Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 163 - Fire - Realism vs Fun

Episode Date: February 19, 2023

Answering a question posed by Adrian from the Age of Adventure RPG, how do you find the balance between realism and fun.  His table devolved into lengthy debates involving fire, oil flammability, and fire spread mechanics. Tune in to the episode that probably put Jeremy on a federal government watch list. #dnd #pathfinder #dungeonsanddragons  #realism #fun  Resources: Resigned:  How to Know When It’s Time to Go:    http://markstretton.blogspot.com/2017/11/fire-arrows-what-can-they-set-on-fire.html

This week on the Taking 20 Podcast. Should DMs get lost in this world to properly adjudicate the physics of flaming arrows in their game world? Not unless you really want to. To borrow a phrase from a former co-worker, sometimes the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. My friends who hate natural ones, thank you for listening to the Taking 20 podcast, episode 163, Fire, the balance between fun and realism. I want to thank this week's sponsor, chiropractors. I didn't think that a chiropractor could correct my horrible posture, but I stand corrected.

Did you know that we have a coffee? ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast Questions posed with the donation as low as $5 float to the top of the line, usually get answered quickly via a message, and if it merits an episode, published within a month or so. This podcast is kind of expensive to keep going, and I keep my goals to the minimum needed to keep it going, so if you do enjoy it, please consider donating just a little to keep it alive. I'd like to thank Adrian from the Age of Adventure RPG for the topic suggestion

for today's episode. They reached out to me on Facebook and asked me to do an episode on fire in tabletop RPGs. Catching fire is all oil flammable, fire damage, intensity, escalation, dousing it, fire spread, tortures as weapons, and so on and so on and so on. He said that the question was spurred by a recent game session in a modern RPG setting where the game went completely off the rails after a scene that involved lantern oil and diesel fuel led to an extended discussion on game rules versus real world facts. While this topic is certainly more niche than I usually cover, the more I thought about it, the more interesting the topic seemed,

especially when I branched out to the idea of realism in general at the gaming table. Also, they didn't ask me to plug their product, but the one-page Age of Adventure RPG is available over at DriveThruRPG.com, and at least as of this recording, was priced at pay-what-you-want. Give it a look-see, and maybe you'd be interested in a little bit of a rules-lighter game system. Let me start this episode by saying something for the record right off the jump. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about fire in the real world. Do not, do not, do not try to play with fire at home, for the love of everything good and holy.

I'm going to be speaking in generalities in the real world, and I don't want you doing anything stupid and making your house explode. Also, no testing the theories that I'm going to put out. I'm basing them off my cybersecurity background and undergraduate degree in physics. So promise me you won't play with matches, okay? Promise? Okay. So promise me you won't play with matches, okay? Promise?

Okay. The way that fire or any other edge case is handled at the gaming table is always up to the DM or GM. Players can make suggestions, but it's ultimately the DM's call. If he says that your fire spell catches the ship on fire, congratulations, the ship is now on fire. You can make your case that it shouldn't be, but the DM is the adjudicator of the rules and can even rule that something happens contrary to a rulebook if they like. Remember, the books contain guidelines and they're not wholly writ. If the GM wants to go a different way with it, so be it. That's the heart of what a DM or GM fiat really means. They make the ruling. For example, one of my GMs, Tom Robinson, once ruled that one of my

fireball spells caught a tree on fire. I simply said I didn't know that fireballs could actually catch objects on fire because rules as written, they don't. But he said it did. Okay, so it did. No skin off my nose. My druid, who just caught a tree on fire, not good, put the fire out as quickly as she could and buried a couple of orcs at the base of the tree to give the tree some nourishment as the orcs began to decay. That was my character's apology to the tree. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry I burned your leaves, Mr. Tree. Oh, do you like orcs? I bet you do. I bet you do like orcs. Here you go. Here's a couple of nice orcs to eat.

I'm just going to put them right here. Please don't hate me. You go, here's a couple of nice orcs to eat. I'm just going to put them right here. Please don't hate me. I didn't throw a fit and say, no, it doesn't catch fire and start pulling out rule books to back up my position. No good comes from that. Even if I'm right, I'm an asshole in front of the other players and the GM. GM made the call on what happened and the adventure continued.

The best course of action for everyone, accept the ruling and move on. If you're with a group that the DM consistently rules in ways that take you out of the fun, yeah, find you a different group. By the way, speaking of my GM, Tom Robinson, I'm going to be interviewing him in the near future because he has an amazing adventure coming out that I cannot wait to introduce you to. It's for Pathfinder 2nd Edition and it looks like so much fun. I guarantee you'll have some good advice for new DMs and GMs out there, and his voice is simply magnificent. He needs to show it off more, and he needs to come on this podcast more often. But more to come on that in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. Back to the question Adrian asked, though. They were running a modern game,

so they began discussing things like catching fire. Is all oil flammable? How intense does fire damage get? How do you put it out once it starts? What about flame arrows? As I mentioned earlier, there's nothing wrong with a good-spirited debate about what would happen in the real world. But RPG systems aren't the real world. Even ones that are set in a world similar to our own, like D20 Modern, Delta Green, and Age of Adventure can be, the rules are an abstracted version of reality that is simplified for gaming purposes. Heck, in most games, as characters level up, they gain more and more hit points, for example, without expressly explaining why. It's not like they're becoming beefier versions of humans or dwarves or elves where an arrow to the eye would no longer be lethal.

By the way, there's a lot more I could say about that, so I'm going to stop the conversation here, but just know that hit points don't necessarily mean more beef on a character. Hit points are always an approximation of survivability. Similarly, the fire rules are abstracted for ease of use at the gaming table. For example, in 5th edition and Pathfinder 2nd edition, wielding a torch as a weapon causes one point of fire damage if you hit with it and has no chance of catching you on fire, rules as written. And that makes sense.

If you're wearing armor and a normal, non-magical fire is pushed against it, it's not going to burn. Could robes burn? Sure, but it's not going to be like the movies, where it seems like clothing goes up like it's made of matches soaked in gasoline. We're not walking around covered in lamp oil all the time. Or maybe you are. I'm not going to kink shame. You do you, but just stay away from the wood-burning fireplace. That being said, nearly every game system I've ever seen gives tremendous leeway to the DM to make a decision for particular sets of circumstances.

If a character pushes a torch against an NPC, I'm not going to let the PC set them on fire. However, if that PC just crawled out of a vat of lamp oil, yeah, alright, I'm going to give them a save to see if they catch fire with DC appropriate to the level of the NPC in the adventure. Now, in the real world, fire requires three things to live. Oxygen, fuel, and heat. Take away any one of these three things and fire dies. Every fire suppression system in the world, whether they are water, which absorbs heat as it turns to vapor, carbon dioxide, which robs a fire of oxygen, or dry agents like sodium bicarbonate, monoamodium phosphate, or dry agents like sodium bicarbonate, monoamodium phosphate, NOVEC, or FM200 work to remove one or more of these three things that fire needs to live. Fire, of course, produces heat, which tends to rise in confined spaces.

Depending on the fuel, fire also produces smoke, which also tends to rise in confined spaces. Solid objects tend to act as fire stops or at least fire speed bumps to slow down the spread. This isn't a how to save your life podcast, but I want to put all this out there and say if you're trapped in a burning building in real life, take the following advice from the American Red Cross. If you know how to safely operate a fire extinguisher and the fire is small, do that. But if you're all in doubt, don't. Two, call emergency services. 911, 999, 112, 10-111, whatever it is where you live. Get out of the building and stay out of the building,

yelling fire as you leave. Check door handles before you open the door. If the handles are warm, don't open it. If you do go through doors, close them behind you if it's safe to do so. Get low, stay low. And if you're trapped in a room, leave the door closed, open a window, and wave either a flashlight or something brightly colored so emergency services can find you easier.

Lastly, if you're set on fire for any reason, stop what you're doing, drop to the ground, and roll back and forth or roll around to try to smother the flames. Running only makes the fire continue to burn. And as an aside, if your local fire department offers a two-hour course on how to use a fire extinguisher, take it. It's not that much time and the knowledge you learn may save a life someday. I'm sorry for that long aside. Hopefully none of you will ever need this information, but as I was doing this episode on fire, I really wanted to put this information out there. Back to the Age of Adventure RPG.

It's a game set in modern or near-modern times. So they asked a question, is all oil flammable? Now, I'm not going to be pedantic and say, well, everything is flammable under the right conditions. So I'm going to assume you mean in a normal environment, atmosphere, pressure, etc. The answer is, unfortunately, it depends. In the real world, diesel fuel, for example, requires sustained flame or intense pressure to ignite. Under normal circumstances, it has a flash point, so it'll catch fire between 37 and

82 degrees Celsius or 100 and 180 Fahrenheit. So per OSHA standards, diesel is considered flammable. But it's not as flammable as, say, traditional gasoline, which has a flashpoint of minus 43 degrees Celsius or minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit. There's a reason they don't want you smoking while filling your car's gas tank with unleaded gasoline. Another flammable liquid, kerosene's flashpoint, is 38 to 52 degrees Celsius, 100 to 125 degrees Fahrenheit. The reason diesel and kerosene vary so widely is because there are different types of these substances. In the U.S., we have type 1, 2, and 4 diesel and 1K and 2K kerosene. Never mind lamp oil, fuel oil, raw petroleum, ethylene glycol,

methanol, freon, conventional or synthetic engine oil, etc., etc., etc. Every fluid has a different ignite point, ambient temperature, and combustibility value, meaning how easily does it go boom. Now here's where I could go into an extended dissertation talking about the fact that most liquids don't actually burn as a liquid. They evaporate into a flammable vapor, and that's what ignites. But I'm getting way into the physics weeds at this point. There's some interesting facts, but not a lot of them gaming-related, that could be mined from this research.

So if you're really interested, start at Wikipedia and go from there. Speaking of research, by the way, I'm pretty sure my Google search history this week has sent my name to some terrorist watch group. by the way. I'm pretty sure my Google search history this week has sent my name to some terrorist watch group. Searching for things like flashpoint of various fuels and oils, someone's probably watching my house with a satellite. Well, law enforcement people, if you're listening to this podcast right now, you really should try tabletop role-playing games one of these days. Come on by to taking20podcast.com, send me a line. I'd be happy to introduce you to this wonderful hobby. Also, while we're on the topic of realism, a lot of times oils in movies explode because it looks cool.

And by the way, GMs, if you want to rule that that's what happens when you toss a flaming arrow into a 55-gallon drum of boat fuel, do it. Let's John Woo this shit and end the encounter with the characters walking towards the camera as the boat explodes blurry in the background. But as I said earlier, if the DM rules that the fuel doesn't ignite, then it didn't ignite. While we're at it, inappropriate of nothing, but it just popped into my head. In the movies, people regularly shoot blocks of C4 or hit them with hammers and make them explode, but I don't think it works that way. C4 is actually really stable, and you can set it on

fire and it won't necessarily explode. It'll give off toxic vapors that can kill you that way, but you know, hey, variety is the spice of life. You see where I'm going with this concept of realism? Sometimes being more realistic doesn't necessarily make the game more fun. It just spawns lengthy debates on the merits of one answer or another. A gasoline fire, for example, burns at a temperature up to 2,000 degrees Celsius, while diesel fuel burns it up to 2,500. Does that mean that you should make diesel fires do more damage than regular fires do? I mean, you could, but I think the difference is largely academic, since most people don't like to be at 2,000 degrees Celsius, much less 2,500.

I think both are just equally lethal. However, let's take something you see in the movies a lot, especially by bad guys. Shooting a flaming arrow at a straw or thatch roof. In researching this, it sent me down a deep, deep rabbit hole about archery in medieval times, types of arrows used, etc. deep rabbit hole about archery in medieval times, types of arrows used, etc. And I wound up at a blog about war bow archery called markstretton.blogspot.com where they did a number of tests on different types of fire, igniters, against a dry hay bale, and the results are actually kind of interesting. I'll put a link in the resources.

Go check that out if you want to lose yourself in the world of flaming arrows and how effective or not they really are. Should DMs get lost in this world to properly adjud in the world of flaming arrows and how effective or not they really are. Should DMs get lost in this world to properly adjudicate the physics of flaming arrows in their game world? Not unless you really want to. DMs, we got enough shit to do. My recommendation would be to approximate or hand wave a lot of that shit and assume that blacksmiths and fletchers and bowyers

and other craftspeople have figured out much of this stuff on their own, and it's baked into the gaming system somehow. If you buy flaming arrows, they have a special arrowhead on them to keep the flame going, make them stick, and make it easier to catch things on fire. If characters don't have an arrow designed to hold a flame, assuming that's a separate thing in your game and you want to create one with chewing gum, bailing wire, prayer, and a little bit of oil, then give the character a minus to hit with the arrow and go to town. Same with fire and fire spread. Both Pathfinder 2e and 5e have rough, rough approximations of how fire spreads. In the real world, it would depend on wind and material and ambient air temperature

and about a dozen other factors. To tell you how old I am, when I was in college, I had to write a computer program that calculated fire spread rates based on various values. In Fortran. Bad old days. God, that's awful. Give me Python and JavaScript. Not as lightweight, but man, way easier. When it comes to realism, to borrow a phrase from a former co-worker, sometimes the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. I've used fire as an example, but let's talk ammunition types used in modern firearms. Off the top of my head, there are standard bullets, hollow point, different types of shots like buckshot, birdshot, slugs, full metal jacket,

and total metal jacket, which are different. There are different loads of gunpowder, and total metal jacket, which are different. There are different loads of gunpowder, different ways of manufacturing, and so forth. As a DM, if your game system doesn't provide rules for it, do you really want to sit down and come up with different stats for each ammunition type? If you want to, great, go to town. But I sure as heck don't. Even simple firearms like cannons used in pirate campaigns, if you want to get stupidly realistic, had different types of ammunition you could load. Ball shot, grape shot,

chain shot, angel shot, canister shot, cartouches, bombs, etc. You can get so lost in trying to make things realistic that it just sucks the fun out of the table as your players pour over multiple tables trying to determine if a canister shot damage is worth the additional cost. My advice, DMs and GMs, keep it simple. If something makes absolutely no sense, talk about it, but the GM, by very nature of holding that position at the table, they get the last word. GMs, listen to the arguments of the players, consider them, but keep the game moving. Rather than losing an hour of gaming time to determine whether that canister of benzene would explode, make your ruling, and if there's a disagreement, offer to discuss it more between sessions or

during break. Anyway, when you get to the subject of fire, once you get past torches, the rules do vary widely game system to game system. In 5th edition, for example, a pool of oil on fire does a consistent 5 points of damage to a character. The assumption is that this is some sort of flammable oil like lamp oil, whale oil, something similar. Meanwhile, those types of oils in Pathfinder 2e, you can throw at a target, and if you hit it and you throw a torch at the creature afterwards, it's a DC 10 flat check to ignite, so it's not automatic, which gives you about a 55% chance if you're doing the math.

In another example, page 249 of the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide, just touching lava causes 6d6 fire damage. That's 6d6, not 66. Wading into it, why would you do that, causes 10d10 damage, and if you're immersed in it, it's 18d10 damage per round, averaging about 100 hit points of damage every 6 seconds. Ouch. Hope you have that backup character,

because if you go the way of Gollum, I doubt they're recovering your body. Real world? We can't even get close to it. Scientists have to wear protective suits to get even remotely close to lava because the heat coming off of it is so high. But 5e rules as written, there's not a default you take X amount of damage within Y feet of molten lava. Again, the game rules are abstracted from reality to make it easier to run. Could your DM home rule something that says, okay, anything within 10 feet of lava takes 2d6 fire damage?

Sure, even if that's not rules as written. And in Pathfinder, by the way, the rules for lava get even a little more abstracted. In Pathfinder 1st edition, it says that lava does 2d6 points per round of exposure and 20d6 if you fall in. They don't differentiate between it being up to your waist versus fully submerged. 2nd edition says that being in lava causes, quote, massive damage, which is a category of damage between 16 and 24d6. There's also a trap, by the way, called a lava flume tube.

In that trap, any character starting their turn in lava takes 8d6 damage and is immobilized as the lava begins to harden around them. These are all approximations, because if you actually fell into lava, chances are you're going to float. For the love of everything good and holy, do not go test this, but lava is about three times denser than our bodies are. As you know, denser liquids sink and lighter fluids float, which we are. You'd probably float along bursting into flames along the way, which is really not my preferred way to go. Here I am somewhere around 20 minutes in and I haven't even talked about

magical fire. My general rule of thumb here is that all things being equal, unless the fire spell expressly states that they set or have a chance to set things on fire, then they don't. In 5th edition, for example, fire bolt and create bonfire expressly state they catch items on fire, then they don't. In 5th edition, for example, Firebolt and Create Bonfire expressly state they catch items on fire, but Scorching Ray, Wall of Fire, and Fireball do not. Again, so rules as written, I would say these spells don't have a chance of setting things on fire. That doesn't mean it would be impossible for Scorching Ray to set something ablaze. That is entirely up to the DM. I might let the sorcerer like the community bonfire with something like, oh, I don't know, Scorching Ray, because it looks

cool. But Jeremy, why don't spells like Wall of Fire set things on fire that pass through it? Because remember, fire is a damage type, not just a state of being. Wall of Fire states it does fire damage, but that's not the same as being on fire. It's damage from the heat. Being in extreme heat can cause fire damage due to an ambient temperature but not set you on fire. Those are two very different things. Things feel hot long before they would actually set you ablaze. Skin for example tends to not catch fire. I'm sure there's a temperature that does because that's how crematoriums work, but I'm not adding that query to my search history.

I'm ugly, but I'm still way too pretty to go to prison. My hands are so soft. Even at temperatures too low to cause you to combust, your skin will still burn, blister, and blacken. Again, do not test this. In college, I had a sunburn so bad that it formed blisters on top of a bad case of poison ivy. Itching and aching and big puffy blisters all over my arms. Looking at them made the dermatologist nurse visibly flinch. I'll just say that the groundskeeper

on the golf course I worked at for one summer had a mean sense of humor when he told me to go clear the weeds out of that ditch that was loaded with poison ivy. Wow, I have wandered way out into the weeds, just like I did in that summer. Game systems by their very nature are approximations of reality, and there are an ocean of what I call edge cases that the system leaves up to the DM to figure out. This is true of 5th edition and Pathfinder that have hundreds of pages of rules and even the Age of Adventure RPG where all the rules fit on a single page. My advice to DMs is to make the best ruling that you can to keep the game moving, but be open to discussing it more on break or between sessions. Players, if you disagree with

a DM, talk to them about it, but once the ruling is made, save any further comments for when the game is not being played. With a little mutual respect and just a pinch of realism, I bet you and your entire table will have fun doing it. Adrian, I hope this helped answer your question. It was very specific, and I hope this helps. Best of luck with the Age of Adventure RPG system. Everyone, if you haven't already,

take a minute to subscribe and rate the podcast wherever you found it. This feeds information back into the recommendation algorithm and hopefully will help others find the podcast as well. Tune in next week when, since I've talked about deities recently, I'll talk about what happens when gods die, using the death of the Pathfinder god Aradin as an example. I once again want to thank this week's sponsor, chiropractors. I used to whine about my aching back, consigned to a maligned spine, but I saw the sign, and now it's aligned like fine wine. You've heard it on the grapevine, I'm on cloud nine. Yeah, you may hate these jokes, but they're all mine. This has been episode 163, Fire, the balance between fun and

realism. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyrighted by the respective publishers.