Hello. I while back I was playing a forge cleric with immunity to fire. Long story short a building was on fire and my cleric rushed into the burning building. That is when i was dealing with a new homebrew mechanic of "smoke inhalation". It was a homebrew campaign.
Two issues i had were
1. This mechanic came totally out of the blue no decussion on new mechanics or nothing. This problem has since been resolved, and overall lessions were learned on both sides.
2. My fire immune cleric was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, which would basiclly incapacidate the charcter after x amount of turns. My argument to this day was, as someone immune to fire, i should be immune to the chemical by-products of fire, ie smoke.
This arguement occasionally gets brought up time and time again. He has asked a whole fb community about this mechanic for feedback, before it was implimented, which was the reason he used it, fair enough. But he was saying that if it was in a future session, deal with it.
What are your opinions? For the record, if i wasn't immune to fire, no problem, choke me out! It's just something that has been bothering me and is frankly a sore spot for both of us.
Inhaling smoke from a fire isn't dangerous only because of the heat. The smoke also basically inflames the lungs and stops them being able to pull oxygen. So it would be much more akin to the drowning rules than any damage resistance/immunity. Also - when some substances burn - the chemicals they give off can be poisonous.
"Fire" is a very broad category. The combustion of hydrogen and oxygen produces only water vapor. The combustion of natural gas is water and carbon dioxide. However, these are only the products of a "pure" common fuel sources. Most things in nature are tainted with other, more dangerous compounds, such as the benzene, formaldehyde, and acrolein found in wood smoke.
Immunity to Fire is immunity to heat damage, not everything that fire is related to. As much as lung irritation is an issue, the byproducts of fire can also displace breathable oxygen. Ash and other fine particulates physically block pathways and prevent breathing, etc.
Even though a fish can swim, it is still sensitive to factors such as pH, salinity, heavy metals, and temperature.
Magical creatures that are native to extremely dynamic environments might be given additional magical allowances, but everyone else needs to count their blessings.
But would they not inflame the lungs due to heat? Or is debris particals the real culprid. Overthinking i know.
It's debris particles and chemicals emitted from burning objects that cause swelling and reactions in the lungs, and the fact that smoke often contains lower levels of oxygen in it (due to combustion) and higher levels of CO2 and CO.
Heat is damaging to lungs, but the damage specific to smoke inhalation is not really due to heat.
its all homebrew so seriously whatever the DM tells you - that's your damage.
but me personally, i'd be totally fine dreaming up a new type of damage if its part of the challenge of the scenario. Remember the whole 'light a match and hold a glass over it and the match goes out because there's no more oxygen' from like 200 years ago? So maybe you're immune to fire, and immune to smoke damage, but you still have to breathe...so just be happy you're not dead.
no matter how you shake it, its homebrew and the DM can think of some way to damage you. I like the idea, although i'd let the group know ahead of time that there's a new mechanic in play.
Hello. I while back I was playing a forge cleric with immunity to fire. Long story short a building was on fire and my cleric rushed into the burning building. That is when i was dealing with a new homebrew mechanic of "smoke inhalation". It was a homebrew campaign.
Two issues i had were
1. This mechanic came totally out of the blue no decussion on new mechanics or nothing. This problem has since been resolved, and overall lessions were learned on both sides.
2. My fire immune cleric was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, which would basiclly incapacidate the charcter after x amount of turns. My argument to this day was, as someone immune to fire, i should be immune to the chemical by-products of fire, ie smoke.
This arguement occasionally gets brought up time and time again. He has asked a whole fb community about this mechanic for feedback, before it was implimented, which was the reason he used it, fair enough. But he was saying that if it was in a future session, deal with it.
What are your opinions? For the record, if i wasn't immune to fire, no problem, choke me out! It's just something that has been bothering me and is frankly a sore spot for both of us.
So I think he was just looking for a way to deal with what potentially is "game breaking".
Here are some of my issues with it:
Forge Clerics get Fire Immunity at LEVEL 17. Trying to screw them with this after the fact with zero discussion is bad play.
In the PHB, when it comes to drowning, it states you can hold your breath for a numbers of minutes equal to 1 + Con modifier. If you have a negative con modifier, you can hold it for 30 seconds. I would have used this mechanic in the smoke situation since it has a similar "holding breath" mechanic.
That being said, smoke is a form of poison. You aren't dying due to the heat, you are dying due to what is being created by the heat. Taking this to ultimate extremes, lets drop the forge cleric in a volcano. All of their gear melts away, they are fine, but if they swallow some of the lava? While they might be immune to the heat of it? Their body CLEARLY wasn't meant to process actual lava, and there should be some form of reprocussion.
In short, I'm not mad at the DM for trying something different. I'm mad that there wasn't a discussion at what the mechanic was prior to application.
Hello. I while back I was playing a forge cleric with immunity to fire. Long story short a building was on fire and my cleric rushed into the burning building. That is when i was dealing with a new homebrew mechanic of "smoke inhalation". It was a homebrew campaign.
Two issues i had were
1. This mechanic came totally out of the blue no decussion on new mechanics or nothing. This problem has since been resolved, and overall lessions were learned on both sides.
2. My fire immune cleric was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, which would basiclly incapacidate the charcter after x amount of turns. My argument to this day was, as someone immune to fire, i should be immune to the chemical by-products of fire, ie smoke.
This arguement occasionally gets brought up time and time again. He has asked a whole fb community about this mechanic for feedback, before it was implimented, which was the reason he used it, fair enough. But he was saying that if it was in a future session, deal with it.
What are your opinions? For the record, if i wasn't immune to fire, no problem, choke me out! It's just something that has been bothering me and is frankly a sore spot for both of us.
So I think he was just looking for a way to deal with what potentially is "game breaking".
Here are some of my issues with it:
Forge Clerics get Fire Immunity at LEVEL 17. Trying to screw them with this after the fact with zero discussion is bad play.
In the PHB, when it comes to drowning, it states you can hold your breath for a numbers of minutes equal to 1 + Con modifier. If you have a negative con modifier, you can hold it for 30 seconds. I would have used this mechanic in the smoke situation since it has a similar "holding breath" mechanic.
That being said, smoke is a form of poison. You aren't dying due to the heat, you are dying due to what is being created by the heat. Taking this to ultimate extremes, lets drop the forge cleric in a volcano. All of their gear melts away, they are fine, but if they swallow some of the lava? While they might be immune to the heat of it? Their body CLEARLY wasn't meant to process actual lava, and there should be some form of reprocussion.
In short, I'm not mad at the DM for trying something different. I'm mad that there wasn't a discussion at what the mechanic was prior to application.
but how do you incorporate situational things like this "beforehand"? is your expectation that it is covered in a session 0? before they wade into the situation? how? I don't think it should be required of a DM to communicate every special environmental situation they dream up prior to it occurring. It is perfectly valid for a DM to say that smoke inhalation is not fire damage, nor asphyxiation rules (though the holding your breath rule would be a way to avoid smoke inhalation). DM's have the right to introduce new and strange situations on their players without a heads up, and the players should accept that. Now I don't think it is wrong for a player who thinks they have an advantage in the situation to ask, so it was not wrong of the OP to ask if their fire immunity worked to mitigate the smoke, but they should respect the DMs adjudication once made. But also, as I stated above, fire immunity shouldn't work in this situation anyway, because smoke inhalation harms you due to chemicals, irritants, and lack of oxygen, not due to heat or flame.
It's all right to ask about the mechanic afterwards, and in fact usually good feedback for a DM if something threw you off your game and wasn't fun.
That said? The DM was perfectly within their rights to consider smoke inhalation separate from fire immunity. Fire immunity means you can stick your bare hands in the forge and not care, not that you can freely breathe not-air instead of air. perhaps the mechanic felt clumsy, but that's what happens sometimes when a DM improvises on the spot. I would not consider smoke inhalation to be covered by fire immunity.
Incremental introductions of mechanics like that are how you introduce players to homebrew mechanics. When you are trying to obviously bypass what a player would perceive to be their "shtick" at level 17, they have a right to get upset. Also as a player, I don't have to accept that the DM is right. I can get up and leave, and I think that's important. I've totally walked out of sessions where I felt my player was getting ****ed unfairly on adjudications.
It goes both ways. It's a game, and there are rules. I say this as the forever DM. I'm not going to introduce shit to my table without zero explanation. It's just bad form and creates situations like this. I also don't expect my players to just "deal with it", because that's bad social form. D&D is cooperative on both sides of the coin.
I mean...how many chances does a DM have to "incrementally introduce" mechanics for limiting how long a character stays in a burning building? o_o
Sometimes the situation moves quickly and both the player and the DM have to play on their toes. Fire immunity is not "Immunity to fire, and also everything fire has ever touched, ever been part of, ever created, or was ever created from". I mean, by that reasoning everyone with poison immunity should be starving to death because poison is a foreign contaminant in the body. So is food. The one, the body is prepared to process - the other, it is not. If immunity to [X] damage type also means immunity to anything that has ever been even slightly, tangentially related to [X] damage type, then a lot of other game assumptions start to break down.
I mean...how many chances does a DM have to "incrementally introduce" mechanics for limiting how long a character stays in a burning building? o_o
For mechanics like this that aren't likely to be relevant in the future, I suggest informing the player ahead of time what the full details of the mechanics are, possibly including discussion of what the players think the mechanics should be.
Man. That sounds like an awesome game. "Quick - the house is burning down! Your cherished NPC is still trapped inside! What do you do?" "I rush in to try and find them!" "Okay. Now, let's break for fifteen minutes while I exhaustively explain this idea I had for a new mechanic that makes rushing into the house more challenging and make sure everybody is on board with the idea. I am absolutely certain this will have no effect whatsoever on flow, pacing, or tension for my high-intensity fire rescue scene."
Sometimes, ya just gotta go with the moment. It's better to have a mechanic fall flat and try to salvage something from a high-tension scene than to break the game flow and design-by-committee in mid-session.
I'm of mixed minds about it. On the one hand, smoke really isn't fire. On the other hand, I don't really think a Adult Red Dragon or Efreeti or Salamander should have trouble with ordinary smoke. I might go with a middle ground: fire immunity would include protection against ordinary combustion products (CO, CO2, soot), but not things like evaporated poisons or drugs (so running to the burning pot farm will still affect you...) unless also immune to poison.
I mean...how many chances does a DM have to "incrementally introduce" mechanics for limiting how long a character stays in a burning building? o_o
Sometimes the situation moves quickly and both the player and the DM have to play on their toes. Fire immunity is not "Immunity to fire, and also everything fire has ever touched, ever been part of, ever created, or was ever created from". I mean, by that reasoning everyone with poison immunity should be starving to death because poison is a foreign contaminant in the body. So is food. The one, the body is prepared to process - the other, it is not. If immunity to [X] damage type also means immunity to anything that has ever been even slightly, tangentially related to [X] damage type, then a lot of other game assumptions start to break down.
I'm going to rephrase your question.
"How can a DM introduce mechanics for smoke inhalation?"
So the Forge Cleric is level 17. They work in a place that naturally has some of the dangers associated with smoke inhalation. That being said, from levels whatever-now? "Cave you are in, there were explosive barrels and things are on fire. You start choking."
Monsters throwing fire bombs at you, catching things on fire.
I mean...how many chances does a DM have to "incrementally introduce" mechanics for limiting how long a character stays in a burning building? o_o
Sometimes the situation moves quickly and both the player and the DM have to play on their toes. Fire immunity is not "Immunity to fire, and also everything fire has ever touched, ever been part of, ever created, or was ever created from". I mean, by that reasoning everyone with poison immunity should be starving to death because poison is a foreign contaminant in the body. So is food. The one, the body is prepared to process - the other, it is not. If immunity to [X] damage type also means immunity to anything that has ever been even slightly, tangentially related to [X] damage type, then a lot of other game assumptions start to break down.
I'm going to rephrase your question.
"How can a DM introduce mechanics for smoke inhalation?"
So the Forge Cleric is level 17. They work in a place that naturally has some of the dangers associated with smoke inhalation. That being said, from levels whatever-now? "Cave you are in, there were explosive barrels and things are on fire. You start choking."
Monsters throwing fire bombs at you, catching things on fire.
The thing is, in a properly vented forge or outdoor area, the risk of actual damage and death from inhaled smoke is insignificant. but in a burning building? There might be very little usable oxygen, tons of chemical irritants, massive quantities of smoke. A lifetime in a forge may not prepare one for entering a true conflagration, regardless of immunity, especially if they have never been in one before.
That said, if you did want to "introduce it" you could have the player roll a history check as they go to enter to remember a story from their smithing master about an apprentice who got too close to the furnace and choked from the fumes, or any other check to impart that there would be danger beyond burns in that location, But I don't think that a player should just think they can be immune to non-fire issues associated with fire because they are immune to fire damage.
Hello. I while back I was playing a forge cleric with immunity to fire. Long story short a building was on fire and my cleric rushed into the burning building. That is when i was dealing with a new homebrew mechanic of "smoke inhalation". It was a homebrew campaign.
Two issues i had were
1. This mechanic came totally out of the blue no decussion on new mechanics or nothing. This problem has since been resolved, and overall lessions were learned on both sides.
2. My fire immune cleric was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, which would basiclly incapacidate the charcter after x amount of turns. My argument to this day was, as someone immune to fire, i should be immune to the chemical by-products of fire, ie smoke.
This arguement occasionally gets brought up time and time again. He has asked a whole fb community about this mechanic for feedback, before it was implimented, which was the reason he used it, fair enough. But he was saying that if it was in a future session, deal with it.
What are your opinions? For the record, if i wasn't immune to fire, no problem, choke me out! It's just something that has been bothering me and is frankly a sore spot for both of us.
Fire immunity is distinct from breathing immunity. Warforged and reborn have the latter, for example. That said, for some reason, someone inside a water elemental will suffocate but someone inside a fire elemental won't, so I understand why you might have been surprised to learn that fire immunity doesn't let you breathe in fire. By the same token, acid immunity and poison immunity combined still won't let you breathe pure methane.
It sounds like the DM simply wanted to challenge you, and just walking around totally immune to the challenge is not the way they wanted it to go.
That being said, this is level 17+ we're talking about here. Rescuing people from a single burning building should practically fall under light activity you can accomplish during a short rest. It doesn't feel like a challenge appropriate to the scale of the game at that point, so yeah I'd allow any PC with a plausible approach to just automatically succeed. And then move on to encounters appropriate for the level.
But would they not inflame the lungs due to heat? Or is debris particals the real culprid. Overthinking i know.
As has already been pointed out, you are in the wrong here. Fire and smoke isn't the same thing and even if you are immune to the heat of the flames, suffocating by the smoke is still a danger, assuming of course, that your character needs to breath. Personally as a DM, I would probably just use the suffocation mechanics or some variant of it.
"Fun" historical fact, most people who were burned at the stake died from suffocation due to smoke inhalation and not from actually burning to death.
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Hello. I while back I was playing a forge cleric with immunity to fire. Long story short a building was on fire and my cleric rushed into the burning building. That is when i was dealing with a new homebrew mechanic of "smoke inhalation". It was a homebrew campaign.
Two issues i had were
1. This mechanic came totally out of the blue no decussion on new mechanics or nothing. This problem has since been resolved, and overall lessions were learned on both sides.
2. My fire immune cleric was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, which would basiclly incapacidate the charcter after x amount of turns. My argument to this day was, as someone immune to fire, i should be immune to the chemical by-products of fire, ie smoke.
This arguement occasionally gets brought up time and time again. He has asked a whole fb community about this mechanic for feedback, before it was implimented, which was the reason he used it, fair enough. But he was saying that if it was in a future session, deal with it.
What are your opinions? For the record, if i wasn't immune to fire, no problem, choke me out! It's just something that has been bothering me and is frankly a sore spot for both of us.
Inhaling smoke from a fire isn't dangerous only because of the heat. The smoke also basically inflames the lungs and stops them being able to pull oxygen. So it would be much more akin to the drowning rules than any damage resistance/immunity. Also - when some substances burn - the chemicals they give off can be poisonous.
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But would they not inflame the lungs due to heat? Or is debris particals the real culprid. Overthinking i know.
"Fire" is a very broad category. The combustion of hydrogen and oxygen produces only water vapor. The combustion of natural gas is water and carbon dioxide. However, these are only the products of a "pure" common fuel sources. Most things in nature are tainted with other, more dangerous compounds, such as the benzene, formaldehyde, and acrolein found in wood smoke.
Immunity to Fire is immunity to heat damage, not everything that fire is related to. As much as lung irritation is an issue, the byproducts of fire can also displace breathable oxygen. Ash and other fine particulates physically block pathways and prevent breathing, etc.
Even though a fish can swim, it is still sensitive to factors such as pH, salinity, heavy metals, and temperature.
Magical creatures that are native to extremely dynamic environments might be given additional magical allowances, but everyone else needs to count their blessings.
It's debris particles and chemicals emitted from burning objects that cause swelling and reactions in the lungs, and the fact that smoke often contains lower levels of oxygen in it (due to combustion) and higher levels of CO2 and CO.
Heat is damaging to lungs, but the damage specific to smoke inhalation is not really due to heat.
Here is a Healthline article on smoke inhalation https://www.healthline.com/health/smoke-inhalation
its all homebrew so seriously whatever the DM tells you - that's your damage.
but me personally, i'd be totally fine dreaming up a new type of damage if its part of the challenge of the scenario. Remember the whole 'light a match and hold a glass over it and the match goes out because there's no more oxygen' from like 200 years ago? So maybe you're immune to fire, and immune to smoke damage, but you still have to breathe...so just be happy you're not dead.
no matter how you shake it, its homebrew and the DM can think of some way to damage you. I like the idea, although i'd let the group know ahead of time that there's a new mechanic in play.
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So I think he was just looking for a way to deal with what potentially is "game breaking".
Here are some of my issues with it:
Forge Clerics get Fire Immunity at LEVEL 17. Trying to screw them with this after the fact with zero discussion is bad play.
In the PHB, when it comes to drowning, it states you can hold your breath for a numbers of minutes equal to 1 + Con modifier. If you have a negative con modifier, you can hold it for 30 seconds. I would have used this mechanic in the smoke situation since it has a similar "holding breath" mechanic.
That being said, smoke is a form of poison. You aren't dying due to the heat, you are dying due to what is being created by the heat. Taking this to ultimate extremes, lets drop the forge cleric in a volcano. All of their gear melts away, they are fine, but if they swallow some of the lava? While they might be immune to the heat of it? Their body CLEARLY wasn't meant to process actual lava, and there should be some form of reprocussion.
In short, I'm not mad at the DM for trying something different. I'm mad that there wasn't a discussion at what the mechanic was prior to application.
but how do you incorporate situational things like this "beforehand"? is your expectation that it is covered in a session 0? before they wade into the situation? how? I don't think it should be required of a DM to communicate every special environmental situation they dream up prior to it occurring. It is perfectly valid for a DM to say that smoke inhalation is not fire damage, nor asphyxiation rules (though the holding your breath rule would be a way to avoid smoke inhalation). DM's have the right to introduce new and strange situations on their players without a heads up, and the players should accept that. Now I don't think it is wrong for a player who thinks they have an advantage in the situation to ask, so it was not wrong of the OP to ask if their fire immunity worked to mitigate the smoke, but they should respect the DMs adjudication once made. But also, as I stated above, fire immunity shouldn't work in this situation anyway, because smoke inhalation harms you due to chemicals, irritants, and lack of oxygen, not due to heat or flame.
It's all right to ask about the mechanic afterwards, and in fact usually good feedback for a DM if something threw you off your game and wasn't fun.
That said? The DM was perfectly within their rights to consider smoke inhalation separate from fire immunity. Fire immunity means you can stick your bare hands in the forge and not care, not that you can freely breathe not-air instead of air. perhaps the mechanic felt clumsy, but that's what happens sometimes when a DM improvises on the spot. I would not consider smoke inhalation to be covered by fire immunity.
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Incremental introductions of mechanics like that are how you introduce players to homebrew mechanics. When you are trying to obviously bypass what a player would perceive to be their "shtick" at level 17, they have a right to get upset. Also as a player, I don't have to accept that the DM is right. I can get up and leave, and I think that's important. I've totally walked out of sessions where I felt my player was getting ****ed unfairly on adjudications.
It goes both ways. It's a game, and there are rules. I say this as the forever DM. I'm not going to introduce shit to my table without zero explanation. It's just bad form and creates situations like this. I also don't expect my players to just "deal with it", because that's bad social form. D&D is cooperative on both sides of the coin.
I mean...how many chances does a DM have to "incrementally introduce" mechanics for limiting how long a character stays in a burning building? o_o
Sometimes the situation moves quickly and both the player and the DM have to play on their toes. Fire immunity is not "Immunity to fire, and also everything fire has ever touched, ever been part of, ever created, or was ever created from". I mean, by that reasoning everyone with poison immunity should be starving to death because poison is a foreign contaminant in the body. So is food. The one, the body is prepared to process - the other, it is not. If immunity to [X] damage type also means immunity to anything that has ever been even slightly, tangentially related to [X] damage type, then a lot of other game assumptions start to break down.
Please do not contact or message me.
For mechanics like this that aren't likely to be relevant in the future, I suggest informing the player ahead of time what the full details of the mechanics are, possibly including discussion of what the players think the mechanics should be.
Man. That sounds like an awesome game. "Quick - the house is burning down! Your cherished NPC is still trapped inside! What do you do?" "I rush in to try and find them!" "Okay. Now, let's break for fifteen minutes while I exhaustively explain this idea I had for a new mechanic that makes rushing into the house more challenging and make sure everybody is on board with the idea. I am absolutely certain this will have no effect whatsoever on flow, pacing, or tension for my high-intensity fire rescue scene."
Sometimes, ya just gotta go with the moment. It's better to have a mechanic fall flat and try to salvage something from a high-tension scene than to break the game flow and design-by-committee in mid-session.
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm of mixed minds about it. On the one hand, smoke really isn't fire. On the other hand, I don't really think a Adult Red Dragon or Efreeti or Salamander should have trouble with ordinary smoke. I might go with a middle ground: fire immunity would include protection against ordinary combustion products (CO, CO2, soot), but not things like evaporated poisons or drugs (so running to the burning pot farm will still affect you...) unless also immune to poison.
I'm going to rephrase your question.
"How can a DM introduce mechanics for smoke inhalation?"
So the Forge Cleric is level 17. They work in a place that naturally has some of the dangers associated with smoke inhalation. That being said, from levels whatever-now? "Cave you are in, there were explosive barrels and things are on fire. You start choking."
Monsters throwing fire bombs at you, catching things on fire.
The thing is, in a properly vented forge or outdoor area, the risk of actual damage and death from inhaled smoke is insignificant. but in a burning building? There might be very little usable oxygen, tons of chemical irritants, massive quantities of smoke. A lifetime in a forge may not prepare one for entering a true conflagration, regardless of immunity, especially if they have never been in one before.
That said, if you did want to "introduce it" you could have the player roll a history check as they go to enter to remember a story from their smithing master about an apprentice who got too close to the furnace and choked from the fumes, or any other check to impart that there would be danger beyond burns in that location, But I don't think that a player should just think they can be immune to non-fire issues associated with fire because they are immune to fire damage.
Fire immunity is distinct from breathing immunity. Warforged and reborn have the latter, for example. That said, for some reason, someone inside a water elemental will suffocate but someone inside a fire elemental won't, so I understand why you might have been surprised to learn that fire immunity doesn't let you breathe in fire. By the same token, acid immunity and poison immunity combined still won't let you breathe pure methane.
It sounds like the DM simply wanted to challenge you, and just walking around totally immune to the challenge is not the way they wanted it to go.
That being said, this is level 17+ we're talking about here. Rescuing people from a single burning building should practically fall under light activity you can accomplish during a short rest. It doesn't feel like a challenge appropriate to the scale of the game at that point, so yeah I'd allow any PC with a plausible approach to just automatically succeed. And then move on to encounters appropriate for the level.
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(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
As a DM, I would probably go with suffocation mechanics within a burning building. Hold your breath, if you are immune to fire.
As has already been pointed out, you are in the wrong here. Fire and smoke isn't the same thing and even if you are immune to the heat of the flames, suffocating by the smoke is still a danger, assuming of course, that your character needs to breath. Personally as a DM, I would probably just use the suffocation mechanics or some variant of it.
"Fun" historical fact, most people who were burned at the stake died from suffocation due to smoke inhalation and not from actually burning to death.