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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6680209" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well no.  It won't work with just 'any' stone.  But it would probably work with any quartz derivative that took a hard edge.  The reason that flint is used as opposed to say chalcedony or jasper, is that flint is far less rare and valuable.  However, I believe that the Japanese - lacking good access to flint - successfully used agate in their flintlock muskets.It does both.  The core of those sparks are little tiny droplets of molten iron.  That iron, because of its high temperature and high surface area, burns.Which is I think why I said, "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."  Nonetheless, while you can light charcloth almost instantly once you get out the flint and steel, place the cloth on the flint, and strike it, what you'll initially get is a little hair thin red flame working its way across the char cloth.  You then have to transfer that flame from the char cloth to increasingly larger tinder and/or kindling by blowing on it while in contact with the tinder and carefully nurturing the flames until they are hot enough to sustain their own draft.  Or to put this in game terms, that spark on the cloth as of yet still isn't doing even 1 point of fire damage.  As such, in game terms, it's not yet 'burning'.  (If you've ever played with fire and newsprint, you've probably observed that at very low temperature the fire appears to creep across the face of the paper without ever producing a flame.  This is because it's not volatilizing the paper fast enough and producing enough heat to create a vapor column, which means its poorly mixing the fuel with oxygen and achieving only very partial combustion.  Often at this stage the ink even remains visible in the burnt paper.  At this stage, a fire is very vulnerable to going out spontaneously, and this is particularly true if you has less than ideal tinder or kindling.)  So I stand by my claim that starting a fire with flint and steel is a lengthy process.I would consider tinder as dry material with zero hardness vs. fire.  I would also still insist that under the normal rules, you'd need to do at least 1 point of fire damage to the tinder to light it.  Any other expectation requires either DM fiat or special exceptions in the rules.We are actually somewhat in agreement on this.  The sparks have to be 'lethal' damage.  The main thing I disagree with is that I don't think there is any good justification for 'nonlethal' energy damage in the first place, so all fire damage is 'lethal' in my game and this argument doesn't occur.  So to the extent that I think sparks inflict fire damage at all or could inflict fire damage, it would IMO be lethal damage in all cases.My argument is basically that if you disagree, and suggest that there is non-lethal fire damage, you have no basis for saying that the sparks are not non-lethal damage.  If the sparks aren't non-lethal damage, then you have no physical representation of nonlethal fire, since the smallest least damaging observable fire is according to you 'lethal' and everything more intense and damaging should be more lethal and not less.  The better ruling IMO would to be suggest that 'sparks' are not damage at all - lethal or otherwise - because they do zero damage, and that the ability of a spark to cause a fire in certain limited circumstances has nothing to do with their ability to inflict damage at all but is an intrinsic product of their 'sparkiness'.  Sparks would fall in their own class of thing.This the nerdiest nerd argument I've had in a very long time.  And that's saying something in my case.</blockquote>

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