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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 2335159" data-attributes="member: 13966">Hrmm......  Elementals are living creatures, but do not have the normal needs of a living creature, i.e. a fire elemental does not need to ingest any material or fluid to fuel its flames, so it doesn't really seem like it has any napalm-like fuel within that could be removed by Horrid Wilting.  Also, the descriptions of elementals describe them as being composed of one of the basic elements, and their descriptions don't really imply that they're a mix of elements; a fire elemental is pure fire from the fabric of the Elemental Plane of Fire.  Like a Flaming Sphere spell, it has a spongy sort of consistency and can thus be stricken by solid weapons, probably because it's some super-dense coalescence of flame.  And it's D&D, not science class, there doesn't need to be any scientific explanation for how a fire elemental of pure flame could somehow be semi-solid, because scientifically, a living fire elemental couldn't exist anyway, so it'd be stupid to say it needs a scientific explanation for how it burns perpetually.  Whatever elemental will creates elemental creatures from the fabric of the Inner Planes simply wills a chunk of the plane to tear away, and coalesce into a physical, somehow-living mass capable of staying alive and intact on most other planes.And not everything in the rules is going to be explained clear-cut for every possible situation; if a spell like Horrid Wilting says it removes moisture to harm the creature, then it quite obviously does not work on creatures with no moisture, such as Fire Elementals.  Just as a Vorpal sword does not work against all creatures, because not every living creature has a head, but the description of the Vorpal sword certainly doesn't contain a listing of every critter it won't affect, now does it?  No, it's implied by its very description.  Not every obscure possibility needs spelling out in full.It seems pretty stupid to me anyway that a wizard who knows that his spell works by extracting moisture would somehow get the idea that it may affect creatures that appear to be made of pure flame, just because they're somehow alive.  Even if fire elementals did somehow possess fragments of other elements in them (which their description seems to deny), the mage would need a pretty high Knowledge (The Planes) check to somehow know this obscure and horribly improbable possibility.In play, I'd have asked them why they were casting Horrid Wilting against fire elementals, and tell them their mage wouldn't really expect that to work, so they should reconsider their action.  I don't force players to accept a bad choice when it should have been obvious to their characters in-game that it would be a bad choice.  I'd have let the player change how he spent his action once he learned from the DM that Horrid Wilting doesn't affect fire elementals, because it would already seem like common sense to the wizard in-character.</blockquote>

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