05-07-2019, 12:29 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: Feeding a Water Elemental
Likewise, metal elementals should have Doesn't Eat or Drink as well as Doesn't Breathe. Wood elementals depend on if you're going with something like the unliving wood in the center (could be mistaken for a wood golem), a mass of vines, branches, and leaves (ala Swamp Thing), or the whole tree (ala Groot). The latter two cases probably should need to drink, flytrap-style eating optional but a need for nutrients by planting roots in the ground for a meal could work.
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05-07-2019, 01:09 PM | #12 | ||
Join Date: Sep 2011
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Re: Feeding a Water Elemental
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It's not that weird that Water Elementals have Stealth 1 as part of Body of Water, while Air Elementals don't have any level of Stealth as part of Body of Air. It suggests that if your body is made of water, it's a little easier to not be noticed/blend in with your surroundings, but people will still have a fair chance of noticing you due to refraction when they look through you. While it helps some while you're moving, it's more effective when your standing still. All of which sounds reasonable enough and Stealth is a good fit for describing it. That's probably why Water Elementals have Stealth. OTOH, Body of Air doesn't have issues with refraction and should be just as hard to notice when moving as when standing still, so Stealth isn't a good fit for describing them. What is weird, is that Body of Air doesn't come with Invisibility as part of the build. Diffuse doesn't have much overlap with Slippery. Slippery 5 makes you hard to hold and lets you squeeze through small openings. Diffuse is a form of Injury Tolerance and while most [but not all] foes cannot grapple or slam you, its primary benefit is making you hard to hurt. If you are Diffuse, you are: immune to crippling injuries; don't bleed; cannot go unconscious by having your blood supply choked off; take no extra damage from a blow to the skull; take no extra damage from an attack to the Vitals or Groin; and only explosions, area effect and cone attacks aren't capped at 1 HP or 2 HP of injury. Diffuse has a lot of bang for the buck. Quote:
Why does an air elemental need to breathe? It's made of air. Likewise, why does a water elemental need to drink? It's made out of water. If either elemental needed this, they could consume their own body if nothing else was handy, but if they live on a plane of their element, they'd eventually consume the whole plane. Fire and Earth might be argued to need to eat (or drink for the earth elemental) and breathe, although that seems a bit unlikely given their opposite numbers don't need to. On the other hand, not needing to breathe or eat or drink doesn't necessarily preclude being able to go through the motions of doing so. It just won't benefit them. As for not being impressed by what the Oxygen Combustion Limitation gives you, it impresses me. The benefits with the limitation are exactly what you'd get if there was no limitation. The effect of the limitation is that although you don't need to breathe as such, you still can't exist anywhere fire couldn't, which seems like an eminently sensible limitation for a fire elemental. Last edited by Curmudgeon; 05-07-2019 at 01:15 PM. |
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05-07-2019, 01:19 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Feeding a Water Elemental
No it doesn't. It in fact it's a quirk-level disadvantage. There aren't any atmospheres where oxygen-based fire can burn and a person with immunity to poisons cannot breathe (there are some where fire cannot burn but a person can breath).
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05-07-2019, 01:56 PM | #14 | ||
Join Date: Sep 2011
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Re: Feeding a Water Elemental
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I wouldn't call it a disadvantage, not even at the quirk level. You sort of need to breathe oxygen, but no one can cut off your oxygen supply just by strangling you, which is an advantage. OTOH, if you were in a room and it were suddenly flooded with water, you would suffocate, essentially putting your Body of Fire out if you can't escape. Which isn't much worse than death by drowning if you didn't have the advantage. It's a point whether your diffuse body could be revived by artificial respiration afterward. Maybe if your rescuer had asbestos protection? Or maybe it would be more like blowing on an ember to get it back into flame. |
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05-07-2019, 02:38 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Feeding a Water Elemental
It's a disadvantage if you already gain all the benefits from other traits. Diffuse and Immunity to Metabolic Hazards already give you everything it does.
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05-08-2019, 10:39 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
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Re: Feeding a Water Elemental
Treebeard "eats" long draughts of liquid. If you don't errata out a need to eat or drink, then I see no reason why elementals in bodies shouldn't have to sustain those bodies, which would require "eating and drinking" sufficiently pure versions of their element.
Thus an air elemental spirit could be bound indefinitely inside a bottle, say, while an embodied air elemental materially stuffed into a container would last no longer in there than anything else without its food sources. Then the body "dies" and you end up with the spirit, which would no longer be trapped unless the bottle was also prepped to trap spirits. (And of course morally you've just starved something to death, if perhaps not quite so unpleasantly as a more natively material creature.) For what it's worth this also opens up the possibility of offering such spirits fine food and drink of the types they like: for instance, an air elemental might be more willing to work without coercion, in exchange for a regular offering of rare perfumes or the scent of many fresh roses. |
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doesn't eat or drink, elemental, magic, water |
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