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Time to bring back the prose?
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<blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5907245" data-attributes="member: 52073"><p>Regarding the interchangeability of damage types: I disagree that you can simply swap out energy types for spells and consider it pure fluff. Different creatures have resistances or immunities to certain types, different class features provide benefits with certain types, and so forth. There's a reason there are many more AD&D/3e spells dealing fire, electricity, or cold damage than there are dealing acid, sonic, force, divine, or other damage. Then there's the secondary effects of different energy types: an acid-damage <em>fireball</em> can melt a bigger portion of a wall than an <em>acid arrow</em>, a cold-damage <em>flaming sphere</em> can freeze more of a lake than a <em>cone of cold</em>, and so forth. If you can just choose a lot of cold spells because you expect to be facing fire creatures, or choose damage types to get around resistances in your campaign against demons, it makes different energy types more bland, when being a pyromancer instead of a weather mage should instead be something meaningful.</p><p></p><p>The supposed interchangeability of energy types showed up in 3e and has carried through to 4e, but I'd much rather see a return to AD&D-style damage types. <em>Lightning bolts</em> bounce, <em>fireballs</em> expand, <em>freezing spheres</em> freeze. I'm not exactly asking for a <em>fireball</em> spell that requires you to break out a compass and protractor, but there should be more mechanical variance between energy types and/or different energy descriptors than just resistances and a secondary condition. If a class in 5e can have a class feature like the 4e wild sorcerer's Wild Soul (gain resistance to a random damage type, from fire and acid to psychic and necrotic and 6 more) because using one damage over another just means your big explody burst of magic is colored red instead of blue or green and no type is inherently different from any other, I'll be disappointed.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Eldritch_Lord, post: 5907245, member: 52073"] Regarding the interchangeability of damage types: I disagree that you can simply swap out energy types for spells and consider it pure fluff. Different creatures have resistances or immunities to certain types, different class features provide benefits with certain types, and so forth. There's a reason there are many more AD&D/3e spells dealing fire, electricity, or cold damage than there are dealing acid, sonic, force, divine, or other damage. Then there's the secondary effects of different energy types: an acid-damage [I]fireball[/I] can melt a bigger portion of a wall than an [I]acid arrow[/I], a cold-damage [I]flaming sphere[/I] can freeze more of a lake than a [I]cone of cold[/I], and so forth. If you can just choose a lot of cold spells because you expect to be facing fire creatures, or choose damage types to get around resistances in your campaign against demons, it makes different energy types more bland, when being a pyromancer instead of a weather mage should instead be something meaningful. The supposed interchangeability of energy types showed up in 3e and has carried through to 4e, but I'd much rather see a return to AD&D-style damage types. [I]Lightning bolts[/I] bounce, [I]fireballs[/I] expand, [I]freezing spheres[/I] freeze. I'm not exactly asking for a [I]fireball[/I] spell that requires you to break out a compass and protractor, but there should be more mechanical variance between energy types and/or different energy descriptors than just resistances and a secondary condition. If a class in 5e can have a class feature like the 4e wild sorcerer's Wild Soul (gain resistance to a random damage type, from fire and acid to psychic and necrotic and 6 more) because using one damage over another just means your big explody burst of magic is colored red instead of blue or green and no type is inherently different from any other, I'll be disappointed. [/QUOTE]
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