Elemental bug?
FrdNwsm
Member Posts: 1,069
I am not sure what elementals look like, but I envisage them as being masses of whatever element, shaped into a humanoid form. Going through the sewers on the eyeless cult quest, Jaheira called up one of her ever helpful fire elementals; we were using it to scout ahead. Not to give things away too much, there was an area where a trap went off, and another where the elemental fought an Otyugh. HOW do you give a fire elemental a disease? And HOW do you hit one with a web? Wouldn't a walking mass of fire just burn through a web? Apparently not. I can see a web giving an earth elemental a few seconds pause (before it tore the web to shreds) but fire?? Working as intended, or some sort of bug?
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As far as I know, it is. That is to say, immune to normal weapons. Here's where enchanted weapons come into play. They can hit an air elemental because ::insert drumroll here:: They're MAGICAL! Magic, by definition, is not subject to normal natural laws of physics. If you must have a rationale, the magical field surrounding the enchanted weapon disrupts the magic holding the air elemental together into one coherent form.
(Fantasy authors can justify any sort of nonsense by saying "it's magic!").
This was rather my point; I was replying to the poster who specified air elementals, but my original post referred to fire. Now, later on my elementals proved supreme in this particular quest line. They pretty much ran amok and nothing could hurt them. Undead, gauths, shadow fiends all fell like ten pins. I have a suspicion that the problem lay with this particular room. The designer said "Anything that enters the room gets webbed" and coded it so.
"Magical disease from otyugh and magic webbing resistant to fire. Seems legit."
Sorry, have to disagree. A disease requires a physical body to infect, webbing, even if you want to specify it as fire-resistant (which, admittedly, it could be) needs something physical to catch onto. I'd be willing to concede, for example, that an earth elemental could be hindered by a web. Air, water or fire? Not likely.
P.S. What the heck is a gauth? It looked like a mini beholder with what appeared to be some sort of gaze attacks, but I never encountered that name before. There was a spot where I encountered 4-5 of the beggers; they were ripping me up until
Gauths are beholderkin. There is enough info on them on the Web
In a fictional world, the rules may be completely different. "A disease requires a physical body to infect" for example only holds true in a framework of rules that actually demand that; but in a world where so much is happening outside of the rules WE know (we are after all talking about sentient fire beings here) there is NOTHING saying that OUR rules have to hold true the way WE understand them.
In fact, the rules we know are only rules BECAUSE we know them to follow certain patterns. If we found them following other patterns, we'd revise the rules. Clearly the patterns different within the world of BG, and so the rules must be as well. You can't just take our rules and apply them to a different framework. That would be like saying "you can't move the knight backward in chess, because you can't do it in shougi".
Of course there's also the whole artistic license thing. This fictional world is not intended to be a comprehensively constructed reality. While some self-consistency is definitely a sign of good world building, it is by no means required to be as thorough and comprehensive as the laws of nature in our world.
Unfortunately, you have to know something exists before you can do a web search for it. I had never come across the term before 10 hours ago.
Indeed, the use of magic does sort of relegate logic to the back burner. I think a quote from Mr. Spock would be appropriate here: "Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers that smells bad."
(True trekkies will recognize the episode that this totally out of character quote comes from)
No real world disease acts this fast - even the fastest will take about an hour to have an impact.
Honestly, elementals are pretty weird to begin with. I'm not a fan of the whole "it works because it's magic, even though the magic isn't specified to so that" argument, but elementals don't really follow anything resembling physics to begin with. So once we posit that they exist, I'm willing to accept that they interact strangely with other entities, because they already do.