Elemental damage colors: how many?

[Lokathor]

In the DND world at least, could resistance be a number of damage dice off from the damage against you? When the CL 5 Wizard shoots a fireball at the Fire Resist 3 salamander, it takes 2d6 fire damage. If the salamander is standing in the burning building at the time, he takes no damage from standing in a fire. If you throw the salamander into lava, he'll still go *poof* from 17d6 damage.

Assuming that damage sources reduced to 0 dice also do 0 damage (meaning that 2d6+2 reduced by 2 dice doesn't still do 0d6+2 damage, it just does nothing).

Could that kind of resistance work out?

[kjdavies]

I kind of have my own ideas but I'd like to see that at least. Just telling me where it was would be good enough. Dragon had some gems.

Sorry, was looking earlier and got roped into running a game.

(Okay, wasn't hard; haven't played in a while, someone in IRC threw down "so when are you running a game again?" and I went with it. Some five hours later wrapped the session up with the players going "okay, so when's the next one, I wanna know what happens next!"... so it seems to have gone well.)

I found an article in Dragon 27 you might find interesting, a different variation. I'll see if I can summarize tomorrow, and find that other article I was looking for.

K.

[RobbyPants]

In the DND world at least, could resistance be a number of damage dice off from the damage against you? When the CL 5 Wizard shoots a fireball at the Fire Resist 3 salamander, it takes 2d6 fire damage. If the salamander is standing in the burning building at the time, he takes no damage from standing in a fire. If you throw the salamander into lava, he'll still go *poof* from 17d6 damage.

Assuming that damage sources reduced to 0 dice also do 0 damage (meaning that 2d6+2 reduced by 2 dice doesn't still do 0d6+2 damage, it just does nothing).

Could that kind of resistance work out?

I guess it could. You might want to spell out what happens if you're getting hit for multiple die types like 5d6 + 1d4 or something. I'd just assume you take the highest dice off first, so resistance three would reduce it to 2d6 + 1d4.

This has the advantage of making the subtraction slightly easier. Although, it does absolutely nothing against sources of damage that add a static amount.

[kjdavies]

I found an article in Dragon 27 you might find interesting, a different variation. I'll see if I can summarize tomorrow, and find that other article I was looking for.

TL;DR -- too much there to summarize completely. The article is "Elementals and the Philosopher's Stone" by Jeff Swycaffer, in Dragon 27.


Ah, found it. "Elemental Gods: A four-part approach to campaign deities" by Nonie Quinlan, in Dragon 77.


Keith