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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 2348010" data-attributes="member: 5890">Point out where I said that following the rules blindly was a great idea.There's a major difference between your example and this. In your example, allowing the rules to override common sense has a great cost to the game - the game ceases to be believable in the slightest (there's no logical reason why a nearby bucket of snails should make a man combat effective) and it ceases to be fun (because every combat starts with "I dump out my bucket of snails" followed by "I hit him 300 times"). The advantages of the ruling are merely that it is simple.In our case, the effects of the ruling are1) The party members occasionally get screwed because a spell will not work when the DM claims that a target has insufficient moisture to be affected. The DM will basically never suffer from his ruling, because the party are flesh-and-blood and will almost always take full damage.2) There will be arguments over whether a target has enough moisture, whether it needs that moisture to live etc etc. There will be arguments that targets that don't fall under the formal specification (ie - a blood golem, a flesh golem, zombies and even skeletons) should be affected by the spell.3) There is a very slight increase in the believability of the game. Since there are logical arguments as to WHY the spell should work on fire elementals, this is not the only way to achieve this.So - we've increase the rules complexity and screwed the players all for a slight and debatable increase in realism. Is it really worth it?Diplomacy needs no house rules. Except "the epic handbook can sod off". Which isn't really a house rule anyway. All you have to do is go "what would my best friend in the whole wide world do for me if he were in the situation of my target" and the skill has a very hard limit which can add to the game instead of destroying it.</blockquote>

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