Adding to hardness or hit points for items

[jyster]

Just curious if Dragonbone or Elven crafted would add to the hardness or to the hit points of a bow, or if it was made as a greatbow.

Is the only way to add to hardness or hit points for a bow just the magical pluses?

[jyster]

Anyone?

[Thazar]

Not really sure what source you used for those materials. I am unaware in the PFRPG core that adds to hardness other then the normal stuff from magic enhancement.

If you are using older 3.5 material there are a few options out there.

[Ravenot]

The problem is all three of your variables (Dragonbone, Elven crafted, Greatbow) are not Pathfinder core. Often the old 3.5 supplements were spotty or missing information on their rules at best. Here's the best I can come up with:

on page 175, table 7-12 of the Pathfinder corebook, it gives the basic hardness and hit points for weapons. All ranged weapons are given the same hardness and hit points for a wood weapon regardless of it being a sling, hand crossbow, heavy crossbow, or longbow, etc. I also could not find any rules on hit points increasing/decreasing with the size category of a weapon, so it appears a basic greatbow would be 5/5.

Elven crafted, if I remember correctly, allows the bow to be wielded like a quarterstaff. a quarterstaff is a two-handed simple weapon with a haft. Looking this up on the chart, a two-handed hafted weapon has a hardness 5, hit points 10. Ok, so i could see an elven crafted greatbow being 5/10.

Dragonbone, now there's the kicker. Nowhere could I find stats for this. Lets look at the basic hardness chart:

Pathfinder page 175, Table 7-13 wrote:

Substance - Hardness - Hit Points
Wood 5 10/in. of thickness
Stone 8 15/in. of thickness
Iron or steel 10 30/in. of thickness
Mithral 15 30/in. of thickness
Adamantine 20 40/in. of thickness

I would suspect Dragonbone would be tougher than wood. So, higher than 5 hardness.

Harder than stone? Maybe.

Harder than steel? Ehhh... Bones typically are actually very brittle. But a Dragons bones, being both a creature of legend, and supporting it's huge size, I could be convinced they have bones that have the strength of steel. Even then, this is a shot in the dark. Steel is hardness 10.

So assuming Dragonbone is the same properties of steel, we could give the steel properties to a ranged weapon on the charts. Hardness 10, 10 hit points. The equivalent of a steel greatsword. That seems fair enough to me.

So this would put an Elven crafted, Dragonbone Greatbow at 10/10.