Immunity (and some MR)

Does having an immunity protect you from all uses of that thing that you're immune to?

Examples, someone with an immunity to Iron.
A) If a giant smashes you in the head with an iron club, does the weight of the club crush you? What if it's only coated in iron?
B) If you fall off a building unto an iron plate, do you take falling damage?
C) If someone presses you between an iron wall and a stone wall, are you smooshed?

While I'm at it...

  1. If you're hit by a falling magical bridge that fails to penetrate, it can't hurt you, but what if you're trapped? Can you stand up?
    1a) If 1 is true, what if you're stuck inside magical stone? Can you just effortlessly push it out of the way? Will it crack and shatter?

A) I would say that an iron coated club would keep sliding to the side of the person with the Iron Immunity always laying down glancing blows, getting tangled in overhanging branches... This is a supernatural merit it can do things like that.

However if he uprooted a tree trunk and started thrashing then things would be different.

B) If you fell onto an iron plate, it's nto the iron plate doing the damage it's the fall and the earth. You could argue that the landing is a soft landing as oppossed to a hard landing. But I would still say that you hit the iron plate, the gorund underneath it is probably hard to hold it. Your immunity isn't like some sort of replusor aura or magnetic field, it's just an immunity.

C) The stone wall and restriction is also doing damage not the metal sheet so I'd say you can be crushed to death with metal sheet as it isn't really doing the damage.

However Iron would be a greater immunity in my book and accordingly as such is paid for in virtues so if you feel the player isn't getting good value for money you could adjudicate that these things didn't effect him.

As to the MR questions I'd say the Bridge or anything which fails to penetrate wouldn't do damage as these essentially kept out by the parma (Thus not crushing him). As to the entrapment, if the aim of the spell is to hold someone within stone and it fails to penetrate then the aim of the spell has failed to penetrate and thus the stone fails to take hold and the entrapment is fatally flawed. This is something like trap of the entwining vines where if the vines don't penetrate, then they can't gain purchase and hold the person in place. The fact that the spell creates stone around a target seems to be a way of indirectly bypassing Parma with direct magical media something which I feel goes against the spirit of the game.

However creating a heavy wall or fence around the target would not count as the thing targeted wouldn't be trapped and could still act (such as spell casting or climbing over the fence).

A

Yes, I know it wouldn't do any damage. The thing is, you've got something really heavy above you... if you can press up on it, then you can conceivably throw it, which could then do significant damage to something else. And if that is true, then something that is part of the earth but magically created (like a stone shell all around you) could conceivably be cracked open.

Alternatively, if you CANNOT stand up under the bridge, then if you sat down you would find yourself very quickly stuck.

I would rule that the power of plot prevails. If you want your players to deal with a set-piece of being trapped under a magically created bridge (i.e. the result of a botch), then it's a good time. If not then you could argue that the fact they can wriggle free as the bridge wouldn't touch them. Essentially a Magi can't be harmed by anything created by magic if it doesn't penetrate. A natural bridge would do crushing damage.

A

Troupe play, so consistency rules the day. And also, magi make plans based on how they understand things to work... if things work differently day to day based on plot concerns, then they would have no consistent basis on which to plan ideas.

I think that keeping someone buried under a bridge, trapping him there but not otherwise harming him (i.e. no crushing problem, no air problem, etc) fits perfectly with the Mythic European worldview.

As I understand it, you do take damage from falling onto a magical bridge, but not from a magical bridge falling onto you, though the division is fiddly. What causes damage when you hit something or it hits you is the force moving it. If you're falling, then there's a force moving you and it doesn't go away just because of magic, therefore you break your legs. The magical bridge, on the other handm exists entirely according to magic and so any force affecting it must stop when it does.

The same logic applies to why a stone thrown by magic stops dead upon hitting the magus and falls to the ground, doing no damage.

errr...no.

You'd push on it and it's to heavy to move so you'd either move back, if possible, or you'd just strain something.

Yeah, that was the thrust of it.
Basically: You CAN trap someone under a magical substance, even if it can't directly hurt them.
Otherwise, there'd be weird consequences.