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Comet
2008-06-15, 01:26 PM
Right. Plane of fire. The DMG states that planar travel is an adventure for strictly high-level characters. This got me thinking, how high excactly are we talking here?

Of course, the planes vary greatly in how hostile the environment is, so let's focus on one of the worse ones. The very air in the plane of fire burns your skin and lungs for quite a bit of damage per round (except for the City of brass, which is slightly more mild when it comes to air temperature). If the air burning you to cinders wasn't enough, there are also lava pools, deadly sprays of hellfire and whatevernot.
And then there are the monsters, but those aren't really relevant for this discussion because nearly every plane has got it's own OH MY GOD THEY ARE GOING TO EAT US ALIVE-type of horrors.

The reason I am asking this is simply because the party I am DM'ing for is more probably than not going to embark on an adventure on the fire plane. They are level 12 at the moment and looking at the random encounter table in the DMG, I can see that the theoretical maximum for a random encounter level on that plane is also 12.
That would imply that a twelve-level party is going to survive in that plane at least for a while. But what about threats other than monsters? The party would have to maintain heavy protective spells for the entire trip, that's for sure. Can they manage it at level 12?

I'm no expert when it comes to protecting oneself from extraplanar dangers in D&D and so I ask you folks, what do you think? At what level can a party hope to survive a short adventure on the elemental plane of fire, if they can prepare in advance and have acces to most of the tricks available to a general PC? (And no, most parties don't train themselves from the very beginning to endure the plane of fire, so specialised builds don't really count for much here. We're talking about general PCs)

kamikasei
2008-06-15, 01:42 PM
The hazard of the plane of fire is that it has the fire-dominant trait. That means 3d10 points of fire damage per round, if you stay away from magma pools and the like. A 12th-level caster can cover that with a second-level spell (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/resistEnergy.htm) per party member (every two hours). Rings are available but cost half the WBL for a twelfth-level character. If you have both a cleric and a wizard, brief forays onto the plane or out of the City would not be impractical (two second-level spells each for two hours' protection? Not that bad).