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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4023182" data-attributes="member: 4937">Again, let me turn around the question.What if the problem isn't with how many hit points the high level characters have, but with the rules for lava, tanks, and missiles?Most of the rules for lava seem to think that its about as hot as an oven, and seem to have no understanding of the difference between temperature and heat.  For that matter, they seem to think that lava has the vicosity of water and the density of vegetable oil.  Do you know how much force it would take to submerge someone in lava?Once again, if it is not enough to melt the stone wall and turn the tree into a torch from a distance of 30', why should it only do 10d6 damage?  Unless of course, you really think it is the intention of the designer to describe a universe where lava isn't that hot and falling doesn't involve alot of energy?  Instead, in both the case of lava and falling, I think that at some early point in the game a designer (or designers, since I can give multiple instances actually) wanted to use the flavor of a deep pit or a pool of lava and assigned some damage level to that hazard suitable for the level of characters in the adventure without regard to any sort of rules consistancy.  And since setting those precedents, the damage done by those hazards hasn't really changed even though modern PC's may have hitpoints several times higher than the PC's had at the time the original numbers where assigned.  So not only did the original numbers come about to challege say 7th level PC's, but the relative damage from the hazard has gone down over time to the point where 20d6 damage even isn't almost certainly lethal.And in fact its worse than that, since early descriptions of lava often involved not 10d6 or 20d6 (or whatever) damage per round, but 10d6 or 20d6 damage per segment - which means the actual damage then is 10 times the current rate/action (and involved doing as a percentage 2 or 3 times as much damage to the PC).  So that now we are a state were we can talk about how much damage lava does in terms of how little it actually does and how survivable it actually is, whereas initially quite the opposite was probably intended.Incidently, the reason for the 'damage per segment' rules was probably so that fire resistance wouldn't need a ridiculously high number to provide protection from the heat.My point being that even to the extent that the original numbers were based on some attempt to simulate lava, they certainly aren't now attempting to do that.UPDATE: One last thing, the best way to use hit points is not to say, 'You are submerged in lava, take 20d20 damage' and then find out if that kills the character.  The best way is to roll 20d20 damage, find out of that kills the character, and if it doesn't explain it in some fashion like, 'You fortunately fall onto a large chunk of floating rock, but its still hotter than a forge here - take 217 damage.'</blockquote>

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