Sundering items?

[Peenicks]

For some reason, there are rules for item damage but only some specific creatures can target them with certain abilities.

So what would happen if for example I were to target a players armor or item?

The example I'm drawing from is the Naunets, they have the options to choose adamantite for their attacks, but there's no ability to use that for apart from shield users which will be gone in a single snap. And against a pair of PC's the other variants are useless as well.

Has anyone done something like

Strike to attack a specific item a player is wearing = players AC following the rules for Shields? Anything past hardness damages the item and the player?

[FlashRebel]

Unfortunately, sundering items will probably not be a thing anymore due to the extreme potential to cheese encounters way too easily by destroying your enemy's equipment until it has no options left, or for any monster with a modicum of intellect to start doing the same thing to players and make martials miserable unless they have reliable unarmed attacks, as well as every fight potentially costing a fortune in magic items to repair or replace entirely. A reliable, widely available option usable at will that completely circumvents the hit point system and can potentially destroy the economy is a dangerous thing to have.

I know what I'm talking about : it only took a single orc fighter with a two-handed hammer and Improved Sunder to cheese the Rise of the Rule Lords campaign I played with friends of mine by smashing every piece of equipment and forcing surrenders without even getting close to killing our targets. This becomes even more penalizing at high levels of play when magic weapons and armor are very commonplace and losing their benefits is even harsher.

Having specific monsters that damage equipment as a gimmick is fine, having limited-use magic items or spells that damage equipment is fine too, having any creature with a Strength modifier above +2 able to ruin equipment with what amounts to basic Strikes aimed at attended items is dangerous.

[beowulf99]

Sundering has almost never been a popular mechanic in Pathfinder. I can count on 0 hands the number of times I have had a player elect to sunder an opponent rather than attacking them specifically. I support the removal of the mechanic, is it was it was nothing more than wasted design space. Nobody wants to break their loot after all.

[Wheldrake]

The murderhobo motto has always been "kill the enemy and take his stuff."

Why would you want to destroy his stuff beforehand? That's like throwing money in the street.

[Gorbacz]

Sunder in PF1 was something that either was not used at all or there was this one player (or worse, one GM) that was total sunder fan and would twink out their PC/monsters to be super good at sunder and then proceed to destroy any fun martial characters could have OR trivialize any encounters with monsters/NPCs relying on manufactured weapons.

Thing is, sunder just plain doesn't work in a game where magic weapons and armors are essential elements of PC/NPC. So it got taken out and shot, rightfully so.

[Claxon]

Yeah, until the game is made so that magic items aren't essential to staying relevant in terms of stats sunder will always be a broken mechanic.

Either no one uses it because it takes too much investment, or you can invest enough that you sunder anything in one hit, which rendered anyone that depended on gear neutralized. Same kind of problem with grapple specialist. Sunder specialist could straight up shut down any martial humanoid enemy, and even a fair amount of spell casters.

Now, if you want to roll the damage and to hit bonuses as well as AC and save bonus into character progression, and only have special abilities of weapons and armor be things you need to purchase you might be able to get away with it. That way if a character needs to pull out a backup weapon they're not any worse off, not really. Armor could be trickier since it's unlikely people would carry backup armor or could manage to put it on in combat.

[Draco18s]

I did a sunder build once for a one-shot type of adventure back about 12 years ago.

It did not go well. Mostly because the only encounter where something could have been sundered to some effect the GM basically declared that nothing happened (not sure if it was because he GM fiat'd the item to be too durable or what, but I contend that it was ludicrous that the damage I dealt--with an adamantine weapon--did not do enough damage to break it, the GM even said that I didn't even manage to overcome the item's hardness).

[Captain Punka]

There's also not historical precedent for breaking weapons. The "sword breaker" is really misunderstood and should perhaps be thought of as a "sword catcher" as it was designed not to break the opponent's weapon but rather break the opponent's grip of the weapon (i.e. disarm him).

[Claxon]

Draco18s wrote:

I did a sunder build once for a one-shot type of adventure back about 12 years ago.

It did not go well. Mostly because the only encounter where something could have been sundered to some effect the GM basically declared that nothing happened (not sure if it was because he GM fiat'd the item to be too durable or what, but I contend that it was ludicrous that the damage I dealt--with an adamantine weapon--did not do enough damage to break it, the GM even said that I didn't even manage to overcome the item's hardness).

Well, if it's adamantine then adamantine weapons don't do anything against it. They ignore hardness less than 20. Admantine weapons and armor have hardness 20.

[Draco18s]

Claxon wrote:

Well, if it's adamantine then adamantine weapons don't do anything against it. They ignore hardness less than 20. Admantine weapons and armor have hardness 20.

Except that:

1) It wasn't adamantine
2) I dealt enough damage that even if it was, it should have become broken anyway

(I don't remember specifics, but I think I did something like 46 damage, raw, and I "didn't beat its hardness")

[Claxon]

I was just taking a guess as to why.

I've seen a lot of people rule that admantine weapons ignore the hardness of adamantine objects they're damaging.

Which is how it should work in my opinion, but it doesn't actually by the game rules.

I think of it how diamond is the main thing used to cut diamond. They take diamond powder and glue it to the edge of cutting implement (side note diamond is super hard, but also super easy to fracture) and use that to cut other diamonds.

[Draco18s]

Claxon wrote:

I've seen a lot of people rule that admantine weapons ignore the hardness of adamantine objects they're damaging.

Which is how it should work in my opinion, but it doesn't actually by the game rules.

Fair enough.