Damage
From P6 Spheres
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Damage Types
Bleed
Bleed damage is persistent damage that represents loss of blood. As such, it has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don’t need blood to live.
Energy
Many spells and other magical effects deal energy damage. Energy damage is also dealt from effects in the world, such as the biting cold of a blizzard to a raging forest fire. The main types of energy damage are acid, cold, electricity, fire, and sonic. Acid damage can be delivered by gases, liquids, and certain solids that dissolve flesh, and sometimes harder materials. Cold damage freezes material by way of contact with chilling gases and ice. Electricity damage comes from the discharge of powerful lightning and sparks. Fire damage burns through heat and combustion. Sonic damage assaults matter with high-frequency vibration and sound waves. Many times, you deal energy damage by casting magic spells, and doing so is often useful against creatures that have immunities or resistances to physical damage.
Two special types of energy damage specifically target the living and the undead. Positive energy often manifests as healing energy to living creatures but can create positive damage that withers undead bodies and disrupts and injures incorporeal undead. Negative energy often revivifies the unnatural, unliving power of undead, while manifesting as negative damage that gnaws at the living.
Powerful and pure magical energy can manifest itself as force damage. Few things can resist this type of damage—not even incorporeal creatures such as ghosts and wraiths.
Mental
Sometimes an effect can target the mind with enough psychic force to actually deal damage to the creature. When it does, it deals mental damage. Mindless creatures and those with only programmed or rudimentary intelligence are often immune to mental damage and effects.
Morale
Things which affects a creature’s morale can reduce its hit points. This is listed as morale damage. However, morale damage can never reduce your hit points below 1.
Physical
Damage dealt by weapons, many physical hazards, and a handful of spells is collectively called physical damage. The main types of physical damage are bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. Bludgeoning damage comes from weapons and hazards that deal blunt-force trauma, like a hit from a club or being dashed against rocks. Piercing damage is dealt from stabs and punctures, whether from a dragon’s fangs or the thrust of a spear. Slashing damage is delivered by a cut, be it the swing of the sword or the blow from a scythe blades trap.
Poison
Venoms, toxins and the like can deal poison damage, which affects creatures by way of contact, ingestion, inhalation, or injury.
Poison damage bypasses any damage reduction the creature might possess.
Damage Resistance
A creature with resistance to damage has the ability to ignore some damage of a certain type per attack, but it does not have total immunity.
Each resistance ability is defined by what damage type it resists and how many points of damage are resisted. It doesn’t matter whether the damage has a mundane or magical source. When resistance completely negates the damage from an energy attack, the attack does not disrupt concentration.
Sometimes, a certain type of attack can overcome this reduction. This information is separated from the damage reduction number by a slash. For example, DR 5/magic means that a creature takes 5 less points of damage from all weapons that are not magic.
Resistance from multiple sources generally does not stack.
Resistance(fire) 5 reduces fire damage by 5 points.
Resistance(slashing) 10 reduces damage from attacks that causes slashing damage by 10 points.
Resistance(physical) 10/slashing reduces damage from attacks that causes physical damage by 10 points, unless the attacker is using a slashing weapon.COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Open Gaming License Version 1.0a Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
System Reference Document. Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, based on material by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.