If a Wild Shaped Druid takes extreme damage due to the Fire Elemental’s Water Susceptibility trait, does the damage carry over to their normal form?

Question

I had a situation come up in my game tonight where a gunslinger opponent used powerful shot to push the druid, who was wild shaped into a fire elemental, off a ship into the ocean. The fire elemental specifically has an "ability" where if it has water splashed on it it takes 1 point of cold damage per gallon of water. The amount of water in a 10ftX10ft cube is thousands of gallons. Naturally this means it takes thousands of cold damage and kills the fire elemental form. My question is would this cold damage, which is only a result of a specific fire elemental vulnerability to water, carry over and also kill the druid?

In the moment I ruled it didn't, mostly out of fairness because that situation already really sucked for him, and I didn't think it was fair to kill him outright, even though turning into a fire elemental on a ship is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but I'd like to know for the future.

Answer 1

You could rule that the damage is applied 1 gallon at a time

The Water Susceptibility trait says:

For every 5 feet the elemental moves in water, or for every gallon of water splashed on it, it takes 1 cold damage.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to read that as saying that each gallon of splashed water deals its damage separately, in sequence, 1 damage at a time. This results in exactly the ruling you described: the druid in fire elemental form splashed with thousands of gallons of water will only take exactly enough damage to bring their fire elemental form to zero hit points, after which they will no longer have Water Susceptibility and will just be a soggy but alive druid.

Does a fire elemental actually die when it falls in water?

There is unfortunately some ambiguity in the Water Susceptibility trait. The two ways for a fire elemental to take "water damage" are having water splashed on it and moving in water. So, which of these two conditions applies when the fire elemental falls into a body of water? Is falling into water the same as having water splashed on you? Or is it moving through the water? Or is it both? I'm honestly not sure what the designers intended here.

Additionally, a fire elemental falling in water is not necessarily exposed to an entire 10 foot cube of water. The 10 foot cube is the space it controls in combat, not the volume of its body. On the other hand, if you assume that any water splashed on the elemental evaporates instantly, then the surrounding liquid water would quickly rush in until the elemental is exposed to enough gallons of water to kill it.

I could take this further, but we're already well into hypothetical "What If?" physics speculation territory, and I'm making a lot of unfounded assumptions. Ultimately, there's no real-life answer to how many gallons of water would be "splashed on" a fire elemental that falls in water. So the DM has to make a ruling, and that ruling should be based on fairness and game balance, not speculative fantasy physics. I've given one possible ruling above.

Answer 2

I think a lot of this comes down to how you rule a fire elemental might interact with the ocean. I think there's a half decent argument for the fire elemental not dying as soon as it goes overboard.

Fire elementals are supposedly made mainly from fire, with "ichor" running through their bodies. I wouldn't imagine they would be particularly heavy. However, they don't have a fly speed, so I think we have to assume that they are heavier than air, and a fire elemental knocked overboard would hit the ocean surface.

If the ocean is calm then the Inverse Leidenfrost Effect might come into effect, and the steam from the ocean surface could even prevent the fire elemental from coming into contact with any water at all. This also depends on how hot a fire elemental is, which is tricky to determine, but it would seem to make sense that it would be at least as hot as a garden fire. If the ocean has saltwater, then the boiling point would be slightly higher than pure water.

If you took this to an extreme, then a fire elemental could even "travel" to some degree over water, by leaning in one direction, and floating on a bed of steam above the water's surface.

If the ocean is choppy, or the ship is making large waves, then you could rule that the fire elemental will be splashed with a wave, even if its essentially floating above the surface, supported by the steam that it's creating. Waves are going to hurt the fire elemental as that is indeed multiple gallons of water splashing it.

Then there's the question of whether the fire elemental could attempt to clamber back out of the water, either by climbing up the side of the ship, or someone throwing it a (fire retardant) rope before it dies.

Answer 3

You could also 'justify' a max of 10 points of cold damage per turn.

Reasoning:

The rule is ambiguous but as I see it the rules intended two scenarios.

The first is moving in water (as nothing is mentioned I assume full immersion). An elemental wants to cross (swim through, dive through) some water and as water hurts it tries to move as fast as possible (50 ft per turn) through it. The rules indicate that moving through 5ft causes 1 damage, which results in 10 damage per turn at max speed.

The rules say:

For every 5 feet the elemental moves in water

I read:

For every 5 feet the elemental moves (at max speed) in water

The second case is about an elemental, that is standing at a dry place (not moving in water), but that's being attacked (splashed at) with water. In a fight one might throw water skins, that burst, empty buckets over them, etc. In this case 1 gallon is required to cause 1 pt of damage.

I don't see how you can expose an elemental to more water by splashing on it, than itself exposes it to by moving through water (full immersion)

I'd thus limit water damage to 10 points per round

Speed of a fire elemental is 50 ft. A fire elemental moving in deep water could move 10x5 feet per turn and thus have 10 points of cold damage inflicted.

A less ambiguois formulation could be (who knows perhaps there will be revised versions )

A fire elemental moving through or emerged in water suffers 10pts of cold damage per turn (1 pt of cold damage for 5 ft of water when moving through it its max speed) A fire elemental suffers 1 pt of cold damage per gallon of water (up to a max of 10 pts per turn) when water is being splashed on it

Final thoughts: I see that others argue, that moving through water might mean, moving through shallow water (a puddle). This is not clear (clearly stated). It could also mean, that an elemental does not sink and always floats / hovers over the water on a steam cloud. or it could mean, that if fully submerged in water an isolating steam layer is forming around the elemental, which absorbs heat, (thus causes cold damage) but also isolates to a certain extent (thus damage is limited) or many other things as nothing is explicitly stated.

As rules are not clear it is difficult to know and the DM has to choose an interpretation, which seems coherent to him.

Coherent does not necessarily mean physically coherent, but which are up to his opinion well balanced in the rule system and which do (if possible) not contradict the wording in the rules.

Answer 4

I have read through the previous answer, and I have decided I will calculate how much damage it could take if you tried to calculate it using math. I'm not gonna try and answer the whole answer, but I wanted to say something.

I am going to make some assumptions here.

1. The fire elemental is medium size.
2. The fire elemental is moving at an consistent speed
3. The damage is applied per gallon of water touching the creature.(1 dmg per gallon)
4. Each gallon of water is a cube in the ocean.
5. The damage from the water is taken every second.

to calculate this I am going to use multiple calculators and reference sites.

STEP 1.

https://dungeons.fandom.com/wiki/SRD:Fire_Elemental says that a medium fire elemental is 8 ft tall and weighs in at about 1 pound. Now taking those stats I can punch them in a body surface area calculator. The calculator used the schlich method, and got about 6 square feet as the body surface area for a fire elemental.

STEP 2.

A gallon of water in a cube is 231 in^3 Using a reverse volume calculator, We find that one side of this cube is 6 Inches, so someone submerged in water would take 2 points of damage per square foot of surface area.

STEP 3.

The final step, which is very easy. you may have guessed it by now. every turn is six seconds long, which means he takes the damage 6 times per turn Putting it all together, we have 6 x 2 x 6 = 72 damage taken per turn.

AFTERWORD.

This is how I would rule how much damage one takes, but you don't have to do it like that. Since the dm's word is law, you could just say "you take 50 damage every turn until you die" and no one could dispute, because after all, you are the dm.