First off, I have no problem with energy resistance, but I wanted to share another way it could be reinterpreted. Let's take the Ifrit. They get Resist Fire 5. Instead, change it so that fire damage does not deal lethal damage, but subduing damage. Now, expand this idea toward other energy types and relative races. Just a thought.
You mean all fire damage becomes nonlethal or just the first 5 points are nonlethal?
why would you want to do that ?
I mean all fire damage would become nonlethal. The reason why is to reflect that while fire damage could knock out an ifrit, it couldn't kill them.
Nonlethal damage is capable of killing.
If a creature's nonlethal damage is equal to his total maximum hit points (not his current hit points), all further nonlethal damage is treated as lethal damage.
So what your saying is resistance to x would make x deal non-lethal damage, right?
So then immunity wouldn't change (I hope), and things that already deal non-lethal damage that you have a resistance to would deal no damage I would think. Something like that? Could be nice. It's much much simpler, but you would need to figure out how higher and lower resistances work, because there are things that have a greater resistance to fire that ifrits, as an example. Maybe they just work like normal, as in resisting a certain amount of damage, on top of turning the damage into non-lethal damage? And what if something is immune to non-lethal damage?
And as Ipslore pointed out, non-lethal damage can still kill you, but if you played by these rules it would have to deal just over twice your hp (roughly) in damage.
Going back to the higher and lower resistances, would you do them as normal, but just with the non-lethal damage part? Maybe it only applies to when it does lethal damage? You'll need to figure out how it works though. The idea seems interesting though.