Is temperature tolerance really that expensive?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

So why not have melting be a special effect of heating damage that results in death?

If I pour tap water on a chunk of ice, that chunk of ice will eventually melt.

If I pour tap water on a human, nothing happens, at least on any moderate time scale.

How much burning damage is the tap water doing, then? Other than being at a temperature that happens to be harmless to humans, this isn't any different from 'how much burning damage does boiling water do' or 'how much burning damage does lava do' -- it will eventually destroy any object that can't withstand being raised to whatever temperature it is, and won't meaningfully harm any object that can.

Now, you might want to say something like "1d6 per X degrees of temperature difference", which would make a clear connection between temperature and damage -- but if 200F water can do a point of damage (100F more than human body temperature), which it certainly can, this implies that a candle (temperature at flame core ~2500F) should be doing 7d damage, which is obviously ridiculous, and tends to result in DR vs heat that is essentially uncorrelated with DR vs other effects (actually, the equivalent for physical attacks is something like "what's the Mohs hardness of your armor").

I actually wrote a relevant blog post a while back.