D&D General Air, Earth, and Water Damage

[CreamCloud0]

I believe that originates in 3e where damage types were starting to matter more, and the main damage types for magic were fire, cold, electricity, and acid. Sonic damage existed but had something of a special status because sonic damage was particularly good at destroying objects (IIRC, doing full damage instead of half and also ignoring Hardness), and as such were relegated to highly specialized spells that mostly didn't do as much damage. So as you say, fire = fire and water = cold are fairly easy, as is air = electricity. So earth became acid more or less by default.

Personally, I think the association of air to lightning/electricity by way of storms is far stronger than the association of water to cold by way of ice. Ice is a result of cold acting on water, not really an inherent water thing IMO. But that's a matter of taste.

yeah it's sort of six of one, half a dozen of the other, the associations of both do have their own threads of logic, but i personally at least see the possibility of magicked water naturally being super cold or something to thematically justify water spells dealing cold damage better than spontaneous lightning generation happening with all air based damaging spells (as few and far between as they are).

 

[Minigiant]

Perhaps Earth damage type can be Gravity?

 

[J-H]

Gravity is.... the force that pulls us towards dense objects. So force damage? But gravity doesn't hurt unless you hit, and that's blunt impact, or bludgeoning damage.

Spell damage is magic, and there are fairly few enemies who are resistant to magic B/P/S. I feel like damage types are fine enough as is. The spell lists are just imbalanced in favor of fire, and the higher level non-core element spells (Whirlwind, Tsunami) are just not great compared to the alternatives.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How many damage types were there in each edition of D&D? 5e streamlined the number down to 13 to keep things short and simple for us players.

Fairly sure it was 4e that originally started cracking down on the proliferation of damage types. Technically, I believe it has only ten types, plus "untyped" which explicitly is not a type but rather the absence of typing, since it doesn't have B/P/S damage.

Elemental types of damage are acid, cold, fire, lightning, poison, and thunder. Non-elemental types are radiant, necrotic, force, and psychic. All attacks which have no type keyword are typeless damage, which is generally understood to be "physical" in some way. Blunt, piercing, slashing, falling, crushing, rending, lacerating, abrasive...whatever it is, it's not magical damage and it's not elemental damage.

As far as I can tell, they never strayed from those ten types plus untyped. No official product ever featured a damage type outside of those ten.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I mean rather than creating workaround damages is there anything actually wrong with a pure ‘earth’ damage type? Like this is dnd, surely being able to summon the essence of stone and dirt into a tangible force is right up this game’s aesthetics? Y’know, the game with earth elementals and the plane of earth?

 

[Minigiant]

Gravity is.... the force that pulls us towards dense objects. So force damage? But gravity doesn't hurt unless you hit, and that's blunt impact, or bludgeoning damage

The word Force is doing heavy lifting.

Force damage is magical Force. Mostly from magically created objects and planes.

Gravity damage would be more crushing or pulling depending on direction (except when due to falling. Like if the Implosion spell returned.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I mean rather than creating workaround damages is there anything actually wrong with a pure ‘earth’ damage type? Like this is dnd, surely being able to summon the essence of stone and dirt into a tangible force is right up this game’s aesthetics? Right?

Mechanically it's fine. PF2 does this and it certainly functions although I can't say how well.

The difficulty of creating a new damage type is incorporating it into the rest of the game. You need spells, of course, but also magic items, monsters, some class features, and probably other stuff. And you need enough of each that it's relevant to gameplay more than once per campaign.

WotC, who have a lot more time than we do, haven't really done this for all the existing damage types let alone new ones, but if you're happy with simple reskins (earth dragon sorcerers, earth sword does earth damage, earth bolt and earthy hands as spells) and someone wants to play iit it can work well enough.

 

[jasper]

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the OP’s question, but I thought the corresponding energy/damage types were:

Fire - fire
Water - cold
Air - lightning and/or thunder
Earth - acid

I agree even if this isn't the case.

 

[Remathilis]

sure, but as you go down that list the direct association becomes more and more tenuous:

fire - fire, yep
water - cold, ice is just another state of water, makes logical sense
wind - lighting, so, there IS a connection there, wind > storms, storms have lightning, but these are two whole different elements.
earth - acid, even if this

is true associating earth with acid as it's primary damage type feels like clown logic, like, what are we doing here Wizards? it doesn't feel like it makes any sense, alternately there is B/S/P which is infinitely boring and underwhelming.

It's worth noting that spells that explicitly summon wind (wind wall), earth (earthen grasp) or water (tidal wave) do bludgeoning damage.

 

[bloodtide]

I would ask though, outside of magic, what would you use air, earth and water damage for. Would tornadoes and hurricanes do air damage? Falling damage and cave ins do earth damage? Drowning as water damage?

I only use them for elemental damage, not all environment damage.