Yes. Word to the wise... Never put an adamantine door in a wooden structure.
Our DM hated us for just going through the wall... he completely missed the possibility we would do that.
I've seen this once in a french comic book from the 80's where the king was hiding with his wine barrels in the vault with the indistructable door, and after a while they just breached the wall next to it to get him out.
I will admit to having done some Dungeon Digging, although it was limited to one time so we could bypass a rather circuitous route around to an inner chamber.
Again, the key was an Adamantine weapon (battle axe), a Barbarian with way more strength then brains, a bard who had maxed out Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), and a modernly high level (around 10 if I remember right.) We would not have attempted it without either the Adamantine weapon or the knowledge. I don't know what the DM set the DC to but I do know I got over 30 (lucky roll).
We did get (h)ambushed coming out the other side through. Good thing the water level in that room wasn't any higher or we would have had to fight in a short flood. Also you never know critters are living between your start and end point.
The conditions that will allow a party to even consider digging long sections of new corridor as a bypass are rather slim and need to be... creatively applied, even with higher level spell/powers/items(Lyre of Building). It is one of my stronger beliefs that manipulation of terrain and environment a good sign that the players are taking the world seriously. (Then again, a long while back, after my players used climbing gear to climb the walls of a Minesweeper like trap room to bypass it, I've stopped being surprised by 'interesting' solutions using the totally of the environment.)
If you go through a dungeon wall, you disrupt the structure of the tunnel and thus collapse the tunnel.
End of adventure and all PCs, buried under tons of dirt and rock.
Explain this to you players next time they suggest this garbage.
Give them a chance with knowledge(architecture & engineering) heck if they want to give up xp then let them.
having been to third world countries, having blown stuff up,having kicked in doors (and not kicked in doors i expected to be able to) I think the occasional "kool-aid guy OH YEAH" is not only feasible but appropriate.
Ive even gone through walls (by slipping and falling) that I didnt intend to in real life.
How many people have ever played starwars? Tell me jedi arent constantly cutting through walls? I do it all the time (and they do it in the movies)
PErsonally Im not sure what sense an adamatite door makes when the walls are wood?
In my gaming group 15 years ago, we had a barbarian that would break through walls with the battle cry "Crud makes his own door!"
years later in the army,when we used det-cord for walls and door breaches,the joke came up again, we'd bang our chest like a gorilla and say"I make my own door!"
Now, if you are going from room one level one,to level 5 of the dungeon and litterally tunneling?? Id put a stop to that with collapses, but slicing through a stone wall with an adamantite battle ax? how different is that from a lightsaber or det-cord,really?
If a hulking 20th level half-orc can't bash through some stone with a morningstar, what chance does a 1st level STR 12 dwarf expert have with a pick (which can also be a weapon)?
Well, if the dwarves have any brains, they don't bash their way through with hand weapons. The most common pre-gunpowder mining method is to impact-drill holes to weaken the rock to a depth of a foot or so, pile wood and hay against the face of rock, light it to get the rock face hot, then douse with cold water to shatter it.
THEN you pound on it with mauls to break it loose.
Its funny that I read this as I'm watching Hellboy. The part, in the original movie where Hellboy beats down the door into the abandoned part of the subway system, and it alerts Kroenen as he's working on his hand.
In other words, pounding on the wall and obviously announcing his entrance made sure that there was no way that Kroenen wouldn't be ready for the BRPD guys as they came into his lair.
The bad guys being ready for the good guys should be part of the incentive to use this tactic sparingly.
If we need a set of rules to fix this "problem" then we have no business being GMs. Logic, common sense, and creativity have to be the rule of the day here.
First: Intelligent adversarys to do not set themselves up to be beaten like that. They always have an escape plan. I DON'T CARE WHAT THE BOOK SAYS! Be creative! Bashing through a wood wall to surprise the villain is one thing, tunnelling through 40 feet of rock is another. The first has a surprise round, the second gives the villain hours to prepare, or even escape if they realize that they are about be at a disadvantage. And guess what, if your PCs use the Pathfinder equiv of the detcord/lightsaber, then an intelligent villain knows when to cut his losses and return to be evil another day!
Second: It's a TUNNEL. Think about it. I don't care how strong you are, what the bonus of your adamantine weapon is, etc etc, it takes time to create a hole in the rock large enough for a medium sized creature to fit through. Time to prepare (see above). I see alot of posts here about medium-to-high level PCs pulling this stunt. Think people...villains who are appropriate challenges for those PCs have plenty of nasty surprises for the PC group that gives them that much time.
Third: Use their effort against them. I had an experience with this. The group I had knew the rules thoroughly, and brought up many of the points stated in this thread for how they could tunnel through the stone. They even had a dwarf with the right skills and knowledge. Then I asked one simple question: "what are you doing with all of the rock?" That stunned them. I stated that their mining efforts didn't happen in a vacuum, the rock they were displacing had to go somewhere. They then developed an elaborate plan to remove the rock and set it somewhere where it wouldn't get in the way. An effort that spread the party out over a third of the encounter setting, so that when the villain sallied out, they were not together for mutual support. Imagine the possibilities...
Fourth: Be creative. Bend the rules a bit to make the story flow. If the door has a DC 40 lock on it per the scenario, and they can't get through it, let them through! Find a way...let them get assist bonuses, find a hidden key(make one up), or anything. A door should NOT be the most challenging thing on the PCs plate, unless that door is a prime part of the scenario. Tunneling should be the LAST thing they think of.
Fifth: I am not a killer GM. I have been out-thought by many a group. Remember, you are one, the PCs are legion, and most times they will outmaneuver you, but this should not be one of those times.
Im still at a loss of why a group wouldnt bust down the door like in the old days (bend bars lift gates) because by the time you have an adamantite axe, wouldnt you persumably have a fighter with the possibility of a 20 str? That's huge! slap bull's strength on him and wouldnt he just tear the door down?
Thats enough noise to alert THAT room or the one next door, but not echo through the whole dungeon, and theoretically would not take very long to do.
cutting through the floor in an old pirate ship is one thing, tunneling through the floor in a mine? Wouldnt your just rather walk and kill what you find in your way? I cant even understand the motivation?
Now spells on the other hand used to tunnel ive seen alot. But they dont last all day either.
When we used to play robotech, battloids would spend whole combats cutting through a wall or laser-welding close a door while team mates held off the baddies, but in those scenarios when you are aboard a battle ship fighting 100s of enemy, controlling your environment, holding them off, funneling them into the blast radius of your missles and limiting manuverability is part of the battle tatics.
We cut through everything in Robotech (but it takes time!) why dont we use missles to blow up walls? We learned too quickly, that the missles were expendable items that caused big damage and we needed them too much to hurt the baddies, soo we used unliited head lasers to cut and weld which took time.
And who says the whole axe is adamantite? isnt that haft still wood? Parts of it can break still.
One wall or door hear and there? Let it be, tunneling??? hah, if they tried that I think Id just close my books and tell them see ya next week, once youve thought about the idiocy of that.
Good post, Old Guy. You and I are totally on the same page.
You forgot to mention the most often opted for in my group: All that banging attracts more bad guys than the party was trying to avoid in the first place. Or that the foes that the tunneling party are trying to "sneak up on" hear the banging and use Stealth to sneak up on the party instead...from behind through their own tunnel!!! That one, with the strong guys at the wrong end of the line (presumably digging) will make sure they don't do it again. Digging through a wall and ending up opening into an underground stream or chasm works too. I hate the "path dictator" style of GMing, but some player don't realize that some really tough DCs are there to keep the alive and not just be a pain to get through.
I would also say that if the door has a DC40 lock, then it was chosen because the surrounding material (walls, etc.) are at least as hard to cut through. That's why such locks are chosen.
'preciate that Cliff. I had a whole mess of other examples, but that post was already long enough. The whole point is that we don't need a set of rules for this. There is no way Jason can write rules in for every potential thing the players may do. While it is certainly our right to ask him in these messageboards, I just think some things have to handled "in-house" so to speak. Meaning within the GM community.
Btw, maybe a good thread would be problems GMs are having with player "rules-lawyering" under the Beta and what to do about it. Not sure thats a game design issue, but it might lead to a look at some of the rules. It may also lead to a horrible message-board doom, but fortune favors the bold...
I have actually come across this recently. In a game i play in there is a Warforged with a adamantine body that simply wanted to punch his way through a large door blocking the entrance to a dwarven hold deep underground. The door it self was made of stone with metal bars through it and rather than wait for the spellcaster to cast knock he just went to start punching his way through. If it was not for the rest of the party bringing up that this would be a good place to take a break he would have simply beaten down the door and made a hell of a racket in doing so.
The Problem that i see here is that if digging through something or simply destroying it is only governed by that items hardness and the amount of damage that is dealt to it, with no repercussions to the item being used to as the implement of destruction Then there is little reason to not simply beat your way through some obstacles.
The Inappropriate tool or weapon not being able to damage it sufficiently rule does allow the GM to make the call but why not reinforce that in some way. I do not think that this is important enough to add a page to the book over but it is something that could most likely be cleared up with a simple rules change say for every foot of material broken though in consecutive rounds your item has to make a save or be damaged or the tool or item is dealt a point of damage for each foot. This way the tool wont last forever. this would allow an adamantine tool to last longer but still give pause to someone thinking about simply digging their friend out of that royal prison or smash through a wall into the kings vault in only a few rounds.
This really does come down to certain common sense things. After we stopped the warforged from his plan of action. We discussed how a fighter of a certain level would have no problem jumping from an air ship and simply dealing with the damage due to the falling damage maxing out at a certain amount he could just easily pass the save. Personally i would never allow it but some people would simply because the rules do not say you can not.
So out of idle curiosity, how much were you able to sell the adamantine door that you hauled off as loot for :)Yes. Word to the wise... Never put an adamantine door in a wooden structure.
Our DM hated us for just going through the wall... he completely missed the possibility we would do that.
DM ruled no one had enough money to make a real offer on it. So we used it as the front door of our granite, magically hardened and protected fortess. When we pointed out the original guy had to get it from somewhere the DM said that that guy had looted it out of some ruins, and had the same problems.
So we used it as the front door of our granite, magically hardened and protected fortess.
I assume you eventually found a key for it. Otherwise you're just causing more problems.
To the guy who's annoyed at a 20th level monk punching through walls: He's 20th level, he's supposed to do crazy & weird things that surpass reality.
Hee hee. Yeah, this actually sounds like the kind of stuff that happens in a lot of Hong Kong martial arts flicks.
As far as tunneling through walls goes, I know someone already mentioned it, but once the characters get up a few levels, magic will get them a lot farther and quicker than an adamantium arrow.
Anecdote time: Ok, so me and my friends were playing through the World's Largest Dungeon, and in the first zone we end up somehow barely making it past a nasty fireball trap (with 3rd level characters, mind!) only to find that we were now in a dead end room, and the trap had reset. After about an hour of mourning for the dark elf (ok, more like 10 seconds) and moaning about our pitiful state, we finally decided to go the tunneling route. The DM ruled it took us about three hours to hack a hole in a wall big enough for us to fit through. Monsters awaited us on the other end. I think the only reason we were able to get away with this in the first place is that aside from the elf, the remaining four of us were dwarves (Hey, we knew we were going into the deep, deep dark. Sue me :)) and we had all kinds of craft and knowledge skills that were applicable.
Just trying to say that sometimes one mans idiotic ploy is another mans lifeline.
I don't think its that big a problem. The reason I play D+D instead of WoW or something (Ok, one of the many, many reasons) is that you can do things like that - its not "oh, the only way to get through this is to solve this ridiculous puzzle." What you guys are forgetting is that D+D is dynamic. While the PCs tunnel through his walls, the thing(s) that live in the dungeon should be either setting up all kinds of nasty traps on the other side or attacking en masse, without giving the PCs the kindness of waiting in their little rooms to be taken on one on one. Time is the number one enemy here, and if it's a situation where there are no guards to stop them (like the treasure vault), then and only then should the walls be almost impossible to break down. In practice, too, these things are difficult. A hewn stone wall (possibly the most common type in underground dungeons) has 540 hp. Magically treat that and it become 1,080 hp per 10 ft section. To make a human-sized hole would still require over 250 points of damage with hardness 16, putting that out of reach of pretty much everyone under 14th level. And by that point, a character is strong enough to do things like shatter wood walls in six seconds.
EDIT: Oh, and Dwarven Pirate, we ended up houseruling that any fall where you reach terminal velocity was automatically fatal. We did the math and it took like 600-some feet and 2-3 rounds, although don't quote me on that, it was a while ago.
One of the guys in my gaming group was in an adventure where they managed to tunnel their way into a vampire's lair. They circumvented a good bit of the dungeon, but they didn't drop right into the lap of the vampire, and they ended up having to work for their treasure after all.
But my gaming group and I had a discussion about this very matter today, and we believe that you could prevent a lot of people from hacking their way through doors and walls and locks by doubling the hardness values that are currently listed and changing Adamantine weapons so that they bypass 10 points of Hardness instead of completely negating it. That way you don't have people running around with Adamantine Daggers and Swords and Axes hacking through everything like a Jedi Knight on the rampage.
One of the guys in my gaming group was in an adventure where they managed to tunnel their way into a vampire's lair. They circumvented a good bit of the dungeon, but they didn't drop right into the lap of the vampire, and they ended up having to work for their treasure after all.
But my gaming group and I had a discussion about this very matter today, and we believe that you could prevent a lot of people from hacking their way through doors and walls and locks by doubling the hardness values that are currently listed and changing Adamantine weapons so that they bypass 10 points of Hardness instead of completely negating it. That way you don't have people running around with Adamantine Daggers and Swords and Axes hacking through everything like a Jedi Knight on the rampage.
So ah... if I animated a stone statue... with twice the hardness it had before... and adamantine weapons only bypassing half the hardness they did before (don't forget adamantine is an all or nothing metal, either you bypass all the hardness or you bypass none of it)... what's the new CR for the statue?
Extra hardness isn't the point, unless you mean to refer to the heads of the players suggesting this as a valid tactic in a game.
:-P
The main issue isn't with the "tunneling through rock and dirt" like a miner would. That takes time and effort and usually ends up being quite counterproductive (like my friend that went on a mining holiday and still ended up having to wade through a ton of minions).
The main issue is the fact that if you have an Adamantine Weapon, you can slice through most doors and some walls inside of dungeons without a whole lot of fuss. But if you double the hardness of the various chests, doors, and walls, and reduce the ability of Adamantine weapons to ignore Hardness, you make it much more difficult for players to start carving up dungeons.
So ah... if I animated a stone statue... with twice the hardness it had before... and adamantine weapons only bypassing half the hardness they did before (don't forget adamantine is an all or nothing metal, either you bypass all the hardness or you bypass none of it)... what's the new CR for the statue?
Please keep in mind that I only wished to double the hardness values for the chests, doors, and locks listed in the 3.5 SRD. Your stone statue would still have a hardness value equal to the what is currently listed for stone, which would be 8. You wouldn't have to increase the CR of the monster in question.
But that being said: I suppose that if you ripped a door off of its hinges and animated it shortly thereafter, it would be a pretty tough customer. The same goes for an animated chest sitting in a dungeon. Just animating the doors and chests and pieces of the walls would result in some very powerful dungeon guardians.
So perhaps the best solution would be to keep the current hardness values, massively increase the HP of the objects in question, but still only allow Adamantine Weapons to ignore 10 points of hardness.
Your thoughts?
I think ignoring hardness 20 is fine, as is dungeon tunnelling. After all as me and many others have pointed out at the point you are actually tunnelling you are mining. Which means you need knowledge, and skill to do it, get where you want (how do they know they are digging in the right direction when underground?), and not kill yourself in a cave in. It'll be slow becuase unworked natural stone has LOTS of HP per inch of thickness, and it's going to attract attention (what are they doing with all the stuff they are digging out by the way?). Just make sure to eat up the character's time, and show them how slow it really is. Sure they can bypass a wall or two with little trouble... sometimes that's needed just to keep things moving, however digging through a hundred feet of rock, dirty or the like is the work of sappers who are specially trained for a reason.
My questions to these would be miners would be:
"Alright, were did you get the knowledge and skill to be able to dig a mine? You do realise that if you get this wrong you could completely miss your target? IF you really screw this up you could kill yourself. Finally you don't have a clue what's in the ground between here and there, you might hit an underground lake, magma pocket, gas pocket or a million other dangers."
Just look up the history on mining and what all is involved dangerwise... there is a reason no sane person wants to do it, and miners make good money.
So perhaps the best solution would be to keep the current hardness values, massively increase the HP of the objects in question, but still only allow Adamantine Weapons to ignore 10 points of hardness.
Your thoughts?
Personally, my problem is not so much with bashing through stone and metal (doors, chests, whatever) quickly with an adamantine weapon. My problem is more with bashing through stone and metal slowly with a regular weapon (which I think should be hard on the weapon).
Also "You can't do it because the rules say so" seems a lot like those invisible walls I keep running into in video games... and I hate those walls!
Rule B, Silly example Half orc barbarian with a 20 str is in town and ambushed when all he has is his trusty dagger 1d4. He rages and buries his dagger in the unarmored chest of his first attacker, breaking it in one thrust. Guess it wasn't as trusty as he thought.
I agree that this is a bad idea, but realistically the above doesn't sound too far fetched. The problem is in real life, that would probably be fatal to the one who has an eight inch sharpened piece of metal now awkwardly lodged in his chest, whereas in D&D it's more a reason to uncork a potion of CLW. Thus, not desireable.
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Does anyone remember not too long ago, the miners trapped in the mine collapse, I think in Illinois? All the modern technolohy we had at our disposal and noone could rescue them because digging through to get to them cause reverberations that resulted in collapses, not in the tunnle they were digging, but further down in the mine. And that was when they could find rock soft enough for thier high powered water drills and diamond tipped bits could even crack through.
That last part highlights the flaw in the rules governing destruction of objects.
Even if your tool is harder than the material, doesn't mean it just turns to butter around your blade, for you to scoop it out in great handfuls. You have to scrape tiny flakes, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
Objects need far more hit points. And still need some form of damage reduction, even against tools hard enough to harm them at all.
Steel has hardness 10. In (a) he's still damaging his sword 1/6th of the time. Do we then need to introduce a mechanic for pulling your punches so you don't damage the weapon? If that Warrior switches to a longsword, he damages it 3/8ths of the time. A greataxe? 5/6th of the time.
In example (b), that seems fairly realistic for a gritty campaign. But what happens when that's a masterwork, or worse, +3 dagger?
Really, the object damage rules are just ridiculously stupid. An easy illustration of this is that greatswords do a better job of breaking rock than picks do.
The picks in the rulebook are the weaponized version, not the mining tool. No one is going to drive nails with a Warhammer either.
That said, I agree with the basic premise of your argument. Even a Warpick should probably be more effective than a sword at breaking up stone.
The problem is that the weapon and damage system was designed to model hitting living creatures with swords, not stone walls with axes.
This could probably be patched with an alternate rule system (possibly involving the crit multiplier for a weapon, after all a pick > an axe > a sword when breaking something.) But then we're wasting a lot of text on something that isn't really a huge part of the game.
The current system works fine as long as you don't look at it too hard, because it sort of makes sense that the 20 Str Fighter could hack/beat down a door now and again, and will generally be more successful with a big weapon than a little one.
A minor fix to adamantine to make it halve hardness instead of being a lightsaber might be in order, but that'd be it.
If a player does get it into their head to hack through a whole dungeon with an adamantine weapon, common sense says that's stupid. And as it stands, a GM can point to the inconsistencies in the current rules as proof that they weren't designed for the job when the player compains 'but the rules say I can.'
The people who want to tunnel through every wall (instead of doing it occasionally, out of frustration/desperation) are the same ones who notice they only have to eat every other day to avoid hunger penalties.
Hardness is a property of the substance, not the thickness: A 3ft thick wall is still hardness 8. Only HPs go up with thickness.
The problem I have with weapon breakage rules is that they add way too much bookkeeping to regular, normal combat.
Having an adamantine sword doesn't give one carte blanche to hack through whatever the hardness rules allow, anyway. I'd say the same thing to a Star Wars player with a lightsaber: "There are fuel conduits and electrics that would cause a catastrophic failure of the hull section of the corridor where you are." That's all GM BS, but ultimately, whether they hack through boils down to what propels the story forward. It's about the story, and if hacking through something that the GM doesn't want the players to hack through disrupts the story, then (a) the GM should be able to explain why on the fly and (b) there doesn't need to be hardness crunch rules to express that.
We shouldn't be relying on "GM BS" or "GM Fiat" to resolve these situations. We need a solid set of rules that covers these circumstances. That way, you don't end up with rules lawyers using the flimsy rules that do exist as an excuse to rip through every iron door in the dungeon with their Greataxes.
The chart says Hardness 8 for every 15 inches of thickness. A 3ft thick wall is is 36inches, rating a factor of 2.4. That times the 8 hardness means a 3'thick stone wall has a hardness of 19.
I don't know about you, but that works out better than suggesting that each time you beat hardness 8 you slice through 15 inches of stone wall.
The chart says stone is Hardness 8 and has 15 HP per inch of thickness. The HP scale for thickness. Hardness doesn't. It isn't any harder to chip a 3 foot wall than a 2 foot wall: the chip just represents less of the wall. By your logic, a mountain can't be damaged at all, because it has a hardness in the millions.
And you still don't break down a wall just by beating hardness 8 (i.e. dealing 9 damage.) You still have to deal with all the HP. Getting an adamantine weapon fast tracks this, as that 8 hardness is ignored.
Having an adamantine sword doesn't give one carte blanche to hack through whatever the hardness rules allow, anyway. I'd say the same thing to a Star Wars player with a lightsaber: "There are fuel conduits and electrics that would cause a catastrophic failure of the hull section of the corridor where you are." That's all GM BS, but ultimately, whether they hack through boils down to what propels the story forward. It's about the story, and if hacking through something that the GM doesn't want the players to hack through disrupts the story, then (a) the GM should be able to explain why on the fly and (b) there doesn't need to be hardness crunch rules to express that.We shouldn't be relying on "GM BS" or "GM Fiat" to resolve these situations. We need a solid set of rules that covers these circumstances. That way, you don't end up with rules lawyers using the flimsy rules that do exist as an excuse to rip through every iron door in the dungeon with their Greataxes.
This is hardly GM BS or GM fiat we are presenting here. These are logical understandable consequences to poorly thought out actions. You can hardly cry for more realism then complain when someone gives realistic and logical answers as to why someone shouldn't do something.
are we still talking about this? IS there not something else of interest on the forum? Someone start another thread.
Just to make sure I'm not misunderstood after rereading my last post:
When I say cry over something, I don't mean like crying over spilled milk, but cry out in warning, as in "The redcoats are coming!" or in shock at something, "That's inconcievable!"
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We probably continue to discuss it because the rules aint there.
%Chance of Collapse=(Cross section of Cave below next surface*/distance from cave ceiling to next surface)/Specific Gravity of rock between cave ceiling and next surface.
*Normally this surface above cave ceiling is going to be "ground level" it is also possible that the surface is an upper cave level.
ex.1. 100' cross section cave below 50' of Limestone (SG=2.6)
SO the prospect of a subsidence is (100/50)/2.6=76.9%
ex.2. a 10' wide tunnel 10' above another 10' wide tunnel cross each other. In the area where they cross they are separated by 10' of limestone. (10/10)/2.6=38% chance of collapse.
ex.3. The PCs are in a 30' wide cave 40' below ground and they decide that rather than following the tunnel through extensive dangers they will cut through another 10' of rock into the 20' cross section treasure cave.
CAVE A:(30/40)/2.6=28.8%, CAVE B:(20/40)/2.6=19%
NEW Merged CAVE: ((30+10+20)/40)2.6=57.6% chance of Subsidence