TOPIC: Unspecified Damage Bonuses, Resistances, and Vulnerabilities

Unspecified damage bonuses make sense to me. I assume that rules to retribution damage are unchanged, and a player is still capable of dealing untyped retribution?

Damage resistance is fine on paper and in VTD, but personally I would have trouble running it as a convention DM. The party card doesn’t currently list damage bonuses of each elemental type, so I would have to ask the player how much damage that is, and they would have to remember it. I might have to ask 5 or more times if the monster has a resistance commonly found in builds, like fire or cold. I think that being accurate would significantly slow down calculations, unless there’s a trick that I’m missing. I would especially dread running a monster that had a blunt/piercing/slashing resistance.


I have a couple of suggestions, but I acknowledge none of them are perfect solutions.

1) DR for monsters mirrors the rule for damage vulnerability. E.g. 10 cold DR yeti takes 10 less damage from any attack that has cold in it. I prefer this way for its simplicity, but understand it’s more punishing to players. A hypothetical paladin that hits that yeti for 20 damage with 2 cold damage included gets reduced all the way down to 10, which could be seen as harsh.


2) DMs wouldn’t have to ask about elemental bonuses if they were on the party card. This would require a new party card design and printing, as well as make more work for the coaches, so I only bring it up as a wish list item.

Thanks for soliciting feedback!

It’s understandable and well explained, but seems quite complicated to me.

For VTD it’s fine.

In the normal dungeon, there isn’t space on the party card to list in detail how much damage of each type a complicated build will do, and I wouldn’t expect a combat DM to consult or understand a matrix of a bunch of numbers anyway.

I might suggest a radical simplification;

Vulnerability to TYPE: if an attack includes any amount of TYPE damage add a flat bonus to the attack (+5?)

Resistance to TYPE: if an attack includes any amount of TYPE damage, either:

A. Deduct a flat penalty (-5?)
B. Halve the entire damage of the attack

Or, maybe monsters having typed resistance should just be eliminated as a rules mechanic, in favor of damage reduction based on attack source, e.g.

-10 from all combat damage
-8 from spell damage
-3 from ranged damage
-7 from melee samate

This just came up in VTD - I equip Charm of the wind (spells do +2 shock) and the Ious stone that gives +2 sonic to spells. The other wizard said he assumed it all just became whatever the spell was (fireball, for example). I figured it would be fire for the spell, plus the shock and sonic. What's the correct interpretation?

bpsymington wrote: This just came up in VTD - I equip Charm of the wind (spells do +2 shock) and the Ious stone that gives +2 sonic to spells. The other wizard said he assumed it all just became whatever the spell was (fireball, for example). I figured it would be fire for the spell, plus the shock and sonic. What's the correct interpretation?

From the first note on this thread:

Examples:
If the core damage of a fireball is 10 Fire but the character has a ring that adds 20 Shock damage to all cast spells, adding 5 Focus to that would net 35 damage (15 Fire and 20 Shock)

If a type is specified, the additional damage is of that type.

If a type is not specified, it is of the "core damage" of the attack.

Charm of Targeting adds +2 damage to ranged attacks, this means for fireball it adds +2 fire damage, and for Magic Missile it adds +2 force damage.

Ella's Electric Earcuff adds +2 shock damage to spell attacks, this means for fireball (and any other spell attack) it adds +2 shock damage.

What does the other Wizard think the possible purpose of specifying spell damage types could be? Why have Ella's Electric Earcuff say it grants Shock damage, and Earcuff of Sonic Splendor say it grants Sonic damage, if in fact what both do is add damage of whatever type the underlying spell does?

Matthew Hayward wrote:

bpsymington wrote: This just came up in VTD - I equip Charm of the wind (spells do +2 shock) and the Ious stone that gives +2 sonic to spells. The other wizard said he assumed it all just became whatever the spell was (fireball, for example). I figured it would be fire for the spell, plus the shock and sonic. What's the correct interpretation?

From the first note on this thread:

Examples:
If the core damage of a fireball is 10 Fire but the character has a ring that adds 20 Shock damage to all cast spells, adding 5 Focus to that would net 35 damage (15 Fire and 20 Shock)

If a type is specified, the additional damage is of that type.

If a type is not specified, it is of the "core damage" of the attack.

Charm of Targeting adds +2 damage to ranged attacks, this means for fireball it adds +2 fire damage, and for Magic Missile it adds +2 force damage.

Ella's Electric Earcuff adds +2 shock damage to spell attacks, this means for fireball (and any other spell attack) it adds +2 shock damage.

What does the other Wizard think the possible purpose of specifying spell damage types could be? Why have Ella's Electric Earcuff say it grants Shock damage, and Earcuff of Sonic Splendor say it grants Sonic damage, if in fact what both do is add damage of whatever type the underlying spell does?

Thanks - We were just about to start our run so I didn't pay attention to the details!