TwinBahamut said:
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.
If you remember, I wasn't the one who started this argument about humans being immune to water/carbon.
But still when no amount of water can harm humans by contact with its skin, why can't the same be true for fire and red dragons or fire elementals?
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.
Please, before continuing with this argument make a build of such a wizard in your mind.
It is nearly impossible to make a wizard or sorcerer whos only effective option in combat are fire spells because there simply aren't enough of those spells.
(@Mourn, hows your build coming along?)
The "best" chance for such a build would be a 5th level wizard whos only combat spells are burning hands, scorching flame and fireball and otherwise has only non combat spells in his spellbook. (Note, that just selecting only fire spells for this day does not count as he can change those spells easily after rest. To be really useless the spellbook must not contain any useful combat spell except fire ones).
And while this build would be rather useless against fire creatures (by now using a crossbow is a bad idea) imo this build is very unrealistic. And when you try this with any other energy type or level you won't succeed. Especially without splatbooks there simply are not enough non combat spells and attack spells of a single energy type to fill the whole spellbook (just spells for leveling) with them.
A wizard will always have a buff/debuf or battlefield control spell he could use in combat when his main attack spells don't work.
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.
Immunities are stylish, resistances are not (see the mentioned dragon entry)
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 I think that anything which keeps D&D lore consistent is better for worldbuilding than something which moves the game away from its roots.
Thats also why I think Mounrs "as long as it does not affect the encounter" argument very silly as that is the most inconsistent thing that can happen.
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.
As I said above, being useless against a single energy immunity is very hard to achieve. So hard that I think it is not possible to achieve by accident.
