"What I need is a ranged attack"

[Keltest]

So if you want to melt Silver, then you can just put loads of dry wood under your crucible, attach a lightning rod to it, and hope lightning catches it on fire because somehow fire which is caused by lightning is hotter than fire you light yourself. That makes loads of sense.

What are you even arguing here? That a misapplication of the rules of D&D is going to create scenarios that conflict with reality?

No kidding.

[littlebum2002]

What are you even arguing here? That a misapplication of the rules of D&D is going to create scenarios that conflict with reality?

No kidding.

No, that's obvious. I'm arguing that "puddle of molten metal" and "pile of ash" are items that do not need a Craft check to create.

[Peelee]

No, I'm referring to:


Which, as I've mentioned, is stupid because "puddle of molten metal" is not one of the things listed that needs the Craft skill to make.

[snip]

Unless you have Craft! Because then fire behaves differently! You light a fire under a bowl of silver, nothing happens! You level up in Craft, suddenly the silver begins to melt because...reasons!


I mean there are some dumb rules in D&D without having to make up your own. And "you need to make a skill check to use fire correctly" is about one of the dumbest I've ever heard.

Imean, it's not actually unreasonable. I'm starting to get into smithing, which means I'm doing lots of research before I even buy my first crucible. Plus, you can't jsut have any old fire. After a bit of lookin' into it, most fireplaces get between 810 K to 1088 K at their hottest, (and that 1088 K is pretty much an upper limit, so I don't expect most to get that hot), while silver melts at 1234 K; gonna need to know how to build the right fire to get that to melt. I don't think it's out of bounds to require a Craft check to see if you have the requisite skills and knowledge to know how hot you need a fire to get to melt a metal, know how to build such a fire to melt that metal, and know what tools/ have the tools required to collect that metal.

EDIT: I should point out gas fireplaces were the ones hitting the hotter ranges; wood fireplaces weren't even breaking 1000.

EDIT 2: Forgot to add, most home furnaces use coal as fuel, as coal burns at 2250 K You can melt quite a few metals with coal.

[littlebum2002]

Imean, it's not actually unreasonable. I'm starting to get into smithing, which means I'm doing lots of research before I even buy my first crucible. Plus, you can't jsut have any old fire. After a bit of lookin' into it, most fireplaces get between 810 K to 1088 K at their hottest, (and that 1088 K is pretty much an upper limit, so I don't expect most to get that hot), while silver melts at 1234 K; gonna need to know how to build the right fire to get that to melt. I don't think it's out of bounds to require a Craft check to see if you have the requisite skills and knowledge to know how hot you need a fire to get to melt a metal, know how to build such a fire to melt that metal, and know what tools/ have the tools required to collect that metal.

EDIT: I should point out gas fireplaces were the ones hitting the hotter ranges; wood fireplaces weren't even breaking 1000.

EDIT 2: Forgot to add, most home furnaces use coal as fuel, as coal burns at 2250 K You can melt quite a few metals with coal.

Saying "your fire needs to be hot enough to do what you need it to do" is one thing. That actually makes sense.

Saying "fire only bypasses Hardness if you pass a Craft Check" doesn't make any sense in any context. The Craft skill is designed to be used to create things, not to burn them.

[Keltest]

Saying "your fire needs to be hot enough to do what you need it to do" is one thing. That actually makes sense.

Saying "fire only bypasses Hardness if you pass a Craft Check" doesn't make any sense in any context. The Craft skill is designed to be used to create things, not to burn them.

I ask again: what are you trying to prove here? There is a rule that allows fire to bypass hardness on wood because wood is vulnerable to fire. You need a craft check to do the same for silver because just exposing it to any old fire is probably not going to be enough to significantly affect it.

[Knaight]

Pft - this is a fine approach to take if you want to.

But you might find your players trying to delibrately cause accidents to light up the forest to deal with the bandits camp you expected them to fight, or to try to argue that burning wood should generate smoke and thereby use Smoke Effects by burning wood at the entrance of a cave system to knock all the enemies in it unconsious (using emerging smoke to find other holes to plug), or similiar.

I encourage this sort of thing, and NPCs will also pull this sort of stuff against the players. There are reasonable limits on it (burning wood at the entrance of a cave system is only going to work for certain fairly minimal cave systems, and that's if nothing in the cave manages to remove or extinguish it), but it's generally done to some extent. If anything I'd rather it were done more often.

[littlebum2002]

OK, I'll concede the fact that melting Silver is difficult enough that some sort of check may be used to determine if you're smart enough to figure out how to make a fire that hot. Heck, I probably wouldn't be able to figure it out on my own.

However:

1) it has nothing to do with hardness. Hardness is about breaking something, not melting it. Either your fire is hot enough or it isn't, the hardness of the metal and the damage done by the fire don't factor into melt-ability, and

2) it certainly does not use the Craft skill.

A Craft skill is specifically focused on creating something. If nothing is created by the endeavor, it probably falls under the heading of a Profession skill.

So this would fall under Profession (Metallurgist) or something similar.

[Peelee]

Imean, technically, those are both wrong. If you want to get semantic about it. All metals are, by definition, malleable, and you can increase that malleability by, say, heating it. A very strong, very hard metal can become very soft when heated enough. A steel bar can turn into a steel noodle well before it melts. How that works into hardness in D&D? I'll burn that bridge when i come to it.

Also, melting is a phase change. In essence, you're taking a solid, and creating a liquid. You are not destroying anything (well, anything not abstract. You could be destroying "art," for instance). A lot of melting in home smithing, for instance, is taking scrap metal and melting them into molds for easy storage and future use, which would be creating ingots. Or, if you do something like lost wax casting, you are creating casts. Both of these are creation by melting, even if you ignore the phase change argument.

I hope soon to be making my own ingots.

[DaggerPen]

Imean, technically, those are both wrong. If you want to get semantic about it. All metals are, by definition, malleable, and you can increase that malleability by, say, heating it. A very strong, very hard metal can become very soft when heated enough. A steel bar can turn into a steel noodle well before it melts. How that works into hardness in D&D? I'll burn that bridge when i come to it.

Also, melting is a phase change. In essence, you're taking a solid, and creating a liquid. You are not destroying anything (well, anything not abstract. You could be destroying "art," for instance). A lot of melting in home smithing, for instance, is taking scrap metal and melting them into molds for easy storage and future use, which would be creating ingots. Or, if you do something like lost wax casting, you are creating casts. Both of these are creation by melting, even if you ignore the phase change argument.

I hope soon to be making my own ingots.

Technically speaking, if you take a metal bar to a phylactery, you're not actually destroying the metal of the phylactery, just reshaping it into several metal pieces

However, yeah, applying hardness here is ludicrous. Hardness is specifically meant to represent damage under certain circumstances, not any time you want to melt metal ever.

[Conradine]

Mabye he could apply a light, but solid, steel chain to his sword's hilt and tie it to his armour's bracelet.
Then he could throw the sword and get it back more or less safely. He would just have to take a feat for throwing melee weapons.