Derren said:
I still want to hear an explanation how water hurts a human (no ingestion, no drowning. Just pure contact as this is how most energy spells work). as energy in the real world works completely different than in D&D I guess you won't find a example for it.
You will never hear such an explanation simply because it is an absurd construction. Of course contact of normal water to human skin will do nothing. However, that is completely irrelevant to this discussion, and I wonder why you keep bringing it up. Water contacting human skin is a case of a possibly dangerous element being kept back by the natural barriers meant to do exactly that. It is the same scenario as the hydrochloric acid being perfectly safe when sealed up by a person's stomach lining, or a dragon's harmless contact with the flames of its own fire breath in normal use. It is
supposed to be safe. It is when those barriers don't apply that dangerous contact can occur (such as water poisoning, stomach acid eroding teeth, or flame breath burning its wing accidentally), which is what everyone else has been saying all along.
Anyway, "air in the bloodstream" and similar things is not a valid argument in my opinion as it works on a complete different way than energy spell (messing up ones body functions).
It wasn't meant to be a direct comparison of damage to the body. It is meant to be a direct comparison to the idea that things can be both normal and dangerous to a creature, depending on method of contact. Attacking an analogy on some concept in which it is not supposed to be a direct comparison is a meaningless counterattack. My argument is still valid.
And I consider such real world mythology examples not valid. By now D&D has its own mythology and in that dragons can't hurt themselves with their breath weapon and fireballing fire elementals is a very bad idea.
So, as others have said, you are just going to refuse any preference other than your own, on the grounds that it is not your own preference? I guess all pretense that you wanted someone to make a logical argument is gone, now...
Regardless what you want or believe,
I want D&D to be able to replicate the stories and ideas of myth and legend. I don't want new editions of D&D to be nothing more than a cheap photocopy of what came before, made with desire to improve or ability to separate the good and bad ideas of the past.
As long as I share different beliefs than you regarding the game, you can't just pretend that your own biases are logical arguments and expect anyone to believe you or agree with you. You need to step up and start making good logical arguments yourself, which you have not yet done in regards to many of these points.
As I said, giving players who build bad PCs the illusion of usefulness. It doesn't matter if you do no damage at all or a small fraction of your normal damage. When you balance the game you have to assume that the players do full damage, especially as energy resistance is so easy to bypass.
I am against this trend of "every build, no matter how bad, must be viable". When a player builds a wizard which only uses one energy type (which is quite hard to do), fully knowing that there are fire immune creatures out there, then he deserves to suck when he encounters them.
The thing is, your entire argument is built upon the idea that the character I described, a Wizard focusing on fire attacks, was a "bad build". The thing is, in my argument I said nothing of the sort. It would be better to assume that he is 100% awesome and useful in every situation that does not involve fire resistance or immunity. In fact, lets assume that for several years of gameplay, he was fighting mostly things that are either not resistant to fire, weak to fire, or had some minor or avoidable resistance to fire (such as fire-resistant shields that can be disarmed). However, a set of events that could not possibly be predicted by that PC results in the party fighting a large series of Fire-Immune things, resulting in him going from 90-100% useful to less than 20% useful for reasons beyond his direct control. This is not a PC who was designed poorly, he is a well-built PC who is just being cheated by the listing under the enemy's "Immunities" column.
It is certainly possible to argue that the situation above is "fair" since he knew what he was getting into, but I say that is irrelevant. What is important is whether or not it is "fun", and I don't think it is. In games, fairness is a only one process to achieve the goal of a fun result, and subjecting the goal to the process would be silly.
Fire immunity is simply more stylish, traditional and (don't really know how to say this) better for world building as damaging fire creatures with fire (or fire creatures burning themselves) is very silly.
Well, I agree that creatures that use fire being immune to fire is seen often enough to be called "traditional", but I do not agree that it has a long-used 1-to-1 ratio of being so for you to make this argument. Your argument is based on the idea that
every fire-user should be immune to fire, when the reality is that only
some fire-using creatures in fiction and games are immune to fire, and a great many more are only resistant. It is far less than a 1-to-1 ratio.
Also, I think absolute resistances are actually crude and inelegant systems in terms of game design, so I don't agree with your claim that it is stylish.
Finally, I think the argument made so far based on real-world creatures, and my own argument based on myth and fiction, are perfectly good counters to your idea that fighting fire creatures with fire is silly. I think that anything which makes a game more closely resemble the real world and works of fiction is better for worldbuilding that something which moves the game away from those things.
And imo those things weight more than giving players with bad build the illusion that they actually contribute to the combat when in reality they would be more useful when they would use other abilities they have. That way they will never learn how to be effective combatants.
Again, this has nothing to do with having a bad build or not. Any
good build is going to have a weakness or two, otherwise the system becomes boring and team-dynamics get boring. Melee characters will have problems against flying things no matter how good they are, for example. This is much more about controlling the extent to which a good build is negatively affected by a weakness. Many people think that it should not involve making that character completely useless, especially when the weakness can logically extend to whole adventures and campaigns.
