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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6679512" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, point, but it's worth looking at how that works.In real life, flint and steel is a mechanism for creating small molten drops of iron.  Even so, you can't really use it to set most things alight.  You can never light your average piece of wood by hitting it with sparks from flint and steel.  You'd have a hard time catching fire even most combustibles.  Which is why, in real life, if you are forced to resort to using flint and steel to start a fire, you by all means carry a special box of especially dry and especially combustible very fine and thin tinder.   Even so, it often takes a minute or more to start any sort of flame, and 'back in the day' tinder was often ignited with the aid of gunpowder (more on that later).The game doesn't have specific rules for how flint and steel works, other than mentioning that you can use it to light a torch.  It's one of those cases that the game is silent on and leaves it up to the DM's judgment.  Not that this is not the case with objects and non-lethal damage, which is an area the game isn't silent on.So what's going on here.  By the rules, nothing suggests that flint and steel causes either lethal or nonlethal fire damage.   But I think it would be extremely backwards to assume that because flint and steel can cause fires, this exception to the normal rules invalidates the normal rules.  On the contrary, I think the obvious thing is to assume that flint and steel have the special implied property 'causes sparks', and there are a few special materials that have the implied special property 'highly combustible' such that if you really wanted to describe them under the rules you'd write something like "[flaming oil/gunpowder/dry tender/tender cloth/toilet paper have the property 'highly combustible' that causes them to ignite when exposed to even the smallest spark."So, I might agree with you that 'non-lethal fire damage' was sufficient to ignite a pile of gun powder or a pool of oil or something similar for which it is reasonable to assume that the substance is far more sensitive to flame than even human skin, if I in fact believed non-lethal fire damage was reasonable in the first place.  But just because agree with you that there are special exceptions to the rules about how fire comes into being that are covered by things like flint and steel, doesn't mean that I agree with you that in general fire is spread just because something is exposed to fire either in the game, under the rules, or in reality.  Baring the 'highly combustible' substance exception, I'm not going to let PC's set something on fire unless they can do fire damage to it.</blockquote>

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