Old School Spells

[moritheil]

No first level spell should instantly kill a creature, imho, short of Fine or Diminutive vermind under 1 HD or something.

I've thought about bringing back a higher-level sort of chromatic orb, or else remaking it substantially as a 1st-level spell. But haven't yet done so, meh.

I don't know about that. After all, a high enough mage can kill a couple of creatures with a magic missile, or a burning hands. And color spray can easily be a save-or-die equivalent if it takes them out for four rounds.

 

[glass]

No first level spell should instantly kill a creature, imho, short of Fine or Diminutive vermind under 1 HD or something.

I don't know about that. After all, a high enough mage can kill a couple of creatures with a magic missile, or a burning hands. And color spray can easily be a save-or-die equivalent if it takes them out for four rounds.

Also, by my reading of it, Chromatic Orb required an attack roll and required the target to fail two saves to be affected. Considering you had to be quite high level to use the death effect, and back in 2e days saves did not scale so high level target basically never failed (let alone twice in a row), the spell was a lot weaker than it might seem.

Of course, bringing it into 3e unaltered, where saves do scale, might cause balance issues.


glass.