Ranged Weapon - Pilum


Rules Questions


I'm currently up to write a character who's in terms of equipment and tactics similiar to ancient greek hoplits, thus using a shield and spear for meele range. While browsing through the armory I came across the pilum, which is pretty much a javelin just with the neat addition that it can cause shield-using enemies to loose their AC bonus from that shield if hit. It might be due to the fact that English isn't my mothertounge but I really don't know how the pilum is supposed to work in practice.

Here's what it says on the SRD. Pilum:

Quote:
Benefit: Like ammunition, a thrown pilum that hits its target is destroyed. If you hit an shield-using opponent with a pilum, he loses the AC bonus from that shield until he takes a standard action to pry out the remnants of the pilum.

What does hit mean? Usually when the SRD says hit, it means a successful attack, thus an attack roll which beats the enemy's AC and would inflict damage. This however seems to make no sense at this point, because if I hit the enemy and deal damage with the pilum, I obviously havn't hit the shield but some vital area.

Thus I thought hit would mean to simply hit the enemy, thus making a ranged attack against the enemy's touch-AC. If I surpass the touch-AC but not his overall AC, the pilum could've hit the shield.

Therefore I think that either the pilum hits the target and deals damage or beats the touch-AC but not the overall AC and disables the shield.

But that's just my five cents after all. Any ideas?


Terranigma wrote:


What does hit mean? Usually when the SRD says hit, it means a successful attack, thus an attack roll which beats the enemy's AC and would inflict damage. This however seems to make no sense at this point, because if I hit the enemy and deal damage with the pilum, I obviously havn't hit the shield but some vital area.

Hit points are an abstraction, not a quantitative measure of how much actual damage you've inflicted upon your opponent. You might do nothing but nicks and scratches all the way down to the last hit point, where you get that one good sword thrust through the chest that drops it. That's why you can still do backflips, swim across rivers, and climb sheer cliffs when you only have 1 hit point left.

A "hit" in the case of a pilum might be the weapon hitting the shield with enough force to send a painful shiver through the defender's shield arm, maybe with a twinge of pain in his shoulder as he struggles to keep the shield up.

Silver Crusade

Hoplites used spears or long spears not Pilums. Roman's used Pilums.


Pathfinder Maps Subscriber
Terranigma wrote:
This however seems to make no sense at this point, because if I hit the enemy and deal damage with the pilum, I obviously havn't hit the shield but some vital area.

The Pilum's long thin iron head is designed to punch through a wooden shield and protrude far enough beyond it to wound the man behind the shield. In this case, that's what a hit means. Not that you avoided the shield entirely, but were able to hit it hard enough and squarely enough that your pilum did not glance off but instead penetrated.

Now the long soft iron part of the head will bend from the weight of the wooden shaft, making the pilum difficult to remove from the shield while the wooden shaft makes the shield heavy and unwieldy. Despite Pathfinder's description, I've never seen one completely broken off. Bent, yes, broken off, no.

See also This Thread (note: thread predates the inclusion of the Pilum in the rules).

And a picture


Lou Diamond wrote:
Hoplites used spears or long spears not Pilums. Roman's used Pilums.

That's why I said neat 'addition'. :P

However, Peltasts were part of Greek infantry and used javelins at distance. A pilum isn't anything else than just the Latin word for a javelin. They were just as common among Greeks, though not used by Hoplites - that's true in fact.

Shadowborn wrote:
A "hit" in the case of a pilum might be the weapon hitting the shield with enough force to send a painful shiver through the defender's shield arm, maybe with a twinge of pain in his shoulder as he struggles to keep the shield up.

I thought that's the reason your defense can be separated in your mere dexterity bonus, your mere armor bonus and both together. If you get hit, you've got hit and not a part of your armor. Otherwise it would be odd to categorize weapons according to different types of damage. An arrow is supposed to be piercing damage but in order to do that the arrow has to actually pierce into your flesh. If it would simply hit the armor or shield, the damage caused by that could hardly be called piercing.

Hitpoints are a very abstract number but after all, I cannot imagine someone inflicting serious damage with a dagger by only hitting a breastplate. Thus I'd say that a pilum hits when it actually hits - namely the body, not the armor. That's how I imagine a fight. As DM I'd rule it as to hit the armor and not to hit the body - because that's what you usually have to do in order to inflict lethal damage. Stubbing against armor might be annoying and exhausting but that I'd call that nonlethal damage at best.

SlimGauge wrote:
Now the long soft iron part of the head will bend from the weight of the wooden shaft, making the pilum difficult to remove from the shield while the wooden shaft makes the shield heavy and unwieldy.

I can imagine that fairly well, but according to your description the pilum did in fact hit the shield, i.e. the touch-AC. Whether you actually hit the shield-bearer or not is not important in order to damage the shield. To me the pilum sounds more like some sort of in-built sunder-attempt, and you don't need to hit anyone in order to damage their belongings. I don't want to start hairsplitting, though.


Pathfinder Maps Subscriber

You've got to hit more than touch AC, since you've got to hit squarely and with force, not just touch.


My apologies first, I've used the wrong terminology all the time as Touch-AC explicitly excludes armor. To hit touch-AC obviously is as wrong as it could get.

SlimGauge wrote:
You've got to hit more than touch AC, since you've got to hit squarely and with force, not just touch.

Ye. To hit could also mean you've hit the right leg, that wouldn't obviously do the trick to. Still, as pathfinder doesn't care about hit zones that's from my perspective the best to make out of it. At any rate, I don't see any logical necessity to hit the shield-bearer when I simply want to damage his shield.

To hit someone implies for me that I've somehow bypassed his defense and hit the body. But in this case I don't want to bypass the armor, in fact I want to hit the shield. Whether the pilum eventually hits the bearer seems redundant for the effect to take place.

In fact it is somewhat similar to a sunder-attempt just ruled quite oddly. Guess I'd take a look at that thread, maybe there's a bit more reasonable (house-)ruling to be found.

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