(offensive) Positive and Negative Energy Effects

[Merlion]

I am working on a campaign world, in which their are no clerics and no arcane/divine magic split and creating a Mystic class to "replace" the cleric. Also, this world is pretty alignment centric, but all good/evil...no law/chaos no neutrality.
Now one of the aspects of my Mystic class is going to be a lot of positive and negative energy spells with positive used by good ones and negative by evil. I was planning on many of their offensive spells being based on this(though not all). with negative energy its not hard...it hurts living things and harms the undead(and probably good outsiders and such as well). Positive energy is hard though since it usualy heals the living and the only thing it hurts is undead and evil outsiders. I would kind of like to extend this to negative energy hurts non evil life and vice versa for positive....almost making positive and negative energy synomous with holy/unholy. But that raises issue with the healing...how do evil types recieve magicaly healing if positive energy hurts them? I figure theirs two ways to handle it...A) positive energy can hurt evil humans etc in one application but can also heal any normal life regardless of alignment as another application or B) positive energy heals good beings and normal nonsentient lifeforms, negative energy heals undead and evil lifeorms of all types.
I have also thought about having positive energy as an attack simply stun living things with over-energy.
Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions?

Heres a link to my thread on the development of the Mystic class if anyone is interested. I will be updating once I have more stuff done.

 

[Merlion]

Thoughts? Someone? Anyone?

 

[Hypersmurf]

I didn't find that offensive at all... you might want to try adding a political-, racial-, or gender-based generalisation to the message

-Hyp.

 

[KingOfChaos]

Some things you should know about positive energy.

1. It's hot. A flash of positive energy could blind and/or burn a living creature like a fire can if it isn't absorbed into the character. The positive energy plane is an endless plane of burning light and is as hot as the elemental plane of fire.

2. It's dangerous. Positive energy can causes diseases such as Mummy Rot and/or Cancer. It does this because it forces cells to increase their splitting and dividing on a massive scale. Sometimes, that doesn't stop and you end up with tumors.

3. It can overload a living creature. If a creature is continually exposed to a source of positive energy it will eventually cause their soul to overflow their body, burning them out and killing them. It does this by increasing their hit points by more than half past their normal maximum.

 

[Merlion]

bump

 

[Blood Jester]

...with negative energy its not hard...it hurts living things and harms the undead...

Actually, Negative energy heals the undead. Unless you are completely changing this in your world?

 

[Merlion]

Typo

 

[ced1106]

Well, it looks like you're not differentiating planar origins of energies vs. alignments. If you're using a purely alignment-based energy system, negative energy will heal evil beings, the more evil, the more effective the spell. Being alive or undead is unimportant. If you're using the undead / living energy system, negative energy only heals undead and partially undead.

OTOH, Why bother duplicating existing spells? A negative energy spell that's evil would only heal someone if something else were to die. The typical sacrifice a virgin for a few more years of immortality sorta thing. You can't cure a disease with negative energy, but you can stave off it's terminal effects (while you start looking like Dorian Grey) and even become a carrier for the disease.

If it's evil, make it interesting.


Cedric.
aka. Washu! ^O^

 

[Merlion]

I thought about doing the whole evil types have to hurt something to heal themselves deal...I just wasnt sure how that would work from a game balance standpoint....healing being so much harder for the bad guys than the good guys.
I might just keep positive and negative energy more or less as they are and just invent some more alignment based attack spells or something. I dont want my new class to be all that offensive anyway

 

[dave_o]

Maybe something like the Energy Substitution feat? A postively-charged fireball could heal the living, and hurt the undead. Though, it is still dangerous, as the living could easy exceed their hitpoints + one-half.

And explode!