I was thinking about making an ice elf dusk blade, but with one or two changes.
1. I was thinking of cutting all spells that aren’t ice/cold related out, but I don’t believe there are too many ice/cold spells on the dusk blades spell list.
2. I’ve thought about making all of this dusk blade’s spells have the cold subtype.
What does the board think, and how much would this handicap a character? I’m not really worried about power. I going more for flavor than anything else.
Fizz
I'd recommend checking out Frostburn. There's some feats in there you'll find highly useful for building this concept without having to trim off spells from the spell list (like snowcasting).
Also, consider Energy Substitution (Cold) to alter your energy based spells.
I was thinking about making an ice elf dusk blade, but with one or two changes.
Sounds like a great idea.
1. I was thinking of cutting all spells that aren’t ice/cold related out, but I don’t believe there are too many ice/cold spells on the dusk blades spell list.
The Duskblade doesn't really get all that many spells anyway, so you may want to avoid anything that reduces that number.
2. I’ve thought about making all of this dusk blade’s spells have the cold subtype.
This sounds like a better solution. But I assume you mean change the descriptor of the Duskblade's spells to the cold subtype, not simply add the cold subtype to the existing subtypes?
What does the board think, and how much would this handicap a character? I’m not really worried about power. I going more for flavor than anything else.
Fizz
Sound like a really cool idea, and the exact sort of thing I would love my players to come up with. I can't really see any reason why your DM would be against this.
Sound like a really cool idea,
Ba-dum-ching.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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I was thinking about making an ice elf dusk blade, but with one or two changes.
1. I was thinking of cutting all spells that aren’t ice/cold related out, but I don’t believe there are too many ice/cold spells on the dusk blades spell list.
2. I’ve thought about making all of this dusk blade’s spells have the cold subtype.
What does the board think, and how much would this handicap a character? I’m not really worried about power. I going more for flavor than anything else.
Fizz
This totally ruins game balance and...
oh wait, no it doesn't...
If memory serves, a decent number of duskblade spells do not inflict damage. It strikes me as odd that such spells would have the cold subtype. You might find yourself getting weird results if the cold subtype is added to all spells (e.g., the duskblade gains immunity to cold and suddenly all his buffs are dispelled because they are cold subtype spells).
For those spells with an energy subtype, changing them to the cold subtype seems appropriate. I would probably also let in any negative energy spells because cold/negative energy are normally so inter-related.
One thing to consider about these tweaks is that the character will have a hard time hurting undead. Not sure how you want to weight that.
As an aside, one odd thing about the way D&D works is that creatures native to an environment have a difficult time hurting creatures from that environment. If the ice elves survive in icy terrain, I would expect them to have a decent arsenal of fire spells because so many of their common foes would be vulnerable to that energy type and resistant to cold. I don't think it would be too bizzare if you slipped in the occassional fire spell here and there for that reason. Casting such a spell may require a special repentence to the west wind or what have you, but it would be an available tool for emergencies. Just some food for thought.
Some points to keep in mind:
Chilling Touch (or Shivering Touch, cant remember) from Frostburn, or Spell Compendium, is retardedly good. You may want to look it up, then look up the various houserules made on it to bring it to more reasonable power levels.
Lord of the Uttercold, a metamagic feat from Complete Arcane I think, allows you to convert half of your cold damage into negative energy. Nice when the cold immune critters come to play, even more worthless when the cold immune undead come out.
Speaking of undead, as far as cold goes you only really need to worry about skeletons and liches. Most other undead are fair game to cold damage.