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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6882241" data-attributes="member: 42582">My freezer is meat-free, but I'm familiar with the phenomenon.But frost giants are immune to cold. Is this because their blood is warm, or is it independent of their bloodedness. At least some depictions of frost giants (and even moreso the 4e frost titans) give the impression that they are somewhat ice-tacular all the way down.Sure, but frost giants aren't canonically described as being fleshy mammals, are they?Whereas the product of a fireball is canonically described as flame, of the same sort as a dragon's breath, which canonically is fire all the way down.Well, that is being discussed in another thread!For me, this is the crux. (That's not to say it is, or should be, the crux for everyone.) I think that avoiding wonky narration is a pretty high priority.There are corner cases - for instance, someone chained to immovable rods "floating" in the plane of vacuum (no crevices to duck into, no possibility of dodging, etc) - but I have tended to find that they are few and far between.This is not correct. I'm not that interested in whether or not fireball can be used to destroy an enemy's gear or equipment - that's more of a side-issue that is brought into play by what I am interested in. And that is the relationship between the mechanics and the fiction, which I think (again, others may not) is fundamental to the difference between a RPG and a boardgame (or CCG, videogame, etc).This is something that I've been interested in, and posting about, for some time. (For instance, in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?308488-In-Defense-of-the-Theory-of-Dissociated-Mechanics/page5&p=5636590&viewfull=1#post5636590" target="_blank">this post</a> from mid-2011 I observed that "a power with the fire keyword, that deals fire damage, can set fire to a tree. A power with the weapon keyword, that deals only untyped damage, cannot set fire to a tree. I think this is fairly obvious".)I was surprised to see the contrary view being very strongly supported by some posters in recent threads, and hence am curious to see how far it extends. Although I was talking about 4e and those posters are talking about 5e, I don't see that the two games are noticeably different in this particular respect.As far as the damaging of equipment is concerned, as I've already posted I favour Gygaxian hit points: as long as the character still has hit points left then s/he took only a nick or a scratch at worst, and hence whatever objects s/he is carrying or wearing will be no worse than lightly singed. But if someone has been burned to death by a fireball, then I think narrating that their clothes, or scrolls, or whatever are charred - and their ice pendants melted - is fair game.</blockquote>

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