Immunities, Resistances, and High level play.

[Minigiant]

[MENTION=68021]Dasuul[/mention]'s idea of primary and secondary types might be a good way to make this work. Perhaps the high level monsters have one immunity to a primary type and flat immunity to secondaries.

So the adult red dragon crawls out from under magma with his immunity to fire (primary), sleep (secondary), and paralysis (secondary). Whereas the wyrmling simply has resistance to all those.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I think the problem has always been specialised damage type characters. The aforementioned 'Cold Mage' struggles against some opponents because they have been optimised in another direction. These characters make for fine archetypes in a fantasy world, but poor adventurers. Adventurers need to be versatile to deal with a spectrum of challenges, and if you choose to specialise in cold magic you should accept that you're not going to be at your best against undead or the Remorhaz. If you go all the way and have nothing but cold spells, then yes, you are near useless, and the DM should politely suggest that you've gone too far.

 

[Minigiant]

I think the problem has always been specialised damage type characters. The aforementioned 'Cold Mage' struggles against some opponents because they have been optimised in another direction. These characters make for fine archetypes in a fantasy world, but poor adventurers. Adventurers need to be versatile to deal with a spectrum of challenges, and if you choose to specialise in cold magic you should accept that you're not going to be at your best against undead or the Remorhaz. If you go all the way and have nothing but cold spells, then yes, you are near useless, and the DM should politely suggest that you've gone too far.

As making such a character should not be an issue for many playstyles as there is often a party to back you up. Now if your group is small or reconfiguring your character is difficult in your game, then the player and DM might have to discuss the issue.

By default, this isn't a spellcaster issue as spells with similar effects didn't come at every level and you were hard pressed to fill all your slots with the same thing unless you used splat books or fill all your higher slots with lower level spells. If you did so, it was usually easily remedied. The issue usually went to noncasters as their features could not be reconfigured to high strength. You couldn't just switch sneak attack into fire damage or make your fighter materialize a cold iron, silver, or magic weapon.

If immunities are to matter then the game must encourage reconfiguring of damage and effect types, encourage versatile characters, or allow immunity busting themes.

 

[keterys]

I think the problem has always been specialised damage type characters. The aforementioned 'Cold Mage' struggles against some opponents because they have been optimised in another direction. These characters make for fine archetypes in a fantasy world, but poor adventurers. Adventurers need to be versatile to deal with a spectrum of challenges, and if you choose to specialise in cold magic you should accept that you're not going to be at your best against undead or the Remorhaz. If you go all the way and have nothing but cold spells, then yes, you are near useless, and the DM should politely suggest that you've gone too far.

Why should you have problems against undead? What's special about undead that makes them immune to cold?

Ie, why would anything other than a theoretical "Cold Elemental" be immune to cold?

I was going to ask the same question of the Remorhaz, since it's a creature that generates heat in order to live in cold environments... but turns out it's not immune or even resistant.

 

[Dausuul]

I can't think of much of anything that should be immune to cold. Sure, a skeleton is less vulnerable to cold than a human, but I'm fairly certain that plunging a skeleton into a vat of liquid nitrogen would not be good for the skeleton. Maybe incorporeal undead, or an ice elemental, but that's all that comes to mind.

In pre-4E D&D, we all got so used to immunity being thrown around like candy that most of us never stopped to think about how very few creatures have a case for total immunity to stuff like fire, cold, and lightning. (Anybody wanna tell me why liches are lightning immune? What gives?)

 

[pemerton]

I think the problem has always been specialised damage type characters. The aforementioned 'Cold Mage' struggles against some opponents because they have been optimised in another direction. These characters make for fine archetypes in a fantasy world, but poor adventurers.

If a game of heroic fantasy adventure can't handle these "fine archetypes", doesn't that tell us that something has gone wrong with the game?

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

If a game of heroic fantasy adventure can't handle these "fine archetypes", doesn't that tell us that something has gone wrong with the game?

Not really. The sage is a classic fantasy archetype (with special rules for them in some of the old edition DMGs if I recall) that doesn't function well within D&D because, surprise surprise, they aren't any good in a fight. If you want the game to be about adventuring, you'll have to narrow the field of plausible character types. I'm simulationist in this again, and detest seeing the 'Loremaster' get arbitrary bonuses to combat abilities instead of things that would actually make them good at knowing things - that role should either be played by an NPC or a PC as a secondary character.

As an aside, I wonder how many players have voluntarily retired/killed characters for in-character reasons and whether they prefer to roleplay or game.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I can't think of much of anything that should be immune to cold. Sure, a skeleton is less vulnerable to cold than a human, but I'm fairly certain that plunging a skeleton into a vat of liquid nitrogen would not be good for the skeleton. Maybe incorporeal undead, or an ice elemental, but that's all that comes to mind.

In pre-4E D&D, we all got so used to immunity being thrown around like candy that most of us never stopped to think about how very few creatures have a case for total immunity to stuff like fire, cold, and lightning. (Anybody wanna tell me why liches are lightning immune? What gives?)

For your first point, it depends how cold your cold damage is..

For the second, well, Liches presumably lack a normally functioning nervous system, and probably don't care much about light burns from entry/exit points, so Lightning could very well do nothing to them (Lightning sucks against all sorts of things when you consider physics).

 

[pemerton]

The sage is a classic fantasy archetype (with special rules for them in some of the old edition DMGs if I recall) that doesn't function well within D&D because, surprise surprise, they aren't any good in a fight.

I thought that D&Dnext was going to make non-combat PCs viable via balance across the 3 pillars!

In 4e, couldn't a sage be built as a lazy warlord (or perhaps a bard/lazy warlord hybrid)?

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I thought that D&Dnext was going to make non-combat PCs viable via balance across the 3 pillars!

In 4e, couldn't a sage be built as a lazy warlord (or perhaps a bard/lazy warlord hybrid)?

Non-combat PCs are as viable as the party and players allow. Some people are happy to do nothing in combat, and happy to let others do nothing in combat, some are not. There are plenty of specialist characters that many people think have no place in a party of adventurers, but YMMV.

Your best bet for a 4E sage would be any ritual caster with the relevant skills for divinations and knowledge. You'd have to have all that combat nonsense at the same time though