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Brewing potions is brewing potions. It has the same relation to alchemy that crafting magic arms and armor does to making the arms and armor in the first place, but making liquids in a holder is NOT exclusive to alchemy. A cook, brewer, and herbalist could all do the same thing, without any use...

Yeah, but they were making medicine and stuff, not practicing chemistry and making explosives. It's a whole different world of thought and style.

The vast majority of monsters are not immune to gunpowder. that's a fact. The vast number by type are also not going to USE gunpowder, unless you're playing a primary-humanoids campaigns. In short, you're now talking about changing the monsters so gunpowder is useless as a fix... Then suddenly...

As I just quoted, that's herblore, which usually falls under the heal skill, not alchemy, which is a whole higher order of business.

No, a shaman's shtick would be herb lore. That's a huge difference from true alchemy, falling under the healer shtick for the most part.

You're answering my posts in a vacuum, not in the context to which I'm replying to Nevin. You just changed my reply to his Treants suddenly being able to bat kegs out of the air to a statement that the kegs couldn't be thrown in the first place? The Heck? Substituting fireballs wasn't a...

Now there's a nice summation, and clearly shows the levels of elves Gygax drew from. He just went more with the faerie model then the angel/sidhe model.

And loses all their magical gear and gold to DM Fiat. No, no, the PC's won't see it for the asshattery it is, not at all. Especially when they've taken precautions with it and the DM says it happens anyways, pretends to roll a die that can't miss, and so it does. But if they didn't use...

Or theives guilds captures a mage/soldier, sends in a disguised rogue, sets off a bomb, and BOOM, there goes your spellbook/barracks of troops, no bunker buster needed. Nothing to do with gunpowder, moving along...

You are once again missing the forest for the trees. A barbaric savage orc tribe won't have alchemists because they are barbaric savages without education, the same way they won't have a chemist or physicist or likely a wizard. I used BARBARIC and SAVAGE for a reason. Alchemy is a civilized...

Be nice. The PC's won't have that big an arsenal of stuff, and stupid people messing with explosives are not the same as decent level PC's with skill ranks in the stuff taking precautions. The PC's ARE the experts. Such explosions are notable for their rarity and surprising effect when they do...

And you may or may not have experienced this, but from the player's side, this comes across as DM Fiat asshattery. "Oh, your gunpowder is missing! It got stolen!" "Oh, it's raining today, your gunpowder is wet and can't be used!" "Oh, your kegs all swelled up and sprang leaks, and its unusable."...

They can't do the same thing because a) a huge portion of your foes are not intelligent, they are literally monsters... b) a huge portion of your foes don't have access to alchemy labs... c) a huge portion of your foes don't have the alchemy skill... d) they may or may not have the money to...

It's a bit ambiguous, but his original stories are as much about fairies as elves in their derivation. Peter Jackson made them taller and superior to men, but it's intimated that humans are actually taller then the average elf after being created. They were described as fair, and pretty sure...

it's trivializing, fyi. It matters when fight after fight becomes trivial, and things lose their challenge. You may not have encountered such an effect yet. Once it happens, it's a death knell to a campaign. So, he's trying to head it off before it does. You'd get the same thing with a power...

The one where making black powder requires an alchemy check, which I believe is the core rules in Pathfinder/3e. Not certain on 4/5e, but it seems it's part of the OP's world.

Because it's called black powder, and it works similar to gunpowder, so people are using the terms interchangeably?

What massive alchemical factory. they have a lab and mix up amounts as they go, making up a few kegs. Then for cheapsies, they start blowing stuff up that was supposed to be a good hard fight, trivializing encounters repeatedly, and start breaking the structure of the setting as suddenly there's...

You know, it is an alchemy check to make the stuff, NOT a chemistry check, right? :)

It's an alchemical item. They can make it for themselves. That's one of the problems with this. Clever things are nice. Breaking a campaign is not. The whole thing is that this has to be carefully managed, or it DOES break a campaign. In most cases, it is much easier simply not to allow black...