buoyancy

[Oryan77]

Is there information on buoyancy in any books?

If you can breath underwater, there's no water pressure, you are wearing full plate, and you are deep underwater, what are the rules for keeping yourself from sinking? I assume a swim check is needed & armor penalties are figured in?

To make this even more technical....say the person is in the Elemental Plane of Water where there is no up or down. Up or down is whatever direction the person swimming thinks it is (so it's still possible to sink).

 

[majustismp15]

A DC 6 swim check keeps you afloat, meaning anybody can stay afloat unless they are wearing armor or thrashing wildly as a jellyfish swims by (rolling a 1)...

As far as I know, there are no specific rules for buoyancy, so the low DC swim check is the "mechanic" for buoyancy...

 

[Pinotage]

There are no specific rules for bouyancy in any books, not even Stormwrack. There is a mention in the rules that if you are weighed down you can walk along the bottom. I think it's something like more than 16 lbs. for a Medium creature. For buoyancy I don't apply penalties to the Swim checks themselves. Instead I reduce the duration of the time you can spend swimming before suffering fatigue damage.

So, for example, as a very simple way, a character in no armor, light armor or a light load suffers fatigue damage every hour. A character in medium armor or a medium load suffers fatigue damage after 30 minutes. A character in heavy armor trying to swim suffers fatigue damage in 15 minutes. You can expand on that framework, but I found that works well, particularly because it reduces the number of checks needed to be made while swimming. It thus represents the fact that an overweight character can swim and remain in place, but just has to put a lot of energy into it and get tired quicker.

Pinotage