Quote Originally Posted by Aquillion View Post
Now you're just quibbling. "Voluntary" in that context means that you have the option to do it
No, that is never what "voluntary" means. I would suggest checking a dictionary, but it just came up in a PM conversation that I apparently do not believe all dictionaries can be trusted to give the actual use-meanings of words as they are spoken by language-users. Regardless, "voluntary" means "taken by one's own choice"; if a machine is attached to your arm which forcibly raises it without your own choice, then you did not "voluntarily" raise your arm.

All you have to do is order a monster to allow a particular spell to work on it, and it will.
Unless you can order the monster to die and it will drop dead, which is not physically possible for most creatures (IIRC the only real-world creatures who are confirmed to be able to die on command are rabbits), then your spell is not powerful enough to force it to accept a fate-worse-than-death spell without resistance. This goes double when the creature is a literal manifestation of some cosmic force.

The broken things here are Gate and the power people use to swap bodies, not the option to choose not to resist a spell.
I disagree. The body-swapping power is a classic psionic trope, so it needs to be available, but it should always be subject to resistance. Gate is a bit more wickety; I don't believe it should work as a complete, irresistable compulsion, but haven't figured out how to word it otherwise. It obviously needs to give you some control over the summoned creature, or using it would be suicide, but as with a lot of spells, the writing is overly minimalist and makes the effect too easy, when there should be a fairly complex subsystem associated with the difficulty of some archmage pitting his will against that of a djinn or demon or something, gradually bending it to service through his indomitable will or establishing some sort of loophole-ridden contract which he must carefully obey. These are classic genre tropes, and it's intolerable that the rules were written so sloppily as to reduce them to an "I win" button.

My understanding is that if a Gated creature comes with a sword, that sword vanishes when the spell ends; if you cut off a Gated creature's arm, that arm goes away along with the rest of it. It seems logical that even if you swap bodies with it, the body that arrived via Gate is still going to go away when the Gate spell expired. The only question is whether it takes your soul with it or leaves it behind.
Interesting question, something I'll have to think about.

It's one of those things that seems obvious until you think about it. The game doesn't actually have rules for where magical effects are "affixed" to following a body-swap.
Yeah, the game doesn't have a lot of rules it could use, and it irritates me how many players use the absence of a rule to proclaim themselves Wrecker of Games, instead of accepting that the situation cannot be resolved per RAW and thus the DM has all the power to arbitrate it, including making a spot-ruling which he may later revoke if the player is successful in abusing it.