27 AM	The dragon knight epic spell seems pretty straightforward. It summons an adult red dragon. However, under the Will saving throw, it says "None (see text)." Reading through the text of the spell, I don't see anything that explains what this means. So I looked at the Summon spell seed, and got even more confused. Here's what it says in the text. [The creature] appears where the caster designates and acts immediately, on his or her turn, if its spell resistance is overcome and it fails a Will saving throw. Now my guess is that at some point during the playtesting, the designers realized that this part of the summon spell seed was dumb. After all, why bother using the most powerful magic in the game to try and summon a creature that might not appear when you call it? That seems a little dumb to me. So I'm guessing they started editing it out, but just didn't do a very good job of it. On the other hand, it's possible that they meant to add it in, because it was decided that the spell seed is just too powerful as written, but again, they just didn't do a very good job during the editing process. So I'm curious if anyone knows what the reality of the situation is. If you do know what it is, let me know. Thanks. In case you're wondering (which I'm almost sure you're not, but I'm going to tell you anyway), I actually used this ambiguity to my advantage when I created an epic spell to summon a phaerimm as treasure for a campaign I'm writing. During the adventure, there's a chance that the PCs might ally with the phaerimm to battle against a mutually hated ally. If they do ally with the phaerimm, they can cast the spell and the phaerimm will voluntarily fail their saving throw when summoned. If they don't ally with the phaerimm, then the caster has to first punch the phaerimm's spell resistance, and then the phaerimm gets to make a saving throw. It's basically a way to reward good roleplaying and to encourage the players to find solutions to problems that don't involve combat.
He Who Lurks 04-18-08, 11:16 PM	Yes, that's just one example of the poor editing/beta-testing done on the Epic Level Handbook. It's weird and there is no official answer (the same contradiction appears in the SRD as well). However, I believe that most people only use the target's spell resistance and will save if they are summoning a specific creature. For example, if you create and cast an epic summoning spell using the summon seed asking for a Solar to come help you, you get one. If you create and cast a spell asking for Bob the Solar, you only get him if you overcome his spell resistance and he fails a will save. So in short, your use of the spell is "correct". The spell is designed to summon that specific phaerimm (and not just any phaerimm), and so it would get its spell resistance and a saving throw to avoid being summoned.
rob_douglas 04-19-08, 12:51 AM	I agree with this interpretation, the only thing being that another editing error was that the use of summon to get a specific creature should be labelled as a calling effect, not a summoning. They did a nice job inventing those terms, and totally mucked them in the ELH. ROB