Any suggestions against the Balor? --SPOILER--

Only time I encountered a Balor in P2P it needed a +3 weapon to pass its damage resistence (20 damage). It was D&D 3.0 but I think it remained ithe same.
And I do not recall daemons being particularly vulnerable from cold attacks, but I may be wrong...

 

To be honest, my 11th level rogue killed it in two turns. I cast greater invisibility on her, and she walked behind him and used haste - then the rest of the party approached from the front. Fear only affected the guys he could see in front of him, and they ran away - then back with their remaining move presenting targets to him.

I backstabbed him 6 times with +2 frost daggers and he dropped.

 

In 3.5 DR was changed. Pluses no longer matter. If something has DR X/Magic, then any magical weapon will penetrate it.

In 3.5 a balor has DR 15/ Cold Iron and Good. Meaning you need a good-aligned (holy) weapon made of cold iron to bypass the DR. However, there is no cold iron weapon property in ToEE. For some reason, Troika coded the DR for demons as Cold or Good, so it can be bypassed with either cold weapons or holy weapons. Short of a temple.dll hack, there's no way to really fix it. (I mean, we could assign them different modifiers in the protos.tab, but cold iron and good isn't a valid modifier in the code. Plus, without a cold iron property in the game code, it would mean no way to bypass their DR.)

 

What in the world is cold iron? Is cold iron in D&D 3.5 something in weaponsmithing as cold fusion is to physics? Those people are plain and simple working too hard at trying to find new ways to change [overcomplicate] D&D.

 

The full term is "Cold Wrought Iron", i.e. iron that has not been heated to be worked into the form of whatever it is, whether that be manacles or a weapon or something else. It is often refered to as just Cold Iron.

 

Thank you CB (man, is that an awkward acronym) for the first explanation that explains anything!

*shakes CB's hand *

 

However, in D&D "Cold Iron" is a special material that's resistant to magic. Making magical cold iron weapons is more costly than making steel ones, but necessary if you want to kill demons.

I'm pretty sure cold iron was in 1st Edition. It disappeared in 2nd Ed, but I remember the 1E monster manual listing cold iron in the demon section.

 

From what people have written here, it reads like cold wrought iron is something the new D&D owners made up [maybe one of them read about it in a fantasy book that has no relation to D&D]. Cold iron as mentioned here sounds to me like it is not resistant to magic but rather is a type of iron ore with inherent magical properties that can overcome protection and enchantment magic.

It would seem to me that something like cold wrought iron weapons would have to be made using some kind of artifact like a magical transmutation cold forge operated by an archmage weaponsmith [the existence of cold fusion relative to D&D]. There would be just a few of these in prime material regions and outer planes.

It is beyond me as to why new D&D would have something ridiculous like that and do away with demons and devils are susceptible to cold type magic spells that penetrate their magic resistance and when they fail a save. (Actually, they'd do that to try to sell a new book and, more than just a new book, it's a rewritten book.)

[EDIT] I looked in the 1st Edition Monster Manual and DM Guide and did not find it. I would be more inclined to believe maybe you read that as an article in a Dragon issue or Dungeon issue.

 

To forge a sword, you would smelt iron ore [like what Allyx referred].

When ore is smelted--metal is taken beyond its kindling temperature to the melting temperature, the physical properties of the metal are taken to the extreme potential as the ore is heated to a liquid and impurities are removed. The actual forging of a sword is after the liquid metal has cooled in a die to its normal state and additional heat is used to flatten, mold, futher shape, surface, edge, and polish the weapon in to the final sword product.

If cold iron were to exist in D&D, cold iron would have to be from a special type of iron ore that is distinct from the vast majority of all iron ore in D&D with its own specific cold iron properties [meaning there'd have to be cold iron ore], not just iron forged in a special way that was obtained from common iron ore. Otherwise, cold iron in D&D would be just like cold fusion in our reality...and the new version D&D book rules re-writers blew it on this one.

[EDIT] Allyx was right about cold iron...kinda stupid...still stupid.

 

The idea of cold iron is taken from folklore.

Most Iron ore must be smelted to make usable iron, but there are veins of ore that have a very low amount of impurities, and can be used without smelting. Also, iron must not necessarily be forged in order to be worked into usable items. Iron, as compared to steel (which is an iron alloy), is a relatively soft metal, and can indeed be worked without using heat. It is much more difficult and time consuming to do so, but possible, and iron items made this way were considered to have special properties when used against the supernatural.

Perhaps these special properties, or the idea of the supernatural, were silly, but cold wrought iron actually existed in our world. This is fact, not something made up by the authors of D&D.

 

(my last word on this topic) IMO - I believe the whole idea of cold iron with respect to the new way in modern D&D of having to deal damage to those entities who rule certain planes of the D&D underworld is somewhere between silly and stupid. I am glad that ToEE has no real implementation for cold iron and that type of damage to those types of entities.

 

I respect your opinion that the folklore of our world is silly and/or stupid, Krunch. Yet the whole idea of the worlds in D&D was drawn from that very same folklore. In that folklore, cold wrought iron items, while being less effective against natural opponents that normally forged items, was supposedly more effective against supernatural opponents, like demons and fey, than normally forged items. It's not supposed to be logical, no more than casting spells seems logical in our modern world.