Wow, that's very powerful. So a 5th level wizard can take 12 subdual damage and throw a 5d20 damage fireball. Granted, the DC will have a 4-8 penalty, but who cares if everybody saves? The avg. damage of 5d6 is 17.5, the avg. damage of 5d20 is 52.5 or 26 assuming they make their save. That's close to max damage on a d6 fireball and assuming they DON'T save. That's really powerful. Then a 5th level cleric can cast cure light wounds on the wizard, doing 1d8+5, and double that since it's subdual damage. Which, conveniently, will always get rid of the 12 subdual, even if he rolls a 1.Pax said:All this is a good reason why, IMC at least, metamagicks should stack fully on each other (after all, the COSTS stack, right?).
Then again, IMC, the metamagicks are all getting revised, sometimes heavily. Empower, for example, no longer is a 50% increase in output. Instead, any and all dice involved are upped by one "Step" (so an empowered Fireball does d8's, not d6's). The cost is much less -- last revision had a slight DC penalty (1 or 2 points), and subdual damage to the spellcaster equal to the spell's level (I dislike level-increase costs for metamagicks *shrug*).
IMO though, most of the metamagicks as presented just don't ... *do* much for me (non-mechanically I mean). Hene my decision to try my hand at rewriting them.
Oh, so you say rogues and others with evasion will skip free of any damage due to the very easy to beat DC of the fireball? Well, the 5th level wizard can just take 12 more subdual and throw 3 magic missiles at one of them, doing 1d20+1 damage per missile (11.5 average). Keep in mind that this is a super-cheap 1st level spell slot, and lowered DC doesn't even matter in this case!
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