Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6882204" data-attributes="member: 177">Do you own a freezer?  Does it contain meat?  Does that meat bend much, or at all?  Have you ever tried to flex a joint on a frozen chicken leg?  That's what happens when a critter that isn't warm blooded spends significant time in conditions below freezing.  It is an ugly bag of mostly water, and will freeze hard as a rock.  How many frozen statues are good at swinging battleaxes?That is, again, unless we move over into magical or otherwise quite alien biology - but then once again we are admitting things don't work the way they do in our world, and that opens the door to other non-intuitive behavior.I think that the game-consideration does have impact on the fiction, yes.  This is why a given set of rules will be better at supporting some genres of fiction than others, because they more naturally support different narratives.One way is to go the way of the in-fiction meaning of saving throws and hit points... except that in the 5e fireball case, the saving throw is irrelevant.  If you are wearing it or using it, the fireball won't ignite it whether you make the save or not.  And, using a reading that many would consider common sense, it won't melt it either - the fireball does not *destroy* stuff you are wearing.If you move this to the in-fiction meaning of saving throws and hit point loss, you can also still eave yourself in the space of not being able to come up with a narration that fits the observed results and intuition all the time.  Saving throws and hit points are *abstract* and thus don't always lead comfortably to concrete narrations.This is why some folks go instead to having it covered by the world metaphysic - rather than try to find a narration of the savign throw and hit point loss that fits *real world* physics, we note that magic is a little wonky, and sometimes doesn't follow the real world version of things.  You lose some hit points, without subsidiary effects and move on.Which is to say, "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!"  If you think too hard about it, you *will* find holes, whateve ryour take on HP and saving throws.</blockquote>

Verification