|
| 1 person marked this as FAQ candidate. |
Refer to d20pfsrd or Pf Core p.175
I'm wondering if weapons derive their hardness score strictly from the table titled "Common Armor, Weapon, and Shield Hardness and Hit Points" or if they should instead receive their hardness based on the table "Substance Hardness and Hit Points".
Ex. Would a +5 adamantine two-handed hafted weapon have a hardness of 30, or 15?
Also, if an item is broken/burst, does that mean it's then broken (reduced to half hit points) or destroyed (reduced to 0 hit points)?
The weapon starts at 5 hardness and 10 hit points. Making it a +5 weapon adds 10 hardness and 50 hit points. Making it adamantine changes the base hardness to 40 so it's now hardness of 50. The hit points would have to be determined by thickness. The original item was iron or steel so it had 30 hit points/inch of thickness. Since it had 10 hit points, it is roughly 1/3 of an inch thick. Apply that to the adamantine and you get 40/3 = 13 (remember to round down). Now add the 50 additional hit points and you get 63 hit points.
So the +5 adamantine two-handed hafted weapon has 50 hardness and 63 hit points. It would take a +5 or better weapon to sunder it as well.
As for the conditions, the item is broken when it has taken 32 points of damage. It is destroyed once it hits zero hit points. This is going to be a tough weapon to harm.
|
The weapon starts at 5 hardness and 10 hit points. Making it a +5 weapon adds 10 hardness and 50 hit points. Making it adamantine changes the base hardness to 40 so it's now hardness of 50. The hit points would have to be determined by thickness. The original item was iron or steel so it had 30 hit points/inch of thickness. Since it had 10 hit points, it is roughly 1/3 of an inch thick. Apply that to the adamantine and you get 40/3 = 13 (remember to round down). Now add the 50 additional hit points and you get 63 hit points.
So the +5 adamantine two-handed hafted weapon has 50 hardness and 63 hit points. It would take a +5 or better weapon to sunder it as well.
As for the conditions, the item is broken when it has taken 32 points of damage. It is destroyed once it hits zero hit points. This is going to be a tough weapon to harm.
Ummm... Where are you getting a hardness of 40 for Adamantine? Everything that I am seeing is saying a harness of 20 for Adamantine...
Sorry, I was looking at the hit points/inch. It should be hardness 20. So in my example just subtract 20 from everything that is adamantine.
Thanks for catching that.
I disagree.
1" of adamantine has hardness 20 and 40 HP, but no metal weapon is an inch thick. And the wooden shaft is still wooden.
Fortunately, the Equipment chapter gives us the actual RAW to use:
Adamantine
Mined from rocks that fell from the heavens, this ultrahard metal adds to the quality of a weapon or suit of armor. Weapons fashioned from adamantine have a natural ability to bypass hardness when sundering weapons or attacking objects, ignoring hardness less than 20. Armor made from adamantine grants its wearer damage reduction of 1/— if it's light armor, 2/— if it's medium armor, and 3/— if it's heavy armor. Adamantine is so costly that weapons and armor made from it are always of masterwork quality; the masterwork cost is included in the prices given below. Thus, adamantine weapons and ammunition have a +1 enhancement bonus on attack rolls, and the armor check penalty of adamantine armor is lessened by 1 compared to ordinary armor of its type. Items without metal parts cannot be made from adamantine. An arrow could be made of adamantine, but a quarterstaff could not.
Weapons and armor normally made of steel that are made of adamantine have one-third more hit points than normal. Adamantine has 40 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 20.
That last paragraph tells you what to do. In fact, it then tries to be confusing because after telling you to add 1/3 more HP, it tells you the stats for a sheet of adamantine. Clearly, this last paragraph is talking about two different things since it tells you weapons get +1/3 HP and inches of adamantium have 40 HP - two different things.
Note that weapons gain no extra hardness from being made of adamantium. I suppose that's because the metal parts are too thin to really call them 1 inch thick.
So, a +5 steel two-handed hafted weapon has Hardness 15 and 60 HP, and if you replace that steel with adamantine it has Hardness 15 and 80 HP.
According to raw.
Use the adamantine entry on the "Breaking Items" chart for things that are not weapons or armor.
|
@DM_Blake
The hardness of a material never changes, regardless of thin it is. It just gets less and less HP. (One might house-rule that foil-thin segments get less, but that's a fairly specific scenario).
You'll note that the chart for weapon hardness seems to assume wood and steel for the pieces. Those that are steel are hardness 10, those that are wood are hardness 5.
Also, +1 adds 2 hardness, not 1. And the HP increase for adamantine I'm pretty sure is *before* magic enhancement's HP increase, not after. That puts the +5 adamantine weapon at hardness 30, 63 HP.
I notice that the entry for armor notes specifically "varies by material" and weapons don't, but I refused to believe that metal behaves differently when it's made as armor instead of a weapon. Especially since that would mean that a solid chunk of adamantine would be hardness 20, unless wielded as a weapon which would magically change its hardness to 10.
EDIT: Unless it's a hafted weapon, in which case you can break it by breaking the haft and the fact that the head is adamantine doesn't matter much.
@DM_Blake
The hardness of a material never changes, regardless of thin it is. It just gets less and less HP. (One might house-rule that foil-thin segments get less, but that's a fairly specific scenario).
You'll note that the chart for weapon hardness seems to assume wood and steel for the pieces. Those that are steel are hardness 10, those that are wood are hardness 5.
Also, +1 adds 2 hardness, not 1. And the HP increase for adamantine I'm pretty sure is *before* magic enhancement's HP increase, not after. That puts the +5 adamantine weapon at hardness 30, 63 HP.
I notice that the entry for armor notes specifically "varies by material" and weapons don't, but I refused to believe that metal behaves differently when it's made as armor instead of a weapon. Especially since that would mean that a solid chunk of adamantine would be hardness 20, unless wielded as a weapon which would magically change its hardness to 10.EDIT: Unless it's a hafted weapon, in which case you can break it by breaking the haft and the fact that the head is adamantine doesn't matter much.
You'll note that both the OP an I referred to a hafted weapon, so we're talking base hardness 5 not 10, which means I did add 2 hardness per +1 enhancement bonus.
And, since we have very specific rules stating quite clearly how to modify the stats of weapons made of adamantine, I don't know why you're falling back on some general statement elsewhere in the book. Doesn't specific trump general.
So, generally, 1" of adamantine has hardness 20, but specifically, weapons and armor don't.
Now, I agree with everyone else, this seems like an error in the rulebook. And I agree, thickness should have no effect on hardness. But nevertheless, it is in the rulebook, so it's RAW. Maybe it needs an errata.
In addition to which, it's quite clear that the hardness of steel weapons is variable (hafted weapons are less than non-hafted weapons). It seems that the same variability should be applied to adamantine, such that an adamantine hafted weapon (like an axe) should have less hardness than a solid adamantine weapon (like a sword). If it's true for one metal, it should be true for all, since the wooden haft is the same on both weapons.
So, does the wooden haft cause a /2 multiplier: 10/2 = 5 hardness for hafted steel weapons? Or does it cause a -5 modifier: 10-5 = 5 for hafted steel weapons? If we assume that we are housruling (or writing errata) to upgrade adamantine weapons to hardness 20 (for solid weapons), then the hafted weapons are either hardness 10 (20/2) or hardness 15 (20-5). Could go either way.
Does anyone have a cite for an official FAQ, Errata, or developer post that answers this?
|
|
I'm glad there is a little back-and-forth going on here, because initially I felt that I was asking a really stupid question. Whereas now I feel like I should be building an equipment table with listed hardnesses and hit points for all the base weapons, to make my job easier in the future. Has anyone done this before?
Anyway, taking what I think I just learned, I'm going to build something a bit more complex. In this case, testing some reverse compatibility, I'm going to try and figure out what the hardness and hit points of a +5 Mithral Longstaff (Complete Adventurer & Dragon #331) would be.
My first order of business is ruling on dimensions and with the help of Wikipedia and common sense, I've arrived at 7.5' in length (not very important here) and 1.5" thickness (quite important here, for hit point calculation).
Referring to the "Common Armor, Weapon, and Shield Hardness and Hit Points" table, I'm noticing there is no category for a Two-handed metal-hafted weapon. I'm going to assume (based on the other entries) that it would have a base hardness of 10 and base hit points of 40.
Here's my arrival at that conclusion:
A light metal-hafted weapon has 10 hit points and a one-handed metal-hafted weapon has 20 hit points. (Both have a hardness of 10.)
Moving on, I'm going to figure out the weapon's hardness score. It's base hardness should actually be 15 because of it's mithral composition (replacing the base hardness of 10), and it should receive a +10 hardness bonus due to it's +5 enhancement bonus. Therefore, it's hardness is 25.
To figure out the weapon's hit points, I'm going to follow roughly the same pattern as I just did for hardness. The base hit points of 40 are being replaced by a base of 45 (30/in. of thickness, at 1.5"), with a +50 hit point bonus due to it's +5 enhancement bonus. I've ended up with a total of 95 hit points.
If I did that right, my +5 mithral longstaff has a hardness of 25 and 95 hit points (and can only be sundered by a +5 weapon). Being that objects halve lots of damage (Ex. piercing weapons and energy damage) before hardness is subtracted, it's a pretty mighty weapon.
Before moving on to breaking/bursting items, I'd also like to speculate that wooden-hafted weapons are not receiving the hardness of wood, as Stabbity suggested above. It's my opinion that the primary hardness of 10 (steel) is actually just being halved. I'm not sure if that's correct, or if it really even matters.
So, lastly, breaking/bursting items has the following description:
When a character tries to break or burst something with sudden force rather than by dealing damage, use a Strength check (rather than an attack roll and damage roll, as with the sunder special attack) to determine whether he succeeds. Since hardness doesn't affect an object's Break DC, this value depends more on the construction of the item than on the material the item is made of. Consult Table: DCs to Break or Burst Items for a list of common Break DCs.
If an item has lost half or more of its hit points, the item gains the broken condition (see Conditions) and the DC to break it drops by 2.
If I'm trying to bend some iron bars, my DC is 24. If I succeed, am I damaging them? Or am I breaking them (thereby reducing their hit points to half)? Or am I destroying them (thereby reducing their hit points to zero)? If I am damaging them, how am I calculating damage?
|
|
... lots of stuff...
Counterpoints!
1) I didn't realize you were initially talking about a hafted weapon, apologies!2) I noted that a hafted weapon likely uses the lesser of the hardness of the haft and the head, since you can break the haft to break the weapon.
3) Armor does specifically take the hardness of the material, probably because armor is always a solid chunk of it.
4) I'm ignoring the "more specific" rule in this case, because it makes no damned sense. A ball of adamantine has hardness 20, a weapon that is essentially a ball of adamantine (such as a mace) has hardness 10? Yeah, not gonna fly at my table. (No offense intended.)
If you take note 2 into account with all weapons, then only those that could function without their non-metal bits (or whose non-metal bits were too hard to target when wielded) would actually get the hardness of the metal. On that note, I would say that only those on the chart that have a hardness of 10 (that of steel) would get the hardness of the metal if they used a harder one.
For the OP's question, he's making a hafted weapon out of a special material, which by-default assumes that ONLY the business end is actually made of that material (if it even had a metal business-end so as to qualify to use that material), so the haft is still normal wood.
Replacing the haft with a metal would normally not work so well (on two-handed weapons) due to the extra weight making it too cumbersome, but making it with mithril would probably work okay (and you can make it hollow to lower weight further since mithril is tougher than steel). In this case I probably wouldn't increase the HP (hollow!) but I would increase the hardness.
Random Note: I need to start sundering hide/leather characters. Leather only has a hardness of 2! Even +5 can't make it resist adamantine's death knell.