I am starting a new campaign in D&D with my friends. We want to create a new feature for our campaign. Elemental armor, where the idea is that if you are hit by a specific type of damage(Of your choice), you will heal instead of being hurt. I think it will be a temporary effect produced by a spell, and you must choose one damage type every time you cast it.
How many damage types are there? I know of Piercing, Slashing, Bludgeoning, Fire, Ice, Necrotic. Are there any more?
What edition is this? In 5th, there’s piercing, slashing, bludgeoning, fire, cold, lightning, thunder, radiant, force, necrotic, psychic, acid, and poison.
But you probably only want to make some subset of that available. Some are a lot more common than others, especially for any given kind of character, and some have as part of their appeal that they’re a lot harder to resist (almost nothing is protected against force damage, for instance).
Also be aware that if you make this available, the players are going to deliberately target themselves with damage just to get the healing. Make sure that it’s balanced against that possibility.
We are playing 5th edition.
Heh. My old 1st Edition Ranger would have totally used fire armor, waded into a pack of hill or frost giants, and called in fireballs centered on his own head.
Yeah, that seems a mite broken.
Some options
-Limit it to a certain number of uses a day.
-Limit it to a certain amount of healing.
-Limit it to a random effect: all 6s rolled on damage dice heal instead of harming.
-Recommended option: instead of healing, have it provide 1 temporary hit point per die of damage. Temp hit points from the same effect don’t stack, so this keeps it from becoming totally overpowered: a 5d6 fireball grants 5 temporary hitpoints, and if you’re then hit by a 7 HD fireball, you’d gain an additional 2 temporary hit points.
Standard tactic (at least for characters who can pull it off) in my combat LARP. We don’t have elemental absorption for PCs, but we do have elemental defenses. Stack enough fire protection on a fighter, then drop a fireball on him whenever he gets surrounded. He’s left unscathed, and all the NPC mooks take a knockdown, leaving him with a target-rich environment at best or a chance to break the encirclement at worst.
Yup, I remember one of my earlier campaigns my character was a dragon shaman who could give fire resist, and one of us found a necklace of fireballs. Roasted kobolds.
The DM gave us bonus XP for creativity.
E: Doesn’t this kind of already exist with heal/harm cleric spells and undead/living? You might be able to ape those mechanics.