Bay 12 Games Forum

It should be impossible to drown in magma, anyway, in the traditional sense - it's way too dense to sink into.  You could walk run across most kinds of lava with a good pair of steel boots and lots of padding.  Suffocation from burnt lungs is a possibility, but not drowning unless you fall in face-first.

Nit-pick + necropost resurrection...  Radiant heat from the lava would do you in even without direct contact with it unless your exposure time was minimal.  Steel is an excellent conductor of heat.  I find it doubtful that sufficient 'padding' to prevent ones feet from being quickly rendered useless would increase the volume of ones foot enough that the amount of steel needed to encase them in even a thin layer would be prohibitively heavy.  Flammable materials will catch fire several feet away from a lava flow, or indeed from several feet downwind.  A helicopter hundreds of feet above a lava flow is still subject to high temperatures from radiant heat.

Even if you could pad yourself thoroughly to protect yourself from heat, you wouldn't be breathing that air- Each breath would do irrepairable damage to your lungs.  Depending on the temperature of the lava, it would range from rapid dessication of lung tissue to flash-boiling all of the moisture in your lungs.  So a self-contained artifical breathing system would be needed, something along the lines of scuba on a cocktail of crack and crystal meth...