OSSR: Frostburn

[DrPraetor]

If you're doing a new edition of basically 3rd edition (ala 5th edition), you no longer have that excuse

The process of designing new and interesting games is a type of research project. If you know how all the pieces will interact before you've put them together, the game is either simple and boring, or a stale clone of something that already exists.

If, say, you add Domain Rules to the game, lots of subtle things will change in ways that aren't necessarily easy to predict. For one, you're adding the idea that high levels should be actually playable rather than decoration, a concept that hasn't been explored very much by 3rd or 5th edition.

That's fair, but new core classes in expansion books are a bad way of adjusting to whatever secondary problems may arise. Further, the need for course correction had better drop over time, if you're actually improving on D&D 3 to begin with.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Could also be that you fight Goblins more often than not and having a nice variety of monsters is important in TRPGs.

The context there though was that you'd want Snow Goblin as a PC race as opposed to Tundra Halflings.

Ah, I see what you meant.

With that said, I don't see why we can't have Tundra Halfings and Snow Goblins.

[Username17]

If you're doing a new edition of basically 3rd edition (ala 5th edition), you no longer have that excuse.

You absolutely do. When you make fundamental changes to how a game system works you're going to have unintended consequences. It's hard to remember, but the reason for BAB to give attacks at progressive penalties was a deliberate design choice with regard to how Fighters got excessive offensive output at higher levels in AD&D. That AC inflation and Hit Point inflation would have independently made that not remotely the case in 3e with extra attacks coming in at full value wasn't widely known. Now that's something which could be mathhammered, it is knowable that Trolls in 3e have functionally double the hit points of their AD&D counterparts. But there are definitely going to be surprises like that.

The players adapt to the challenges and the resources they are presented with and the MCs adjust the challenges and the rewards to the players. The Nash Equilibrium of challenges and preparations is going to be emergent and in some cases highly influenced by internet culture. 3rd edition adventurers generally don't need 10 foot poles, but that's not intrinsically the case with the 3e rules. There certainly could be endless pits and buzzsaws of death that you needed to prod things ahead of you by 2 squares to uncover. There just aren't. Late period 3.5 parties often don't even bother having a character who has trap finding because meaningful traps are such a rarity.

But regardless of the fact that you are going to learn things you never knew that you never knew about your own game as the edition progresses, you're also just going to come up with new ideas for archetypes and resource systems, and you're going to want to showcase those ideas in expansion books. Shadowrun added Adepts and Aspected Magicians and Technomancers and some of those caught on and some of those didn't. The Beguiler is a thing we care about because it was one of the first classes to use the Warmage resource management mechanic but have an actually useful set of abilities to use it with.

You are going to develop new stuff and you should develop new stuff, and trying to fill the core book with bullshit half-developed ideas and unplaytested fail parades instead of doing that is bad. It's a waste of space in the core book, it makes your work look unprofessional, and it creates a lot of trap options. Even if you know with certainty that you're going to make a Warlock and you're going to have it use at-will spellcasting, it's better to sit on it until you get to It's Hot Outside or Tome & Blood if you don't have it firing on all cylinders when it's time to launch the PhB.

Now obviously that "Save it for the PHB 2" attitude can get out of hand. Like, 4th edition trying to launch with only 8 classes while leaving PHB classics like the Barbarian, Bard, Druid, and Monk on the cutting room floor was legitimately insulting. But an edition that has fifteen classes in the PHB has clearly done due diligence on that front even if the ultimate goal is twice that or more.

But if you then say, "let's add a swashbuckler/warden/samurai/archivist", I say, "that's just a few customization levels for rogue/ranger/soldier/white mage, not a different class." This has the big advantage than an existing rogue who had a swashbuckling character concept can take the new material.

No and no. It isn't just that you want to have characters that buckle swashes, it's that when you make the Swahbuckler in Sword & Fist or Stormwrack, you will also be exploring new design space. Like, maybe the Swashbuckler has some kind of deck of cards system like the Swordsage in Tome of Battle. Maybe it uses a rage bar that builds up points for major stunts by doing basic maneuvers. I don't know, it's new design space that you can and should explore after you've got the basic game functional. And maybe it'll suck ass or be way too good and banned at all tables. Those are risks you can take by thinking outside the box and exploring design space.

---

A book like Frostburn is going to live or die by how the various parts of the edition are good or bad. The 3.5 version of Frostburn is pretty good when it's filling in blanks and following directives for things that already work OK in 3rd edition rules, and when the 3rd edition rules fail us the book dutifully also fails us.

So if address 3rd edition's root problems, a book like Frostburn gets a lot better. If your skill system doesn't fall apart when people gain levels, if your ability to run challenges for high level characters actually works, and if your paragon classes aren't such a fail state, then simply coloring in the lines on those parts of the book would work much better.

-Username17

[Username17]

Could also be that you fight Goblins more often than not and having a nice variety of monsters is important in TRPGs.

The context there though was that you'd want Snow Goblin as a PC race as opposed to Tundra Halflings.

Ah, I see what you meant.

With that said, I don't see why we can't have Tundra Halfings and Snow Goblins.

The point is that goblins of the snow is totally a thing in a lot of cultures, while the Tundra Halfling is just a D&Dism. So you might say 'I want more Norse Vættir and Finnish Hiisi in my D&D' and there are just Goblinesque creatures from the far north that already have extensive folkloric cultural ties. It is entirely possible to have a 'Snow Goblin' concept entirely without reference to Dungeons & Dragons.

On the flip side, Tundra Halflings are just a D&D mashup concept. If you image search the Tundra Halfling, the first result is from this book, but also too all the other references you can google up are just ultimately back linking to Frostburn. Tundra Halflings aren't a reference to anything, they are a Madlibs mashup of a concept rooted in rural agrarian life and harsh unfarmable conditions.

Now, there's nothing wrong with making new characters out of seemingly incongruous concepts. Like, that's basically the Athasian Halfling, right? But if you're going to make a race of inherent irony you've got to sell it. Which the cannibal Halflings of Darksun did, and the blandly cold and uninteresting Tundra Halflings of Frostburn most assuredly did not.

Snow Goblin is an established concept that potentially draws on thousands of years of real world folk culture. Tundra Halfling is an irony powered D&D palette swap monster with no established cultural connection or baggage. Snow Goblin justifies itself, Tundra Halfling might as well be tiles plucked out of a Scrabble bag unless and until you write them an interesting set of traits and history. Tundra Halflings could have been good, but only if they were written well and had a concept other than 'spin the wheel of minor starting character abilities.'

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Shadowrun added Adepts and Aspected Magicians and Technomancers and some of those caught on and some of those didn't.

This is an example that shows my first point - newer editions of Shadowrun need Adepts, Aspect Magicians and Possession Traditions in the basic book.

As a game develops through editions, less and less "core" material, such as basic classes!, should be relegated to expansion books.

So newer editions of D&D should have Beguilers, the better Book of 9 Swords mechanics, playable Drow, and so forth, in the basic book.

For my second point, let's consider adding a new stunt mechanic:
This is especially true for anything that shows up before level 6 or so, which we understand pretty well from D&D 3rd edition, and which is harder to use in an expansion book because you have to create a new character.

I've got my Rogue - Wesley, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts.

If you release an expansion book with Swashbucklers, I've been retroactively closed out of a character concept which Wesley was promised to occupy. He doesn't get to build stunt points from every swash he buckles? Do I need to redo my entire character from scratch?

OTOH, if you release an expansion book with a Swashbuckling mechanic that existing Rogues can use (with a substitution level or a feat or whatever), I can select it at my next level up, or make some much smaller retroactive ability swap.

If D&D never improves - if it has to rebuilt from atoms in every edition - then yes, you need experimental beginning character options spread across sourcebooks. But that's not ideal, and I simply don't think it's true at this point.

This is also a better way to tack when you inevitably misjudge character strengths. If it turns out that Wesley's superbluff and trapfinding and such are just lame, then you can hand out better powers for Rogues in the expansion book, and again I don't have to scrap Wesley and create a new character who is a Swashbuckler instead of a Rogue!

Near the end of the edition lifetime, you would start releasing experimental books with new starting character options. I mean, the Book of Nine Swords was a good idea, when it came out. But a new edition of D&D should have an entire product cycle planned with room to adjust or power-up the core classes in the PHB rather than trying to supplant them by introducing the Tome Fighter, which renders the PHB fighter obsolete by not sucking.

[Libertad]

So newer editions of D&D should have Beguilers, the better Book of 9 Swords mechanics, playable Drow, and so forth, in the basic book.

Commercially speaking this will be a terrible idea, as a significant portion of D&D's fanbase will complain loud enough to make Mearls do an errata. Or do what he did to 4e, which was axe it entirely and pretend it doesn't exist.

[DrPraetor]

I'm old enough to remember when 3rd edition was supposed to fail because of grognard complaints. 3rd edition overcame these problems by actually being good.

5th edition is basically an inferior reboot of 3rd edition - but this was not a commercially successful move (I'm told that Stranger Things has revitalized the market, but their production schedule is still a joke.)

A new edition of D&D that was actually better than 3rd edition would be a commercial success.

[Username17]

As a game develops through editions, less and less "core" material, such as basic classes!, should be relegated to expansion books.

But 'More' does not mean 'All.' It's not only impractical to put everything into the core book, it's not even something you'd want to do if you could. Intentionally holding off on Druids and Frost Giants from the core books because you want popular sizzle to sell expansion books like 4th edition did is bullshit, but leaving rules for metavariants like Wakyambi for the Companion in a new edition of Shadowrun is wholly expectable.

A good example would be the Beguilers you keep mentioning. There is zero reason to make Beguilers core. That's not to say that there isn't a need for an arcane caster who specializes in tricky shit and has a kind of 'magic rogue' feel, because obviously there is. The thing is that moving forward you're going to want to embrace more thematic wizards as well as less fiddly resource mechanics that spellbook preparation. But that just is the Illusionist once you're making a new edition.

If you make a new class called the Beguiler, it would be in an expansion book, and also it would be to showcase a new resource management system or a mashup of new abilities or something.

More explicitly, consider the Dread Necromancer. It's a pretty good class, and you want a Necromancer option. But the Dread Necromancer name exists because the Necromancer from the 3e core book was hot garbage. The Necromancer you'd make for the core book would just be called 'Necromancer'. You'd only ever have to make a 'Dread Necromancer' class if the Necromancer you made for the core book turned out to not deliver the goods for some reason.

More broadly, a lot of the hotfix classes and feats and shit shouldn't even be necessary if you're writing a new set of core rules that hopefully don't have the problems those were intended to fix in the previous edition. You aren't going to need a Tome Monk if you're writing a new edition and the regular Monk can just not suck in the first place.

Commercially speaking this will be a terrible idea, as a significant portion of D&D's fanbase will complain loud enough to make Mearls do an errata. Or do what he did to 4e, which was axe it entirely and pretend it doesn't exist.

As DrPraetor correctly surmises, success justifies anything. 4th edition didn't fail because grognards rejected the depowering of wizards or the strengthening of fighters - that's Something Awful Goonthink. 4th edition failed because it was a sweaty pile of uncleaned taint hairs. The number of people who actually gave a shit about THAC0 being removed or Thieves being renamed Rogues or Clerics using spears or whatever was chickenfeed. There were some very online people who ranted about how all that was ruining D&D, but it turns out no one actually cares what RPGPundit thinks and the effect on sales was insignificant compared to the overall buzz about the edition being good.

People will completely accept an edition where Fighters get nice things. There will be a few people who scream about that, but to be honest those same people would scream about Halflings looking insufficiently like Bilbo Baggins or whether or not our Lizardfolk females are drawn with boobs. Grognardism that is unswayed by overall quality is not something you can mollify by preemptively surrendering on design points.

The people who would complain about Fighters getting nice things are going to complain anyway and also there aren't very many of these people despite how loud they seem sometimes. Edition wars are won or lost based on the quality of the offering, not on the fanservice offered to people who were teenagers in 1981. 3rd edition is only now fading from relevance, and it hasn't been in print for 12 years.

-Username17

[Emerald]

Commercially speaking this will be a terrible idea, as a significant portion of D&D's fanbase will complain loud enough to make Mearls do an errata. Or do what he did to 4e, which was axe it entirely and pretend it doesn't exist.

People will completely accept an edition where Fighters get nice things. There will be a few people who scream about that, but to be honest those same people would scream about Halflings looking insufficiently like Bilbo Baggins or whether or not our Lizardfolk females are drawn with boobs. Grognardism that is unswayed by overall quality is not something you can mollify by preemptively surrendering on design points.

The people who would complain about Fighters getting nice things are going to complain anyway and also there aren't very many of these people despite how loud they seem sometimes.

The vast majority of the complaints about Tome of Battle weren't even about fighters getting Nice Things, they really boiled down to three points:

1) ToB was "too anime!"...because of the art style, some of the class flavor snippets, some of the maneuver and stance names, and the Behind the Curtain: Blending Genres sidebar in the introduction, not because of the mechanics themselves.
2) ToB was "giving noncasters spells!"...because maneuvers had stat blocks formatted like spell stat blocks and were organized into disciplines like spells are into schools, and because 3 of the 9 disciplines (none of which were available to the fighter analog, of course) had obviously-magical maneuvers.
3) ToB was "replacing classic martial classes!"...because the warblade/crusader/swordsage was stronger than, and had more options and more complex mechanics than, the fighter/paladin/monk.

When 4e rolled around, complaint 2 still applied because warlords healing people by shouting at them broke a lot of peoples' suspension of disbelief, and complaint 3 still applied because you couldn't even come close to making a simple powers-less fighter until Essentials came out, but I never saw anyone complain about 4e martial classes being "too anime" because that was purely an aesthetic concern in ToB and the 4e art style and power naming convention didn't "feel anime" to them.

When 5e rolled around, the Battle Master Fighter was basically an attempt to squeeze the warblade and warlord into the fighter, but people didn't really complain about 2 (even though 5e maneuvers were fairly thematically similar to 3e warblade maneuvers and 4e warlord powers) or 3 (even though the Champion Fighter was hot garbage that the Battle Master effectively obsoleted except in niche optimized builds) because the maneuver formatting was different from spell formatting, there were no magic-flavored maneuvers, and the Battle Master and Champion were presented as two co-equal options rather than one being a replacement of the other.

So if you whipped up a 6e with a fighter that basically played like a warblade and got plenty of Nice Things, you could probably avoid any grognard complaints so long as you were careful with the fluff text and provided enough simplistic options to make a "don't think, just hit stuff" build for the grognards' "classic fighter" option.

[DrPraetor]

leaving rules for metavariants like Wakyambi for the Companion in a new edition of Shadowrun is wholly expectable.

That's a bad example, since "is an Elf... but black!" should probably not have game mechanics associated with it? Or, at the least, the special rules should be minor enough that you play as an Elf until the Africa source book comes out and you can use whatever Wakyambi special rules. But, yes, in a D&D clone, you'll want at the least new monsters and some of those are going inevitably to be playable.

A good example would be the Beguilers you keep mentioning. There is zero reason to make Beguilers core. That's not to say that there isn't a need for BEGUILERS BUT YOU SHOULD CALL THEM SOMETHING ELSE

I think a new edition should have both Enchanters (who use the Beguiler rules, essentially) and Illusionists built around non-busted illusion rules, but this isn't the point.

If you make a new class called the Beguiler, it would be in an expansion book, and also it would be to showcase a new resource management system or a mashup of new abilities or something.

... Dread Necromancer = Necromancer ...

This is the core disagreement and you're not defending this position well by basing it on what different classes should be called.

Further, I say, instead of adding a Beguiler core class in Stormwrack, you should add a Trump progression which draws cards to determine which spells you cast, or whatever other experimental mechanic, as an option for Enchanters or Illusionists.
Let me give an example of a bad implementation of the correct form: Divine Feats. Divine Feats let existing clerics explore a new resource mechanic, of using their turning attempts to do shit. The design quality was low, but this was a new option for the existing core classes and that is the correct way to add such things to most D&D campaigns. Just, you know, be good at your fucking job.

If you then want to make a new core class that uses Trumps exclusively, you would save that until after you had run through It's Cold Outside, I'm Totally not a Pedo: Let's Fuck Some Hobbits, and Clanbook Wu Jen: Can I go home now, to complete the product life cycle and start spitballing ideas for D&D 7th.

More broadly, a lot of the hotfix classes and feats and shit shouldn't even be necessary if you're writing a new set of core rules that hopefully don't have the problems those were intended to fix in the previous edition. You aren't going to need a Tome Monk if you're writing a new edition and the regular Monk can just not suck in the first place.

I ASSERT:
In D&D 6th edition, the need for hot fixes that reset at first level is not worth the cost. The cost is very real - they invade the protected territory of existing characters, they cause cognitive dissonance between different secondary sourcebooks that don't share the same core classes, and so on.

Ideally, even setting specific sourcebooks would have special options for existing classes rather than new core classes.

New races are unavoidable - especially, as you will be adding new monsters some of which will be playable.

[Username17]

I ASSERT:
In D&D 6th edition, the need for hot fixes that reset at first level is not worth the cost.

First of all, the need for hot fixes that reset at first level is unknowable on release. It might be a trivial affectation, it might be absolutely mission critical. You don't actually know, and can't know until the players actually get their hands on it. It might be that the Assassin just doesn't work with the way the players actually play the game and the entire concept just needs a whole class replacement. It might be that making new classes is simply an indulgence or an excuse to try out ideas for the next edition. And also it might be hat new class concepts are important because whatever the next Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or whatever has like chessmasters or dancers or some fucking thing and everyone wants a core class that does something analogous.

Regardless, since you don't know how critical it's going to be to do hotfixes or when it's going to be critical to do hotfixes, you should pencil in hotfix class space along the entire edition plan. The Paladin and the Ranger might be fine, and they might have crippling flaws (either as released or with respect to how they interact with future material), and either way you want to pencil in a Warden class in the 'Trees Outside' book, and if that class needs to be a Ranger or Paladin redo it can be, and if it's just a novelty seeking hybrid of two successful concepts, that's fine too.

-Username17

[Libertad]

I'm old enough to remember when 3rd edition was supposed to fail because of grognard complaints. 3rd edition overcame these problems by actually being good.

5th edition is basically an inferior reboot of 3rd edition - but this was not a commercially successful move (I'm told that Stranger Things has revitalized the market, but their production schedule is still a joke.)

A new edition of D&D that was actually better than 3rd edition would be a commercial success.

There's no reliable sales figures besides that which the companies themselves claim, so it's a bit hard to say what Edition sold the most. And 5th Edition is widely popular in spite of its rules and design, not because of it.

As DrPraetor correctly surmises, success justifies anything. 4th edition didn't fail because grognards rejected the depowering of wizards or the strengthening of fighters - that's Something Awful Goonthink. 4th edition failed because it was a sweaty pile of uncleaned taint hairs. The number of people who actually gave a shit about THAC0 being removed or Thieves being renamed Rogues or Clerics using spears or whatever was chickenfeed. There were some very online people who ranted about how all that was ruining D&D, but it turns out no one actually cares what RPGPundit thinks and the effect on sales was insignificant compared to the overall buzz about the edition being good.

It's quite easy to say this if you're a hobbyist with ample amount of free time, labor, and money to burn, but if you hope to break even in tabletop good game design is not as important as the aesthetics. There's a rather large amount of self-publishers who have to bite the OGL bullet and make 5e-compatible rules for their rules in order to get more sales, even if some other system is more suitable for it. This is not to say they can't do both, but one sells clearly more than the other.

Being 'approachable' or having the illusion of approachability to newbies is also important. 5th Edition's primary concern was whether or not it felt like D&D to readers, being a sort of multi-Edition Rorschach test. While a lot of 5e's popularity is in spite of Mearls and WotC, designers are more likely to be risk-averse and play it safe than pick something divisive. 5e has a Warlock in the core rules is because for the most part, 3rd Edition fans overwhelmingly liked it, whereas with something like Tome of Battle there were fans who were decrying it.

People will completely accept an edition where Fighters get nice things. There will be a few people who scream about that, but to be honest those same people would scream about Halflings looking insufficiently like Bilbo Baggins or whether or not our Lizardfolk females are drawn with boobs. Grognardism that is unswayed by overall quality is not something you can mollify by preemptively surrendering on design points.

The people who would complain about Fighters getting nice things are going to complain anyway and also there aren't very many of these people despite how loud they seem sometimes. Edition wars are won or lost based on the quality of the offering, not on the fanservice offered to people who were teenagers in 1981. 3rd edition is only now fading from relevance, and it hasn't been in print for 12 years.

coughpathfinderfandomcough

Apologies if I'm thread-derailing now. If people want we can split my stuff into a new thread topic.

[Dean]

Frank. One thing I thought would be valuable to hear from you specifically would be how you think Cold/Extreme Cold should be done in terms of gradients of significance and what the effects are. Heat too while I'm asking I suppose.

How much cold does it take to fuck up a person over how long? How would you chunk that into a few discrete levels to be grokkable to a human player. What are the effects of extreme cold on the body? Cause it'd be cool to make Icy Grasp do something actual similar to the effect of liquid nitrogen on human skin. If you're on a roll I'd also be curious about heat. I'm curious how you would chunk the effects of heat and cold on flesh into something an RPG player could parse if you wanted to do so.

[Username17]

The human body's temperature tolerance is almost non-existent. The effects of hypothermia start to set in with the body temperature dropping about two degrees. and the body can start to go into convulsions when the body temperature goes up by 2 degrees. That is to say: your body is 37 degrees right now, and if it went up to 39 or down to 35 you could lose consciousness.

Absolute temperature isn't terribly meaningful. Heat and cold injury occur because heat transfer rates exceed your body's ability to counteract them (or in the case of heat injury that heat transfer is sufficiently limited that the body cannot divest itself of waste heat quickly enough). Chilblains and Frostbite happen because the body ends up cutting off blood supply to peripheries in order to conserve core temperate because it's losing too much heat. 20 degree water feels cold and 20 degree air does not because there's more specific heat and conductance in the water.

Bottom line is that freezing to death because of exposure to cold weather isn't all that similar to getting a freeze burn from contact with liquid nitrogen or a frozen piece of metal. You can freeze to death in 5 degree air if it's wet and windy and your body heat keeps getting blown away. An actual freeze burn happens because some of your cells get reduced to below zero in a hurry and those cells die because the liquid inside turns to ice and expands and tears the cell membrane to shreds.

The Frostburn rules for cold weather exposure are not too complicated to use and actually give reasonable outputs. And splitting "cold damage" from freeze rays and exposure damage is totally legit.

-Username17

[Dean]

What do you think cold damage, like a frost beam or area of crazy cold would do narratively or mechanically if it wasn't just d6's of damage? What can cold do in approximately 10 seconds to a human being?

[Username17]

What do you think cold damage, like a frost beam or area of crazy cold would do narratively or mechanically if it wasn't just d6's of damage? What can cold do in approximately 10 seconds to a human being?

Depending on what your heat transfer rate is, you could turn someone into a statue that then exploded in 10 seconds. An ordinary human turns into an actual block of ice with the loss of about 243000 joules. That's the inverse of the amount of energy you get out of detonating about 80 grams of TNT. A magic freeze ray that can suck heat of people at a reasonable clip could be functionally a death ray. Of course, it'll probably just look like a regular low budget death ray, because body temperatures fall to the point where the heart stops and nerves stop conducting well before you actually turn solid or get frosty. You hit someone in the chest with a freeze ray and they'd turn directly into a room temperature corpse. The loss of 17 degrees of body temperature would make you very dead, but your body wouldn't be colder than the furniture.

If you aren't doing some kind of magic heat conductance thing, your ice attacks are probably about throwing chunks of ice at people - at which point the fact that it's cold doesn't mean anything in a 10 second period. We are now only concerned with the boring mundane mass and speed of your ice shards.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

We are now only concerned with the boring mundane mass and speed of your ice shards.

-Username17

I consider the mass and speed of your ice shards extremely exciting and fascinating.

[Foxwarrior]

Perhaps he meant "boring" in the sense that the mass and speed causes the ice shards to bore into your flesh.

[Lokey]

Surprised I don't get a relevant result for a search engine query of how much energy loss it takes it freeze someone.

Anyway, think you're forgetting something Frank. That's how much energy it takes for a person-size amount of water to lose 30C, sure. But ice formation also takes energy loss, something like 300j/g iirc. So just the gallon of blood (4000g) at 0C would take about a Mj alone to turn into ice assuming it's similar enough to water.

[Username17]

Surprised I don't get a relevant result for a search engine query of how much energy loss it takes it freeze someone.

Anyway, think you're forgetting something Frank. That's how much energy it takes for a person-size amount of water to lose 30C, sure. But ice formation also takes energy loss, something like 300j/g iirc. So just the gallon of blood (4000g) at 0C would take about a Mj alone to turn into ice assuming it's similar enough to water.

Good point about the enthalpy of fusion. Dropping someone to zero degrees would of course kill them (heart, lung, and brain would all cease), but because of the enthalpy of fusion only a small amount of the water in their body would actually freeze. Like when it's 0 degrees outside and puddles just form a thin and easily cracked crust of ice on the surface.

-Username17

[Neeeek]

Frank:

So let's consider Blood Snow and Shivering Touch. Both are 3rd level spells, and most people who have played 3.5 D&D have heard about Shivering Touch and Blood Snow has been lost to memory. So first off, Blood Snow causes an area of snow to very slowly kill everyone near it. If people like walk away they don't die. So it's a spell whose killer app is if you can get your enemies stuck in a confined space, but that space also has to be covered in snow so it's generally outside. You could imagine getting enemies stuck in a courtyard or casting a wall spell to seal off a ravine filled with blood snow or something, but you're not going to prepare it speculatively because it's essentially garbage in most scenarios.

Shivering Touch makes a single target clumsier by lowering their Dexterity score, giving the target minor penalties. But if the target's Dexterity actually hits zero, they become paralyzed and combat is over. Against most enemies, this isn't particularly good. But if you happen to have a single powerful enemy whose Dexterity is on the low end of the scale to start with, this can fucking end things. Is that good? Most of the time no, but it turns out to have a certain utility...


The game is literally named “Dungeons & Dragons” and the end boss of a lot of adventures is a Dragon. And it turns out that 80% of Dragons are very weak to the exact kind of cold damage to Dexterity caused by Shivering Touch. You don't prepare it every day, but the fact that it exists on the spell list means that Carlos the Dwarf Cleric can sometimes prepare spells in the morning and then literally one-punch the final boss. Making everyone else feel small in the pants.

A while back, I played in a game with a DM who wasn't all that bright, and had some trouble understanding level-appropriate threats, but let pretty much anything WotC published in. One of the other players kept Shivering Touch as a fire alarm in case he threw something at us that would wipe us out.

Unfortunately, if I remember right, he sent a super powerful demon with like 24 Dex instead of a dragon. I think one PC got out alive. Wasn't me.

[Thaluikhain]

More useful than freezing someone, IMHO, would be, say, pouring water into a lock and freezing that.

[Dean]

I feel like you'd have to freeze water super super fast to harm a lock. I could be wrong. But like if I leave a bottle of water in the freezer it explodes if its closed not open, plus being made of metal and all.

[deaddmwalking]

It'd be cool and thematic to have an ice spell that reduces an objects hardness to 0. Then you can smash locks and/or doors (and maybe bank vaults) with your bare fists after getting them cold enough.

[K]

The context there though was that you'd want Snow Goblin as a PC race as opposed to Tundra Halflings.

Ah, I see what you meant.

With that said, I don't see why we can't have Tundra Halfings and Snow Goblins.

The point is that goblins of the snow is totally a thing in a lot of cultures, while the Tundra Halfling is just a D&Dism. So you might say 'I want more Norse Vættir and Finnish Hiisi in my D&D' and there are just Goblinesque creatures from the far north that already have extensive folkloric cultural ties. It is entirely possible to have a 'Snow Goblin' concept entirely without reference to Dungeons & Dragons.

On the flip side, Tundra Halflings are just a D&D mashup concept. If you image search the Tundra Halfling, the first result is from this book, but also too all the other references you can google up are just ultimately back linking to Frostburn. Tundra Halflings aren't a reference to anything, they are a Madlibs mashup of a concept rooted in rural agrarian life and harsh unfarmable conditions.

Now, there's nothing wrong with making new characters out of seemingly incongruous concepts. Like, that's basically the Athasian Halfling, right? But if you're going to make a race of inherent irony you've got to sell it. Which the cannibal Halflings of Darksun did, and the blandly cold and uninteresting Tundra Halflings of Frostburn most assuredly did not.

Snow Goblin is an established concept that potentially draws on thousands of years of real world folk culture. Tundra Halfling is an irony powered D&D palette swap monster with no established cultural connection or baggage. Snow Goblin justifies itself, Tundra Halfling might as well be tiles plucked out of a Scrabble bag unless and until you write them an interesting set of traits and history. Tundra Halflings could have been good, but only if they were written well and had a concept other than 'spin the wheel of minor starting character abilities.'

-Username17

DnD has never committed to the idea of templates. but it really should have done that because Snow Goblins and Tundra Halflings really, really, really, needed to just be a People of the Frost template that goes on top of gobbo and Frodo.

You could still have cultural write-ups, but honestly every adventure should have a cultural write-up telling you how these frosty gobbos in this valley are different from the stereotypes that PCs might buy into.