Boneshard bomb vs dr / magic

[TheTheos]

Does boneshard bomb bypass dr/magic?

Rules wrote:

This discovery is popular among necromancers and necrologists alike; aside from its offensive potential, necrologists sometimes use it to turn uncooperative live creatures they wish to question into pliable undead.

Prerequisite(s) Must possess the alchemical zombie discovery

Benefit(s) The alchemist's bomb deals piercing damage instead of fire damage, and creatures that take a direct hit from a boneshard bomb must succeed at a Fortitude save or take 1d4 points of bleed damage in addition to normal damage. If a creature is killed by a boneshard bomb or the resulting bleed effect, its corpse immediately reanimates as an undead creature with the skeleton template. Skeletons that are created in this manner count as undead created by animate dead for the purposes of determining how many undead the alchemist can control.

[mplindustries]

No, since it deals piercing damage instead of fire damage, it is subject to DR, and it never specifies it counts as magic or anything else, so, it doesn't. The only kind of DR it would overcome would be X/Piercing.

Hint: It's not a very good bomb.

[Starbuck_II]

mplindustries wrote:

No, since it deals piercing damage instead of fire damage, it is subject to DR, and it never specifies it counts as magic or anything else, so, it doesn't. The only kind of DR it would overcome would be X/Piercing.

Hint: It's not a very good bomb.

The Bleed would bypass the DR at least.

And as long as the battle takes a good amount of time: it will be useful.

But in short battles it sucks yeah.

[Durngrun Stonebreaker]

The bomb would still be supernatural. Would that count as magic?

[_Ozy_]

It does for anti-magic fields.

[Rhatahema]

I would say treating the damage as magic for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction is a fair compromise. According to rules that are written, damage reduction does not apply to supernatural abilities. The FAQ response adds an exception to that rule without really expanding on the idea. If Ice Storm creates "magical hailstones", the bludgeoning damage should certainly count as magic!

So going only by what the FAQ states, there's no way you can overcome DR/magic. But I think there's a strong argument for supernatural effects counting as magic.