Need advice on how to break a magic item

[dreamspeaker]

Hi was in a game last week where our thief did a critical hit on the creature he was attacking and our DM decided he had got her between the eyes and bolt stuck in her magical mask.
Now she was wearing a MEDUSA MASK at the time so the bolt from his +1 light crossbow stuck into mask and destroyed it.

Would you say this is possible I would not as most fantasy games it takes a bit of hard work to break a magical item. Also he was shooting at monster not trying to break the mask which is a wondrous item worth 10,000gp.

[Grizzly the Archer]

Items get a save roll to see if destroyed. Also, this would only occur with a sunder or some other type of ability. This can't just be some amount of damage to destroy it, especially since it's a magic item.

[IejirIsk]

possible to destroy the mask with a magic crossbow? sure... kosher... *shrug* most magic items have pretty good hp iirc... + hardness + hitting mask itself... sounds like their is either more to story, or parts missing in story...

[Nawtyit]

SRD wrote:

Sunder

You can attempt to sunder an item held or worn by your opponent as part of an attack action in place of a melee attack. If you do not have the Improved Sunder feat, or a similar ability, attempting to sunder an item provokes an attack of opportunity from the target of your maneuver.
If your attack is successful, you deal damage to the item normally. Damage that exceeds the object's Hardness is subtracted from its hit points. If an object has equal to or less than half its total hit points remaining, it gains the broken condition (see Conditions). If the damage you deal would reduce the object to less than 0 hit points, you can choose to destroy it. If you do not choose to destroy it, the object is left with only 1 hit point and the broken condition.

Made of Iron: 10 hardness, 30 HP/inch, CL 11th~+3 -> ~13 hardness with ~13 HP. So he would have had to do over 26 points of damage with a light crossbow while sundering, somehow, and chose to destroy it.

But really, the DM said it so it happened. You can try and reason with him.

[IejirIsk]

oh... yea... forgot about fiat...

[AnnoyingOrange]

There are no rules for it, but I would not be bothered. The DM presumably prefers not to give you a magic item like that, furthermore magical items can be fragile if the DM says so. If you enjoy the campaign I'd not make too big of a deal and try to win a rule argument, it seems your DM plays fairly fast and lose with the rules making a lot of judgement calls, forum advice can not change that.

[Umbranus]

AnnoyingOrange wrote:

There are no rules for it, but I would not be bothered. The DM presumably prefers not to give you a magic item like that, furthermore magical items can be fragile if the DM says so. If you enjoy the campaign I'd not make too big of a deal and try to win a rule argument, it seems your DM plays fairly fast and lose with the rules making a lot of judgement calls, forum advice can not change that.

This.

The GM didn't want you to have the item and used the crit to rule it was destroyed.

[dreamspeaker]

No I think he just decided that the crit had hit the monster in the head not that he did not want to give the party the item.