Topic: Summon: Does your DM/Referee allow it?

The handful of DMs I've played with that run LOTFP, or allow characters made in that system in to their games, have not so far allowed the use of Summon. I actually had a DM that let my character use the spell, which I cast without failure several times, only to revoke that permission later (after he read the spell description).

The most common reason cited for house-ruling Summon out of play are the Abstract Forms and the list of negative consequences for failing domination. It's usually phrased like "I don't want one spell cast to explode the world" or "Letting a million demons loose in the middle of town isn't going to happen in my game"

So, does your DM/Ref allow Summon in your game? and Why/Why not?

Re: Summon: Does your DM/Referee allow it?

Mine does. He likes chaos bombs in his games. They make the game unpredictable which is fun to him.

We've used summon several times with great success. Once we managed to randomly switch the minds of more than a hundred people gathered around us, including ours. As this was meant as a distraction anyway, we considered it immensely successful use of the spell. :-)

Re: Summon: Does your DM/Referee allow it?

I encourage it, to the point where if the Magic User of the group doesn't have the spell in his spellbook by level 3, I'll add a scroll of it as treasure at the earliest appropriate chance. If I'm ever making pregen characters for a game, the MU and Elf will ALWAYS get Summon in their "random selection of spells".

My biggest problem is getting players to actually cast it, heh. I keep hoping that the one guy in the group that most enjoys working the rules to his benefit will wrap his mind around Summon soon, but I'm also not willing to outright tell him how to make it awesome, heh.

Re: Summon: Does your DM/Referee allow it?

The GM is fully in his rights to veto some catastrophic failures.  Once things reach the "horribly wrong" stage, he can step in to limit the extent and severity of the problem.  From a play balance perspective, "we all die horribly" isn't that much different from "the world all dies horribly".

Re: Summon: Does your DM/Referee allow it?

I mean, really; if something goes wrong and the GM doesn't like it, it's THEIR GAME, they can just ignore it or tone it down to their liking. Me, as long as the summoning happens by-the-book as far as cost and time goes, I don't care. I've even let some of my players spend the time and resources in-game to research and summon things from Carcosa and laughed when it all went horribly wrong for them. The players spent the next session trying to unmake what they had unleashed, then the next session getting the Hell out of dodge by way of a planar portal. Next session? Same characters, but instead of Lamentations we used Call of Cthulhu. They wanted to play with unimaginably powerful extra-planar beings, I gave them unimaginably powerful extra-planar beings.