Create Servant abuses

Someone asked about abuses of the Create Servant spell in Here a few things people used Create Servant for that I did allow:

– touching basically anything that a PC might touch that wasn’t immediately, obviously dangerous (no touching living things, say)

– as scouts. They’re terrible scouts, but you can make them act as lookouts and hope for the best with their low Per and IQ

– carrying things

– taking up back rank space so attacks from behind will have to shoot past them, or just take them out and spare a PC a single attack

– opening doors (stuck doors, no, because of ST 9)

Anything that basically had them be a warm body without the will to resist a potentially (but not obviously) harmful suggestion worked out fine.

Here are some things they wanted to do, but I wouldn’t allow:

– havng a servant go into the druagr tombs and pour oil all over the place so someone could lob in an alchemist’s fire to light it up

– having a servant hold a grenade potion and then drop it at their own feet

– using servants to throw grenades

– pretty much anything that allowed for a combat use except as a speedbump

– set off traps meant for living things (they aren’t living and won’t detect as “life.”)

My logic for these is not that they can’t fight well, but that they can’t fight at all. They just crumple under the pressure of doing anything remotely violent. Even in combat, they won’t stand around and force someone to kill them – they’ll whimper and curl up and move out of the way. Bend a little on this, and I expect the floodgates would open. They’d be running out into mobs of foes with grenades and getting shot down by the scout to act as a kamikaze, holding weapons to fend off attackers with their default skills, etc.

This is almost a teaser of a list – if you read the session summaries that feature Dryst, you’ll see these guys getting used and abused to the point that everyone assumes Dryst is basically the Evil One of the servants. But this is a start.