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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

D&D Magic: So much fire, so little ice

One thing that has always bugged me about most D&D editions is that ice magic is so limited, when compared to fire magic. Same with air and earth. I guess they aren't as exciting as fireballs blasting everywhere.

There are some very nice non-fire spells, but they are few and far between. The old 2nd edition Wizard Compendium addressed this quite nicely, but I haven't seen most of that stuff in print since then.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I always liked that about D&D. I could play an Aquamancer, develop my own water-based damage-dealing spells, and no monster in the whole world except new ones the DM creates will be resistant to it. I look at it like this: the spell list in the PHB are the common ones that everybody knows about - thought they might not have all those spells! This means if there's a bunch of fire spells, some ice, but few water / earth / air, that reflects the predominant magical tradition and/or the spells that have been "out on the market" for the longest after recovery from dungeons, or else those represent the knowledge carried over from before the apocalypse.

That said, I think the basic list should be the ones from OD&D and any others are special / rare / problematic.