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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6351709" data-attributes="member: 6775031">I started with 2E, under a rather process-sim-style Dungeonmaster, so I never even learned about the whole poison-that-deals-damage-but-never-actually-hit scenario until fairly recently, on these forums. Going back to some of those early Gygax quotes, it still seems out of touch with my experience as to how the game is actually played.The example that comes to mind for me is when the fighter is chained to a wall, and a dragon breathes fire on him. Gygax explained that it would be impossible to dodge the fire, if you were actually bound to that wall, so a successful saving throw vs breath weapon meant there was a weak link in the chain which the fighter subsequently broke before taking cover behind a nearby rock.Which honestly baffles me, because I can't imagine anyone actually running it that way. While the dragon was heading over, I'm sure the fighter was already struggling to break free, and any chance to escape would be tested before the dragon gets there. The chance to break free would be based on Strength (either a Strength check against a set DC, or a bend-bars/lift-gates check), rather than the chance to save against breath weapon. If the fighter didn't already escape before the dragon breathes fire, he would get a saving throw anyway to see if it can dodge the brunt of the blast (possibly with a penalty for being chained up), or maybe the DM would say that no save is possible, but you wouldn't get the actions somehow conflated together into a single event. Positioning and state-of-being-chained-up-or-not are too important to the state of the scenario to be left to the whims of how you describe other things that are going on.</blockquote>

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