Spell that gets rid of Oxygen?

[Solo]

Is it possible to find/create/research a spell that will remove all oxygen from a space?

*The dying scream of a catgirl is heard.... one life down, 8 more to go.*

[Fax Celestis]

You could use the Crisis of Breath psionic power...

[Solo]

Well, yeah... but I'm thinking of a spell that actually gets rid of the oxygen..... no save v suffocating.

[Ninja Chocobo]

You'll want Polymorph Any Object for that...Polymorph the oxygen into a single molecule of O2. Permanent duration, too. Combine with a Forcecage or Portable Hole, and you have a deathtrap.

[Solo]

Sounds like fun.
thanks.

[Viscount Einstrauss]

If you don't mind murdering plenty of catgirls to do it, fire would do it too. Fire consumes oxygen very rapidly. The size of the area would determine how much fire you'd require to consume all the oxygen. In general, it's best to create a gigantic flash of flame instead of a long-burning one for this purpose. So, cast a few delayed fireballs, seal off the entrance, then wait a second.

[Sardia]

Are you trying to get rid of just the oxygen, or will getting rid of all the air do? Also, how big a space?

[Solo]

Either all of theoxygen or all of the air would do.

Space wise, I'm looking at a 10x10x10 ft cube.

[Demented]

If you don't want to kill catgirls, I believe there actually are rules mentioned for breathable air in closed spaces, but restricted to things like Bags of Holding. The only other thing besides living creatures that consumes "breathable air" is non-magical fire, if I recall correctly.

You could probably just hold a creature in that 10x10x10 ft cube for a day or two and it will suffocate on its own, provided the cube is made airtight.

Edit:
Oh, looky right there, it's under Slow Suffocation.
A medium-sized character in a 10 ft. cube has 6 hours of breathable air before he starts running out of breathable air.

[Jothki]

Would opening a portal into space work?

[Neek]

With a pinch of coal, cast Fabrication and Fabricate O2 into CO2. Call it a day.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

...snip...it will suffocate on its own, provided the cube is made airtight.

Edit:
Oh, looky right there, it's under Slow Suffocation.
A medium-sized character in a 10 ft. cube has 6 hours of breathable air before he starts running out of breathable air.

So that's 3.6 medium-character-rounds per cubic foot of sealed environment. Traditionally, we round down in d20, but I'll say that for durations of a minute or more, we'll keep the decimal figure and call it 36 med-char-rounds per 10 cubic feet.
Anyway - let's say an air-tight space holds 3.6 times as many med-char-rounds of breathable air for each cubic foot before the 1d6 non-lethal damage per 15 minutes kicks in. Small characters need half as much air.

Let's say that fire eliminates one medium-character-round of breathable air per point of damage it does. A torch does one point of fire damage if you hit with it - but that's not 1 hp per round, it's per hit. You might get six hits in a round (TWF, +20 BAB, Haste, for example), so let's say it does 1d6 if it's brought into contact with a person for a whole round, averaging 3.5. That's very close to one cubic foot of breathable air spoiled for every round a torch is burning, which matches what the SRD says ("each Medium character or significant fire source (a torch, for example) proportionally reduces the time theair will last").
So there you go: every point of fire damage = one round of breathable air
QED

[Dhavaer]

Actually, a torch takes up as much oxygen as a medium sized character.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Actually, a torch takes up as much oxygen as a medium sized character.

Yup, that's what I said - after a sudden revelation and hasty edit.

But the fact that non-magical fire damage = 1d6 per round, and one cubic foot of air holding 3.6 rounds of air for a medium character means that each point of fire damage done can equate to one round of air for a medium size character, yeah?

EDIT: so the spell that the OP is looking for might be a big fire spell.

[Dhavaer]

How would you work that with fireball or similar spells? It doesn't strike me that a spell like that would take up oxygen. Perhaps only effects that have duration and/or can ignite take up oxygen?

[daggaz]

I would stay away from magical fire on this one... it already has tons of properties that dont match up with normal fire, like instantaneous heat that won't catch clothes/hair on fire.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I take the point.
Personally, I've always ruled that while instantaneous fire effects have no chance to ignite material, they do leave things "scorched" - sort of like the old slapstick "I've been in an explosion" effect: smoking, blackened, that sort of thing.

But... to get practical about it - let's say that just as a fire does 1d6, but hitting a person with a torch does only 1 damage, we should say that 1 round of breathable air is used up per die of instantaneous magical fire damage. Thus a 5th level caster's Fireball uses up just 5 rounds of air, rather than 5d6 rounds.

Which makes it less useful for removing oxygen.

[Jayabalard]

Is there actually something in D&D that says that you have to have oxygen in the air to breathe?

[Charity]

Is there actually something in D&D that says that you have to have oxygen in the air to breathe?

Good point, also whose to say that Dwarves require the same component of air that Elves do, and how about extra planar creatures, or the various abberations etc.
I would avoid using science in a magical realm entirely, it will never gel.

[iceman]

There is a spell from sword&sorcery called smother. It is a second level sorc/wiz spell that allows spell resistance and a reflex save to negate, you can choose it to effect a target or a 10ft area. On a failed save the target immediately (I think) begins to make constitution checks to avoid suffocation. If it is an area effect then any creature within merely has to move out of the area to resume breathing normally. It also puts out non-magical fires in the area or on a target. If you are in the area of effect you are treated as having taken a breath before casting the spell (seeing as how you are aware of its effect and therefore don't have to make constitution checks until after your con is used up. It is a one round per level spell

[Variable Arcana]

Much, much, much easier to just fill the space with water.

The D&D rules cover that quite easily.

A forcecage and an activated Decanter of Endless Water make for a nice James-Bond-Villainesque certain demise for our heroes... (until they Escape-Artist out of their bonds, sunder the Decanter, and...)

[Seffbasilisk]

Flaming Sphere creates nonmagical fire that should eat away at oxygen, then hit'm with Drowning Glance to suck the air out of thier lungs. That or there's a necromancy spell that does something similar.

[Illiterate Scribe]

Sphere of Ultimate Destruction (wait, there's such a thing as minor destruction?) should work nicely.

This fits in quite neatly with something I've been wondering for a long time - if there are spheres of annihilation in the world, why is there any air left? It would, if I'm not mistaken, destroy all of the air around it, which would then cause air from outside to rush in, which is also destroyed, until there is no air left, anywhere.

[Viscount Einstrauss]

Teleport them into space.

[martyboy74]

Better yet, Polymorph the air around them into a Gelatinous Cube.

Hah! Breathe that, sucker!

[Aquillion]

This also involves a certain amount of metagaming--even if you assume that the D&D universe has oxygen (rather than just the classical element of 'air') and that creatures actually need it to survive, how would your character know this? Unless you're a specialist on air with an extremely high Knowlege (Alchemy) or Knowledge (Air) score, I don't see how you could even know to start researching a spell that affects oxygen... and you certainly wouldn't know how to use existing spells for the effects described. We take it for granted, but the discovery of oxygen is a major, major scientific advance, something that to all evidence doesn't seem to have happened in the typical D&D universe yet (if, as noted above, it's actually there to be discovered.)

You could research the nature of air yourself, but you'd probably have to be epic-level or something similar to even start. I mean, you're talking about fundimentally changing the way in which the universe is understood... with no scientific background to draw on, or understanding of the scientific method to start with.

And if you actually do all that, then tell anyone, the effects of your discovery (remember, you'd probably have to formulate the scientific method just to get started) would make a little suffocation spell seem a bit silly... it'd be like discovering atomic power and using it to light your cigar.

[Viscount Einstrauss]

They might not know about oxygen, but I think everyone can assume that they'd know that living humanoids need air to breathe. And suffocation would be pretty well known too, from fire hazards mostly. So any fire-based suffocation would be rather reasonable to know about, as would any spell that simply targets the air instead of oxygen.

Though, yes, most instances where the wizard would try to target the oxygen, specifically, in the air would be metagame knowledge.

[Were-Sandwich]

Isn't this how they killed the original Godzilla?

[Demented]

For those debating the existence of Oxygen in D&D....

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#suffocation

It uses "breathable air".

[Lemur]

Talking about oxygen is just semantics. The wizard doesn't have to know what oxygen is to make the spell, he just has to have a goal that he wants accomplished. In this case, removing all "breathable air" (Edit: beaten to the punch by my own long-windedness) (how most D&D people would probably think of the effect) from an area, and making it stay that way for a period of time. Hardly an epic spell, but fairly dangerous (effectively a Save or risk losing spell).

If you're worried about the air problem, you could always fill the area with water (although it could be countered by a water breathing spell) or another liquid (like maple syrup. Mmmm.) This would accomplish the same thing, more or less.

As a side note, I don't think that transmuting air into something else is in the spirit of the Polymorph Any Object spell, for various reasons.

A spell would probably give creatures in the area to hold their breath first. This would probably be accomplished with a Fort or Reflex save. Success means they can hold their breath for the normal duration (2 rounds per point of Con) and failure means they immediately start suffocating. They'd still get Con checks every round, at a continually increasing DC.

If the spell has a duration of 1 round/level, and the aformentioned saving throw, I'd peg it at about 5th, possibly 4th, level as a sorc/wiz spell. You'd probably have to combo the spell to make it truly effective (cast web on the area first, for example) or else they'd just walk out of the area on their turn and avoid further Con checks (the DC starts at 10, so it's not too hard to make it through the first round of the spell)