What would happen if you cast an Energy Immunity (Fire), then follow it up with an Energy Immunity (Acid)? Are you now immune to both Fire & Acid for the duration of the spells, or does the second casting negate the first? If both are active, what prevents a player from buying a wand of Energy Immunity and making himself completely immune from damage from all five basic energy types every day for as long as his wand has charges?
[RPG] What happens if you cast Energy Immunity (Fire), then Energy Immunity (Acid)
dnd-3.5eimmunitiesspellsstacking
Related Solutions
I counted up the number of creatures with those resistances and immunities in the Monster Manual (the first one only), and I came up with these totals:
Fire - 62
Cold - 50
Electricity - 40
Acid - 33
Here's a Google Doc with all of my information spelled out. All monsters on this list have either resistance or immunity against the listed energy type, and I didn't differentiate between the two. In this list, I did not include templates (like Skeleton or Half-dragon) and I did not include monsters that were just more powerful forms of other monsters (so each dragon color gets one entry, as does the Arrowhawk and Tojanda). The numbers would change a little bit if you included those, but not by terribly much, and I'm fairly sure that it wouldn't be by enough to change the order of which is most common. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NDEusHrX9TKlVl7aoozoz2Sy1oa5FFAODWbWmU4njEY/edit
The rules would have it do so, yes
The sorcerer’s elemental bloodline literally does nothing but swap the damage type of the spell; all other effects remain the same. In effect, an acid burning hands still launches a jet of flame and still sets things on fire – it’s just that the fire and flame now deal acid damage instead of fire damage. This can, of course, be easily justified as, “hey, it’s magic.”
Of course, seeing as acid’s effect is frequently described as a burning sort of feeling, this isn’t much of a stretch – the action to “put out the fire” could be “wiping the acid off” and “dousing” it could be “diluting” it. In most cases, “being on fire” is entirely equivalent to just “taking damage-over-time that you can use an action to end.” But then if you consider a spell that magically puts out fires – which would work – it gets a little tougher to explain.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. The DM certainly has purview to change something like this, and there is certainly room for adding variety this way. The problem is that the game does not define obvious substitutions to use; fire damage sets things on fire, but it’s less clear what the rest should do if you want them to all be distinct. Even setting up distinct damage-over-time effects is awkward – some spells douse fires, but there won’t be any spells that end these new damage-over-time effects that you make up.
Which is, of course, why the rules don’t do this: having a unique status effect tied to each energy damage type requires having the rest of the game react to that fact. Pathfinder doesn’t, and adding it now would be very difficult.1 It’s much easier to say “it’s acid-damage-dealing fire, deal with it; magic, yo,” than to write out specific versions for each element, and then make sure they’re all reasonably competitive with one another, and that the rest of the product line takes into account, and so on.
- Remember, even when the elemental bloodline was written, much of “Pathfinder” was already “written” – the core rules did not change that much from 3.5, and most of 3.5 was just used as-is. A change like this would have required rewriting substantial portions of 3.5 that they chose to leave alone, and thus even at the “beginning” would have been very difficult.
Best Answer
Yes, they would stack as described.
I couldn't find this spell in the wonderful SRD (which is still a wonderful resource and can answer a lot of rules questions for you), so @JonathanHobbs and @BESW dug up a link to the spell in Complete Arcane. The text is as follows:
Emphasis mine, of course.
Repeat castings do in fact stack, creating a near-total immunity to energy damage (this spell notably does not protect you from force damage, positive energy damage or negative energy damage). On the one hand, this is fairly powerful. On the other hand, 6th and 7th level spellcasting isn't a joke and it does burn up spell slots.
The stacking rules in 3.5 have to do with two things and two things only unless there's a specific exception in the wording of a spell or ability - bonus type stacking, and same source stacking. Bonus types - such as dodge bonuses, inherent bonuses, or insight bonuses - differentiate the sources of a bonus to a roll. With some small amount of exception, two bonuses of the same type (such as two enhancement bonuses) do not stack if you attempt to apply them to the same value. Likewise, two bonuses from sources with the same name do not stack, nor do two abilities or spells with the same name stack - if, and only if, they're trying to add or modify the same values or abilities. Though multiple instances of Energy Immunity do in fact have the same name, they're not trying to modify the same values or abilities - each one gives immunity to a different kind of energy. Thus, they stack.
But you can't have a wand of it.
The player can't buy a wand of energy immunity for the simple reason that it's a 6th level spell for divine casters and a 7th level spell for arcane ones, both well above the limit on wands (to wit, they can only contain spells of 4th level or lower).