As a DM, if my players' fighters, and barbarians rip through a bunch of goons, and then loot all their armor (plate mail, +1 studded leather, etc.), should I assume all the armor is fine and dandy, or should I be rolling to see which of it is broken beyond repair since the former owners of the armor got hacked to pieces...
Just let it be dinged up, but still fully functional. That constitutes a level of detail D&D has never done (note that the party's armor doesn't fall apart no matter how badly they get clobbered), and the point of body treasure is, well, to be treasure.
You could say the armor is unwearable until repaired/fitted by someone with appropriate craft skills and a workshop.
Armor's pretty heavy, and bulky as well. Are you tracking encumbrance?
If the concern is that selling loot is giving your PCs too much wealth, you can always reduce the size of future hoards until they are back in balance.
By the rules, it was the owners who got hacked, not the armour (unless someone does some sundering, I guess). In most cases, the armour should be undamaged. If you want to damage it, feel free, but you may wish to consider increasing the amount of treasure you hand out (though the ease of repairing items with magic might make this pointless). I certainly wouldn't make the armour less effective due to the damage, though (saves you a lot of bookkeeping), and to be properly "realistic" you'd have to implement some rules about how much damage the armour takes when the person wearing it gets hit, and then you'd need rules for how much damage it takes when the armour is what prevented the hit... that could all get very complex, very fast.
So, in short, by the rules, no.
Fully functional, unless you are going for super gritty feel.
For example, how many enemies have hacked and bit and stabbed and slashed and clawed at the group's fighter, and how many times have you told him that his armor is damaged beyond repair? If the answer is "Never" then it's save to assume that enemy armor is equally indestructible.
Of course, sometimes the Sunder ability is used, which can damage/break/destroy armor or weapons. But ordinary combat does not.
Realistic?
Maybe. The assumption is that anyone wearing armor knows the basics of how to fix it, much like anyone driving a car knows the basics of how to change a flat tire (well, most anyone). So between fights, at night during camps, and during resting time in town, fighters (etc.) spend a little time banging out the dents, fixing broken buckles, stitching torn leather, honing blades, etc., keeping the armor and weapons serviceable. Looting gear of of dead foes just assumes the characters will do that stuff to their new loot, too.
unless the armor or weapons was sundered or the subject of a rust spell or similar effect like acid splash, it never so much as gets scratched.
the game mechanics pretty much make items their own people
I usually don't worry about it unless someone is dishing out massive amounts of damage (50+ in one hit). For example, in a recent game, an NPC critted a PC and did 116 pts of damage. I gave his armor the broken condition (he was at -8 hp) due to the heavy hit (my version of 'massive damage' rule).
That's a house rule of course, per the rules, the only situations that damage armor is sunder, or rolling a 1 on a save that does damage (note that this could result in some destroyed armor easily). I had a player lose +5 mithral full plate to a pair of ones on saves against fireball. Basically the armor got blown off him and turned into shreds of mithral.
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As a DM, if my players' fighters, and barbarians rip through a bunch of goons, and then loot all their armor (plate mail, +1 studded leather, etc.), should I assume all the armor is fine and dandy, or should I be rolling to see which of it is broken beyond repair since the former owners of the armor got hacked to pieces...
The half price mechanic basically covers this abstractly.
In the special case of full plate, it has to be specifically built for the wearer, or at a minimum, resized.
How much damage did that fireball cause?
Energy damage to objects is usually halved and hardness still applies. Magical enhancements increase both hardness and hit points as well.
Even a maxed fireball should have problems doing what you describe.
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Looks like the armor gets hardly scratched without some heavy house ruling
edit:
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You probably missed where he rolled a 1 for the item's saving throw. So, it had a critical failure on it's save.
Plus, I'm not sure how you're calculating 95 hp for full plate Mithral. Mithral is 30hp per inch of thickness. The thickest you'll ever find any plate mail is about 2mm thick. That's about 2 hp. Now, I usually give more than that, because the rules are basically useless on hp for items. Going by thickness doesn't make any sense at all. It should be weight. The rules don't take how much you have of the mithral into account, just the thickness. So a 10x10 wall has 30hp if it's one inch thick, and a one inch thick cube has 30 hp. blech.
I usually just peg the 15hp as minimum for Mithral armor (half inch thick). However, by the rules for thickness, it's 2hp. The +5 adds 10 to hardness, and 50hp. So at most it could have 52 hp by RAW, not 95. By my house rules, it's 65 hp. The fireball, if I remember, did somethign like 150hp. Add on to that the loss of hardness (which it was agreed on at the table that the critical failure on the armor's part bypassed), and the 75 blew through the armor's HP. Especially since he'd already damaged it earlier when someone sundered it and did 25 hp or so to it.
"armor bonus × 5" http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/additionalRules.html#_table-7-12-common- armor-weapon-and-shield-hardness-and-hit-points
Huh,
I think everyone missed that on in our group somehow. Oh well, 75+25 = 100 which was still more than 95.
critical failure on the save does what exactly (in your game)? A fireball does max 10d6 damage. After halving this you end up with 30 max.
I don't remember how the fireball got so high, but I do remember the dice ended up all 6's and 5's (mostly 6's), and said NPC had a rod of maximize and empower, as well as some feats and such that boosted fire damage so it ended up being in the 150's, give or take a bit.
EDIT : Hmm, it wasn't a rod of Maximize, because we wouldn't have rolled. Darn it, now I'm trying to remember how it got so high. I'm gonna have to go dig out my notes.
EDIT2 : I remember now, Intensified Fireball with an Empowered Rod, 90ish*1.5 = 135ish, plus he was an evocation wizard, and there was some other feat that added damage to fire that I can't remember. Anyway, just that was 140ish damage.
Edit 3 : Removed some language that I shouldn't have posted due to being overstressed and shouldn't blow up at people on the interwebs. :)
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Here's some thoughts to consider.
1) Were any Area of Effect spells cast like fireball/etc that could have harmed the gear.
2) If the enemies were ogre/orcs and the PCs are halflings or humans then how would they fit into armor that isn't sized/fitted for them to wear? Seems a bit weird that a halfling could slip on a +1 breastplate that an orc was wearing a few minutes ago.
3) Would the NPC actually just buy a crap ton of armor from some random stranger? The Armor crafter in town probably has a good deal of armor already, the armor is worn/used and probably has dings or normal wear and tear to it so he'd most likely use it as scraps or would have to repair it, let alone have to refit it for customers. Also, would the NPC want a bunch of armor that someone just hauled in (possibly with bloodstains)? Wouldn't he be somewhat worried that you stole the gear and you're just trying to sell "hot" items or that you just slaughtered a bunch of people and looted them?
Try to think of it as real-world and not "I have A and it says it costs B in the book so i'll sell you all 40 of these items for C gold." The person probably doesn't have a ton of room for all the junk nor the gold lying around. If you've ever been to a Pawn Shop you'll know what I mean.
I didn't mean to put you in a defensive position. I was just trying to understand how this happened. Maybe you had a house rule that doubled damage on a critical failure or whatnot. That's fine. But if you state something like this you may wake other people's obsessive compulsive behaviours ;)
nah, sorry, my fault. July's just been a massive overload for me, so my fuse has been pretty short lately. :) It does seem hard to get 150 on a fireball, until you go back over it (I tried to find my build, but it was a couple of years ago and I lost it). But I knew it was a feat and a rod, jsut couldn't remember which two (intensified and empowered).