XMark

Is anyone up for the Vancouver Retro Gaming Expo? Tickets might be selling out soon.

The most effective way to combat a water elemental is a giant sponge.

Not bad, but show me a Spinning Bird Kick 

To understand what kind of damage works against skeletons, we need to examine what kind of force propels the skeletons to walk around and attack you.

Obviously by the rules of normal physics, a skeleton couldn't do anything without muscles and tendons to keep it all together, so we need to assume a magical force.

There are definitely limits to that magical force, though. They cannot fly, and the bones always appear to be connected together and always remain humanoid in shape.

Individual bones are unable to move on their own, so if a limb is hacked off it becomes inert and can only be reattached if the rest of the skeleton picks it up and puts in back in its original place, at which point it "snaps" back into place.

Skeletons being decapitated and then putting their own heads back on (or just continuing to fight headless) are a fairly common thing in movies and video games, so we'll assume that the source of the energy field is somewhere within the center of the body. We'll also assume that, since it has no actual eyes, the head serves no practical purpose in its perception of its surroundings.

So the best way to fight a skeleton would be either to smash the ribcage directly with a very large and heavy blunt weapon. A light slashing weapon would be quite difficult to use, a poking weapon completely useless, but a two-handed sword or a lighter blunt weapon could be used to sever its limbs one-by-one, leaving the torso unable to fight.

The only magic which would work is some kind of "holy" magic to dispell the magic which animated the skeleton. Fire would just leave you facing a really hot skeleton with a really hot weapon.

I've found the show and books work great together. For anyone new, I'd recommend watching the first season before reading the books. It'll make it much easier to know who to focus on when the books shove a thousand character names into your face all at once.