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Even if the Noachi cut through stone like butter it still weighs 8 pounds.
Which is insanely heavy for any kind of sword. Even the big german zweihanders never weighed more than 6 pounds. That's what you get for basing the weapon tables off of sword-shaped objects made as "replicas".
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On of my fellow PCs brought a adamantine crowbar named Sebastian to the Tomb of Horrors and dismantled everything along the way as part of his character's way to deal with the tomb. For those of you familiar, if you were able to see your guests on the other plane our DM described them as face palming or throwing temper tantrums. Hilarious!
And to the OP, I think you actions are perfectly valid if not too light of a touch. Fatigue, collapses, alerting resident BBEGs, releasing a ton of methane either suffocating or a spark from a strike blowing the crap out of the PCs, and any other potential consequence of destroying that wall should have been leveraged. For a quick answer next time calculate the HP of the object that is targeted calculate the PC's average damage minus any penalties for an inappropriate tool and give the PC a number of rounds it will take to get through ONE side of the hole they are cutting. Remember there are FOUR cuts required to make a square or rectangle like a door. Good luck!
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Try to explain it to your player like this:
The nodachi is to the wall what an axe is to a dirt floor.
Then explain to him that using the nodachi to chip away at the wall is like using an axe to dig a hole in a dirt floor.
20 minutes is probably being generous.
That is good comparison, considering that while dirt has no inherent hardness to it, and visciously sharp axe would still be hard to dig up a hole
@Ascalaphus
And I'm fine with PC's just cutting locks off stuff. If anything is just more wealth by level that I am throwing to them, and if a chest was going to be hard to open, it would probably be a phalactery or something with insanely high Hardness.
@Mysterious Stranger
I completly forgot that damn sword weighed 8 pounds! One thing is to have the strength to use it, which the player does, but he only has a 12 Con. One can do weights and dumbells all they want, but if they dont do cardio, then they are still going to tire out with excessive physical activity.
@Zilvar2k11
I agree that from a narrative point of view it should be allowed in some cases, as I had said, the walls he was escavating through were relatively worn out instead of just solid wall.
@TPK
Those are some handy suggestions! The dungeon they were running was a pretty linear one that I had created to catch the PC's up on some loot and wealth, but I remember they were using similar tactics previously in other instances such as enemy forts and dungeons that I told them alerted whatever denizens resided in there.
The gas is a nice touch. I wonder what the perception DC it is to identify flammable gas?
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Adamantine whips let you break down stone walls, solid or not, from a distance. Much safer, better all around. Adamantine arrows are brilliant for carving through walls.
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Luckily for GMs, it isn't up to players to declare what is and is not an 'appropriate tool' for digging through walls.
You have every right to say a weapon won't work for digging. They can either accept this, or not.
Lightsabers don't exist in Pathfinder, and shouldn't be used as a basis for comparision.
If Adamantine weapons granted a burrow speed, the rules would say so.
Not disagreeing with you, but lightsabers do exist in Pathfinder now. Look up the plasma blade from AP #100. >.>
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I always thought brilliant energy weapons went BZZZZZZZZZZZMMMMM!!!?
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For a quick answer next time calculate the HP of the object that is targeted calculate the PC's average damage minus any penalties for an inappropriate tool and give the PC a number of rounds it will take to get through ONE side of the hole they are cutting. Remember there are FOUR cuts required to make a square or rectangle like a door. Good luck!This answer bothers me a bit. Maybe this is a problem with my view of the object breaking/hardness rules, but when I see someone say that you need to roll damage in excess of a wall's hit points in order to make a window, or a door, or whatever, I wonder why GM's rule that you've got to do the same damage to make an opening big enough to get through as you have to do to reduce the entire wall section to rubble.
Am I misinterpreting your position? If not, why is that your concern?
By no later than 9th level, any obstacle limited by walls is potentially a joke because of casters (probably earlier, dimension door is available earlier). Why is it such an issue if someone with an adamantine (sword/axe/pick/flail/hammer/whatever) gets a way to do the same thing by 5th or 6th level?
Actually I have no problem with and adamantine hammer breaking through the wall with ease and not requiring the 4 cuts concept, but at this point I am more pointing out that the HP and Hardness apply to each section. The PC is using a adamantine blade which cuts cleanly through and when you do enough damage it will penetrate that section of wall, but the penetration is still in the shape of a cut, so a line... For this to be useable you need to make 3 more cuts. The only reason I think this description is truly important is to define the timeframe, difficulty (read fatigue) and amount of noise that will occur once the cuts have been complete and a slab of stone falls loudly slamming into the ground, not just making noise but a hell of a lot of noise and shaking the area with its force. No more surprise rounds against all the BBEGs in this dungeon and frankly expect some ambushes since you just alerted everything to your presence and obvious violence. I guess my biggest point is in my games I very very rarely say NO. I usually just describe the situation in what the cost/difficulties would need to be payed/dealt with to succeed and allow the PCs to make a decision. At the decision determine what the effect with be and how it affects the situation including consequences. I hope that clarifies.
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Not disagreeing with you, but lightsabers do exist in Pathfinder now. Look up the plasma blade from AP #100. >.>Luckily for GMs, it isn't up to players to declare what is and is not an 'appropriate tool' for digging through walls.
You have every right to say a weapon won't work for digging. They can either accept this, or not.
Lightsabers don't exist in Pathfinder, and shouldn't be used as a basis for comparision.
If Adamantine weapons granted a burrow speed, the rules would say so.
Laser swords (lightsabers) and plasma blades may look similar, but utilize different types of energy. :P
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Laser swords (lightsabers) and plasma blades may look similar, but utilize different types of energy. :P
Not disagreeing with you, but lightsabers do exist in Pathfinder now. Look up the plasma blade from AP #100. >.>
I am _so_ glad you know the details of lightsaber construction and operation, because I don't think Lucas himself does....
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I am _so_ glad you know the details of lightsaber construction and operation, because I don't think Lucas himself does....Laser swords (lightsabers) and plasma blades may look similar, but utilize different types of energy. :P
Not disagreeing with you, but lightsabers do exist in Pathfinder now. Look up the plasma blade from AP #100. >.>
To be fair though, I can more easily imagine a plasma sword (magnetic field containing superheated stuff) far more easily than a 'laser sword'... I mean, why doesn't that laser just... keep going? Midi-Chlorians? :D
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To be fair though, I can more easily imagine a plasma sword (magnetic field containing superheated stuff) far more easily than a 'laser sword'... I mean, why doesn't that laser just... keep going? Midi-Chlorians? :DI am _so_ glad you know the details of lightsaber construction and operation, because I don't think Lucas himself does....Laser swords (lightsabers) and plasma blades may look similar, but utilize different types of energy. :P
Not disagreeing with you, but lightsabers do exist in Pathfinder now. Look up the plasma blade from AP #100. >.>
For the link impaired (emphasis mine):
The lightsaber, sometimes referred to as a laser sword, was a weapon used by the Jedi and the Sith. Lightsabers consisted of a plasma blade, powered by a kyber crystal and emitted from a metallic hilt.
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Actually I have no problem with and adamantine hammer breaking through the wall with ease and not requiring the 4 cuts concept, but at this point I am more pointing out that the HP and Hardness apply to each section. The PC is using a adamantine blade which cuts cleanly through and when you do enough damage it will penetrate that section of wall, but the penetration is still in the shape of a cut, so a line... For this to be useable you need to make 3 more cuts. The only reason I think this description is truly important is to define the timeframe, difficulty (read fatigue) and amount of noise that will occur once the cuts have been complete and a slab of stone falls loudly slamming into the ground, not just making noise but a hell of a lot of noise and shaking the area with its force. No more surprise rounds against all the...How much damage is enough though? I guess that's where I might be misunderstanding. Would you really require someone to do 172 points of damage to cut a single line through a 1 foot wall section? And then do it again 3 more times?
Because now you've made the guy with the sword do enough damage to reduce the wall to rubble 4 times.
WAIT A MINUTE...
Maybe this is where the creators saw some weapons as being ineffective...
Scenario 1: You Slash a wall as hard as possible, and it makes a cut. Going by sunder rules, and other stuff like that, you actually dealt damage. A sunder specific character would also probably do a lot of damage, and by Raw it should do enough damage to destroy it... the only problem is that it was an ineffective weapon to begin with.
Scenario 2. You Hit a wall with an earthbreaker, rolling a high sunder check and damage. By raw, the great damage is enough to collapse a wall, and because its a hammer its an effective weapon. So by rules sake, it makes sense.
Similarly a net falls upon a character, and such character takes out a dagger, and begins to deal damage. In no time, the damage succeeds and the player is free.
Another character gets caught in a net, and takes out a Warhammer. The he may have the str and damage to inflict enough damage on the net, but being an ineffective weapon would limit it, not by a clearly defined RAW, but the rule interpretation of "ineffective weapons."
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Then "hardness" shouldn't be a thing. Instead, rope would have "DR 20/slashing" and stone would be like "DR 20/bludgeoning," or whatever. It's awkward and goofy for rope to have hardness 0 and also virtual "DR infinity/slashing" but not even call it that, and make no effort to integrate the two systems. Or for stone to have hardness 8 but also DR/arbitrary.
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Do they need to go through every substance and spell out which tools are more or less effective in damaging those substances?
They already more or less started down that road, with the whole hardness system, which does indeed have numerical values for those sorts of things. It's like they left the job half-finished and added a note that says, "Make up some arbitrary stuff to cover for the fact we ran out of time and never got to where we were going with this stuff."
Or leave it ALL out -- eliminate "hardness" entirely -- and make it all arbitrary. I'd actually be fine with that, too.
As it is, we have a half-finished draft system and a non-system and we're layering them on top of each other, like a parfait with one layer of granola, one of ground glass, and most of the glass empty so that we can just imagine the other toppings.
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Is that really such a counter-intuitive concept that it needs specific codification in the rules? Do they need to go through every substance and spell out which tools are more or less effective in damaging those substances?
Given the number of forumites that choose to parse rules in extremely narrow ways, with no heed to context?
A 2000 page rules appendix/glossary written in legalese by a team of competent lawyers would not be sufficient.
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I once spent a little bit of time looking into designing rules for hardness, tensile strength, and... a third one that I forget right now. All materials would have different scores for each, and resist the three physical damage types in different ways, so that a bludgeoning weapon would be useless against a rope, a slashing weapon would work great, and a piercing weapon would be mediocre.
My conclusion: too much effort for too little gain.
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I once spent a little bit of time looking into designing rules for hardness, tensile strength, and... a third one that I forget right now. All materials would have different scores for each, and resist the three physical damage types in different ways, so that a bludgeoning weapon would be useless against a rope, a slashing weapon would work great, and a piercing weapon would be mediocre.
My conclusion: too much effort for too little gain.
That's kind of my thought on the matter.
Basically, is it cool to be able to cut through walls with an adamantine sword? Hell, yes. Does it derail the plot? Probably not. Will the players think it's awesome? Absolutely.
Then mundane materials science can sit down and shut up. Just like I'm not concerned about conservation of energy when someone throws a fireball.
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Actually I have no problem with and adamantine hammer breaking through the wall with ease and not requiring the 4 cuts concept, but at this point I am more pointing out that the HP and Hardness apply to each section. The PC is using a adamantine blade which cuts cleanly through and when you do enough damage it will penetrate that section of wall, but the penetration is still in the shape of a cut, so a line... For this to be useable you need to make 3 more cuts. The only reason I think this description is truly important is to define the timeframe, difficulty (read fatigue) and amount of noise that will occur once the cuts have been complete and a slab of stone falls loudly slamming into the ground, not just making noise but a hell of a lot of noise and shaking the area with its force. No more surprise rounds against all the...How much damage is enough though? I guess that's where I might be misunderstanding. Would you really require someone to do 172 points of damage to cut a single line through a 1 foot wall section? And then do it again 3 more times?
Because now you've made the guy with the sword do enough damage to reduce the wall to rubble 4 times.
WAIT A MINUTE...
Maybe this is where the creators saw some weapons as being ineffective...
Scenario 1: You Slash a wall as hard as possible, and it makes a cut. Going by sunder rules, and other stuff like that, you actually dealt damage. A sunder specific character would also probably do a lot of damage, and by Raw it should do enough damage to destroy it... the only problem is that it was an ineffective weapon to begin with.
Scenario 2. You Hit a wall with an earthbreaker, rolling a high sunder check and damage. By raw, the great damage is enough to collapse a wall, and because its a hammer its an effective weapon. So by rules sake, it makes sense.
Similarly a net falls upon a character, and such character takes out a dagger, and begins to deal damage. In no time, the damage...
This is exactly the way would play it. Sunder says it has gained the broken condition or been destroyed... NOT that you have made a hole. The job of the GM is to describe how the wall has been damaged. I responded to the specific choices the character made and based on the hardness (negated), HP and the type of damage you dealing what would happen and stated how to succeed. I think I am being very reasonable in allowing a blade to cut through a wall and providing the PC a chance to be reward/deal with consequences depending on what is on the other side of the wall.
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I once spent a little bit of time looking into designing rules for hardness, tensile strength, and... a third one that I forget right now. All materials would have different scores for each, and resist the three physical damage types in different ways, so that a bludgeoning weapon would be useless against a rope, a slashing weapon would work great, and a piercing weapon would be mediocre.
My conclusion: too much effort for too little gain.
That's kind of my thought on the matter.
Basically, is it cool to be able to cut through walls with an adamantine sword? Hell, yes. Does it derail the plot? Probably not. Will the players think it's awesome? Absolutely.
Then mundane materials science can sit down and shut up. Just like I'm not concerned about conservation of energy when someone throws a fireball.
The problem is that "it's cool" is a matter of perspective; what seems cool for some games is a mess for others.
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The problem is that "it's cool" is a matter of perspective; what seems cool for some games is a mess for others.That's why I asked the question:
By no later than 9th level, any obstacle limited by walls is potentially a joke because of casters (probably earlier, dimension door is available earlier). Why is it such an issue if someone with an adamantine (sword/axe/pick/flail/hammer/whatever) gets a way to do the same thing by 5th or 6th level?
If there was an answer, I've missed it. If there's an answer that involves 'spell slots' or 'limited uses', then I respectfully respond in advance: scrolls, staves (lol), wands, pearls, bonded items, etc. It might cost more than an ad. sword/hammer/pick, but it's also a lot more flexible.
I didn't see any response to your question, but I may have missed it in the mayhem. For my own answer, I've no problem with an adamantine item designed to break down walls. I don't subscribe to the "It'd be cool if people could like, hack thru walls with adamantine butterknives!" Cool doesn't override silly or nonsensical for me. I'm willing to suspend disbelief a lot in games, but there are lines (and we all have them, even if we don't admit it on forums.)
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I really don't see the problem with allowing a player to hack through a stone wall with an adamantine or any other weapon. Taking the OPs comment that the wall is 10 feet thick and assuming that as it is in a dungeon it is effectively unworked stone, which due to fractures gains the broken condition. Lets say it has 450HP for a 10'x10'x10' section.
The medium size No Dachi does 1d10 and x2 for a critical. Lets also assume the person wielding it has a +3 bonus due to strength. Now the character is aiming the blows carefully, the equivalent of a coup de grace, so lets allow one blow a round, every blow to be an auto-critical and because of the coup de grace care and the ineffectiveness of the No Dachi is neutralised. The character is doing 23HP of damage a round and ignoring hardness. So assuming they want to carve a narrow, squeeze tight, corridor they would need to carve out a minimum 2.5'x5'x10' volume. That equates to 56HP of damage. So they could chop through the wall in 2 rounds - providing they can reach it.
Now, all of that rubble has to go somewhere. Sandstone weighs approximately 150lbs per cubic foot, limestone and granite average at 175lbs per cubic foot and our No Dachi wielder is damage wise carving out 62.5 cubic feet per round. I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that once they have carved the first foot of depth, it must be cleared to allow access to the next foot of depth and the minimum face allows 12.5 cubic feet to be carved.
A character has two move actions per round. So assuming they are strong enough to pick up a cubic foot sized boulder they could grab a boulder as a move action, move half their movement allowance, drop it as a free action and return with the rest of their movement allowance in one round. Now for most characters their movement speed will be reduced due to heavy encumbrance.
With a party of four, a maximum of three of which will be moving boulders then, excepting exceptional or poor strength, a maximum of 3 cubic feet per round can be moved. So it would take 42 rounds to clear the rubble.
Now the next question is where are the party moving the rubble to? A nice rule of thumb with soil excavation is that the excavated soil has twice the volume of the compacted soil. With roughly stacked boulders, I can imagine this easily being more. Let's say that dropped boulders have 4 times the volume of solid wall and can only be stacked 3 feet high (because they are dropped) and placed boulders can be up to 6 feet high and are 2 times the volume but cannot be stacked on top of dropped boulders and require an additional move action. I.e. stacking boulders takes two rounds per round trip instead of one - 42 rounds is now 84 rounds, assuming they started with stacking instead of dropping.
It would also be reasonable to reuse the run rules to determine how many rounds a character can shifty boulders for before resting. This could easily push the number of rounds required to above 100.
All the boulder movement should nicely fill up the corridor or room that they are currently in, take a lot of time and make retreat difficult. It is probable that the characters moving the material will have to remove their armour, weapons and other items to make the encumbrance allowance.
Meanwhile the GM should be rolling for wandering monsters every round, due to the loud noise. The characters should be rather distracted due to the exertion required.
So by all means allow it. Once the player realises that carving through a wall doesn't mean the wall material disappears then they should soon stop. If they don't the other players should stop them.
To answer the OP other questions. Bypassing hardness only applies when sundering or attacking objects. So to answer 1 and 2 it is the AC not the touch AC that applies and to answer 3, the adamantine arrow bypasses hardness but it doesn't bypass hit points. The arrow will embed itself in the castle wall having done very minor damage to the wall.
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I didn't see any response to your question, but I may have missed it in the mayhem. For my own answer, I've no problem with an adamantine item designed to break down walls. I don't subscribe to the "It'd be cool if people could like, hack thru walls with adamantine butterknives!" Cool doesn't override silly or nonsensical for me. I'm willing to suspend disbelief a lot in games, but there are lines (and we all have them, even if we don't admit it on forums.)Why is it a suspension of disbelief for someone to do inexplicable things with a sword made of an inexplicable material, but not one for a wizard to wiggle his fingers and turn the same wall into mud, or just make a magical hole appear, or just appear on the other side of it because reasons?
One is magic and the other isn't? One is a manipulation of reality itself, and the other is a really sharp sword -- which is really neat by itself -- being used in a way that it wasn't mean to be used in.
There's a reason we don't see Wolverine cutting through 10 foot walls; as I recall, even with his impossibly cool claws he has in the past lacked leverage, strength, or time to do so.
As I said above, there is a line for most if not all of us. Where your line and what your likes are vary. For me, it's someone using this inappropriate weapon as a pick to do some mining, let alone someone WANTING to do that. In character. To their prized weapon. Oh, out of game we know that it is super duper metal and probably won't break. Does your character know that banging it over and over on a wall won't cause problems?
For that matter, why isn't it destroying armour and leaving people in ruined gear afterwards?
I imagine it's the same reason that it is hard to watch computer crime/hacking shows with computer people, medical shows with doctors and nurses and EMTS, cop shows with lawyers and cops and so on. There comes a point where they go "Oh come ON!"
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The funny thing is that even if an object is much harder than the other, that doesn't mean you're capable of using it to pierce the softer one... Depending on your strength it might take unreasonable amounts of effort or be simply impossible for a certain person to do it.
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As for inappropriate weapons, I grew up on books about magic swords doing incredible and inappropriate things. The Saberhagen's first 3 Books of Swords were formative fiction for me. I have NO problem with a sword slicing chunks out of rock :) But obviously that's just me. :)
As I recall, the 12 swords were made by a God and empowered, they weren't just picked up at the local market. Which in many games is where you'd pick up a an adamantine nodachi, right next to the 100 feet of rope and iron rations.
I enjoyed the books as well, but I'd prefer that every sword wasn't a God-forged blade or at least didn't have the attributes of one.
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Are your PCs exhausted after 4-6 tiger encounters a day?
1 or 2 is enough.
That's known as the 15 minute adventure day.What you really need is from 2nd Ed:
An earlier character of mine had one, and it was sweet.
/cevah
I haven't read the whole thread but I did read several posts and favourited many of them against digging with a sword.
First of all 20 min to go though 10 feet of stone with a sword? More like 10-20 hours of extremely exhausting work.
It's not like he could swing the sword and slice through the stone wall to any degree. Friction and just that much dense mass being hit by a weapon without most of its mass at the end (like a hammer) I think it would bounce off the wall and or skip off it. It would do some damage but not a lot. Plus it would hurt like a b~#&@ on your arms as all the force you put into the wall was put back on you. You cannot slice thought it adamatine blade or not as you would have to disperse the stone as the blade is passing through it and the stone is too dense and hard/strong for that and it's solid not a liquid. So comparing say a knife of normal steel going through flesh is completely different than a indestructible blade going through stone.
On another note in machining you can't take a carbide tool bit and just take off the maximum amount of material(as per how big the bit is) of say mild steel in one pass without asking for trouble. But that's sort of getting off topic.
Anyways, you couldn't slice though the stone wall with the sword at best you could half-sword with it and chip away at the wall. Which would be very tiring and chips of stone and stone dust would be flying in your face and elsewhere. I would have him take a certain amount of non-lethal damage every so often from flying chips and just the stress on your body of hitting something that dense for many hours. Plus you would have to remove the rubble you created as you went. I suppose the other party members could do that. Then as other posters have said would your tunnel hold up?
Also with stone even a small stress fracture can all of the sudden start to crack and grow and grow and if there is a lot of weight on top of it can fail explosively. Which is why in concrete structures there is rebar so it doesn't explode if it fails as it use to before rebar was put into concrete. Off topic again oops
Experiment use a regular sword and try and go through a 10 foot thick clay wall. That would be much easier than the stone wall and adamantine sword and it would take more than 20 min. Not sure where you're going to find that clay wall though. ;)
Apologies for jumping all over the place and the poor editing on this post as I'm tired but I think it more or less gets the point across. ;)
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Now if it had been a katana, he could just have meteor swarmed his way through the wall in five or six rounds.
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Just make the players roll out all of the damage they are doing to your objects. Instead of saying "it takes you about 20 mins" say "make your attack roll". After 10-15 irl minutes of AC10 attack rolls and dealing damage, maybe they will be dissuaded from doing it and will instead try......dun dun dun....the door.
edit: If in later levels they are dealing absurd amounts of damage and are getting through faster than you like, just remember: at high levels why would a stone wall stand in the way of a protector of the planet/universe/all of existence!
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I haven't read the whole thread but I did read several posts and favourited many of them against digging with a sword.
First of all 20 min to go though 10 feet of stone with a sword? More like 10-20 hours of extremely exhausting work.
It's not like he could swing the sword and slice through the stone wall to any degree. Friction and just that much dense mass being hit by a weapon without most of its mass at the end (like a hammer) I think it would bounce off the wall and or skip off it. It would do some damage but not a lot. Plus it would hurt like a b*+~$ on your arms as all the force you put into the wall was put back on you. You cannot slice thought it adamatine blade or not as you would have to disperse the stone as the blade is passing through it and the stone is too dense and hard/strong for that and it's solid not a liquid. So comparing say a knife of normal steel going through flesh is completely different than a indestructible blade going through stone.
On another note in machining you can't take a carbide tool bit and just take off the maximum amount of material(as per how big the bit is) of say mild steel in one pass without asking for trouble. But that's sort of getting off topic.
Anyways, you couldn't slice though the stone wall with the sword at best you could half-sword with it and chip away at the wall. Which would be very tiring and chips of stone and stone dust would be flying in your face and elsewhere. I would have him take a certain amount of non-lethal damage every so often from flying chips and just the stress on your body of hitting something that dense for many hours. Plus you would have to remove the rubble you created as you went. I suppose the other party members could do that. Then as other posters have said would your tunnel hold up?
Also with stone even a small stress fracture can all of the sudden start to crack and grow and grow and if there is a lot of weight on top of it can fail explosively. Which is why in concrete structures there is rebar so it doesn't...
I think you brought some good points along your explanation. While most actions and events in pathfinder have some sort of rule, there aren't clear explanation of real world physics that would only serve to slow down the game. I believe that such rules fall under the category of common sense.
As such someone shoot a lit arrow into the roof thatching of a farmers homestead.A DM could say:
"The small kindling, alongside the dry weather are the perfect conditions for the roof to catch on fire, eventually the house erupts in flames and the farmers run out."
Instead of
"You do 6 damage to the house, however since its an arrow you only do 3 damage. Now the house gets a reflex save. It fails, now it begins to take 1d6 points of fire damage every round. The house has 300 Hit points. Roll 1d6 damage, each time rolling equating to 6 seconds passing"
I feel players read 1 rule or interpretation, and try to use it as a blanket term to get the best bang for your buck. But considering Pathfinder is a game of optimization and utility, why wouldn't players think like this?
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Sounds like a great way for a martial character to do the same kind of stuff casters use spells for.
How many different ways do casters have to get past doors or walls?
Knock
Shatter
Passwall
Soften Earth and Stone
Stoneshape
Disintegrate
Quite a few different shapeshifting spells
Quite a few different summon spells
Why not let the martial have a nice thing?
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In Soviet Golarion, Adamantine Sword Cuts You!
(in the wallet, I mean...)
i.e. AFAIK there's only two places in canon that have forges hot enough to smelt adamantine: Riddleport and Alkenstar... soooo... while the CORE rules say it's +3000gp for an adamantine weapon, I think a GM that wishes to make a vibrant world come to life would be perfectly in his rights, for a home campaign, to make adamantine weapons exceedingly rare (old hoards or long waiting lists in above-mentioned cities) and much, MUCH more expensive than that. Needless to say the supply of such weapons seems to be much, MUCH inferior than the supply of weapon magic enhancements, so I don't think most cost-savvy adventurers would care for the waiting time and the cost of opportunity presented by say, +3 weapons or flaming holy weapons that would be cheaper than such adamantine rare finds... thus relegating ownership of adamantine weapons to eccentric nobility, royalty or debonair stupid rich merchant oligarchs.
I know, 'not according to APs' or 'not according to PFS', etc. I'm just talking about home campaign that would attempt to make sense of things, considering the short supply of this metal AND locations that can transform it.
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Imagine if you will a dungeon room, that is actually made of butter.
Butter flagstones on the floor, huge slabs of butter for the walls, butter beams on the ceiling. Everything is butter.Now go cut through the wall with your sword. Cuts like butter! Your sword cuts the butter wall easily. Now it is a butter wall with a slash in it. Wall still standing, because one slash isn't enough to compromise the structural integrity of a wall (butter stick to itself or melting back together notwithstanding). So you cut the wall again. Easy, it's butter! Still, wall standing.
So now you are hacking and thrusting and drilling into the wall with your sword, trying to make a hole. And while cutting the wall is easy, it's butter, man that sword is heavy and so is all this butter you're trying to move around. Eventually, you're just plum tuckered out.
Now, things would have been much easier if they had been using an adamantine spoon, adamantine shovel, or adamantine hot fresh loaf of bread, all of which are much better at getting through butter, but not one ever thinks to bring those.
I remember a 2nd edition module where I found a +5 butter knife once. It was the only thing that would kill the ginger bread man IRRC.
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I know, 'not according to APs' or 'not according to PFS', etc. I'm just talking about home campaign that would attempt to make sense of things, considering the short supply of this metal AND locations that can transform it.Someone's probably already out there counting the number of adamantine weapons that show up in AP's... you know that right?
(it's could be pretty low and support your thesis, who knows :)
A cursory search of Skull and Shackles revealed 4 half of which were ammunition.
+1 Adamantine trident
+1 Adamantine bardiche
6 Adamantine bullets
+1 Adamantine light balista bolts
Not a weapon but also in the AP
Adamantine torture needles