Mearls talks about how he hates resistances

[Legildur]

This is amazing. The answer to this 'problem' is incredibly simple. Chuck the keywords. Everything becomes Elemental. Period. The player writes in his prefered element, which is pure fluff and has no mechanical effect whatsoever. Everything is now balanced.

This appeals to me. What if it was half elemental damage and half magical damage? That way even a resistant creature is subjetc to some damage regardless of resistances.

Or, the other possibility is to keep your suggestion (elemental keyword) in its entirety, but attach a secondary effect to the 'preferred element' regardless of resistances so that it isn't just fluff... eg fire does residual damage, cold slows etc. That way an ice wizard may not do as much damage against creatures in his home turf, but he can still have some effect.

 

[Minigiant]

The problem with resistances is the simple design of most attacks and the crazy mechanics.

An ice wizard just doesn't shoot cold spells. She can shoot with cold or hit you with a cold item.

In a past game, the campaign was based in an artic area. The fire wizard had the regualar bonus damage advantage. The cold wizard's cold spells had advantages based on the type of cold spell. His "pure cold" spells did less damage to ice creatures but would crit easier against them. The ice spells only did partial cold damage. So even though 75% of the PCs and enemies wore cold gear, a person with all cold attacks was still to be feared.

 

[mearls]

I love the Internet. The collected insights are usually revelatory.

I think that simply getting rid of damage types might be a viable answer. The keywords could remain to link effects (feats that boost cold powers, that sort of thing) but an ice shard spell that damages and slows someone doesn't *need* to attach the cold keyword to the damage, just the power as a whole.

You could also even look at translating resistances into a defense bonus. I like that avenue better because you can still use combat advantage or other accuracy boosts to negate that disadvantage. Even in that case, I'd still reserve such traits for elemental creatures.

 

[mearls]

This is amazing. The answer to this 'problem' is incredibly simple. Chuck the keywords. Everything becomes Elemental. Period. The player writes in his prefered element, which is pure fluff and has no mechanical effect whatsoever. Everything is now balanced.

I think this goes a little too far. It's fun to have fire wizards, and druids that focus on a winter theme, or whatever, with mechanics that make that interesting. However, the push to simplify is smart.

(What follows is a bit of a ramble about game design, but Ed's post struck close to home.)

IME, it's easy to add more complexity to a game design, especially when you have a time constraint. Adding stuff feels productive, and you generally add mechanics to other mechanics that already seem to work. You're building on solid ground. The problems are clear, and your new mechanics are going to solve them.

Simplifying is tougher because it forces you to make changes that are risky. It's hard to simplify an existing system while keeping its foundation. You usually have to junk that foundation and build something new, even if that something is largely based on the old foundation's intent.

Yet, once you have that new foundation, you might find that you can never really understand what you saw in the original in the first place.

(And now that I think about it, a generic elemental keyword could be interesting. You could build feats that let you do stuff like give a cold flavor to all your elemental powers, and so on. All the flavor and none of the complexity unless a player asks for it. I have a feeling that someone in this thread already suggested that idea...)

 

[NMcCoy]

Borrowing the Ancient Red Dragon's trick:

Scouring Flames Wizard Attack 7

An intensely focused blast of white-hot flame strips your foes' defenses.

Encounter

Arcane, Fire, Implement
Standard Action Close blast 3
Target: Each creature in blast
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 3d6 + Intelligence modifier fire damage, and the target takes a -2 penalty to AC and Fortitude defenses (save ends).

Effect: The target's fire resistance is negated until the end of the encounter.

 

[Freakohollik]

Resistances create a disparity in value between energy types, but only if the DM uses a particular mix of monsters. Fire attacks blow in the campaign that has lots of red dragon and azers, while cold attacks such in an arctic campaign.

Not all monsters must be of exact equal effectiveness against every possible party. Over the course of a campaign this sort of thing should balance out, a resonable mix of resistance monsters should be encountered. If your DM is always throwing monsters that resist your stuff at you then he's not being very nice. On the other hand if your DM is throwing stuff at you that doesn't resist your attacks, you probably won't mind.

The special abilities that fire when you hit a monster with the 'wrong' type could be done right, or it could be done wrong. To me this seems like it would a lot more powerful for the monster than resistances. In the case you had best not use the wrong energy type or something bad is going to happen such as +5 AC or giving the creature an action point. Where as with resistance, its okay to use the wrong type, just slower. This makes your original problem worse.

 

[Skallgrim]

Bleargh. I disagree with Mearls on this almost completely. I think resistances are a good, simple, straightforward way to handle this. The duergar are Resistant to fire, so that they can use fire attacks safely, walk through normal fires, etc. The White Dragon is resistant to cold, so that icy spells don't damage it as much.

I am hoping that in Arcane Power there is a way for a specialist to "ramp up" his elemental powers (there are already feats for some specialists), but I think D&D currently handles it pretty well.

Sure you get the occasional oddity (why is resistance to cold protecting me from an Icicle, which just stabs me), but no one has problems with them in thousands of other situations in D&D (how is the metal shield improving my defense against a lighting bolt? Why does the power that shoves me have trouble hitting me in plate armor, when I move slower?).


Again, it's not that I don't like more complicated damage systems (I love HERO and GURPS), but these are not the strength of D&D, in my opinion.

OK, I can see his point when the "Ice Wizards" of the north don't practice Ice Magic. Hey, guess what? You chose to keep a wacky-ass magic system with no prerequisites. Look at GURPS Magic for a detailed, coeherent way to handle magical "colleges". The wizard who knows how to throw fireballs knows how to light fires, and control fires, and do other stuff with fire, necessarily. The guy who knows really powerful Ice spells knows most of the wimpy little cool ice spells. The designers chose to write a system where you can know Magic Missile, Thunderwave, Burning Hands, Phantasmal Assailant, Ray of Frost, Acid Arrow, and Prismatic Spray, even though all of them are different types. Bit late to complain about the fact that "thematic magic" is discouraged (even though the feats can still help you there). If you wanted a system where a wide selection of spells of the same element were encouraged, you could have written one, no?

 

[fba827]

I agree that it creates uneveness in the campaign based on what monsters are about. Oddly enough, I was thinking something similar very recently. If my campaign heavily features a particular enemy that has cold resistance, well, any PCs that created themselves as icemages are a little screwed.

I'm not saying there aren't ways to work around it, but, yes, in a typical mix, there are some resistances that come up more often than others.

 

[DaveyJones]

that's not RAW but would make an interesting house rule

 

[I'm A Banana]

Crazy. FFZ just explored this idea, and while I'm not 100% satisfied with our result, it's something that solves the dilemma, even if it's not a simple one-prong solution to the problem.

The FFZ solution works on a few different angles:

#1 is rarity in monsters. Resistances and immunities and "eater" abilities (taking damage as healing) is limited to basically certain boss monsters and obvious elementals -- monsters that are supposed to be an unusual challenge, and so will need a different kind of strategy to handle.

#2 is variety in PC's. There are no "pure elemental mages." Much like the elemental ninjas of Naruto, any "elemental effects" are actually expressed on a few different levels. If you're a fire mage, you're not just doing fire damage -- perhaps you're healing, causing Berserk, using a weapon like the Axe, etc. You can't be a one-trick pony like that. And, there are options for lowering the resistances of enemies to various elements, if you take up that vanguard. Most parties should have access, even if only in item form, to any elemental energy that they may need.

To use the example from Mearls's blog, there's a lot more to "Ice Wizard" than cold damage -- piercing damage (from icicles!) and obscuring effects (from snowstorms!) and effects that knock prone (suddenly slippery!)...cold damage will never be all that you do.

#3 is a trade-off of resistances for vulnerabilities and transformative effects turning damage into "other stuff." If the boss monster is immune to fire damage, fire damage might still do SOMETHING to them (blind them, give them a penalty, reduce their SPD, SOMETHING!). Even if the boss is truly immune to Fire, he should have a vulnerability (say to Ice or Water or even something weirder -- there is no strict duality).

#4 is flexible character choice and adventure choice. Chances are good that even if you have an "ice wizard" who can't damage yetis for crud, you also have two or three other characters that might work in the adventure, and have a choice of two or three other adventures that don't involve yetis.

In tandem, these things basically patch the problem so that it's not a problem. I'd prefer to do it from the ground up, but resistances and immunities are part and parcel of the source material (true in both FFZ and in D&D), so what's left is to find a way so that your "ice wizard" can still work in a land of ice.

I approached Naruto and Avatar and the FF games (which hand out vulnerabilities like candy, but are generally choosier with immunities, and always have diverse character abilities), and these things gave me the answers FFZ used.

Overall, I like OBE's idea better than Mearls's. Making combat more dynamic like that, as others have pointed out, doesn't solve some of the more onerous problems (ice mages STILL aren't good in icy campaigns). Treating them more like weapons is a very good idea, but you don't want to get into the "ice = immobilize" thing either, because then a creature that can't be immobilized offers you the same problem as a creature that can't take ice damage.

Ultimately all the solutions share this:

An element is not just a type of damage.

The easiest solution, of course, is just to hand out "elemental specialist" feats that help you ignore a chunk of resistance.

There's a lot of ways to hit this problem.