Summon magic in Neverwinter Nights absolutely sucks. ((Not including the PRC summons in this, I have yet to see them in action))
I'm talking about all of the summoning spells.
Animate Dead
Summon Creature I-IX
Create Undead
Create Greater Undead
Gate
Basically any spell that summons up a creature based on your spellcaster's level.
The problem is, the creatures are all fixed in nature. Summon Creature gives you different stuff per spell, however they are a fixed level. And when you get to the higher level areas, this creature is just a brief piece of fodder. They just don't last in battle at all.
It makes trying to play a summoner just an absurdity. In low levels on the single campaign, it's not that bad. But in Hordes, it's just useless.
I think it'd be great if the ones doing PRC could work on fixing the summoning spells in an update.
I started this briefly in the past, but got sidetracked on other things and abandoned it.
The way I was doing it, there was a simple summoner upgrade on NWVault, it gave options and summoned different things, based on the prerequisites. ((However it was slightly flawed, in that it took the first trigger it found, so multiple triggers was a bit harder to accomplish))
We used something like this on the server I played a lot in multiplayer. City of Arabel.
On it, they had some great features. Here were some of the basics.
1) Magical Tomes - Basically these were books, and you could "activate" them. When you did, it set some flag on your character, and your summoning became specific creatures when you cast any of the Summon Creature spells. The books were actually named after some of the sourcebooks, and actual books within the realms I think.
Such as the Book of Exalted Deeds would create "holy" themed creatures. And the Book of Vile Deeds would create "unholy" themed ones.
2) Themes based on race, alignment, or feats.
Race would give you specific things, keyed to the race of your character. ((Which might be a daunting task for the races included with PRC)). But Dwarves got constructs and helmed horrors, elves got elven spirits and such.
Alignment would give you evil creatures if you were evil, and good ones if you were good. Neutral got the standard animals. I believe race would override this one though, so it mainly affected humans.
Feats were also in there. Such as having a Spell Focus Necromancy would give you undead summons from the spells, rather than the cute cuddly animals.
3) Perhaps the best part of the system was the reagents. This includes the books I mentioned before. However there were also items you could purchase, like real magical reagents. You then used a PC Tool to "activate" the reagents, and each reagent would alter your summon a single time. Like Dragon Blood would give you dragons.
The main thing, if none of the above stuff was included, is the fact that the creatures changed based on your level. It was a low level server, but if you used the dragon blood reagent and were casting Summon Creature VI, you would actually get a full dragon, although it was just leveled to be similar to yours.
I really like this system. I mean, if you are a level 40 spellcaster, and you cast Summon Creature 9, you should get an elemental like normal, but it should be at least level 36. That would make things so much better.
On a brief ending note, the last thing I liked about the system is if you take Spell Focus Conjuration and GSF Conjuration, you could get more summons out at a given time. They were added as henchmen. Similar to the cohorts, I believe.
Although I'm not sure how well this would work in single player games, where I believe the limit is set to having 2 henchmen at any one time? But I believe you can alter this setting as well.
But when I was working this, I had the following stuff:
GSF Necromancy | Deity: Kelemvor/Myrkul - Undead summons
Deity: Lolth - Spider summons
Deity: Auril - Ice summons
Deity: Eldath/Silvanus/Chauntea/Meilikki | Domain: Animal - Animal Summons
Deity: Mystra/Azuth | Domain: Magic | - Magical summons
Deity: Gond | Domain: Construct - Construct summons
Alignment: Good - Celestial summons
Alignment: Evil - Infernal summons
Alignment: Neutral - Animal summons
Deity: Tiamat/Bahamut - Draconic summons
And so on.
The only main problem is the amount of work you have to apply. Each summon needs a single entry in the Toolset. If you increase one in level, you need an entry for each level of the spell, so at a minimum you need 18 entries for the weakest of summons, and 10 entries for whatever is at the highest level. So it's 126 creature entries for every line of summoning added.
