Is temperature tolerance really that expensive?

[vitruvian]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Problem is that 'dice of damage' from heat/fire is only minimally correlated with temperature. Between swimming in boiling water, and walking through a bonfire, the boiling water will actually kill you much faster (higher 'damage'), but if I put a lump of tin in the boiling water nothing will happen to it, while if I put it in the bonfire it will melt.

The other problem is that DR in general is mostly about thickness, and thickness is utterly irrelevant to the maximum temperature a material can withstand -- it just determines how long it takes for the heat to get through.

In the GURPS rule set, hotter fires do more dice, so it seems more than minimally correlated. It might not perfectly reflect differences in convection vs. conduction depending on the medium, but it's close enough.

And no, DR on a character writeup (so how many inches of mild steel or whatever we're talking about is irrelevant unless you're statting up a tank) is about damage resistance that's invariant with regard to time of exposure, unless it's Ablative.