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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Machiavelli" data-source="post: 3086671" data-attributes="member: 40964">I hate to sound grumpy, Hawken, but you make no sense.  Yes, applicability to the creatures encountered does increase overall potency.  Conversely, you come come up with a death effect, but if it only affects creatures with eighteen heads born in the month of March, then it's useless and impotent in every situation except maybe one: meaning it's much less useful and potent than a death effect without the restrictions.  This is actually VERY important to balance of power/potency.  You shouldn't dismiss it so flippantly.  Almost EVERYTHING in D&D uses dice.  Pointing that out doesn't help anybody.  Ignoring hardness is, once again, important because of its universal applicability.  Almost every object one may wish to damage has hardness of some sort, while not every object you damage with this spell needs to be heated, burnt, frozen, or whatnot.  It's all about universal utility: the more frequently a spell is useful, the more powerful it is in-game.  Ask a left-handed pitcher or batter about this one.  Because there are so many right-handed players, other players are used to compensating for the right-handed players' playing style, and a lefty makes their foreknowledge and experience less useful.  Being different in a generally standardized contest gives a decided advantage.Perhaps your argument is that D&D shouldn't be standardized.  Well, it is unless homebrewed otherwise, and it would be a disservice to the OP to launch into speculations about his spell's effects upon a houserule he isn't using.  Conjuration spells bring an entity or item into existence that had not existed previously, then that entity or item follows the natural laws of the plane during its brief existence.  Evocation spells bring an effect into existence, such that the tangible aspects of the spell are purely magical and not inherently bound by natural laws.  Acid spells are conjurations because the acid itself works just like acid produced by any other means.  You can't conjure "electricity", because there is no such substance in the material plane; just items charged with electrical differentials.  You couldn't conjure "fire", either, just flamable materials of high enough temperature to auto-ignite.  Swapping out energy types in existing spells should follow some basic guidelines and remain similar to the existing system, because otherwise it just makes no sense at all.I can't believe I just typed all that out.  Except for the energy types, this is pretty fundamental to good game balance.</blockquote>

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