Ice Breakers
December 6th, 2010
Hello everyone. As those of you with access to an ice mirror are no doubt already aware, it’s Ice Week, the week devoted to all things cold, frozen, and, uh, frosty. Rather than spend hours trying to find a way to weasel out of trying to come up with a way to write a Dark Designs article about ice, or else some elegant (or, perhaps, not so elegant) way to quickly get my ice-related obligations out of the way, such as using a metaphor about being “frozen out” or “getting the cold shoulder” to then move on to talk about something entirely unrelated, I figured that maybe, just once, I’d tackle one of these difficult weeks head on.
As an aside, for those of you who are wondering why I spend so much time complaining about theme weeks: I believe that theme weeks are very important. Not just because Mark Rosewater says they’re important (though I typically take anything MaRo says at face-value), but for mostly the same reasons: theme weeks give us writers restrictions, boxes to think inside, which forces us to write articles we wouldn’t normally write, and which helps us from being paralyzed by the wide array of possible articles that we potentially could write. The only reason I spend so much time only technically fulfilling them here in Dark Designs is that a lot of them just really have nothing to do with design. For example, what, precisely, do deserts have to do with game design? (For the answer, or at least to watch me artfully dodge the question, check out this article from August.) This, naturally, begs the question of why we don’t have more Dark Designs-friendly theme weeks. The answer? It’s kind of hard to have something that’s equally relevant to both Dark Designs and, for example, Foursaken Feature. Also, when we initially made the theme weeks, some members of the staff got it into their head that the themes for the weeks should, for whatever reason, be related to the week itself, such as a holiday in the week or at least something to do with the season, etc. Thus, Ice Week and (later) Elf Week for December.
So, back to the point: Ice. What about it? It’s apparently universally game-breaking. Now, hold on a second, I’m not talking about players using ice-cubes in creative and DM-headache-inducing ways (though now that I mention it, that’s something I’ll have to look into. Someday I should be an evil DM and run my players through a murder-mystery where the answer is an ice-crossbow-bolt, as opposed to the traditional ice bullet). No, what I’m really talking about is power creep, and for some reason, ice always seems to be amongst the worst offenders.
I’ve talked about power creep before, and about how it happens primarily because each new option added creates dozens (if not hundreds, or even thousands) of new combinations of options, and if any of those is better than an existing combination of options, well, the power level just rose, because players can sniff these sorts of things out like dogs sniff out bacon. To a certain extent, then, power creep is something we just have to live with, because the only alternative is to either stop producing new content, or to make old content eventually become obsolete, like Magic: the Gathering’s Standard format.
Sometimes, however, power creep doesn’t come from necessity, but rather from negligence on the part of the designer, and, for whatever reason, ice magic seems to attract this sort of designer. Take, for example, the ice-scrying spell which doesn’t require an expensive focus or allow a saving throw. Or, alternatively, a version of spell focus which is twice as potent, but only for ice spells, which, with the abundance of elemental- and cold-themed bloodlines, will be basically any spell you cast.
But it’s more than just 3rd-party publishers at fault here. Back in the days of 3.5, Wizards itself published a number of ill-conceived ice-related feats: for example, it’s the only elemental type that allowed you to simply ignore resistance or immunity (see the Piercing Cold metamagic feat, from Frostburn, if you don’t know what I’m talking about). To the best of my knowledge, cold magic was also the pioneer of getting a bunch of extra free damage per damage die (again, from Frostburn). I’m not saying that either of these things, in a vacuum, is necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being able to counter something like immunity to your chosen energy type. Having seen it in action, I’m pretty sure that Piercing Cold wasn’t the best way to do it, but the concept isn’t inherently unsound.
Adding extra damage based on energy type, however, feels like a bad idea to me, at least as long as Energy Substitution remains basically free. The entire point of feats like that is that they reward you for sticking to the purview of spells they care about (cold descriptor spells), but when anything can gain the cold descriptor, they just become a bunch of free damage.
So why does ice attract all this half-baked attention? I think it’s because there’s this belief that cold magic is underdeveloped, at least as far as blasters go. It’s probably true that there aren’t as many ice-related spells as fire-related ones, and though electricity doesn’t have very many, it does get some pretty flashy ones, but even if there were a shortage of ice-stuff, creating carrots like Piercing Cold is an incredibly unsound idea. Why? Because if there ever are enough cold spells for it to no longer be a “rarity” (like, for example, it has been for years. Hells, I’m not really sure there ever actually was a shortage of cold spells), then this stops being something that “enables” being an ice mage, and becomes something that gives ice mages an unfair advantage.
In my opinion, at least, these kinds of “carrot” tactics (where the designer gives you strong mechanical incentives to build your character a certain kind of way, to encourage you to buy into whatever their current book or week’s theme is) aren’t a very responsible strategy for designers—at least, not if they have to worry about power creep as options continue to build. It’s a perfectly fine strategy for, say, Magic card designers, who can always fall back on the fact that whatever broken things they create will be gone from Standard in two years, freeing up any design space that it had previously prevented them from exploring. But in the world of D&D, a broken feat, spell, or class feature is forever. So, while providing a little incentive for players to play a certain way is all well and good, one has to be careful about providing too much carrot, or else they’re just going to create something that’s broken and unfun.
In any event, be sure to stop by next week, when I’ll be taking another look at DM prep time, from a somewhat different angle than last week’s GM on the Go. In the meantime, keep warm.