In case anyone asks why lightning bolts never actually strike stuff (feel free to include/not this at your leisure, it's long-winded):
Lightning specifically does NOT have actual in-game bolt strikes because of the way DDA (and Cataclysm before it) handled world-monitoring.  Since effects only happen in a 60-tile radius around the player, destructive fire-starting lightning strikes would only happen close enough to endanger the player's shelter, rather than anywhere in the region.

This led to folks either hiding underground to avoid the mechanic altogether, or doing the totally unrealistic and counterintuitive behavior of *fleeing their shelter* for the most expendable area possible whenever a lightning storm hit.  Since they were the only ones with anything to lose, we can't really fault folks for doing that, and thus simply removed the damaging-bolt mechanic as it only encouraged metagaming.