vandaexpress
First Post
Good morning, fine folks of ENWorld. I was hoping to pick your brains on a situation in my campaign.
I have a player with a dragon sorc, his history and backstory is heavily tied into blue dragons and, therefore, the lightning element. He is actually a very savvy player, probably the most capable of optimizing of any in the group, and he was well aware of the opportunity cost inherent in picking lightning over the more traditional fire element.
Now he's at level 5, about to hit level 6, and he's been wanting me to approve his converting fire-based spells to lightning versions. I'm not averse to the idea, so long as we keep things balanced. Initially, I just handwaved it and said "sure", putting in a cost of 5 downtime days per spell level to "research" a reskinned lightning version of it. I figured the DMG had spell creation guidelines in place that talked about swapping elemental damage etc as being okay and didn't think much of it.
Over time, however, I'm finding that I may want to change my approach on this. Thus far, the only spell he's done this on was scorching ray which I've allowed to be converted in zapping ray.
My concern is that, naturally, he took the feat that allows him to overcome resistance to an elemental type, so the only way to shut down his spell damage (which I don't do all the time, very rarely, in fact) is if something has straight-up immunity. After browsing around online, someone posted that there are only something like 10 or 11 monsters with lightning immunity, whereas there are a whopping 40 in the MM with fire immunity. Fire immunity seems to be much more common, and I think this is something that the designers probably took into account when they made so many attractive fire-based damage spells. In most cases, you'll be able to hit more creatures with a fireball than a lightning bolt, doing greater overall dpr, countered by the fact that creatures are more likely to have immunity to fire.
By letting him convert fire spells into lightning, do you think that, given a standard distribution of monsters from the MM, I'm basically letting this player get an unfair advantage over a fire sorcerer, given the fewer monsters immune to his spells that have a similar damage/aoe of fire spells? If so, how would you recommend balancing this? Or am I overreacting?
I don't award a ton of downtime, so I'm able to control his conversion efforts this way, but he's looking to convert Melf's Minute Meteors to lightning next level and I want to have a good system in place.
My initial plan off the top of my head is to let him convert whatever spells he wants, but drop the damage dice by one size (d8 to d6, for example) on a fire spell that's been converted to lightning.
I haven't gone through all the different spells to see if this is going to be overkill or not. I also haven't reviewed the specifics of which monsters have fire immunity to see if most of them are extremely rare creatures that most parties won't encounter anyway, meaning he's not going to have any real advantage most of the time or not.
Thoughts?
I have a player with a dragon sorc, his history and backstory is heavily tied into blue dragons and, therefore, the lightning element. He is actually a very savvy player, probably the most capable of optimizing of any in the group, and he was well aware of the opportunity cost inherent in picking lightning over the more traditional fire element.
Now he's at level 5, about to hit level 6, and he's been wanting me to approve his converting fire-based spells to lightning versions. I'm not averse to the idea, so long as we keep things balanced. Initially, I just handwaved it and said "sure", putting in a cost of 5 downtime days per spell level to "research" a reskinned lightning version of it. I figured the DMG had spell creation guidelines in place that talked about swapping elemental damage etc as being okay and didn't think much of it.
Over time, however, I'm finding that I may want to change my approach on this. Thus far, the only spell he's done this on was scorching ray which I've allowed to be converted in zapping ray.
My concern is that, naturally, he took the feat that allows him to overcome resistance to an elemental type, so the only way to shut down his spell damage (which I don't do all the time, very rarely, in fact) is if something has straight-up immunity. After browsing around online, someone posted that there are only something like 10 or 11 monsters with lightning immunity, whereas there are a whopping 40 in the MM with fire immunity. Fire immunity seems to be much more common, and I think this is something that the designers probably took into account when they made so many attractive fire-based damage spells. In most cases, you'll be able to hit more creatures with a fireball than a lightning bolt, doing greater overall dpr, countered by the fact that creatures are more likely to have immunity to fire.
By letting him convert fire spells into lightning, do you think that, given a standard distribution of monsters from the MM, I'm basically letting this player get an unfair advantage over a fire sorcerer, given the fewer monsters immune to his spells that have a similar damage/aoe of fire spells? If so, how would you recommend balancing this? Or am I overreacting?
I don't award a ton of downtime, so I'm able to control his conversion efforts this way, but he's looking to convert Melf's Minute Meteors to lightning next level and I want to have a good system in place.
My initial plan off the top of my head is to let him convert whatever spells he wants, but drop the damage dice by one size (d8 to d6, for example) on a fire spell that's been converted to lightning.
I haven't gone through all the different spells to see if this is going to be overkill or not. I also haven't reviewed the specifics of which monsters have fire immunity to see if most of them are extremely rare creatures that most parties won't encounter anyway, meaning he's not going to have any real advantage most of the time or not.
Thoughts?
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