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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6120867" data-attributes="member: 58197">I'm strongly in favor of having immunities and resistances used sparingly, but where appropriate.Some monsters ought to be impervious to normal attacks. Look at an iron golem. It's a twelve-foot colossus made of solid iron. If you whack that thing with an ordinary sword, it should not even notice. Or take a wraith; it's an incorporeal spirit! It can pass through solid objects, why does it care if you shoot arrows through it?But immunity should be granted only in cases where the fiction strongly supports it, and it should be made clear why each creature is immune. Suppose some clever player devises a way to lure the monster into the kill zone of a trebuchet and hit it with a 300-pound boulder. If the monster is a wraith, it couldn't care less. Its weapon immunity is a result of being an incorporeal being, and no amount of physical matter can affect it. But an iron golem's weapon immunity derives from being made of materials too durable for swords and arrows to harm. Getting slammed by 300 pounds of stone at high velocity is a whole other matter, and the golem should be severely damaged if not destroyed.I would go so far as to get rid of the "Immunities" section, and replace it with a custom-tailored special ability for each immune monster. Except for a few special cases (undead immunity to poison, for instance), total immunity to anything should be so rare that this presents no issue.Historically, I think D&D has been overly generous with resistances and immunities. For instance, there's no call for a red dragon to be immune to fire--resistant, sure, but immune? Just because it uses fire doesn't mean it's impervious to it, any more than a human boxer is impervious to being punched in the face. Extraplanar creatures often seem to have a slew of immunities and resistances for no apparent reason.</blockquote>

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