Thanks for the reply.
Even if your DM claims that the energies from weapons do harm the equipment of the owner when not in his hand, that will not make much trouble.
The question is more of the "my frost weapon made my equipment so cold that my potions froze!" variety. Not damaging to the equipment per se, but something that makes them unusable in the short-term.
Or perhaps the cold permeates the sheath and starts to makes the fighter's plate armor cold. One of the (possible) prereqs for
frost is
chill metal which would clearly have an effect on the fighter inside his armor...
A Sword Sheath is often made of metal or wood.
So a weapon with the
shocking ability can't harm a metal sheath? What about the person holding the sheath in their hand? Uh... Are you
sure? Seems pretty likely to me that they're going to get hurt!
What about weapons that don't have sheaths? Bows, bolas, blowguns, and so forth? (Hmm, lots of B-words there.
)
As I have already stated (in the last year), inflicting certain type of damage is not always a good idea. Some creatures actually be benefited from certain type of energy damages.
But then a command word is only needed to turn it off, not turn it on.
I think command word was a huge mistake. They should've just said they were use-activated and the whole problem would go away, although you might lose some of the flavor descriptions.
So let's say I wanted a frost weapon that was use-activated. Should it be the same +1 market price? Or something different?