Green Slime: Does falling in destroy most of your stuff?

[Big Blue 22]

In a recent session, a telekinetic trap pulled three characters into a pit of green slime. Resolving the exposure of their bodies to the green slime is pretty straightforward, but what about all their gear? In the green slime description it says "Against wood or metal, green slime deals 2d6 points of damage per round, ignoring metal's hardness but not that of wood. It does not harm stone." There is no mention of a saving throw.

There are some tables for arms and armor hit points and a table for material hit points, but I can't find anything that discusses what happens to magical or mundane items exposed to the slime. For instance, what about a handy haversack, efficient quiver, backpack, boots of striding and springing, a ring of protection, cloak of resistance, etc. etc. It looks to me like most things would not have very many hit points, like 5 or less. If you add another 10 for being magic like each plus 1 for arms and armor some of the gear would survive. This fall could be very expensive if all their gear is destroyed. Mending only repairs the item, it does not recreate the magic.

Thoughts?

[Sundakan]

Seems pretty straightforward. All of these items have hardness and HP for a reason.

Make Whole restores the magic, BTW.

[Valantrix1]

On the first round of contact, the slime can be scraped off a creature (destroying the scraping device), but after that it must be frozen, burned, or cut away (dealing damage to the victim as well).

From the way I always play it, if you can get it off in the first round then you are fine. By falling into a pit full of the stuff, like you describe, your only recourse would be to destroy it with an area effect spell. This would harm the characters as well, but its better than losing expensive magic items. Just my opinion.

[Diego Rossi]

Note that several of the items you listed aren't made of metal or wood, nor vegetable matters if your GM extend the meaning of "wood".

Handy Haversack "t is constructed of finely tanned leather, and the straps have brass hardware and buckles." it can eb damaged but not destroyed.

Cloak, can be wool or leather, not only cloth

Efficient quiver: leather "Arrows come in a leather quiver"

Boots: leather.

And so on.

On the other hand, most miscellaneous magic items have very few hit points.

[Pizza Lord]

Green slime is one of the most fun things for a GM to use. Green slime is explicitly described as devouring flesh and organic materials, so leather and other 'animal parts' like fat, muscle, hair/fur, are subject to it. Wax made from animal fat tallow could be dissolved, while other waxes might be resistant to it. Whether you want bone to be dissolved might be a GM choice. There could be a green-slime covered skeleton on the floor with no flesh left on it, or maybe over a period of time that is eaten away too. That part isn't described clearly.

There are also other problems; we know, for a fact, that green slime eats flesh and dissolves it, really fast, judging by how fast it can kill most creatures, however, since it's Con damage, technically it 'does nothing' to a zombie. Even though we know that a zombie is covered in flesh. So it should have some effect, even though the zombie doesn't worry about Con damage. Is it as simple as turning the zombie into a skeleton and using those stats? OR just... have a fleshless (or slime-covered) skeletal zombie, which could make for some fun mistaken identifies. "It's a skeleton, use bludgeoning attacks on it! Man, it's moving slow, though!"
This would be a similar case if you were to use stone to flesh to make a block of inert, lifeless flesh. It wouldn't just be immune to being devoured by green slime because it doesn't have a Con score. That clearly isn't the intent or description of green slime's effects, it's just clearly a case of not having to describe every single object/material/item/circumstance that might potentially exist in a world that can be made up to possess any possible object/material/item/circumstance that someone could possibly imagine.

This is just an example where you have to use common sense and look at the situation. Yes, leather objects can be devoured, no, there isn't a damage listed for anything other than wood or metal (except as Con damage). A common sense choice as a GM call (which I feel I must label it as such, since this is the Rules Forum) would be 1d6 damage to leather, flesh, or organic items that don't have Con scores. Your call on keeping or bypassing hardness, I'd say keep it.

In answer to your question, green slime has the potential to damage almost anything that falls into it that isn't made of stone, clay, or glass. Gemstones are also safe, being minerals in most cases (I would say even amber is safe, being created by an organic substance I believe it's transformed enough to be considered otherwise, like how a petrified tree would not count as a tree or wood.) Otherwise, it would have to be some other composite or manufactured material that isn't clearly metal, wood, or organic, like plastic or a special paint, plaster, or shellac/lacquer.

[Ascalaphus]

I'm not convinced that destroying all of someone's equipment within seconds was really intended for a CR 4 hazard.

[Sharoth]

Ascalaphus wrote:

I'm not convinced that destroying all of someone's equipment within seconds was really intended for a CR 4 hazard.

They forgot the zero after the 4.

[Samish Lakefinder]

The items are slime.

Green slime is almost harder on a GM than players. Players have been automatically scraping green slime off in the first round for decades. Quite often the decision is at least a little from metagame knowlege.

As a GM you are supposed to have a creature react to what the creature knows, so when the PCs start bottling up the slime as grenade weapons or using touch of slime there is a very good chance that the NPC hit will not have the knowlege dungeneering needed to know how to get rid of green slime. When an opponent, that has not identified green slime, is hit with it in combat and suffers very little con damage on the first round, it likely would ignore the slime and possibly become unable to deal with it later.