How much damage overkill to reduce a body to just a skeleton with FIRE magic?

[BlueWitch]

Morbid question, but I gotta strange group lol

Well anyway, how much damage beyond 0 Hit Points wold you need to inflict on a corpse to turn it's skin, flesh and organs all to ash?

Do they need to be -10? -25? -50? -100? etc.

What do you think? (And yes, this was inspired by Mortal Kombat hahaha xD)

[False God]

Varies, so, I say -HP.

[Nizaris]

Well to cremate a body IRL it takes 1-3 hours, let's go with 2 hours or 1200 rounds. It take temperatures between 1400-1800 degrees Fahrenheit for cremation and for a good counterpoint in game terms we look to lava as lava ranges in temp from 1300-2200 degree. Damage ranges for lava are 2d6 for base exposure or 20d6 for immersion. Using 2d6 damage per round as a low range estimate of the burning damage for 1200 rounds gives you and average 8400 damage.

Since you're only trying to burn away the fleshy bits, I'd say a 10th of that?

Or just cast Disintegrate and call it a day

[BlueWitch]

Well to cremate a body IRL it takes 1-3 hours, let's go with 2 hours or 1200 rounds. It take temperatures between 1400-1800 degrees Fahrenheit for cremation and for a good counterpoint in game terms we look to lava as lava ranges in temp from 1300-2200 degree. Damage ranges for lava are 2d6 for base exposure or 20d6 for immersion. Using 2d6 damage per round as a low range estimate of the burning damage for 1200 rounds gives you and average 8400 damage.

Since you're only trying to burn away the fleshy bits, I'd say a 10th of that?

Or just cast Disintegrate and call it a day

Lmao yeah I guess just go with the Disintegrate on that one! Waiting 1200 Rounds would not be fun xD

[Mr Adventurer]

For a person, once they are dead, their corpse is an object, so their statistics in life are no longer really relevant. So how many HP does an object made of meat, the size of a person have? Don't forget that fire deals half damage to objects too.

[Asmotherion]

A fireball (even cast at minimum caster level) states that it melts low melting point metals and the highest of them is gold at 1064 C (1947.2 F)

i'd say something along the lines of "as long as the target dies outright (as oposed to being entitled death saves to stabilise) from fire damage that deals 5d6 (average 17 fire Damage) or more".

[BlueWitch]

A fireball (even cast at minimum caster level) states that it melts low melting point metals and the highest of them is gold at 1064 C (1947.2 F)

i'd say something along the lines of "as long as the target dies outright (as oposed to being entitled death saves to stabilise) from fire damage that deals 5d6 (average 17 fire Damage) or more".

Something like that would be pretty sexy. Just imagine a group of Ogre's getting blasted with a Widened Maximized Fireball. Then right after the explosion we see these giant charred skeletons all over the place! xD Flippin' BRUTAL!

MK Announcer: FATALITY!

[tiercel]

The closest thing to a RAW answer is presumably based on the object stats of cloth (2 hp/inch) and hide or leather (5hp/inch); presumably these would be limits on the hit points of flesh. (Also, presumably, hardness 0.)

If an average human torso is ~12inches in its narrowest dimension, 24-60hp, or 48-120 points of fire damage, not counting any damage necessary to burn through any clothing and/or armor.

In game, though, one probably will want something more ad hoc than computing exact sizes for any given creature; if one wants something based on what passes for D&D realism, then a corpse’s object hp (not counting anything it is wearing) presumably should be a simple function of its size category, e.g. ~36 hp for an M-sized creature, say, x2 for each size category larger and x1/2 for each size category smaller, roughly.

That said, more cinematic “damage which reduces a creature below -10 results in some sort of Ludicrous Gib” ruling is undoubtedly simpler and may work just fine.

[Mr Adventurer]

On a formula like that you'd probably want hp to be ×4 or ×8 per size category, rather than 2...

[OGDojo]

they way my group has always done it is:

If you can bring the creature down to -1/2 hp then it should be enough to destroy everything except the bones, if you want him left in ashes with nothing left at all, - total hp

and this goes for other things as well:
Bashing? turns them into a paste
Slashing? cuts them into tiny pieces
Piercing? breaks all the bones in its body or turns into a pin cushion

what im saying is if you do enough damage you can basically just come up with a story as to what you did to him to make him that way

i mean hell one of the necromancer characters that i played with turned a group of goblins into a blood fountain shrine to the god Nerull.

[ericgrau]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/exploratio...ashinganObject

Once a body is dead it's pretty much an object. I'd say no more than 4 inches of "leather" and half damage to objects (especially wet ones), so no more than 44 fire damage past -10. And probably less than that. But at least that gives you a ballpark. Dehydrated flesh is going to be a lot like leather but 1/6th as thick. But water does absorb a lot of fire energy, so you can't ignore it. Probably a lot more damage than that for a clean skeleton rather than simply burnt meat. Which is your real problem: almost no matter how much you torch meat, the black burnt crud doesn't really come off. What you have is going to be more like black skin stretched over a skeleton.

Or fudge it as many have suggested.

[Troacctid]

If you want to quantify it, I don't think it's an effect you'd get from HP loss. It sounds more like death by massive damage.

[BlueWitch]

If you want to quantify it, I don't think it's an effect you'd get from HP loss. It sounds more like death by massive damage.

I know Red Dragon's is a Supernatural affect. They have it to where you roll a Fortitude save or be turned to ash by their breath weapon.