Changeable Fire Ball Dmg

[Thomas_Not_very_wise]

If it is possible, can we change the dmg type done by spells such as fire ball and scintillating sphere?


Like, a Fireball doing sonic damage instead of fire, or a Sphere doing cold instead of electric?

Can this be done for spells such as fire arrow, and firebrand?

With the changes to dark fire and flame weapon, I don't imagine this is far fetched.

[Cruzel]

It's kind of far fetched, because the changes to darkfire/flame wep change the visual effect as well.

Fireball and scintillating sphere will always be fire  and electricity visually!




While I agree that alternate damagetypes would be cool, and the EFUDM team has a notorious habit of implementing things months after they say they will not implement them, I do not think this is the  case with this suggestion.

[DeputyCool]

More work than desireable, I suspect.

[Cruzel]

Actually unless your implementation is really crazy, you could probably almost copy/paste functions that allow a wizard to change their damagetypes for flame weapon to these spells. with minor tweaks.

It would just look ridiculously silly to see a fireball explode and have someone take cold damage!

[Thomas_Not_very_wise]

Perhaps you could add animations for a Sonic boom?

[Mort]

It's been tried. The casting animation can't be changed and the result looks silly.

[Caddies]

Dude its called FIREball or FLAMEbrand for a reason. If you want cold damage used Ice Storm or Cone of Cold. If you want acid use Melf's or Mestil's Acid Breath, if you want Electrical use Scintillating Sphere ETC.

[ExileStrife]

ScottyB put a lot of work into this once upon a time since we were investigating it.  And some point, we were changing the animation to match the damage type, so for an acid based fireball we used HORRID WILTING.  :)

To my knowledge, the system still exists, but it's reserved for only very, very special cases.  We decided it just wasn't desirable to have open access to the ability to change your damage types around.

[ScottyB]

That was Johannes, not me. As far as I know, he added it for every spell in which there were adequate animations to pull it off without looking silly. I believe the elemental change occurs when a craftable item is used.

Update: Johannes removed these items from the PC-available recipes. His framework was not actually limited to "only adequate animations" and so things like "cold lightning bolts" were possible.

He left the items in so DMs could give it out as loot, but it may have become subject to the infamous Snoteye Palette Cleanup I keep hearing about.

For DMs, this is a link to his thread: link

[Snoteye]

He left the items in so DMs could give it out as loot, but it may have become subject to the infamous Snoteye Palette Cleanup I keep hearing about.

Unlikely. Johannes appreciates the need for order and I expect him to have named the resrefs appropriately. ^.^

[Nuclear Catastrophe]

We decided we wouldn't do it because there were enough varied spell-types there (mestils acid breath, scintillating sphere) to justify leaving it be.

[Egon the Monkey]

Scint Sphere for some reason has half the range though O_o.

[tears_of_elysium]

From a PnP Perspective

In the Magic of Faerun supplement, one of the first Forgotten Realms supplements to be released after the first Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, there is a feat called "Energy Substition", a metamagic feat which does just that - allow a caster to swap out one type of damage for another.

ENERGY SUBSTITION [METAMAGIC]
You can modify a spell that uses one type of energy to use another type of energy.
Prerequisite: Any other metamagic feat, 5 ranks in knowledge (arcana).
Benefit: Choose one type of energy: acid, cold, electricity, fire, or sonic. You can modify any spell with an energy designator to the chosen energy type instead. A substituted spell works normally in all respects, except that the type of damage changes. For example, an acidic fireball spell still deals damage in a 20 foot spread, except that it is acid damage instead of fire damage.

If a spell has a secondary effect, the altered spell still has that effect. For example, a shout spell can deafen creatures and deals extra damage to crystalline creatures; if fire is substituted for sonic energy in a shout spell, creatures can still be deafened and crystalline creatures can still suffer extra damage. Sometimes a spells minor effects are directly related to the spells energy, for example, a flaming sphere can set items afire, but a purely sonic or acidic flaming sphere does not.

When a spell deals some damage that does not come from energy, Energy Substitution does not effect that portion of the spell. For example, ice storm deals 3d6 points of impact damage and 2d6 points of cold damage. An electrical ice storm deals 3d6 points of impact damage, and 2d6 points of electrical damage.

A substituted spell uses a spell slot zero levels higher than the spells actual level.

Special: This feat may be taken multiple times, and applied to multiple different types of energy.

So there is setting or world based support for this suggestion. As to the reason why casters might take something like this, which people have wondered in this thread, for wizards it is probably less relevant, but for sorcerors and even to a lesser extent wizards and other casters, it gives them increased flexibility within combat against an enemy with resistances, and more range generally or discretion (for instance not wanting do a particular kind of damage, from an rp point of view).

That said, I can understand why it might be too difficult to implement in a hakless server, because it would require the addition of a feat or a feat representative item. I don't understand scripting or anything well  enough to know what is and isn't possible, but I just thought I'd make sure the relevant source material was out there in any discussion of it.

[Cruzel]

It's both possible and ridiculously easy to add feats to a hakless server, players would just need to download an optional override before they could take the feat.

Like said above, it would just look ridiculously silly.

[Behemoth]

Sizzle sphere is meant to electrify people. Fireball is meant to FIRE ball people. It just would must up the spell Wang if we did it.