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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 6576560" data-attributes="member: 907">Ideally, earth element spells ought to do physical damage: mostly bludgeoning, but occasionally piercing or slashing.The problem is that D&D's spells are poorly adapted to elemental balance, because that was not a thing Gygax considered back in the late 70s. Heck, he didn't even bother with school balance - the schools listed in 1e spells were mostly flavor. I think the first attempt at elemental-themed wizards was in Tome of Magic, and after that you had the slightly different elemental schools in Al-Qadim (sand/flame/wind/sea instead of earth/fire/air/water) - but these were both a matter of retro-fitting the existing spells into the new schools, with a handful of spells added.Then came 3e, notably Tome & Blood, the 3.0 wizard/sorcerer splatbook (as an aside, I still think they should have called the rogue/bard book "Lute & Loot"). Of course it had an element-themed prestige class in it, and as a result they had to try to map the 3e energy types to the classical elements, and then that mapping mostly stuck with us. A better solution would have been to make spells with elemental balance in mind from the start, but that ship sailed in the 70s and we don't have the water magic needed to bring it back.</blockquote>