Shattered Kingdoms

Summon is a great spell. It gets useful NPCs to you for equipment, to use as charmies, to get some characters to you quickly, or to help newbies and many other such nice things.

1 - Summon also helps with one noble enterprise; Thinning down your enemies, when they go on huge hunts, five of them or more to bring down three or less persons.

2 - Summon also helps with a despicable sort of task; Going somewhere you know your enemy to be, and without having to risk your footsteps being heard, without having to waste any potions or magic to somehow conceal yourself, and without having to face more than one person, you just summon. And bash/taun/trip away.

Yes, sometimes, some class/cabal combinations will have more chances to cope well against being summoned and get away, or even win the fight! Not that the summoning group cannot just as easily include a mage who will dispel whatever magical aids the target already has on him.

But what happens in general, is really simple. The summoner group can easily send an irrelevant person as a scout, who will not even get involved but otherwise co-ordinate everything as needed. There is little margin for error.

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How often does number 1 happen? One, perhaps two times out of ten? More? Doubtful? Less? Probably. Where is the point in summon killing? Who has ever truly considered this "tactic" anything but the best way to avoid all of the difficulties of PK? Approaching your target unseen. Avoiding potential difficulties or enemies on the way. Facing not just one target, but whoever might be about and may intervene, ally or not. In effect, everything that makes PK interesting and a challenge.

Gate is the greatest, and most fun unorthodox tactic of PK I've ever experienced. It can be very rewarding but is also -highly- risky. It can be used as bait, or a distraction. It -will-, if successful bypass roughly half of the difficulties I mentioned above. But the inherent risk to it, the danger of not knowing what lies the other way, or even if your scout is there and you do know what awaits, is not the same. You do not isolate the person in question. You do not single-handedly alter his surroundings. You are the one charging in. And you have to be good at it, and good at being able to react in case something does not go as planned.

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To conclude, I think summon is a fine spell. I think it's great to be used on NPCs and willing PCs.

But I would think this MUD would be so much better off without the use I described above. The classic summon/kill. I am, at the moment, seeing it as a negative part of PK. Please share your opinion with me, whatever it may be. Thanks in advance.

Summon is fine. It's recently(?) been wimped not to work over water and in air sectors, so it's doing great. Dulrik will never make it so you can't be summoned. The only common theme I've seen to all the changes he's made to SK though out all the years I've played is that nothing is risk free.

It's a safe bet that summon will continue to be one of the dangers you face on SK for as long as Dulrik runs the mud.

I h8 this damned spell. Nothing worse than to be returned from the river and not have any gear hardly at all and especially before you can have a sorc or priest enchant it for you and get summoned.

I will say it's better to be on the summoning side than the summoned side. It's a tactic we've actually started going out and using, if for nothing else but to have people go hide in the HQ to give us a bit of a break from their [REDACTED]. And hey we've even gotten lucky a few times. I do think it's used way too much as is Sleep. Used in conjunction with each other this combination, just makes life miserable for the soon to be Ganked victim. Because once asleep you get all this other crap cast on you. Voodoo'd, Weakened, drained. Then they wake you up and your facing 4 or more all alone and in a severely weakened state.

And yes I know these are standard spells here, they are still very annoying for a non magic user to cope with.

I would much rather see summon be made impossible on pcs, but make gate easier. Gate kills are so much more exciting and you have the risk of going into whatever danger lurks with said character.


Summon kills -are- risk free. I know there have been a few cases of summoned people kicking the tails of their summoners..but this has been a minority by far. A mere handful over the years that I've played the mud. And usually it was just the incompetence of the people doing the summoning.

Nowadays you have to get into the same area with a person to be able to summon them. Unless of course they're an idiot and have auto summon off. Then you can summon them from just about anywhere.

One thing I used to do was after Dulrik re-introduced the bounty hunter NPCs into the game was to go with small teams to summon the guy I wanted dead to us. There was still danger involved though because once you got them all of their friends would soon be breathing down your neck. So it always irked me when we would make say a rift and then our team members would dispel it while we're still in the danger zone. You just had to have a quick exit once you got who you wanted.

Summon kills still aren't as enjoyable as walking in and bashing their faces in in front of their friends though. Those leave lasting impressions. Especially when their friends don't help them, which is a lightie disease mainly. If the same happens in a darkie city then those darkies sure as hell will jump in and kill the offending lighties.

That's the point. Being summoned by someone relatively nearby means insta-death. It's not just a considerable risk for the one benig summoned, and it can be -very- easily organized. Of course, if the summoning group has more than a killer and a summoner (a backup killer or 2nd spellcaster support-summoning), your character is near guaranteed to die. The risk/reward ratio to the summoning group is, IMHO, severely imbalanced.

I agree with what you said about gate Cannibal.

"There was still danger involved though because once you got them all of their friends would soon be breathing down your neck."

Ardith man, most summon/kills I see have a total time requirement of around one minute after the summon itself. Less than that, if a gate is opened immediately after the corpse is looted and/or junked. Today, my character took around 30-40 seconds after being inforned to go to the scene of a summoning, and I was too late (let's say roughly one minute having passed after the summon itself).

Note: I am not looking for Big D to come out and say "Yes, with enough signatures, I am going to change X or Y in SKs". This is never how things worked, nor will it be like that now. I just want to probe the playerbase as a whole, and if in the meantime this generates useful feedback for the IMMs and D, all ther much better.

Edit: A crazy idea that came to me just now: Imagine summoning someone taking both the caster and the one being summoned or another chosen person (so that a warrior could fight, and not a priest or spell-caster only) nearby to a random location of Pyrathia where they can dish it out against each other.

All I know is that in about 2 years of playing time I have not died to a summon kill once. And I have been summoned by a lot of people over those 2 years. While it might mean death for the average player that congregates in cities and RPs it doesn't mean 100% certain death. In my [REDACTED] elitist opinion I think all it takes is learning from your mistakes to prepare yourself for these things.

And summon doesn't have a 100% guaranteed success rate in close quarters. Against A GM Dimmel with 14 art trains and my scout having naive wisdom and roughly 15 willpower he was able to resist 50% of those summon attempts. And willpower equipment grows on trees.

You avoided all of them? How, if we assume you cannot avoid the first (spammed) bash coming from a summon? I hope we are not talking about recalling triggers when "has summoned you" pops up or being affected by every spell-up available to you 24/7 (although even that would not save you against more than two enemies).

The only times I managed to escape was because I was running at that time, and I managed to get out of the wilderness screen before getting hit.

I think that if someone is 3-4 screens nearby and summons, your possibilities to resist it are negligible, despite your bonuses.

Maybe the spell should be changed so that it summons you and any pet you have so that the spam bash omfgIwinyousux might not be such a common occurence.

Of course, if you're n00b and don't carry a pet around with you if you're in a cabal, well...go wild!

I've escaped a lot of summon kills with my sprite simply because I avoided all the bashes..25 dex and cabal skills can do that.

However I still died to a lot.

I actually kept auto summon off with my paladin and though he was summoned a few times, he was never summon killed. This was becuase he was so well enchanted and walked around with every concievable spell up at all times. Gave a few necromancers nasty surprises when they summoned him, it was great. Paladins can be absolute beasts to try to take down.


However, most of my characters usually die to summon kills. Cthugan was rarely pk'd outside of summon kills. It always irritates me to no end when I'm running around having a good fight and then I get summoned becuase people can't take me in straight forward pk. I'd much rather run into your group in the street by myself and have it out than to be summoned into a room. Its not even a fight anymore, its shooting fish in a barrel. Its no more challenge than a grand master warlock walking into goblin town and fireballing everything to death. Summon kills serve no purpose other than taking the person's equipment which you're too much of a pansy to get by killing them with any skill whatsoever.

The only time I will consider summon killing is if I have fought my way into the middle of a city trying my hardest to get to a person and that person refuses to engage. If you just flat out refuse to fight me and I've done everything concievable to get to you, then I'll use it as an option. I would much prefer however that I be able to gate to you, then I can at least beat you with whatever preparations you've prepared so I can say without a doubt that I beat you in a sportsmanlike manner.