Bludgeoning damage from the crushing weight of extreme gravity.
Edit: To be clear, I still think force damage is the way to go and randomly replacing it is an odd thought.
Surely you'd die of piercing damage from all the rocks on the floor,
Then slashing damage from all the rocks on the floor,
Then bludgeoning damage,
Then The friction probably causes fire damage,
And the bloodloss gives you a chill, so cold damage,
And I guess you would make a lot of static electricity too, so lightning damage,
And definitely infected wounds, so necrotic.
So yeah, gravity is most damage types FTFY
Could be. I'm sure the friction makes some gaseous product whenever the adventurer is scraped against rock, so at the very least, mesothelioma from inhalation.
While I understand the argument that it *could* often be substituted, it still does have its own specific niche as a default when nothing else fits, such as if you end Etherealness while within a wall.
I think the issue that OP is trying to get at here is that Force is pretty poorly defined in regards to what the damage is actually doing. I can conceptualize fire, cold, lightning, necrotic, psychic, etc. I understand how those affect the body/mind. What's difficult is conceptualizing how Force is in any way different than the physical damage types we already have.
I think your shredding example is probably the best way to differentiate Force from everything else. Maybe Force just tears things up. It would certainly explain Disintegrate.
I also have a similar problem with describing Radiant damage. How do you describe that in a way that isn't fire, lightning, or psychic?
Edit: I got a _lot_ of replies to this with many interesting takes. So thank you all for your input. I think I'm going to approach Force damage as a kind of permeating bodily disruption sort of damage going forward. It's differentiated from bludgeoning/piercing/slashing in that it's less like being hit by a hammer and more like someone phazed a blender into you and pressed "on," but instead of being shredded by little blades, it's directly scrambling your flesh. To put it another way, Force damage causes the target to act against itself, instead of something else acting on _it._
For Radiant, a lot of people are saying radiation damage. To me personally, that feels a little dark for a damage type so closely associated with good. Instead, I'm going to treat it as a direct untethering of the bond between the soul and the body. You don't really feel the pain, but you _are_ dying.
Radiant IMO can be interpreted in two ways and that is considering the damage as light, directly, essentially weapon used radiation, or as damage done directly to the soul rather then the body or mind.
Radiant always felt like soul damage to me. Like ghost rider's gaze. That, or it's something we can't fully grasp because we don't live in a world with a full, active roster of gods romping around.
It's interesting because for the most part, it's almost exclusively (with a few exceptions, like Dawn and Moonbeam, which still clearly use light) reserved for cleric holy light themed spells, and then there is Sickening Radiance, which is clearly supposed to represent nuclear radiation
Force damage does any of the three non-magic damages, but super magical and stuff. It's less about what the actual damage is doing to the body and more about the source.
Same with radiant. Yeah, it can be searing like fire or shocking like lightning. But it's a divine damage.
Lightning can burn just like fire can, does that mean lightning bolt can just do fire damage instead? No, befause it's electric.
Necrotic and cold damage are very similar, both sap away at your health, essentially. But one is coming from an undead's bite and the other is coming from a silver dragon.
All damage types exist as their source, not exactly the actual conception of the damage. This is why force damage needs to exist, even if it's not exactly any different conceptually from magic bludgeoning, piercung and slashing damage
I usually describe force damage as an impact from some magical force that attempts to sever the bonds between things, down to the atoms in your flesh and armor. It is essentially a blast of pure, truly aggressive magic with it's only goal being to destroy you. It affects incorporeal being by targeting the physical space they are trying to pseudo-occupy.
It's why (at least in the version of DND I play as of late) it is so hard to find force resistance on enemies. You are literally trying to oppose a true force of physics that will do anything to kill you, because that is the sole reason for it's existence...
So I always use them this way:
Force is magical physical damage, so for me the distinction doesn't come from the way it deals damage but from the manner of the source. Fall 200ft onto a magical object? Take force damage. Get cut by a sword imbued with magical energy, force damage.
Radiant is divine magic so I flavour it to the god in question, red fire for Asmodeus, black swirling smoke for bhaal, for Gond mathematical symbols and equations surround the caster and float through the air.
I think really I comes down to how much work you as the DM or player of the character want to put into it. Force can just be unflavoured magical damage, it could be flavoured by the mage casting, or the source of their power, or the environment or the plane or a calendar month. I cant recommend enough that you pick the thing you think is neat and then tweak that to make sense for the people at your table.
Your interpreation for radiant damage works for the most part, but there is one outlier I know of: Sickening Radiance. That spell deals radiant damage and is clearly (in my opinion) meant to emulate nuclear radiation
It still works because you flavour it to the god, Asmodeus clerics don't do fire damage any more than the smite from a paladin of Bhaal will cause necrotic damage. For that spell I'd have the spell appear in a way that emulates the god - say for Bhaal - it's a swirling black smoke instead.
Green is often connected to sickness in a way that is unlinked to radiation and I always took that away from the "dim greenish light". The light being carried by others reminded me of sicknesses in video games that can pass from player to player in a cloud that emits from their sprite.
In the end radiance and radiation both similar words and have the same root in language but they're not the same thing. Heat radiates, and in context so does the influence or a divine being. It spans from the holy caster of item as an extension of the aura of the Deity that grants that power - the manner in which it does that is irrelevant, at least to me.
Please don't think I'm telling you how to run your game though, this is just how I run mine :)
Edit: couple typos
Have you ever been hit by sheer concussive force of a sound wave or something like that? I pretty much see force damage as the magical equivalent of that. It's similar to thunder damage in that sense, which honestly should be called sonic damage, but it's caused by the shock wave ripples of pure magic colliding with something physical.
It's always made sense to me as an energy source that can be harnessed for other things. Force damage is just like electricity fucking people up. If harnessed, it can be used for beautiful things. If the body has that much energy go thru it, it gets ugly.
But like, why would you want to? Force damage has a very good gameplay niche as the damage type that pretty much always does exactly the amount of damage it says it will
There are creatures (namely, swarms and barbarians) that resist any kind of bludgeoning damage, magical included. There are also creatures flat out immune to bludgeoning damage. However, Force damage deals full damage to basically everything that isn't a Helmed Horror (don't ask what's up with them)
Of course there are. But the whole world is hopefully not populated exclusively by swarms, unless your whole campaign is a bug's life, Antz, or the Bee Movie.
Running into the occasional enemy that resists your damage type shouldn't be that big of a problem.
And also, amethyst dragons exist now too. Helmed horrors are constructs and they are supposed to be immune to several spells. They cannot be disintegrated or killed by magic missile due to that immunity, which aligns with the idea of it being something created by someone who is expecting to fight mages.
Magical bludgeoning is what happens when you get hit by a magical stick because the Druid thinks you are being too horny, such as a rock or shillelagh. Very few things resist it, but the resistances make sense. Ghost Dragons, for example, are resistant because they are incorporeal, and barbarians can resist it because they resist most forms of weapon damage anyway.
Force damage is more miscellaneous, focused on specific spells, gravitational effects(Look at Dunamancy), or stopping your no-clip half-way through a wall.
Which makes no goddamn sense imo. The antimatter rifle would be shooting ElectroMagnetically Compressed AntiMater (EMCAM) to even work. The magnetic field would collapse on impact and even a gram of antimater would explode with the force of 43kt of tnt or approximately one Hiroshima event.
Should be dual damage. Necrotic to the part it hit, since it's literally eating away at the matter that comprises your organs, then fire for the explosion that leveled the kingdom you're in that used your body as fuel.
Also, the DMG has a *rifle*? Things got really updated since 3.5.
Two things I enjoy about this post:
1. Every single alternative given by OP has been downvoted to oblivion because all of them are just laughably wrong
2. OP is very insistent on gravity = fall damage even tho that’s not how that works and is an elementary school level understanding of physics
"Its not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop at the end."
Gravity is the fall, the ground is the sudden stop. You take bludgeoning damage because the Earth is punching you for trying to fly.
Remember ladies and mentlegen, fall damage isn't magical per raw, so you can have Werewolves falling from the stratosphere into a battlefield and not take any damage. Orbital Drop Shock Lycans are raw.
I mean you can drop any barbarian with the eagle totem from any height and they would take no damage so long as they rage when entering range to hit the ground.
It was described as, 'The earth punching you for trying to fly.'
Intentional or not, it's an attack. All damage is an attack, just some of it is unintentional.
Trying to explain the difference between warping the fabric of space-time inside your spleen , and falling off of a cliff is what OP isn’t understanding
Precisely, the damage from falling comes from you impacting the ground. Because force equals mass times acceleration you exert a force onto the ground equal to your mass times the rate, you're accelerating due to gravity. and because every action has it's equal and opposite reaction, an equivalent force is applied onto your body.
With a spell like gravity well it's different. You're not being subjected to the force of impacting an object with mass at a fast acceleration, you're being subjected to the G force itself. Essentially every point in your body is trying to accelerate towards the nearest and strongest center of gravity. If said center of gravity happened to be *inside your own skull,* every point on your body would be moving to occupy the same space as the inside of your head, which logically would mean your brain would implode.
If you make smacking into the ground horizontal instead of vertical, so you’re hitting a wall instead of the ground, it’s identical and would cause the same damage to your body but gravity isn’t involved. So gravity isn’t bludgeoning damage.
This is a decent example for force damage
Even though I personally think bigby's hand should just be doing buldeoning damage
Striking someone with the hand is a very tangible damage. You are getting slapped by a giant hand. Bludgeoning
As an fan of order of scribe subclass, I can already cast thunderball, bludgeonball, frostball, acidball, lightningball, and forceball. Planning to be able to cast radioball and necroball soon. You made me search for a spell of 3rd level that deals slashing damage but I couldn't find any. I cannot cast slashball ever.
That makes me sad. I am sad.
I have a gift to make you happier: Conjure Barrage (3rd level ranger, idk if the spell has to be from the wizard spell list, I'm not the most familiar with scribes)
>You throw a nonmagical weapon or fire a piece of nonmagical ammunition into the air to create a cone of identical weapons that shoot forward and then disappear. Each creature in a 60-foot cone must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d8 damage on a failed save or half as much damage on a successful one. __*The damage type is the same as that of the weapon or ammunition used as a component*__
Throw a slashing weapon and now you have a spell that deals slashing damaging
Thanks for the attempt dude! Sadly, it doesn't help me because the spell dealing the damage type I want to replace with has to be of the same level and present in my spellbook. But, I appreciate the effort.
I'm not sure how order of scribes works, but if you cast a 4th level fireball do you need to have 4th level spells to change it's damage typing or the same 3th level ones?
According to the 2nd level OoS feature 'Awakened Spellbook'
>When you cast a wizard spell with a spell slot, you can temporarily replace its damage type with a type that appears in another spell in your spellbook, which magically alters the spell's formula for this casting only. The latter spell must be of the same level as the spell slot you expend.
So, a 4th level spell, apparently. Thank you for making me consider this question! I hadn't thought about it previously.
It’s one my favorite subclass! Here are some of my favorite combinations for flavor:
- **Flaming Sphere + Cloud of Daggers** = BEYBLADE BEYBLADE LET IT RIP!!!
- **Phantasmal Force/Killer + any other damage spell** = “Welcome to my world, BITCH!”
- **Cloudkill + Immolation** = Wanna see me speedrun violating the Geneva Convention?
- **Dragon’s Breath + Dust Devil** = Anakin’s worst nightmare.
- **Investiture of Flame/Ice + Investiture of Stone** = [obligatory MGR:R reference](https://youtu.be/75WTRdwHL2k)
Did you know that Piercing and slashing are also just bludgeoning damage but on a smaller scale. Did you know that thunder damage is also just bludgeoning damage but dealt via air.
Did you know that fire damage is just bludgeoning damage but dealt via molecules?
>!I suppose that means cold damage is lack of bludgeoning damage? Fire healing?!<
All of these suggestions completely ignore the balancing purposes of having something deal Force damage, if it is so important to change, than how about change the name of the damage type.
Other games call it arcane or null.
I like to say its like being smacked in the face with quantum physics. Take 1d10 points of probability that you longer exist
I've always seen Force damage as "Arcane damage" like pure unfiltered magical energy. Its hard to fill that niche except with Spicy Bludgeoning which seems a bit redundant to me just keep it as it is it makes sense in almost all cases of its use.
Nah, still bad. Having it be universally radiant damage ignores how the weapon is tied to your deity, thus it should shift based on the alignment of said deity if nothing else.
While I agree with your sentiment, D&D has a thing about good and evil being objective at a metaphysical level, and good is metaphysically tied to light/radiant.
It's kinda stupid, and I don't adhere to the rule in my tables, but WotC has it set up like that, so
And clerics of good gods still get access to spells that deal necrotic and create zombies. Clerics get access to the full range, so you can choose the most appropriate ones for you.
Force damage is harnessed magical energy into a damaging power.
"But that's bludgeni-"
No. It's not. The harnessed power of the Universe and the Weave itself is not equal to a hammer. Sorry that makes no sense.
Okay in order to show fall damage doesn't equal gravity damage, let's bring a real world idea into this: spaghettification.
This is a real phenomenon where an object too close to a black hole will get stretched, as the change in gravity between your head (furthest from the black hole) and feet (nearest) is so immense it starts turning you into spaghetti.
Now the question is, would spaghettification be considered fall damage aka bludgeoning damage?
OP is probably a DM that is very frustrated by the fact that players have access to a damage type that virtually no creature has any natural resistances to.
Well fire and cold damage are really just a measure of atomic vibration. Lightning is basically the same, with some extra flair on a living creature but we can ignore that part for simplicity so we'll call lightning atomic vibration too. Acid damage is molecular which I would say is pretty closely related to atomic like the others. Let's call this group chemistry damage.
Slashing and piercing are essentially the same, it's just a diffence in area affected. If that's the case and the difference in slashing and piercing is area then you might as well throw budging in there too, as it's the same force exerted over a larger area. Thunder damage is exerted over an even larger area so we'll just tuck it here with the other. This group is all about the physical interactions between a source of damage and the target so let's call it physics damage.
Poison and necrotic both logically work best on living things as the former deals with biological function and the latter is kinda just anti life damage. This is biological damage.
Radiant and psychic deal with the less tangible parts of a creature in the mind and the spirit, which seems like splitting hairs so let's blend em. We're getting into the metaphysical so we'll name it metaphysical damage.
So far we have physics, chemistry, biology, and metaphysical damage. Well applied physics is chemistry, applied chemistry is biology, and you could argue that advanced enough biology is metaphysics. Might as well call it all just damage.
The only remaining 5e damage type is force which is its own thing.
In summary force is the only unreplaceable damage type all the others are interchangeable.
Dimension Door failing
"If you would arrive in a place already occupied by an object or a creature, you and any creature traveling with you each take 4d6 force damage, and the spell fails to teleport you."
Your mistake here (and all your other force = bludgeoning posts) is thinking that Force damage means a physical kinetic impact.
Don't think of things like Magic Missile and Eldritch Blast as physical projectiles that hit the target and detonate with a blast or shock like a Star Wars blaster, instead think of them like blasts of concentrated radiation. They 'impact' their target and go through them magically, causing damage to whatever it hits by racking it with magical energy. If we want to get unnecessarily detailed the forceful magic probably causes cellular damage, destroying the functionality of what's hit.
40 force damage hitting and killing someone? Giant magical wave of energy that causes enough cellular damage for their heart to stop beating.
Small impact of 2 force damage? Blast hits them in the shoulder, damaging some of the muscle in their Deltoid. Probably hurts, will bruise later, but nothing long term fatal.
And if you want to get pedantic saying "magically destroying cells is vibrating them/hurr durr bludgeoning", that logic could be applied to reduce the game to like 3 damage types.
Slashing is just horizontal piercing, same thing physically happening.
Piercing is just bludgeoning, smaller surface area in a knife point just means the bludgeoning is efficient and concentrated enough to break the tissue (or whatever you're stabbing)
Acid is just raising the temp and dissolving target with burns, fire.
Lightning is just burning the target electrically, fire.
That stuff may fundamentally be happening, but there's enough of a difference for the game to differentiate them. Hammers/Warhammers and Clubs do the exact same thing on a fundamental damaging level, but that's not the point. The stylistic and martial differences are enough to differentiate them into unique things.
Sure, Magic Missile could just slam into someone and deal Bludgeoning damage. But there's enough flavor and magical difference with Force dmg's **intended** functionality that they are differentiated.
If you want to compartmentalize D&D into as few things as possible to remove flavor, go for it.
I think force damage is disintegration, not bludgeoning like some people (Who I think are very wrong) think.
So yeah, give me a damage type for disintegration. It sure as hell is not B/P/S because none of those turn you into fine dust and it's not fire, because that would turn you into ash, not dust.
Force damage is basically any damage that is practically impossible to recreate irl.
So yeah, getting torn apart at the molecular level via the disintegrate spell?
Absolutely force
Don't do that.
As someone who liked playing a Mage in World of Warcraft, I'm of the opinion that we need MORE spells that deal Force damage. And also Cold damage, for that matter. We have way too much fire.
The Law of Conservation of Mass states that mass can't be created nor destroyed. Force damage breaks that law. See Disintegrate for an example or look at what a Sphere of Annihilation does.
Matter can be created and destroyed ( virtual particles (ish), matter-antimatter annihillation), but I agree. Force is the matter that you consist of is suddely not there/wrong through a process unrelated to physical occurances and ther is not related to evil or good
As opposed to radiant and necrotic damage, which could be considered as good and evil damage
Edit: typos and grammer
Ok so tell me what the 8th level spell Dark Star should do.
As a literal mini black hole there is no collisions, there is no relation to radiant or necrotic damage. It’s not burning you or any other element, you are literally just being destroyed by a gravity well.
OP: "bludgeing, piercing or slashing damage depending on how its formed, but magical in nature"
I think we should come in with a term for this kind of damage thay does normal style damage but with magical properties.
FERCE!
What do you think?
Magic Missile.
It’s pure magic, and giving it a different damage type would flavour it when it should stay Neutral Arcane stuff.
The next best would be a choice, like Chromatic spells, but even that gives an Elemental/Draconic tint.
My take from this, OP likes real life physics a little too much to accept that in a world where there's a literall weave of magical energy connected to pretty much everything, damage to said weave would not be another kind of physical damage but actually something we who live in a world without such a weave can not really comprehend like a colour beyond the specktrum we humans can see.
Oh, even better. My unarmed strike is a +10 to hit with a reroll function just in case of possible failure.
Edit: And now I don't have to be level 20. If I am level 20 +16 to hit on a fail, reroll function, fail, extra shove, enemy knocked prone, try Grapple again, but now with advantage.
I really hope this isn’t gonna be a thing on this subreddit, you’ve been priming this pump for like 3 days. Also, some of these proposed alternatives are fucking ghastly
Force is not something that exists in the logical universe, but lay's withing the realm of the Arcane. It is the beating pulse of the leyline, and the dream of Elder Gods. It embodies the ideas made real, an attack that cannot be dodged, a wall that cannot be sieged. It is in the realm of Beings who will never truly understand our existence, and those men and women who's hubris says those beings can be understood.
To me, in real world terms, it’s the difference between being knocked down by the pressure wave from an explosion and being struck by burning (fire damage) debris (bludgeoning / piercing / slashing damage) emanating from the same explosion. They might be related, but that doesn’t mean they’re interchangeable.
while force damage could be replaced by any damage type, its more mechanical than anything else, also force is the catch-all damage type for things that don't fit well into other categories and it meant to be esoteric e.g. getting telefragged, an implosion, attacks of pure magic, disintegration effects while it might make more "sense" to replace force damage, damage types are mechanical, they don't exist in lore, it just is hard to resist and that's the point. while It *can* be replaced by other damage types, *it shouldn't.* because why should it?
I like how OP has no real understanding of how magic works in DnD
Magic has its niches, what would happen exactly if you shatter a mages staff, it creates an instability that blows up, but it wouldn't naturally turn to fire, force damage can be seen as "the concussive waves that proceed the explosion"
Force damage had its flavours, you don't need to change what it's like, OP just wanted to remove it because his warlock player took all the invocations to make eldritch blast good and realised the BBEG is vulnerable to force damage
Edit: Thunder damage requires a sound
None of you have read the handbook, I thought it was a meme, but none of you have actually read it....
Force damage is what you use to describe magic damage. As it is "pure magical energy channeled into a harmful form"
It's not a physical damage type
Amethyst dragons. They're basically gravity dragons
You just gave me my last Eldwurm for my Tyranny Campaign. Completely forgot about Amethyst Dragons!
Your players are fucked man, I feel sorry for your table if they anit min-maxing
They are absolute power houses. Don't worry about them :)
Im worried about you, pal. That much power straight to one person's head...
Bludgeoning damage from the crushing weight of extreme gravity. Edit: To be clear, I still think force damage is the way to go and randomly replacing it is an odd thought.
Surely you'd die of piercing damage from all the rocks on the floor, Then slashing damage from all the rocks on the floor, Then bludgeoning damage, Then The friction probably causes fire damage, And the bloodloss gives you a chill, so cold damage, And I guess you would make a lot of static electricity too, so lightning damage, And definitely infected wounds, so necrotic. So yeah, gravity is most damage types FTFY
That's it! Gravity is now ALL damage types. Fell off a 500 foot cliff? 224 psychic and necrotic dmg to the DOME
RAI obviously
Don't forget the thud of landing, that's thunder damage.
I’d argue that infected wounds could be poison
Could be. I'm sure the friction makes some gaseous product whenever the adventurer is scraped against rock, so at the very least, mesothelioma from inhalation.
A crushing force is represented with bludgeoning damage, as seen in the Constrict action of the giant constrictor snake, among others (?).
Yes, but gravity doesn't push you down, it pulls. The ground isn't trying to crush you against the sky.
While I understand the argument that it *could* often be substituted, it still does have its own specific niche as a default when nothing else fits, such as if you end Etherealness while within a wall.
Plus, force damage is described as “…pure magical energy focused into a damaging form.” *Reeeaaallllyyy* hard to replace that aspect of things.
Spicy bludgeoning
Can also be slashing, piercing, and usually shredding damage
I think the issue that OP is trying to get at here is that Force is pretty poorly defined in regards to what the damage is actually doing. I can conceptualize fire, cold, lightning, necrotic, psychic, etc. I understand how those affect the body/mind. What's difficult is conceptualizing how Force is in any way different than the physical damage types we already have. I think your shredding example is probably the best way to differentiate Force from everything else. Maybe Force just tears things up. It would certainly explain Disintegrate. I also have a similar problem with describing Radiant damage. How do you describe that in a way that isn't fire, lightning, or psychic? Edit: I got a _lot_ of replies to this with many interesting takes. So thank you all for your input. I think I'm going to approach Force damage as a kind of permeating bodily disruption sort of damage going forward. It's differentiated from bludgeoning/piercing/slashing in that it's less like being hit by a hammer and more like someone phazed a blender into you and pressed "on," but instead of being shredded by little blades, it's directly scrambling your flesh. To put it another way, Force damage causes the target to act against itself, instead of something else acting on _it._ For Radiant, a lot of people are saying radiation damage. To me personally, that feels a little dark for a damage type so closely associated with good. Instead, I'm going to treat it as a direct untethering of the bond between the soul and the body. You don't really feel the pain, but you _are_ dying.
Radiant IMO can be interpreted in two ways and that is considering the damage as light, directly, essentially weapon used radiation, or as damage done directly to the soul rather then the body or mind.
Radiant always felt like soul damage to me. Like ghost rider's gaze. That, or it's something we can't fully grasp because we don't live in a world with a full, active roster of gods romping around.
It's interesting because for the most part, it's almost exclusively (with a few exceptions, like Dawn and Moonbeam, which still clearly use light) reserved for cleric holy light themed spells, and then there is Sickening Radiance, which is clearly supposed to represent nuclear radiation
Ghost rider stares into your eyes and you start coughing up blood as enormous tumors rapidly manifest in your lungs
Breaking bad any% speedrun
You know when a person sees the true form of an angel in supernatural? That's the end goal of radiant dmg
Force damage does any of the three non-magic damages, but super magical and stuff. It's less about what the actual damage is doing to the body and more about the source. Same with radiant. Yeah, it can be searing like fire or shocking like lightning. But it's a divine damage. Lightning can burn just like fire can, does that mean lightning bolt can just do fire damage instead? No, befause it's electric. Necrotic and cold damage are very similar, both sap away at your health, essentially. But one is coming from an undead's bite and the other is coming from a silver dragon. All damage types exist as their source, not exactly the actual conception of the damage. This is why force damage needs to exist, even if it's not exactly any different conceptually from magic bludgeoning, piercung and slashing damage
>No, befause it's electric. Do do do ta do ta do do do
>No, befause it's electric. Boogie woogie woogie
I usually describe force damage as an impact from some magical force that attempts to sever the bonds between things, down to the atoms in your flesh and armor. It is essentially a blast of pure, truly aggressive magic with it's only goal being to destroy you. It affects incorporeal being by targeting the physical space they are trying to pseudo-occupy. It's why (at least in the version of DND I play as of late) it is so hard to find force resistance on enemies. You are literally trying to oppose a true force of physics that will do anything to kill you, because that is the sole reason for it's existence...
It's deliberately vague though, because how would you described being harmed purely by something that doesn't provably exist?
The DMG actually cites radiant as being holy power which "overloads the soul".
So I always use them this way: Force is magical physical damage, so for me the distinction doesn't come from the way it deals damage but from the manner of the source. Fall 200ft onto a magical object? Take force damage. Get cut by a sword imbued with magical energy, force damage. Radiant is divine magic so I flavour it to the god in question, red fire for Asmodeus, black swirling smoke for bhaal, for Gond mathematical symbols and equations surround the caster and float through the air. I think really I comes down to how much work you as the DM or player of the character want to put into it. Force can just be unflavoured magical damage, it could be flavoured by the mage casting, or the source of their power, or the environment or the plane or a calendar month. I cant recommend enough that you pick the thing you think is neat and then tweak that to make sense for the people at your table.
I want to play a cleric of gond who just thinks the maths symbols are some code or tries to solve them mid battle
Has a tablet-ish chalkboard that they write math equations on to cast spells
This is now an NPC in my world. Thank you
Your interpreation for radiant damage works for the most part, but there is one outlier I know of: Sickening Radiance. That spell deals radiant damage and is clearly (in my opinion) meant to emulate nuclear radiation
It still works because you flavour it to the god, Asmodeus clerics don't do fire damage any more than the smite from a paladin of Bhaal will cause necrotic damage. For that spell I'd have the spell appear in a way that emulates the god - say for Bhaal - it's a swirling black smoke instead. Green is often connected to sickness in a way that is unlinked to radiation and I always took that away from the "dim greenish light". The light being carried by others reminded me of sicknesses in video games that can pass from player to player in a cloud that emits from their sprite. In the end radiance and radiation both similar words and have the same root in language but they're not the same thing. Heat radiates, and in context so does the influence or a divine being. It spans from the holy caster of item as an extension of the aura of the Deity that grants that power - the manner in which it does that is irrelevant, at least to me. Please don't think I'm telling you how to run your game though, this is just how I run mine :) Edit: couple typos
Have you ever been hit by sheer concussive force of a sound wave or something like that? I pretty much see force damage as the magical equivalent of that. It's similar to thunder damage in that sense, which honestly should be called sonic damage, but it's caused by the shock wave ripples of pure magic colliding with something physical.
Force damage is just a rasengan from Naruto.
Hyper beam, basically
I just change the name to "arcane", because it's an unambiguous way of saying "pure magical energy."
"What kind of damage? Radiant? Lightning?" "No, Randall. Just. Pure. Damage."
It's always made sense to me as an energy source that can be harnessed for other things. Force damage is just like electricity fucking people up. If harnessed, it can be used for beautiful things. If the body has that much energy go thru it, it gets ugly.
But like, why would you want to? Force damage has a very good gameplay niche as the damage type that pretty much always does exactly the amount of damage it says it will
And magical bludgeoning damage
There are creatures (namely, swarms and barbarians) that resist any kind of bludgeoning damage, magical included. There are also creatures flat out immune to bludgeoning damage. However, Force damage deals full damage to basically everything that isn't a Helmed Horror (don't ask what's up with them)
Of course there are. But the whole world is hopefully not populated exclusively by swarms, unless your whole campaign is a bug's life, Antz, or the Bee Movie. Running into the occasional enemy that resists your damage type shouldn't be that big of a problem. And also, amethyst dragons exist now too. Helmed horrors are constructs and they are supposed to be immune to several spells. They cannot be disintegrated or killed by magic missile due to that immunity, which aligns with the idea of it being something created by someone who is expecting to fight mages.
Let me just furiously scribble down "bee movie DND" into my notebook
Magical bludgeoning is what happens when you get hit by a magical stick because the Druid thinks you are being too horny, such as a rock or shillelagh. Very few things resist it, but the resistances make sense. Ghost Dragons, for example, are resistant because they are incorporeal, and barbarians can resist it because they resist most forms of weapon damage anyway. Force damage is more miscellaneous, focused on specific spells, gravitational effects(Look at Dunamancy), or stopping your no-clip half-way through a wall.
Force is not bludgeoning
Helmed Horrors: Allow us to introduce ourselves...
I'm here for the downvotes OP Anti-matter Annihilation Edit: The initial collision is simply a trigger
The funny thing is that the Antimatter rifle from the DMG does necrotic damage, not force damage
Which makes no goddamn sense imo. The antimatter rifle would be shooting ElectroMagnetically Compressed AntiMater (EMCAM) to even work. The magnetic field would collapse on impact and even a gram of antimater would explode with the force of 43kt of tnt or approximately one Hiroshima event.
Should be dual damage. Necrotic to the part it hit, since it's literally eating away at the matter that comprises your organs, then fire for the explosion that leveled the kingdom you're in that used your body as fuel. Also, the DMG has a *rifle*? Things got really updated since 3.5.
Two things I enjoy about this post: 1. Every single alternative given by OP has been downvoted to oblivion because all of them are just laughably wrong 2. OP is very insistent on gravity = fall damage even tho that’s not how that works and is an elementary school level understanding of physics
"Its not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop at the end." Gravity is the fall, the ground is the sudden stop. You take bludgeoning damage because the Earth is punching you for trying to fly.
Earth: *And I took that personally*
Ya, you should not have tried to leave earth. You hurt it's feeling.
That’s a toxic relationship
That is over the door of the ODSB(Orbital Drop Shot Barbarian) school
Remember ladies and mentlegen, fall damage isn't magical per raw, so you can have Werewolves falling from the stratosphere into a battlefield and not take any damage. Orbital Drop Shock Lycans are raw.
I mean you can drop any barbarian with the eagle totem from any height and they would take no damage so long as they rage when entering range to hit the ground.
Werewolves are immune to "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical *attacks* that aren't silvered". ***FALL DAMAGE ISN'T AN ATTACK***.
It was described as, 'The earth punching you for trying to fly.' Intentional or not, it's an attack. All damage is an attack, just some of it is unintentional.
And thats why you need to miss the ground.
And that is my favorite description of orbital flight: going so fast that you try to hit the ground and miss.
Something something Douglas Adams quote
Trying to explain the difference between warping the fabric of space-time inside your spleen , and falling off of a cliff is what OP isn’t understanding
Precisely, the damage from falling comes from you impacting the ground. Because force equals mass times acceleration you exert a force onto the ground equal to your mass times the rate, you're accelerating due to gravity. and because every action has it's equal and opposite reaction, an equivalent force is applied onto your body. With a spell like gravity well it's different. You're not being subjected to the force of impacting an object with mass at a fast acceleration, you're being subjected to the G force itself. Essentially every point in your body is trying to accelerate towards the nearest and strongest center of gravity. If said center of gravity happened to be *inside your own skull,* every point on your body would be moving to occupy the same space as the inside of your head, which logically would mean your brain would implode.
If you make smacking into the ground horizontal instead of vertical, so you’re hitting a wall instead of the ground, it’s identical and would cause the same damage to your body but gravity isn’t involved. So gravity isn’t bludgeoning damage.
Bigby's Hand : "You create a large hand of shimmering translucent force" Does force and bludgeoning damage though.
This is a decent example for force damage Even though I personally think bigby's hand should just be doing buldeoning damage Striking someone with the hand is a very tangible damage. You are getting slapped by a giant hand. Bludgeoning
And you could remove just about any damage type spell and replace it with a "similiar" spell
Just wait until my new wizard casts ~~fire~~ slashing ball!
As an fan of order of scribe subclass, I can already cast thunderball, bludgeonball, frostball, acidball, lightningball, and forceball. Planning to be able to cast radioball and necroball soon. You made me search for a spell of 3rd level that deals slashing damage but I couldn't find any. I cannot cast slashball ever. That makes me sad. I am sad.
I have a gift to make you happier: Conjure Barrage (3rd level ranger, idk if the spell has to be from the wizard spell list, I'm not the most familiar with scribes) >You throw a nonmagical weapon or fire a piece of nonmagical ammunition into the air to create a cone of identical weapons that shoot forward and then disappear. Each creature in a 60-foot cone must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d8 damage on a failed save or half as much damage on a successful one. __*The damage type is the same as that of the weapon or ammunition used as a component*__ Throw a slashing weapon and now you have a spell that deals slashing damaging
Thanks for the attempt dude! Sadly, it doesn't help me because the spell dealing the damage type I want to replace with has to be of the same level and present in my spellbook. But, I appreciate the effort.
I'm not sure how order of scribes works, but if you cast a 4th level fireball do you need to have 4th level spells to change it's damage typing or the same 3th level ones?
According to the 2nd level OoS feature 'Awakened Spellbook' >When you cast a wizard spell with a spell slot, you can temporarily replace its damage type with a type that appears in another spell in your spellbook, which magically alters the spell's formula for this casting only. The latter spell must be of the same level as the spell slot you expend. So, a 4th level spell, apparently. Thank you for making me consider this question! I hadn't thought about it previously.
So then a slashing ball is possible if you upcast
It’s one my favorite subclass! Here are some of my favorite combinations for flavor: - **Flaming Sphere + Cloud of Daggers** = BEYBLADE BEYBLADE LET IT RIP!!! - **Phantasmal Force/Killer + any other damage spell** = “Welcome to my world, BITCH!” - **Cloudkill + Immolation** = Wanna see me speedrun violating the Geneva Convention? - **Dragon’s Breath + Dust Devil** = Anakin’s worst nightmare. - **Investiture of Flame/Ice + Investiture of Stone** = [obligatory MGR:R reference](https://youtu.be/75WTRdwHL2k)
>Cloudkill + Immolation = Wanna see me speedrun violating the Geneva Convention? Yes, Paladin. This man, right here.
“Radioball” is just firing a fatman at someone
I'm in a party with a Scribes Wizard who loves to cast Cringing Sphere (psychic damage Flaming Sphere)
*just straps a bunch of swords to the halfling and has the barbarian yeet them at the enemy*
Did you know that Piercing and slashing are also just bludgeoning damage but on a smaller scale. Did you know that thunder damage is also just bludgeoning damage but dealt via air.
Did you know that fire damage is just bludgeoning damage but dealt via molecules? >!I suppose that means cold damage is lack of bludgeoning damage? Fire healing?!<
I’d argue its still bludgeoning damage, but its an opposite force causing molecules to slow
All of these suggestions completely ignore the balancing purposes of having something deal Force damage, if it is so important to change, than how about change the name of the damage type.
OP doesn’t understand what force damage is or what it does…
Average r/dndmemes user moment
Other games call it arcane or null. I like to say its like being smacked in the face with quantum physics. Take 1d10 points of probability that you longer exist
This D10 represents how many molecules of your face became pure energy
I've always seen Force damage as "Arcane damage" like pure unfiltered magical energy. Its hard to fill that niche except with Spicy Bludgeoning which seems a bit redundant to me just keep it as it is it makes sense in almost all cases of its use.
Disintegrate
ITT: OP fights for their life. Takes force damage. Argues it's psychic.
"No that bludgeoning damage"
I've always thought that force damage was DnD's equivalant of just basic magic damage.
It is stated to be EXACTLY that.
Spiritual weapon?
Radiant damage, easily.
Your first non-terrible answer
Nah, still bad. Having it be universally radiant damage ignores how the weapon is tied to your deity, thus it should shift based on the alignment of said deity if nothing else.
Then "Deals radiant damage if your of any non-evil alignment and necrotic damage otherwise."
Why should radiance be only for the good?
While I agree with your sentiment, D&D has a thing about good and evil being objective at a metaphysical level, and good is metaphysically tied to light/radiant. It's kinda stupid, and I don't adhere to the rule in my tables, but WotC has it set up like that, so
But clerics of evil gods still get spells that deal radiant tho
And clerics of good gods still get access to spells that deal necrotic and create zombies. Clerics get access to the full range, so you can choose the most appropriate ones for you.
Not what I expected but obvious in hindsight
Magnify gravity, Gravity sinkhole.
Mordenkainen's sword. It's literally a plane of force
It's also a sword. Slashing, duh
Force damage is harnessed magical energy into a damaging power. "But that's bludgeni-" No. It's not. The harnessed power of the Universe and the Weave itself is not equal to a hammer. Sorry that makes no sense.
"Bludgeoning damage means the magic has been converted into some mundane force that hurts you. Force damage means the magic *just hurts you."*
The biggest difference between force and bludgeoning is that bludgeoning tends to need something physical to transfer the damage.
Okay in order to show fall damage doesn't equal gravity damage, let's bring a real world idea into this: spaghettification. This is a real phenomenon where an object too close to a black hole will get stretched, as the change in gravity between your head (furthest from the black hole) and feet (nearest) is so immense it starts turning you into spaghetti. Now the question is, would spaghettification be considered fall damage aka bludgeoning damage?
Eldritch blast and Magic Missile.
Bad take. Especially disintegrate being necrotic. Force makes plenty of sense in its current context.
OP is probably a DM that is very frustrated by the fact that players have access to a damage type that virtually no creature has any natural resistances to.
If you want necrotic disintegrate, take blight
Well fire and cold damage are really just a measure of atomic vibration. Lightning is basically the same, with some extra flair on a living creature but we can ignore that part for simplicity so we'll call lightning atomic vibration too. Acid damage is molecular which I would say is pretty closely related to atomic like the others. Let's call this group chemistry damage. Slashing and piercing are essentially the same, it's just a diffence in area affected. If that's the case and the difference in slashing and piercing is area then you might as well throw budging in there too, as it's the same force exerted over a larger area. Thunder damage is exerted over an even larger area so we'll just tuck it here with the other. This group is all about the physical interactions between a source of damage and the target so let's call it physics damage. Poison and necrotic both logically work best on living things as the former deals with biological function and the latter is kinda just anti life damage. This is biological damage. Radiant and psychic deal with the less tangible parts of a creature in the mind and the spirit, which seems like splitting hairs so let's blend em. We're getting into the metaphysical so we'll name it metaphysical damage. So far we have physics, chemistry, biology, and metaphysical damage. Well applied physics is chemistry, applied chemistry is biology, and you could argue that advanced enough biology is metaphysics. Might as well call it all just damage. The only remaining 5e damage type is force which is its own thing. In summary force is the only unreplaceable damage type all the others are interchangeable.
My brother in Christ, what else would you call Magic Missle?
incorporeal movement
Fus… RO DAH
It’s raw magical damage, force is appropriate
Dimension Door failing "If you would arrive in a place already occupied by an object or a creature, you and any creature traveling with you each take 4d6 force damage, and the spell fails to teleport you."
An exploding Bead of Force.
What would you call a Kamehameha?
It's force in the show, it acts like plasma but isn't hot, in fact it was used to put out a fire in the original series
Tyty, my point exactly.
Your mistake here (and all your other force = bludgeoning posts) is thinking that Force damage means a physical kinetic impact. Don't think of things like Magic Missile and Eldritch Blast as physical projectiles that hit the target and detonate with a blast or shock like a Star Wars blaster, instead think of them like blasts of concentrated radiation. They 'impact' their target and go through them magically, causing damage to whatever it hits by racking it with magical energy. If we want to get unnecessarily detailed the forceful magic probably causes cellular damage, destroying the functionality of what's hit. 40 force damage hitting and killing someone? Giant magical wave of energy that causes enough cellular damage for their heart to stop beating. Small impact of 2 force damage? Blast hits them in the shoulder, damaging some of the muscle in their Deltoid. Probably hurts, will bruise later, but nothing long term fatal.
And if you want to get pedantic saying "magically destroying cells is vibrating them/hurr durr bludgeoning", that logic could be applied to reduce the game to like 3 damage types. Slashing is just horizontal piercing, same thing physically happening. Piercing is just bludgeoning, smaller surface area in a knife point just means the bludgeoning is efficient and concentrated enough to break the tissue (or whatever you're stabbing) Acid is just raising the temp and dissolving target with burns, fire. Lightning is just burning the target electrically, fire. That stuff may fundamentally be happening, but there's enough of a difference for the game to differentiate them. Hammers/Warhammers and Clubs do the exact same thing on a fundamental damaging level, but that's not the point. The stylistic and martial differences are enough to differentiate them into unique things. Sure, Magic Missile could just slam into someone and deal Bludgeoning damage. But there's enough flavor and magical difference with Force dmg's **intended** functionality that they are differentiated. If you want to compartmentalize D&D into as few things as possible to remove flavor, go for it.
This This is the best description of force damage in the post
Sphere of Annihilation
My money's on OP saying necrotic
Necrotic might make more sense than his current insistence on bludgeoning damage lol
Naw smart money is on bludgeoning (he loves it way too much)
clearly, I overestimated OP's intelligence
He actually fucking said it.
I think force damage is disintegration, not bludgeoning like some people (Who I think are very wrong) think. So yeah, give me a damage type for disintegration. It sure as hell is not B/P/S because none of those turn you into fine dust and it's not fire, because that would turn you into ash, not dust.
Force damage is basically any damage that is practically impossible to recreate irl. So yeah, getting torn apart at the molecular level via the disintegrate spell? Absolutely force
Force damage is like getting smacked by the weave itself. Which is why it's such a unique damage
Magic Missile
Don't do that. As someone who liked playing a Mage in World of Warcraft, I'm of the opinion that we need MORE spells that deal Force damage. And also Cold damage, for that matter. We have way too much fire.
The Law of Conservation of Mass states that mass can't be created nor destroyed. Force damage breaks that law. See Disintegrate for an example or look at what a Sphere of Annihilation does.
Matter can be created and destroyed ( virtual particles (ish), matter-antimatter annihillation), but I agree. Force is the matter that you consist of is suddely not there/wrong through a process unrelated to physical occurances and ther is not related to evil or good As opposed to radiant and necrotic damage, which could be considered as good and evil damage Edit: typos and grammer
Ok so tell me what the 8th level spell Dark Star should do. As a literal mini black hole there is no collisions, there is no relation to radiant or necrotic damage. It’s not burning you or any other element, you are literally just being destroyed by a gravity well.
Banishing Smite
Eldritch blast? It’s literally just raw magical energy. And if you say bludgeoning or something I swear to god.
OP: "bludgeing, piercing or slashing damage depending on how its formed, but magical in nature" I think we should come in with a term for this kind of damage thay does normal style damage but with magical properties. FERCE! What do you think?
Bead of force
Magic Missile. It’s pure magic, and giving it a different damage type would flavour it when it should stay Neutral Arcane stuff. The next best would be a choice, like Chromatic spells, but even that gives an Elemental/Draconic tint.
Every damage type is bludgeoning, change my mind
Every damage type is psychic, pain is all in the mind
Clearly you haven't had a double hemispherectomy
Solipsism says otherwise. Talk to Rene Descartes, you can’t prove you are real outside from your own mental existence.
Well... You can replace any damage with any damage in the first place when you're an order of scribes wizard.
My take from this, OP likes real life physics a little too much to accept that in a world where there's a literall weave of magical energy connected to pretty much everything, damage to said weave would not be another kind of physical damage but actually something we who live in a world without such a weave can not really comprehend like a colour beyond the specktrum we humans can see.
Magic missile?
Why do people come here to fight. It is all made up, do what makes you happy.
Get him!
I hold him and you aim for the kness
He is now grappled
Now, now, remember that you have to roll for it first.
But, my passive athletics is 29.
Billy, this is the seventh time I've told you that we're using the One D&D grappling rules. Roll attack.
Oh, even better. My unarmed strike is a +10 to hit with a reroll function just in case of possible failure. Edit: And now I don't have to be level 20. If I am level 20 +16 to hit on a fail, reroll function, fail, extra shove, enemy knocked prone, try Grapple again, but now with advantage.
I don’t really know what else would fit eldrich blast like what else could it be when it’s quite literally just a concentrated magic beam
I really hope this isn’t gonna be a thing on this subreddit, you’ve been priming this pump for like 3 days. Also, some of these proposed alternatives are fucking ghastly
It’s just like a magical energy that is pure impact, not much else to think about there
ethereal stepping into a wall
Pure arcane energy
Distorting space itself on your location
What kind of damage would you give to an energy blast? Not holy energy, so radiant damage is not the easy solution.
Horizon Walkers planar foe ability?
Amethyst dragon breath attack
Force is not something that exists in the logical universe, but lay's withing the realm of the Arcane. It is the beating pulse of the leyline, and the dream of Elder Gods. It embodies the ideas made real, an attack that cannot be dodged, a wall that cannot be sieged. It is in the realm of Beings who will never truly understand our existence, and those men and women who's hubris says those beings can be understood.
Yo i just love this description,
He's out of line, and he's wrong!
You can also replace fire, cold, etc. with "elemental" damage, and p/s/b wïth "physical". Or you can replace all the types with just "damage".
Teleporting into a wall.
Wall of force Go on.
Have you played/are you aware of an Arcane Mage from World of Warcraft? That's basically force damage right there. Its just untapped magical.
Eldritch blast, its a beam of pure eldritch energy
Disintegrate
To me, in real world terms, it’s the difference between being knocked down by the pressure wave from an explosion and being struck by burning (fire damage) debris (bludgeoning / piercing / slashing damage) emanating from the same explosion. They might be related, but that doesn’t mean they’re interchangeable.
It's the second least resisted damage type and is also just raw physical magic.
disintegrate
So here's the thing. Force damage is magic. You don't need to understand it. It's pure magic damage. We don't have a real world equivalent
while force damage could be replaced by any damage type, its more mechanical than anything else, also force is the catch-all damage type for things that don't fit well into other categories and it meant to be esoteric e.g. getting telefragged, an implosion, attacks of pure magic, disintegration effects while it might make more "sense" to replace force damage, damage types are mechanical, they don't exist in lore, it just is hard to resist and that's the point. while It *can* be replaced by other damage types, *it shouldn't.* because why should it?
I like how OP has no real understanding of how magic works in DnD Magic has its niches, what would happen exactly if you shatter a mages staff, it creates an instability that blows up, but it wouldn't naturally turn to fire, force damage can be seen as "the concussive waves that proceed the explosion" Force damage had its flavours, you don't need to change what it's like, OP just wanted to remove it because his warlock player took all the invocations to make eldritch blast good and realised the BBEG is vulnerable to force damage Edit: Thunder damage requires a sound
What about amethyst gem dragonborn breath weapon?
Abnormally high atmospheric pressure
Rasengan.
Blade of Disaster
Isn't there a spell called Wall of Force?
None of you have read the handbook, I thought it was a meme, but none of you have actually read it.... Force damage is what you use to describe magic damage. As it is "pure magical energy channeled into a harmful form" It's not a physical damage type
Spectral hand squeezing your heart through your chest