Hello. My name is Jo. I'm a pretty average fellow. I have a strength of 8. Hey, don't judge. We're not all built to lop off the heads of a hydra, you know.
One day my demanding wife asks me to go out and cut down a tree. I grab my trusty hand ax and walk out to the field. I run my thumb across the edge of the ax. Boy, it sure is sharp. Taking my time, I line up my swing. The ax hits the tree dead on.
Hmmm. Not a scratch. Let me try that again.
Oh no. What gives?
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Forgive me if what I'm saying here is persnickety, but for some reason I'm bothered by it.
My hand ax does 1d6 - 1.
The tree I'm trying to cut down is (for argument's sake) about 10 inches thick. That means it has about 100 hit points. Since it's wood it has a hardness of 5.
Clearly, I can not do enough damage to overcome the hardness of the tree. I can not cut it down. I can not chop firewood.
My family freezes that winter.
(I suppose I can work in the probability of factoring in critical hits, but I'm pretty sure that it's going to take way too long to hack through the tree even so.)
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Or perhaps I'm a halfling, and I use a small sized hand ax. This creates the same problem.
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So. My question is: am I missing something obvious here in the RAW? Can a guy with a strength of 8 actually chop wood? For instance, is there some rule that allows automatic criticals against items?
Did you roll your d20 and add in all modifiers to see if you could even hit the tree in the first place?
NPC's chopping wood is fluff, why would you ever even worry about whether or not they could do it via mechanics?
A hand axe that does 1d6 would be used for splitting small logs to make kindling after you chop down the tree not for cutting the tree down in the first place. The axe for that would be more akin to a battle axe damage wise and be wielded in 2 hands.
But really..
Find another tree that's more suited to your feeble self.
Pick up sticks for your fire and leave the trees for real men, ya pansy
Take a level in barbarian so you can rage on that tree!
Pick up a bow and shoot the tree to splinters ya nambie pambie
What the heck are you trying to use a melee weapon with an 8 strength. Do you even know which end to hold onto Nancy!
What is this axe crap? did you leave your spellbook at home?
Some systems would handle this quite elegantly.
For example, in the Mouse Guard variant of Burning Wheel, if you weren't healthy enough to make a good farmer, you'd fail quite a bit, and eventually you'd get more healthy because you were out trying to chop wood every day. Then it would start to work.
Pathfinder isn't like that. I don't want Pathfinder to be like that.
In Pathfinder, the guy with the Str 8 is probably either a layabout or a bookworm. Assuming a very modest 5 point buy, he took his points from strength and put them somewhere else. Like me. I'm a layabout and a bookworm. And if you handed me an axe, and pointed me at a forest, and said "go to it..." I suspect that Pathfinder would model the situation pretty accurately.
Based on an average, assuming 1 swing per 6 seconds, you should average 1 crit per 2 minutes anyway. With a critical of x3 that would more then dent into the hardness and you should have it downed within an hour. Of course a handaxe is a pretty terrible tool for chopping a tree either way, as a few have mentioned, for actually taking down the tree, a saw or a 2 handed axe would make far more sense. Proficiency is irrelevant when using a weapon for non-combat, between the size modifyer, and the -5 Dex modifyer (and the fact that it could be considered an object and thus auto hit anyway).
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From the smashing and object section under additional rules: Vulnerability to Certain Attacks: Certain attacks are especially successful against some objects. In such cases, attacks deal double their normal damage and may ignore the object's hardness.
As DM I say that using an axe on a tree is especially successful. Your Commoner does double damage and chops that tree down lickety split.
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Jo, the game rules are not the physics of the game world. They are not the absolute arbiter of everything that happens or can happen. This is not a super-detailed simulation run by a computer, these are highly, highly abstract RPG rules.
There is no conceivable circumstance in which you should be using the game rules to determine if and how an NPC woodcutter chops wood, because this is simply not what those rules are *for*.
What I'm trying to say is, your question is bad and you should feel bad.
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The game doesn't have rules about how to hammer nails into wood either, so the farmer couldn't even build a house to keep his cold family in!
That just falls under Craft (carpentry) which you can do untrained. A lot of things commoners need to do fall under Craft which can be rolled untrained. Almost everything else falls under their profession which is trained only so they need to have 1 point in it to make it their profession.
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Jo, the game rules are not the physics of the game world. They are not the absolute arbiter of everything that happens or can happen. This is not a super-detailed simulation run by a computer, these are highly, highly abstract RPG rules.
There is no conceivable circumstance in which you should be using the game rules to determine if and how an NPC woodcutter chops wood, because this is simply not what those rules are *for*.
What I'm trying to say is, your question is bad and you should feel bad.
I would like to say I have found the rules to be fairly robust once you get out of the adventurer mindset and try to apply them to the typical NPC non-combat tasks.
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Maybe rules shouldn't be physics?
I would like to say I have found the rules to be fairly robust once you get out of the adventurer mindset and try to apply them to the typical NPC non-combat tasks.Jo, the game rules are not the physics of the game world. They are not the absolute arbiter of everything that happens or can happen. This is not a super-detailed simulation run by a computer, these are highly, highly abstract RPG rules.
There is no conceivable circumstance in which you should be using the game rules to determine if and how an NPC woodcutter chops wood, because this is simply not what those rules are *for*.
What I'm trying to say is, your question is bad and you should feel bad.
I have found literally the exact opposite of this and I'm ok with that as rules shouldn't be physics.
I don't know if they changed it in Pathfinder but in 3.5 someone like a Cook, Maid, etc would only earn 1sp a day and a poor meal cost 1sp per day. So working every single day they could barely feed themselves by eating nothing other then gruel... ever. Certainly could never have anything like meat (3sp a chunk) or a hunk of cheese (1sp). They could just forget about ever affording new clothes or tool needed for their work. Just an empty sack cost an entire day's wages ffs! Even peasants in the middle ages had it better then that!
Apparently in DnD 99% of the population was naked, homeless and slowly dying of malnutrition. I guess that's why we see so many adventures trying to make it big. Spending hundreds if not thousands of gold for some trinket sounds like a much better life.
Anybody know what the wages look like in Pathfinder and what book that would be in?
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Cook is a profession so he would make half his profession check in wages.
Assuming a 1st level commoner for whom it is a class skill. He gets +3 for class skill, +1 for skill point, +1 for having a 12 stat. Average roll of 10+3+1+1=15=7.5 gp per week. Over 52 weeks he makes 390gp per year.
You can adjust that higher with feats like skill focus.
The average cost of living is 10gp/month so a single NPC can live fairly nicely and even support up to two other people on his own. If his wife works (maybe granny watches the kids) they can double that amount and have more kids. As the kids get older and learn to work in the same profession they can do aid another checks or their own checks.
Greetings, fellow travellers.
For starters, Arikiel, I would look at the Skills section, there you find - under Profession:
You can earn half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work.
It also has a long list of applicable professions (including the cook!)
Hope that helps!Ruyan.
Edit: Ninja'd.
Cook is a profession so he would make half his profession check in wages.
Assuming a 1st level commoner for whom it is a class skill. He gets +3 for class skill, +1 for skill point, +1 for having a 12 stat. Average roll of 10+3+1+1=15=7.5 gp per week. Over 52 weeks he makes 390gp per year.
You can adjust that higher with feats like skill focus.
The average cost of living is 10gp/month so a single NPC can live fairly nicely and even support up to two other people on his own. If his wife works (maybe granny watches the kids) they can double that amount and have more kids. As the kids get older and learn to work in the same profession they can do aid another checks or their own checks.
Well that's much better then the Hireling wages they had set out in the 3.5 edition. :)
Greetings, fellow travellers.
For starters, Arikiel, I would look at the Skills section, there you find - under Profession:
You can earn half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work.It also has a long list of applicable professions (including the cook!)
Hope that helps!
Indeed it does. I'll have to check that out! :D
Anybody know what the wages look like in Pathfinder and what book that would be in?
Pathfinder has significantly higher wages for the trained peasants, that is for someone with any ranks in a skill. The 1 sp thing is there for untrained labor
Hireling, Trained:(1sp) The amount given is the typical daily wage for mercenary warriors, masons, craftsmen, cooks, scribes, teamsters, and other trained hirelings. This value represents a minimum wage; many such hirelings require significantly higher pay.
Hireling, Untrained (3sp): The amount shown is the typical daily wage for laborers, maids, and other menial workers.
They can also earn gold with profession and craft checks, one rank will get you a fairly comfortable living
1 rank +3 trained = +4 take 10= 14
Check: You can earn half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work.
so thats 7 gp per week (why anyone would teamster for adventurers for 3 sp per day then i have no idea)
Vulnerability to Certain Attacks: Certain attacks are especially successful against some objects. In such cases, attacks deal double their normal damage and may ignore the object's hardness.
why anyone would teamster for adventurers for 3 sp per day then i have no idea
Because the chance to be eaten by a dragon totally makes up for the pay cut. :p
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Personally I would call it a profession: woodcutter check and let them have a wood chopping axe as a tool (rather then the hand axe weapon).
Happler has won the thread. Move along, nothing more to see here.
if you're not convinced:
The PRD doesn't put a price on cords of wood, but by any measure of reasonableness it's going to be in the fews of copper peices range. If not fews of cords of wood per 1 cp, for that matter. Let's be outrageously conservative and assume 1 cord of wood = 5 cp.
Our example woodcutter is going to be either a commoner or expert, either way profession:woodcutter can be a class skill. Assuming a no penalty to wisdom (knowing which wood is economical for harvest) and 1 skill rank in profession, his average income for a week's worth of woodchopping is 7.25gp, or just over 1gp worth of profit per day.
Using the prior price assumption, he's generating at least 20 cords of wood per day, or 2 and a half cords of wood per hour of work.
Happler has won the thread. Move along, nothing more to see here.
if you're not convinced:
The PRD doesn't put a price on cords of wood, but by any measure of reasonableness it's going to be in the fews of copper peices range. If not fews of cords of wood per 1 cp, for that matter. Let's be outrageously conservative and assume 1 cord of wood = 5 cp.Our example woodcutter is going to be either a commoner or expert, either way profession:woodcutter can be a class skill. Assuming a no penalty to wisdom (knowing which wood is economical for harvest) and 1 skill rank in profession, his average income for a week's worth of woodchopping is 7.25gp, or just over 1gp worth of profit per day.
Using the prior price assumption, he's generating at least 20 cords of wood per day, or 2 and a half cords of wood per hour of work.
Or you can stop trying to use the vague and nonsensical Profession rules to try to determine what any given peasant NPC can and can't afford, because it should be blatantly obvious that a simplistic rule like "gp based on profession check" isn't going to model anything in the same *country* as a realistic economy.
As others have pointed out, a hand axe is not what you use for felling trees. What you would use is a felling axe. Felling axes are two-handed axes designed to cut across wood grain. If I need to figure damage for some reason, I would treat a felling axe as either improvised dwarven waraxe or improvised great axe (depending on the size of the haft).
From personal experience, the one I used as a kid to help clear small trees would have been closer to the dwarven warxae in size. You could use it in one hand with a lot of difficulty.
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Or you can stop trying to use the vague and nonsensical Profession rules to try to determine what any given peasant NPC can and can't afford, because it should be blatantly obvious that a simplistic rule like "gp based on profession check" isn't going to model anything in the same *country* as a realistic economy.
I don't follow the complaint.
OP said that RAW, a less-than-robustly built woodcutter cannot chop a tree down, using the combat rules & damage reduction for materials as evidence. 'Common sense' or 'blatantly obvious' is, near as I can tell, not the point. Just the deficiency, or lack thereof, of the RAW rules in Pathfinder that cover the activity.
As Happler pointed out, there IS in fact rules RAW that allow for such a person to not only chop wood, but do so quite prodigiously.
Are you saying that using combat rules IS a more appropriate ruleset for a woodcutter's mundane activity than profession skill check? O.o
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A tree is a creature of the Plant type, but it is immobilized and helpless.
Every axe swing is a Coupe De Grace; x3 damage.
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I don't know if they changed it in Pathfinder but in 3.5 someone like a Cook, Maid, etc would only earn 1sp a day and a poor meal cost 1sp per day. So working every single day they could barely feed themselves by eating nothing other then gruel... ever. Certainly could never have anything like meat (3sp a chunk) or a hunk of cheese (1sp). They could just forget about ever affording new clothes or tool needed for their work. Just an empty sack cost an entire day's wages ffs! Even peasants in the middle ages had it better then that!
Apparently in DnD 99% of the population was naked, homeless and slowly dying of malnutrition. I guess that's why we see so many adventures trying to make it big. Spending hundreds if not thousands of gold for some trinket sounds like a much better life.
Anybody know what the wages look like in Pathfinder and what book that would be in?
I would like to point out that one pound of flour costs 2cp, so does a chicken. An untrained laborer could eat 3 chickens a day and still have 4 cp left over. Are they still poor? Yes. But people with no skills tend to be poor.
A peasant's outfit costs 1 sp. So they can still afford that too.
The cost of living is tough and unless they can stay with friends or relatives they are out on the street as 3gp a month will let you live a poor lifestyle.
The correct Answer is with a wood axe. Or chuck Norris.
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I am amazed at how many people have responded with actual mechanical ideas to solve this "problem."
At what point does: how much wood could a woodcutter cut, if a woodcutter could cut wood, in any way enhance a Pathfinder campaign for the PCs?
Is worrying about how and or why an NPC gather's their firewood an exercise in anything other than hypothetical fluff finding?
At what point in running a campaign, even a homebrew campaign, would the GM say "Hold on, I have to roll to see if this NPC can actually chop some wood to burn."?
I would like to point out that one pound of flour costs 2cp, so does a chicken. An untrained laborer could eat 3 chickens a day and still have 4 cp left over. Are they still poor? Yes. But people with no skills tend to be poor.
A peasant's outfit costs 1 sp. So they can still afford that too.
The cost of living is tough and unless they can stay with friends or relatives they are out on the street as 3gp a month will let you live a poor lifestyle.
Yet a Common Meal costs 3sp a day. *shrugs* Anywho! What book are those prices from? I don't see the in the Core book. Can't find anything on Hirelings either. : /
A tree is not a creature, thus it is an object.
However, has anyone of you actually tried to cut down a tree with an axe? If you have, how many hours did it take? And that's with a modern axe, probably very high-quality compared to what most farmers used back then.
I'm neither a weak nor strong guy, probably about 10 strength, and if someone gave me a hand axe and said "hey, chop down that pine", I'd say "frakk you" if it was more than a decimeter in diameter. I work in that environment, with both bladed trimmers, chainsaws and hand saws, and it's hard work with a hand saw - an axe would be about ten times harder.
That said, combat axes are built quite light. If you want to chop down a tree, you should get a proper felling axe with a long handle - probably a 2h weapon that deals about 1d10 damage with a weight that makes it quite useless in a real battle.
I'm neither a weak nor strong guy, probably about 10 strength, and if someone gave me a hand axe and said "hey, chop down that pine", I'd say "frakk you" if it was more than a decimeter in diameter. I work in that environment, with both bladed trimmers, chainsaws and hand saws, and it's hard work with a hand saw - an axe would be about ten times harder.
I actually cut down a 30' ceder with a axe. Yes it was a b%+$% and took a while. That was a steel axe, not a Iron axe but still it is an all day thing. To cut the tree up I am guessing you need a few people or a couple of days.
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I don't follow the complaint.
The complaint is that people think that the "RAW" is somehow supposed to be able to be used to determine what a random peasant makes, or if he can chop wood. It's not. This is quite literally not the purpose of the rules. The rules have a hard enough time working when used for their intended purpose; trying to use them to figure out what a woodcutter can and can't cut down is asking them to do something they're neither intended nor built to do, and for no good reason.
Are you saying that using combat rules IS a more appropriate ruleset for a woodcutter's mundane activity than profession skill check? O.o
I'm saying neither is at all appropriate, and that the desire to use either of them to determine how much the woodcutter makes is bad and makes gaming worse, not better. Using a "Profession skill" to determine this isn't any better than using the combat rules, and can even be worse. The Profession skill isn't actually there to simulate an economy or determine how much random NPCs make. It's an extremely abstract skill that doesn't actually make much sense if you try to use it for anything other than its intended purpose.
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How do I chop wood?
You should use Profession: Woodcutter if you're interested in determining how much money you can make from cutting wood. The rules don't really cover how well characters can chop trees, because that's not very interesting or relevant to adventuring.
I do not recommend using the combat rules (including attack and damage rolls) for day-to-day professions unless that profession happens to be "adventurer."
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Yet a Common Meal costs 3sp a day. *shrugs* Anywho! What book are those prices from? I don't see the in the Core book. Can't find anything on Hirelings either. : /I would like to point out that one pound of flour costs 2cp, so does a chicken. An untrained laborer could eat 3 chickens a day and still have 4 cp left over. Are they still poor? Yes. But people with no skills tend to be poor.
A peasant's outfit costs 1 sp. So they can still afford that too.
The cost of living is tough and unless they can stay with friends or relatives they are out on the street as 3gp a month will let you live a poor lifestyle.
I always just assumed that the inns jacked up the pricing because they knew that the adventurers could handle it.
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I'm saying neither is at all appropriate, and that the desire to use either of them to determine how much the woodcutter makes is bad and makes gaming worse, not better. Using a "Profession skill" to determine this isn't any better than using the combat rules, and can even be worse. The Profession skill isn't actually there to simulate an economy or determine how much random NPCs make. It's an extremely abstract skill that doesn't actually make much sense if you try to use it for anything other than its intended purpose.
The thread wasn't about 'Obviously the GM can just say the woodchopper chops the wood...'.
If you're not enjoying the discussion about using (and only using) strict RAW rules, maybe this isn't the thread for you.
I always just assumed that the inns jacked up the pricing because they knew that the adventurers could handle it.
He's won the thread now two times over. Of course the game economy is jacked if viewed from a macro perspective.. it's written for adventurers' perspective. And every NPC 'knows' adventurers are just oozing spare coin. Got any idea what the 49'ers were paying in California for shovels and goldpans? Far more than market price, that's fo sure.
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Tangentially, this is a very interesting article on the topic of realism and "what those numbers really mean" in D&D/3.5/Pathfinder.
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If you want a RAW answer, I would refer to the following rule:I'm saying neither is at all appropriate, and that the desire to use either of them to determine how much the woodcutter makes is bad and makes gaming worse, not better. Using a "Profession skill" to determine this isn't any better than using the combat rules, and can even be worse. The Profession skill isn't actually there to simulate an economy or determine how much random NPCs make. It's an extremely abstract skill that doesn't actually make much sense if you try to use it for anything other than its intended purpose.The thread wasn't about 'Obviously the GM can just say the woodchopper chops the wood...'.
If you're not enjoying the discussion about using (and only using) strict RAW rules, maybe this isn't the thread for you.
Vulnerability to Certain Attacks: Certain attacks are especially successful against some objects. In such cases, attacks deal double their normal damage and may ignore the object's hardness.
Perhaps a tree is vulnerable to an axe designed for felling trees. In this case, let's say the aforementioned Str 8 character will deal 2d8-2 damage every round, ignoring the tree's hardness of 5. Every inch of the tree has 10 hp, and the character will deal about 7 damage per swing. Sounds good to me.
The thread wasn't about 'Obviously the GM can just say the woodchopper chops the wood...'.
If you're not enjoying the discussion about using (and only using) strict RAW rules, maybe this isn't the thread for you.
Sorry, but "the premise of this thread is bad and you should feel bad" is still on-topic. The idea that the game rules should be used to determine everything that happens to everyone in the game world--that a woodcutter can't cut wood if he can't beat the hardness of the wood with an axe's damage, or that you should build an NPC with points in a Profession skill to determine how much money a woodcutter makes--is actively bad for gaming.
Tangentially, this is a very interesting article on the topic of realism and "what those numbers really mean" in D&D/3.5/Pathfinder.
That article is hilariously bad.
My favorite part is the part where he insists that because the average person has a 1 in 10 chance of kicking down a heavy wooden door with a single kick, the rules are somehow realistic. Or that an average infantryman has "STR 13".Basically, what he's doing in that article is arbitrarily inventing numbers (stats, DCs, etc) and then going "the probability looks about right to me! Therefore, 3.5 is pretty realistic."
I'm saying neither is at all appropriate, and that the desire to use either of them to determine how much the woodcutter makes is bad and makes gaming worse, not better. Using a "Profession skill" to determine this isn't any better than using the combat rules, and can even be worse. The Profession skill isn't actually there to simulate an economy or determine how much random NPCs make. It's an extremely abstract skill that doesn't actually make much sense if you try to use it for anything other than its intended purpose.The thread wasn't about 'Obviously the GM can just say the woodchopper chops the wood...'.
If you're not enjoying the discussion about using (and only using) strict RAW rules, maybe this isn't the thread for you.
On the contrary... I'm thoroughly enjoying watching as people dissect the various mechanics of the game to determine that "yes" an NPC can chop wood, and if they did in fact want to make money chopping wood, here's how much the rules say they would make. It's entertaining to watch people spend so much time figuring out something that will in no measurable way affect the PCs of a campaign. Unless they kill the woodcutter with the STR of 8 and then violently slaughter his whole family and have to be put on trial.
I actually cut down a 30' ceder with a axe. Yes it was a b!$~@ and took a while. That was a steel axe, not a Iron axe but still it is an all day thing. To cut the tree up I am guessing you need a few people or a couple of days.Same here. Well my tree was a little smaller and a fir. There is no way that a guy with a hand axe is going to knock a tree down of that size in under two days especially with a strength score of 8. In fact I would be willing to bet the moron that tries it will more likely end up hurting themselves before finishing off the tree. Most strikes are going to simply bounce off or shave off some miniscule amount of material. If you really want a tree to come down you go get a saw.
Yeah I wouldn't even try a hand axe. The one I used was a good two bladed wood axe, been ...ugh near 20 years but I am pretty sure the thing was at lest 8-12 pounds. Heavy, thick handled you could put alot of weight into.