Another Disintegrate question

[orion90000]

pure and simple: what type of damage is disintegrate?

I would assume acid, but the spell doesn't say. It just says "damage"

It cannot be negative energy since it can target nonliving. So the only other logical option is force damage. What is the default form of damage?

Obviously this assumes that the 2d6/lvl isn't enough to transmute the person into dust.

 

[Drowbane]

Untyped.

Disintegrate is just "damage", it does not have a descriptor. So its not Acid, Cold, Electricity, Fire, Force, Negative, or whatever else you can think of. It is closest to the "divine half" of Flame strike.

And for a 6th level spell that does a pitiful 5d6 on a successful save, I'm ok with that.

 

[emoplato]

It is untyped so it is damage that can't be stopped by anything unless you mess with the ray itself. It would say if it is force damage because force damage does more than just avoid resistances and DR. It also affects incorporeal/ethereal creatures just as well as corporeal creatures so a wall of force can obstruct a ghost's path as well and an attack of force damage doesn't suffer any miss chance, so long as the attacker sees them.

 

[orion90000]

So, are we going with "raw energy" because "untyped" doesn't mean diddly?

 

[Drowbane]

Fluff it however you want. Untyped means there are no Resistances or Immunities to it... aside from Spell Resistance / Immunity (such as Golems).

Disintegrate is usually described as a green ray that reduces targets to a pile of dust. That doesn't sound like "raw energy" to me, but if a player described it as that to me I wouldn't object either.

edit: If anything it is "focused entropy" or something.

 

[frankthedm]

So, are we going with "raw energy" because "untyped" doesn't mean diddly?

It is untyped damage. It doesn't really sound even like energy, more like the victim is being turned into dust with the damage dealt representing mass lost to the spell. In game, it is probably a fascinating phenomena for scholars to examine and research.

 

[Empath Negative]

It is untyped damage. It doesn't really sound even like energy, more like the victim is being turned into dust with the damage dealt representing mass lost to the spell. In game, it is probably a fascinating phenomena for scholars to examine and research.

This sounds like it could be the awesome basis for a prestige class.

 

[Vegepygmy]

So, are we going with "raw energy" because "untyped" doesn't mean diddly?

"Untyped" is actually a more meaningful term than "raw energy" would be. "Raw energy" suggests nothing about how the damage might interact with other in-game effects, but "untyped" tells us that it isn't blocked by energy resistance, death ward, etc.

 

[Dandu]

Disintegrate uses a burst of nadion radiation to destroy a target.

 

[Empirate]

You seem to think damage must come from some source of outside force, be it thermic (fire, cold), chemical (acid, electricity), mechanical (force, cold) or mystical (negative energy) in nature. That is not the case.

Living (and magical) targets seem to have much more resistance to the spell than nonliving matter - they get a saving throw and aren't necessarily destroyed completely even if the save fails (if the target has enough HP). That leads me to conclude that the spell might work based on transporting entropy. Living beings (and probably magic-powered creatures like Undead and Constructs as well) export entropy out of their system - which we usually just call staying alive. Disintegrate seems to IMport entropy into the target, leading to a rapid degeneration of thermodynamic processes. Ultimately, matter within the affected system simply fails: atoms decompose into radiation, molecular bonds break down, living cells' biochemistry comes to a stop, and so on. Portions of the target's mass disintegrate into their smallest components, until even those are emitted as radiation.

In creatures, this may be less effective than it is in nonliving matter. And the tougher the creature, the more efficiently it exports entropy, so it is less easily affected by the spell. But it just isn't healthy to have parts of one's tissue dissolve into inorganic sludge or even radiated away.