Hi all! I'm making a Scribe wizard and have some questions about the ability to swap one type of damage for another.

The exact wording for this subclass is: "When you cast a wizard spell with a spell slot, you can temporarily replace its damage type with a type that appears in another spell in your spellbook, which magically alters the spell’s formula for this casting only. The latter spell must be of the same level as the spell slot you expend."

Now, what would happen if your wizard wants to swap the damage of one spell for another that does more than one type of damage? Let's use a level 1 Burning Hands spell swapped with a level 1 Ice Knife's damage type for an example. Burning Hands is 3d6 of pure fire damage but Ice Knife has both piercing damage and cold damage. Would the wizard get to pick between 3d6 piercing damage or 3d6 cold damage? Would the spell deal half of one type and half the other (say you roll 11 total damage and split it as 6 piercing and 5 cold)? Would it have to be random with the player needing to roll a d2/flip a coin to see which damage type comes out?

Now let's do the Ice Knife spell swapped with Burning Hands fire damage. Can the wizard choose to swap out both piercing and cold damage for fire damage or does it have to be either one or the other? Or would it be random with the player rolling a d3: 1 means the fire damage replaces piercing, 2 means fire replaces cold, and 3 means it replaces both.

Maybe an interesting solution would be to have the wizard make an Arcana check with a success meaning the damage swap goes however they want but a failure means the results are randomized.

And what about the Chromatic Orb spell? If a Scribe wizard has that level 1 spell in their spellbook, does that give them the ability to swap out any spell with their choice of acid, cold, fire, lightning, poison, or thunder damage? Or should that be randomized/skill checked? The wizard wouldn't even need the 50 gp diamond as a material component because they technically wouldn't be casting the spell, just using the damage type.

Or maybe it would be simpler to rule that spells with more than one damage type cannot be damage swapped. Seems rather restrictive but less of a headache. I'd appreciate anyone sharing their thoughts, especially if you've dealt with this before!

hi, i would say he can pick as it states "replace its damage type with a type that appears in another spell in your spell book" ice knife just happens to have 2 types to pick from. it says "a" type, not "the" type. hope this helps.

emphasis mine

You don't pick a spell and then take the damage type from it, you just take a damage type that appears in any of your spells. You can replace burning hands with either piercing or cold if you have ice knife, no Arcana checks or splits required. If you replace the damage in ice knife with fire, then both the piercing and cold damage would do fire damage instead. Chromatic orb would allow access to all of its listed damage types.