I was just thinking about The idea of Plasma damage now of course the only real difference between fire damage and plasma would be the intensity of the heat (maybe some thing else if one of you science people want to correct me)
Lets say I wanted to make sort of star dragon that breathed plasma.(not what i'm doing just an example) Should fire immunity completely negate all the damage? I'm kind of in favor of treating it like hell fire where resistances does nothing and immunity cuts it in half?
Do you guys feel like that is the way to go or maybe have another suggestion?
I also wonder if pathfinder could consider something like that for starfinder.
There are currently two forms of plasma damage used in Pathfinder already. The first was introduced with robots and deals half and half on Fire and Electricity, which makes sense as plasma is highly conductive and would probably be weaponized as such.
The second was introduced with the Kineticist and involves half fire and half bludgeoning damage. Now, this is pretty interesting and also works, as plasma is just superheated matter.
For non-tech sources, I would go with the latter, personally.
Hmm half-fire half bludgeoning I kind of like that. makes me think of comic books with guys shooting plasma blasts that knock their enemies back as well.
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
At first I read the thread's topic as "Should Pharasma be the same as fire damage?"
To which I say, yes. Yes, of course!
plasma
it's really a question of what energy resistance applies, if any, and how to apply it.
so plasma is super hot gas, very conductive and usually (at sea level atmosphere on earth) accompanies a strong electrical discharge (the plasma has lost most of it's electrons into a cloud in the plasma, they aren't staying with a particular atom anymore).
Pathfinder has acid, cold, elec, fire, sonic energy damage types.
Lantern archon light rays bypass all DR.
Lasers are listed as [fire] types in the Technology Guide. (silly IMO but it fits with the alchemical 4)
plasma as [fire] & [elec] damage types, makes sense. As plasma is super energetic, I'd reduce the resistance to half and make immunity half damage.
The kineticist uses kinetic energy (lol) and that's bludgeoning. So I think their damage is part of their namesake.
Both lasers and plasmas give the target a lot of energy allowing the molecules to become gaseous, vaporizing what they hit. The laser is radiant(E-M waves) and the plasma is particulate(super-heated gas).
A campfire burning wood (1d6 of fire) is about 873K(600C)
paraffin candle flame 1273K
Oxy-acetylene torch 3773K(3500C)
plasma torch 14000-22000K (!) sample video
Wow thank you for the science of it. How would you do lasers then? I noticed you said you didn't like it i'm not a big fan either.
And yeah seems plasma is whole magnitudes hotter then fire its practically disintegration.
Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscriber
focused plasma should effect someone as the disintegrate spell...
also, >Meltaguns<
nothing quite beats having a fusion based handheld weapon.
except when you roll a 1!...
so the effects are like disintegrate.
should Plasma be its own damage type. for realism's sake lighting damage would be fire damage too right?
really its all heat damage isn't it something like
fire
laser
lighting
plasma
Its all kind of the same thing isn't it?
I really wouldn't group lightning into that list. Yes, it's accompanied by heat, but electricity comes with muscle spams, electrolysis happening inside your body, the gas in your lungs violently expanding, and occasionally it comes with deafness due to thunder going of right next to your head.
There is no mechanically balanced way to simulate "real" lightning. It can still kill you hours, days or even years after you were hit by it, and it really comes with bludgeoning, heat, sonic, and probably... Acid damage from the electrolysis?
Better to just keep it as "electricity".
They did plasma in Rolemaster as a mixture of fire and electricity too. Since this is not science, but fantasy, anything works, even if you don't have the necessary magnetic containment units for the plasma...;)
If it is fire/electricity like flamestrike is fire/divine you know already how to handle immunities and resistances.
Plasma weapons in SF games can be pretty devastating, in Traveller a hit melts everything within 6m of the impact point, but that is beside the point here.
I dont like single effects counting as half and half of any mix though i understand some really epic things can be modeled in many different ways. if it has to be done in a case like this i would rule it as a fire effect that deals half damage no matter what and the other half can be resisted or nullified by immunity.
|
2 people marked this as a favorite.
|
well, as E=mc^2 + p^2c^4 you cannot exactly "destroy" matter as in marvin's disintegration gun. Maybe it just become dark matter and you cannot see/sense it. *MAGIC*! lol...
If it were a phase change (solid-liquid-gas-plasma){which just takes some energy} like sublimation (solid to gas) then there would be considerable gas and if it happened real fast that's called an explosion.
problems - I know... and the solution again, *MAGIC*!
so anyway... I'm not a designer or paid to come up with solutions by Paizo... the physics of the game system is very rough, even worse than simple newtonian physics circa 1800 (before the wave theory of light). Falling damage ceases to accrue after 210ft which is a major gaff. ahh well...
so, going back in time I take [acid, cold, elec, fire, sonic] energy damage types to be classifications based on visual appearance.
"acid" would be breaking molecular bonds and dissolution. Conversion of a solid into a liquid (melting or vaporization). It's more a simple inorganic chemical attack or enzyme attack.
"cold" the reverse flow of phogiston. The condensation, freezing, deposition, recombination part of the cycle.
"fire" to be phlogiston (random motion/heat). Close to oxidation or burning. Causing melting, vaporization, sublimation and possibly ionization.
"electricity" would be lightning and much closer to plasma, but more current(be it DC or AC or high frequency static). Again causing melting, vaporization, ionization, & sublimation.
"sonic" more systemic damage from vibration of mainly organic parts or crystal lattice structures.
so knowing my point of view...
lasers are oddballs in that it is coherent light (and that's special). Radiant heat is just infrared light or random light. Light from a laser moves together in phase and is not random like heat. An analogy might be an angry drunken mob(heat) playing instruments versus a marching band (coherent light). It is a lot of energy in a tiny area and when molecules vibrate with it (absorb light) they get excited and gain heat and decide to become gaseous(vaporizing). If you hit the right material(usually a moving gas) with the right light you could cool it.
so I'd half the [fire] resistance for lasers with immunity going to 50%. It produces much of the same effects as if it were hot but the scale of heating is magnitudes more intense and localized than a torch, lava, scorching rays or fireballs. One can still punch holes in lava or flames with a laser. So it can be more than a toy to entertain cats.
One of the main side effects of lasers is blindness. This isn't reflected in the game and while debilitating in combat is easily cured using spells.
Very interesting. It seems to be a lot to think about.
Azothath wrote: so I'd half the [fire] resistance for lasers with immunity going to 50%. It produces much of the same effects as if it were hot but the scale of heating is magnitudes more intense and localized than a torch, lava, scorching rays or fireballs. One can still punch holes in lava or flames with a laser. So it can be more than a toy to entertain cats.
One of the main side effects of lasers is blindness. This isn't reflected in the game and while debilitating in combat is easily cured using spells.
This is an effective and easily workable solution for lasers. nice :)
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Azothath wrote: Falling damage ceases to accrue after 210ft which is a major gaff. ahh well... They're just wrong about the distance. In real life, "falling damage" stops at 1500ft. After that, you hit terminal velocity and acceleration stops due to air friction.
And, due to the square-cube-law, squirrels are literally immune to damage from falls. Their terminal velocity is to low to hurt them. Cats are *just* big enough to still get hurt from a fall if they don't land properly - if they *do* land properly, they, too, can withstand an impact at their terminal velocity.
Long story short, tiny creatures should take reduced falling damage and negate it completely with an acrobatics check, and anything smaller than tiny should take no falling damage whatsoever.
Larger creatures should take higher falling damage - elephants can not even jump, they'd injure themselves.
the focal plane of hindsight is only clouded by the astigmatisms of perceptions. (lol...)
If you decide to home game the blindness effect, my suggestion is blindness (Fort DC(CraftDC -10 med/-12 small) or blinded within 20ft radius, +2 per 5ft from target to 20ft). Items that grant a bonus/percentage vs gaze attacks add their bonus versus laser blindness. Invisibility grants immunity. Note that with a laser torch the user IS IN the radius AoE.
=====
free falling is one of those things that involves drag and aerodynamics so it's a complex thing beyond simple friction. Check out the old Millikan oil drop experiment.
P.S.: let's not hash over damage from momentum or kinetic energy... it's a done deal.
you just have to chant - it's a game (and nobody's paying me to do this).
A laser still has to hit the eyes to cause blindness. Making it an AoE... is kind of the opposite of a laser.
I'd suggest letting the blindness saving throw trigger on a critical hit - that way it could also have a higher DC. But yes, yes, anything protecting against Gaze Attacks should protect against a laser's blindness effect.
And one way or another, terminal velocity is a thing, and people have survived falls from inedible heights due to it. That pathfinder's distance is only 1/7th of the actual falling distance to reach it is a minor point compared to how falling interacts with size, so what actually bothered me was calling it a "mayor gaffe" when it's just a wrong number...
(And that oil drop experiment isn't really relevant to anything heavier than, say, a large grain of sand. Air density and updrafts have much stronger effects on how fast you fall.)
Rajnish Umbra, Shadow Caller wrote: A laser still has to hit the eyes to cause blindness. ... incorrect. It is very dependent on light frequency, power, and scattering. Given that the laser in question is a weapon, I'm thinking 100kW laser pulsed in 2.5 microsecond bursts at 355nm, 1450nm, or 10,600nm. That's gonna sting =:o]. A Dazzler(weapon) uses a 450 mW, 532 nm (visible-green) laser which is considerably less powerful and good at 10m(safety reasons) to 500 meters.
There's a reason safety warnings come on lasers and why you see lab techs always wear glasses in labs. UV and IR are particularly nasty in this regards and they also happen the be the best frequencies for weapon types. Not unexpected, eyes tend to be self focusing to concentrate the light on the receptors in the back of the eye which may flash burn those cells. The lens in the eye has no blood flow thus cooling becomes an issue (if it heats up from UV or IR).
laser beam welding requires workers wear protective eyegear. Scattering from a metal target is an issue.
I treat plasma damage as both fire and electrical damage, in my games.
gamer-printer wrote: I treat plasma damage as both fire and electrical damage, in my games. If players have both resist fire and elec, does the resist stack against plasma?
In general, I believe it would. That, of course, is one of the weaknesses of plasma as a hybrid damage type. XD Having things that resist both fire and elec isn't particularly rare, so they'd essentially get double the defense against the attack, whereas a single-element attack would only let them reduce it once.
I'm sure we could use lots of math to calculate out the average probabilities and figure out if split-damage or single-damage is more useful overall, but... the important point is that just having a hybrid damage type isn't always useful. XD
It's a common misconception that plasma is a "super-hot gas". But that's not the case. Plasma is an entirely separate state of matter from Gas. Saying Plasma is super-hot gas is like saying that gas is a super-hot liquid or a liquid is a super-hot solid. Plasma doesn't behave like gas does. For one thing, it sticks together because it's electrically charged. If you get hit with a puff of gas, the gas disperses. But if you get hit with a "clump" of plasma, its kinetic energy isn't readily dissipated; it's more like getting hit by a ball of ooblek (really, really HOT ooblek). So it makes sense that there is a physical damage component to plasma damage.
Part of the problem is that real-world physics doesn't translate well into the Pathfinder system. In the real world, we have matters like electrical conductivity and the electro-magnetic force. Infrared radiation is a part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, as is visible light, ultra-violet, gamma rays, etc. Cold is just a relative absence of electromagnetic energy (usually referring to infrared, but "cold" can refer to any relative absence of the EM spectrum). And both acids and bases are ionic solutions that are conductive and caustic. But in Pathfinder, Fire, Cold, Electricity, and Acid are fundamental energetic forces of the meta-verse (as are Force, Positive, Negative, Good, Evil, Chaos, and Law).
Technically speaking, a lightning bolt electrically charges the gasses in the air so much that they are very briefly boosted into the Plasma state of matter, but this very quickly dissipates as the plasma settles back down into a gaseous state. The same can be said of certain kinds of plasma weaponry; they set up a conductive feeder line in the air and briefly "snap" the gasses in the air into plasma. This would be the "fire/electric" type of plasma because you aren't really "launching" it at a target so much as you are creating a plasma conversion close enough to them that they take damage from the dissipated energy. By contrast, other types of weaponry would be capable of generating and maintaining a mass of plasma which is then "launched" at a target and impacts them while, at the same time, dissipating heat into the target. So both approaches are valid and can coexist, based on the nature of the weaponry.
Rynstar wrote: gamer-printer wrote: I treat plasma damage as both fire and electrical damage, in my games. If players have both resist fire and elec, does the resist stack against plasma?
In my home games yes. If you have the appropriate energy resistance to any specific energy, it works. Are you searching for a kind of energy that there is no resistance? That might be overpowered, in my thinking.
In fairness, those types of damages do exist. Very few creatures resist force damage. There's also holy and unholy damage, which are usually half the damage of a spell and can't be resisted.
None of them are particularly common, though, and there's usually some other sort of limit to help balance them out. (Lower damage cap, reduced effectiveness on certain types of creatures, located on classes with few other attack options, etc.)
Yeah I appreciate all the input but i'm still kind of undecided.
the ways im favoring so far but i'm still not sold on.
laser = 50% reduction from fire immunity
Plasma = still unsure best way.
Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscriber
plasma being released in normal atmosphere conditions is best described as an explosion with a lot of electricity.
Thanks bandw2 that helps me thing about it. Hmm so really laser would be intense fire damage and plasma would be intense lighting damage?
so maybe for both the 50% after immunity rule.
or plasma could do some sort of impact damage and lighting damage which goes back to the guy who said half bludgeoning.
"Plasma" could be "treat as fire or electricity, whichever is more effective".
My two cents though? It's all fire - whether it's hot gas, hot liquid, hot solid, or hot plasma, it's primarily the transfer of kinetic energy through heat transfer that is going to do something bad to you.
Azothath wrote: plasma
it's really a question of what energy resistance applies, if any, and how to apply it.
so plasma is super hot gas, very conductive and usually (at sea level atmosphere on earth) accompanies a strong electrical discharge (the plasma has lost most of it's electrons into a cloud in the plasma, they aren't staying with a particular atom anymore).
Pathfinder has acid, cold, elec, fire, sonic energy damage types.
Lantern archon light rays bypass all DR.
Lasers are listed as [fire] types in the Technology Guide. (silly IMO but it fits with the alchemical 4)
plasma as [fire] & [elec] damage types, makes sense. As plasma is super energetic, I'd reduce the resistance to half and make immunity half damage.
The kineticist uses kinetic energy (lol) and that's bludgeoning. So I think their damage is part of their namesake.
Both lasers and plasmas give the target a lot of energy allowing the molecules to become gaseous, vaporizing what they hit. The laser is radiant(E-M waves) and the plasma is particulate(super-heated gas).
A campfire burning wood (1d6 of fire) is about 873K(600C)
paraffin candle flame 1273K
Oxy-acetylene torch 3773K(3500C)
plasma torch 14000-22000K (!) sample video
Re. Lasers. Not necessarily silly. Lasers induce heat in whatever object that the beam strikes, if the emitted power is great enough. There is a reason that some experimental fusion reactors use lasers. Hope this helps. :)
Majuba wrote: "Plasma" could be "treat as fire or electricity, whichever is more effective".
My two cents though? It's all fire - whether it's hot gas, hot liquid, hot solid, or hot plasma, it's primarily the transfer of kinetic energy through heat transfer that is going to do something bad to you.
Exactly. As someone who has studied physics, I'll second your statement.
Yeah I kind of mentioned that there all kind of the same earlier but Trying to make them fit with the pathfinder rules is tricky.
Maybe the damage they do when someone is exposed to them is the way to look at it.
so lasers burn the skin and can catch things on fire so fire damage works (heat damage but lets not differentiate fire and heat i hated that in previous editions) So if someone was hit by plasma what would the damage be closer to fire or lighting?
Hmm if we take plasma and laser as intense versions of fire and lighting is there intense versions of acid and cold?
Acid maybe the blood of the aliens from the alien franchise?
cold? isn't there already a spell that does absolute 0? and there is of course nothing colder then that. (so ice spikes add piercing lol?)
Not sure if it was the base or the prestige class, but Winter Witches learn to turn half of the cold damage they cause into "uttercold" or something like that, which can't be reduced by resistance and bypasses immunity. Basically, they could freeze an ice elemental to death.
Thats cool alternative kind of like its combined with shadow. I might just do laser and plasma along those lines
Correction: Uttercold was from the D&D 3.5 supplement "Frostburn" (aka. "It's cold outside"). Still, it was cold that bypassed resistance.
The Winter Witch prestige class just calls it" unnatural cold" (resistance halved) and "unearthly cold" (resistance and immunity bypassed).
One more thing to consider: how consistent you want to be with existing releases. For example, we have laser stuff in the Technology Guide, and plasma has been published as a fire/elec hybrid at least once by a 3PP.
If there's a bunch of different abilities with the same name, you could get weird crossover effects and buffs that weren't meant to happen. You may want to consider using names that haven't already been taken.
I think maybe in star finder there might be some clarification on it. I would have to assume Lasers and plasma are gonna be a bigger deal there.
Speaking from the experience of having been burned by an industrial laser, the most significant difference between what I suffered and a traditinal burn was the slow healing of the injury. Flesh was literally removed by the beam, as if scooped out with a spoon.
That sounds super painful. I hope you got some compensation for it.
Vidmaster7 wrote: I think maybe in star finder there might be some clarification on it. I would have to assume Lasers and plasma are gonna be a bigger deal there. I brought up this concern in the starfinder threads and there was some commentary from the team that they were already thinking about how to balance it all out in the new game.
Recent threads in Homebrew and House Rules
|
