What is the most efficient/cost effective to store snowballs?

[incog64]

The spell zone of glacial cold requires snowballs as the material component. What is the best way to keep snowballs as a material component?

Thanks in advance.

[Maat Mons]

From experience, I can tell you that snowballs stored in the freezer eventually become hard and crusty.

[Beni-Kujaku]

I recommand the close-packing of equal spheres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_equal_spheres) method. Up to 74% of your available space filled up with snowballs!

(Also, remember that a perfect snow ball will melt in such a manner that its radius will shrink linearly, so if you know how long you want to store your balls, just time how long it takes for a small snow ball to melt, then make snow balls that many times bigger to reach your desired time.)

[SirNibbles]

I think Blue Ice (Frostburn, page 169) might work for you.

[Remuko]

spell component pouch!

:tongue:

[Inevitability]

Get someone to cast Mold Touch (3rd-level spell) and obtain some brown mold from it, which radiates a permanent area of cold that you could also employ for AoE damage. One of the E6 builds in my sig makes use of that.

Alternatively, encasing the snowballs in Quintessence (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/quintessence.htm) is expensive but incredibly reliable.

[incog64]

THankssssssss

[ciopo]

spell component pouch!

:tongue:

Isn't that factually correct?

[Rebel7284]

Isn't that factually correct?

Yeah, but if you go with that, why not just draw artifacts from your spell component pouch since apocalypse from the sky requires an artifact material component?

[ciopo]

if you don't RP bat guano or tiny tarts or (arbitrary component, which we know are mostly meant as a joke), why RP (also arbitrary component, such as snowballs) ? where do you draw the arbitrary line?


I see components very binarly, either you track them all or you track none of them, is what I'm thinking.

[JNAProductions]

if you don't RP bat guano or tiny tarts or (arbitrary component, which we know are mostly meant as a joke), why RP (also arbitrary component, such as snowballs) ? where do you draw the arbitrary line?

I see components very binarly, either you track them all or you track none of them, is what I'm thinking.

I wouldn't agree that you have to track all or none...
But I would agree that this material component isn't a balancing mechanism, it's just flavor. Draw it from a component pouch.

Also, 5th lets you replace any material component without a listed price with a simple focus-a wand, staff, holy symbol, etc.
Obviously apply some common sense (no, you can't Apocalypse From The Sky with a stick that has some runes carved on it!) but I doubt it'd break anything to let a component pouch be replaced with a focus.

[Rebel7284]

The issue is, of course, that the snow component is meant as a limitation that prevents you from casting the spell in the middle of summer...
This is in a world where royalty would historically pay huge amounts of money to have snow carted from the mountains to cool their refreshments since modern refrigeration did not exist.
Overall, I agree, you have to draw the line somewhere. However, it's unclear what is exactly a good place to draw the line.
Fragment of Armor from a 13th level fighter?
Heart of a humanoid child?
Snow in the summer?
Parts of various creatures for Ice Assassin?
Artifacts?

Overall I think that things that are extremely difficult to get, are very time sensitive, or are actually super expensive but happen to not have a set price are all VERY sus.

With all of that said, the lowest level approach I can think of is Prestidigitation.
It can chill 1 pound of nonliving material for 1 hour. Assuming that chilling prevents a pound of ice from melting, repeated casting would work for a single large snowball.

At higher levels, you can do something like Energy Transformation Field -> Blizzard + Call Faithful Servants for a full year of SLAs and a LOT of snow.
Planar Bubble on something native to somewhere particularly cold would work too and is closer to storage than creation.

[JNAProductions]

The issue is, of course, that the snow component is meant as a limitation that prevents you from casting the spell in the middle of summer...

Is it? Or, at least, is said limit from a balance point of view, or just a thematic one? It's one level lower than Haboob, but does worse damage type, worse damage per round, and lasts 1/10th the time, while not affecting visibility either.

[ciopo]

The issue is, of course, that the snow component is meant as a limitation that prevents you from casting the spell in the middle of summer...
This is in a world where royalty would historically pay huge amounts of money to have snow carted from the mountains to cool their refreshments since modern refrigeration did not exist.
Overall, I agree, you have to draw the line somewhere. However, it's unclear what is exactly a good place to draw the line.
Fragment of Armor from a 13th level fighter?
Heart of a humanoid child?
Snow in the summer?
Parts of various creatures for Ice Assassin?
Artifacts?

Overall I think that things that are extremely difficult to get, are very time sensitive, or are actually super expensive but happen to not have a set price are all VERY sus.

With all of that said, the lowest level approach I can think of is Prestidigitation.
It can chill 1 pound of nonliving material for 1 hour. Assuming that chilling prevents a pound of ice from melting, repeated casting would work for a single large snowball.

At higher levels, you can do something like Energy Transformation Field -> Blizzard + Call Faithful Servants for a full year of SLAs and a LOT of snow.
Planar Bubble on something native to somewhere particularly cold would work too and is closer to storage than creation.

I disagree, we are explictly told those material components are flavor to be handwaved away. If one wants to make them relevant, that's fine, but since that's diverging from the actual rules, one prospective user could as easily pretend/invent that the arbitrary material component for this or that spell is not the one we are told to ignore, but something else, which would be just as arbitrary. Perhabs I'd like to pretend I need powdered mushroom to cast zone of glacial cold, or dew collected on a full moon night, or what-have-you.


Hell, I'd argument that a spell component pouch is a magic feather device, and it pulls out (arbitrary things) because the casters has been told that's how it works and that's what he observes happenign when their mentor use it. by the power of make believe, a spell component pouch produce spell components at need! Without anyone actually putting them inside! How does it work, an inquisitive mind might ask, and the answer will be: magic!


The "line" is arbitrary, and I'm for all or nothing, we can all contrive reasons for making the most common component actually rare as hell, or those we would intuit as being rare be common as hell.
That is worldbuilding, and material components is the ur-example of.. Grod's Law, I believe?

[Rebel7284]

I disagree, we are explictly told those material components are flavor to be handwaved away. If one wants to make them relevant, that's fine, but since that's diverging from the actual rules, one prospective user could as easily pretend/invent that the arbitrary material component for this or that spell is not the one we are told to ignore, but something else, which would be just as arbitrary. Perhabs I'd like to pretend I need powdered mushroom to cast zone of glacial cold, or dew collected on a full moon night, or what-have-you.


Hell, I'd argument that a spell component pouch is a magic feather device, and it pulls out (arbitrary things) because the casters has been told that's how it works and that's what he observes happenign when their mentor use it. by the power of make believe, a spell component pouch produce spell components at need! Without anyone actually putting them inside! How does it work, an inquisitive mind might ask, and the answer will be: magic!


The "line" is arbitrary, and I'm for all or nothing, we can all contrive reasons for making the most common component actually rare as hell, or those we would intuit as being rare be common as hell.
That is worldbuilding, and material components is the ur-example of.. Grod's Law, I believe?

Spell component pouch is not a magical item, it's a 5GP mundane item. The distinction is significant since "magic" cannot be the answer to what it does. Again, you have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise this 5GP mundane item becomes your most prized possession once you can learn Ice Assassin.

If your line involves giving it the ability to produce snow regardless of local conditions, that is fine and won't break the game. But I do expect some DMs to ask questions about how a completely mundane item is doing that. And again, the answer can't be magic.

[icefractal]

Honestly, the spell component pouch is one of the dumber things in 3.x. Most spells just shouldn't have material components, and the ones that do should actually matter (at least potentially).

[ciopo]

Spell component pouch is not a magical item, it's a 5GP mundane item. The distinction is significant since "magic" cannot be the answer to what it does. Again, you have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise this 5GP mundane item becomes your most prized possession once you can learn Ice Assassin.

If your line involves giving it the ability to produce snow regardless of local conditions, that is fine and won't break the game. But I do expect some DMs to ask questions about how a completely mundane item is doing that. And again, the answer can't be magic.

I'm not adding anything, I'm just.. a PITA, I guess? You'll make me do something special about this or that spell component, then I will do this or that for every component, and insist everyone else does, too. Because that's fair, since you want me to not ignore something we are told to ignore by the rules themself... then I'll not ignore something we were supposed to ignore. not out of malicious compliance, mind you. I go "oh, okay" and assume that ruling applies to "a category" that is not arbitrary, because I'm very precise when it comes to bookkeeping.

I mean, I'm ultima online generation, I damn well had the pouch full of frigging guano and garlic and whatever! If you track one you track all, or go a step further in your homebrew and start removing the components you think shoulnd't matter, and/or end up handwaving those you think do matter with a "you spend X GP at a vendor", unless you RP vendor itneractions, etcetera, but what is and isn't "to be tracked" is so randomly arbitrary that, what? You want me, every time I am thinking of perhabs preparing a spell, to ask you if the material component of that spell is difficult to source or not? If you'll tell me to not bother tracking "common components" I will ask what the "common components" are. "use common sense" doesn't cut it, or well, common sense defaults to spell component pouch, I guess? I mean, the moment you tell me to handwave it I will go back to handwave it?


I'm not trying ot be difficult, but I don't understand. The.. the... "shape"? of argument you would use to "no, you can't pull snowballs out of that" is just as good to say "no, you can't pull tiny tarts out of that". We don't even need to pull snowballs out of that, they "not"-exists to be destroyed without being even interacted with!


For all we know, it's all a perspective-shifting frame-trick spellcasters do. Spitballing here, but have this: let the verbal component of Zone of Glacial cold be "I define the nothing inside this pouch as a snowball, which I will now consume to cast zone of Glacial cold". There, I've now used a snowball to cast Zone of Glacial cold.

I don't need to know how a component pouch work (or doesn't) to have the rules work as presented. I've a friend that really likes to RP the equivalent of spell thematics, what I'm trying to say the fiction justification for a dumb rule ( yeah, component pouches as is are dumb ) can be whatever, it doesn't make the rule not a rule, and the existence of this particular rule is for quality of life purposes, so have the QoL no muss no fuss?


Sorry for the rambling, the topic twigs me in "just that way"

[Duke of Urrel]

The spell zone of glacial cold requires snowballs as the material component. What is the best way to keep snowballs as a material component?

Thanks in advance.

I would make the following proposal to my dungeon master. The Bag of Holding (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#bagofHolding) is described as follows.


The bag of holding opens into a nondimensional space: Its inside is larger than its outside dimensions.
...

If living creatures are placed within the bag, they can survive for up to 10 minutes, after which time they suffocate.

Since the space inside a Bag of Holding is nondimensional and not even air can enter it from the outside when it is closed, then perhaps not even heat can enter it from the outside.

Suppose we test this hypothesis. Stuff a whole lot of snow inside a Bag of Holding. What will happen?

Only your dungeon master knows for sure. But I think the hypothesis that a Bag of Holding insulates just like a cooler or a thermos bottle – only perhaps much better, because the inside of the Bag of Holding might as well be on another plane of existence – has a lot of merit.

And nobody denies that a single Bag of Holding can hold a LOT of snow, enough for any spell that requires snow as a material component – maybe even enough for the Simulacrum spell, provided that the creature that you simulate is not too large.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

One could always procure a +1 frost sling stone for a mere ~166.01 gp and keep it in the bottom of a cheap extradimensional storage space, such as a handy haversack. Cast any low-level spell that creates snow (such as prestidigitation to chill water into ice flakes), form the snowballs you want, and toss them in your portable extradimensional mini-fridge, along with a jug of refreshing fresh fruit juice to keep you hydrated during your adventuring job or during treks in the wilderness.

[ericgrau]

Eschew materials, but that costs a feat.

A shrink item spell implies that it puts the shrunken object in stasis and that a collection can count as a single item, using a burning fire and its fuel as an example. You can make 1 or more boxes of snowballs. With a duration of 1 day per caster level you don't even need to cast it every day. Still requires 5th level of course, and planning the right spell preparation timing may get tricky at times.