Is a monk with adamantine gauntlets, using elemental fist, the ultimate loophole around DR, and hardness?

[James Risner]

Autocorrect crap

I’m enhancing = in enhancing
Might listed = a Might listen

[Amarantheon]

Laughing out load at the opinion that a Bruce Lee punch in D&D would be cushioned by conjuring adamantine gloves around his fists. But remember that nonsensical rules lawyering can and will be used against you by players armed with creativity.

[Amarantheon]

I would however offer a choice to monks between 1d3 dmg or their unarmed strike dmg and if they choose the latter give them the damage as well, since physics insist that since their elbow and shoulder joints aren’t adamantine, they are going to eventually destroy their own arms. Seems fair and tamperproof, doesn’t it?

[toastedamphibian]

Punch metal with bare fist is fine, but punching metal with metal covered fists causes joint damage? Sure, makes perfect sense. /s

[blahpers]

Gauntlets are silly and should never have been statted as weapons for this game. Either interpretation has too many issues to be worth dealing with.

[maouse]

#1 Gauntlet attacks are not unarmed attacks. But you can use the Gauntlet to attack as a monk, yes. They won't ignore DR (see #2).
#2 Adamantine weapons ignore hardness, not DR. So no reduction on a construct's DR unless it is DR/adamantine.
#3 Elemental damage is applied ignoring DR, so they get that in addition to normal damage, it IT ALONE ignores the DR (but not resistances).
#4 your claw attacks probably won't do much to get past the DR either. They don't get magical / special properties of other attack types (ie. gauntlets don't transfer their adamantine quality to your claws, even if adamantine weapons ignored DR, which they don't).

DR is "Some magic creatures have the supernatural ability to instantly heal damage from weapons or ignore blows altogether as though they were invulnerable." Hardness is "Each object has hardness—a number that represents how well it resists damage. When an object is damaged, subtract its hardness from the damage." They are not the same thing. Adamantine quality on weapons confers the ability to ignore HARDNESS. Adamantine quality on armor confers DR to the armor (NOTE: NOT NOT NOT DR 20, which is its hardness). The two things are not the same.

In short, an adamantine gauntlet is better at punching through a door than attacking a construct with DR. 1d3 to the door (under 20 hardness) every round versus DR 5 = never getting hurt, ever, even if +2 Str bonus.

[Diego Rossi]

Just for pointing it out:
- adamantine sadly hasn't a listed price for pound of material, but we can guess it. A adamantine dagger cost 3,002 gp and weight 1 lb, 300 gp of that is the masterwork cost, 2 the dagger cost, so the crafted adamantine part cost at least 2,700 gp. The price of the raw material is 1/3, so 900 gp for lb of adamantine.
- same calculations for a light armor: 5,000 gp for the adamantine part, of those, 150 are from the masterwork part, so it has 4,850 gp of crafted adamantine and 1,616,17 gp of material. Less than 2 lbs out of 25 for a chain shirt.
Medium armor: less than 4 lbs of adamantine for an armor that weight between 20 and 40 lbs.
Heavy armor: 5,5 lbs for an armor that weight between 35 and 55 lbs.

From those numbers, the armor is made by an adamantine/steel alloy.

Weapons: the price stay the same, so at most 1 lb is used in any kind of weapon, regardless of the size. So the adamantine part is from 100% of the weapon (dagger) to 1/8 (greatsword or falchion) for weapon made primarily of 1 material (polearms and so on have a mixed composition).

So only the heaviest weapons have a adamantine percentage that is roughly on par with the armors with the higher quantity of adamantine. And a gauntlet, to count as an adamantine weapon would need 3,000 gp of crafted adamantine by itself.

From all that, we can deduce that:
- probably the adamantine in weapons is used primarily on the striking surface and the weapon still need a good percentage of it;
- in armor it is probably used to strengthen all the structure and it very dispersed.

So adamantine gauntlets from an armor for sure don't count as an adamantine weapon. If adamantine gauntlets exist as a weapon, the should be crafted separately from the armor.

-

[toastedamphibian]

Adamantine darts cost about the same as a dagger but weigh half as much. No reason to assume the 1lb dagger is 1lb of adamantine. An adamantine Kerambit has no weight at all.

[BigDTBone]

Did this mystery gauntlet FAQ ever come to be?

[Diego Rossi]

Considering that Paizo is developing the 2nd edition, I doubt it.

[zza ni]

maouse wrote:

#4 your claw attacks probably won't do much to get past the DR either. They don't get magical / special properties of other attack types (ie. gauntlets don't transfer their adamantine quality to your claws, even if adamantine weapons ignored DR, which they don't).

i agree with all that you posted. just a small point to make.

reason why in #4 claws won't work with gauntlets, is that they are weapons. and you can't use a claw attack with a hand that has weapon in. (if it's a finger-tip-less gauntlet, id say you pick whether you use the claw as is or fist-smash with the weapon.)

[Moonheart]

Sean K Reynolds answered the question here

Gauntlets, Knuckles and Cestus are incorrectly categorized as Unarmed Attacks in the Core Rulebook. They should be light melee weapons instead.

Sean added, taking the brass knuckles as an exemple because the original question of that thread was about them:
"Which makes it clear that using brass knuckles is -not- an unarmed attack (and the description of the weapon should not refer to unarmed attacks), and therefore monk's don't get their unarmed damage with them. They can, as others have pointed out, still use them to flurry, and allows for things like silver brass knuckles and +5 flaming brass knuckles."

So... long story short: you need to ignore any "unarmed attack" reference in the Gauntlets/Cestus/Knuckles descriptions.

[Pax Miles]

maouse wrote:

#1 Gauntlet attacks are not unarmed attacks. But you can use the Gauntlet to attack as a monk, yes. They won't ignore DR (see #2).

#2 Adamantine weapons ignore hardness, not DR. So no reduction on a construct's DR unless it is DR/adamantine.
#3 Elemental damage is applied ignoring DR, so they get that in addition to normal damage, it IT ALONE ignores the DR (but not resistances).
#4 your claw attacks probably won't do much to get past the DR either. They don't get magical / special properties of other attack types (ie. gauntlets don't transfer their adamantine quality to your claws, even if adamantine weapons ignored DR, which they don't).

DR is "Some magic creatures have the supernatural ability to instantly heal damage from weapons or ignore blows altogether as though they were invulnerable." Hardness is "Each object has hardness—a number that represents how well it resists damage. When an object is damaged, subtract its hardness from the damage." They are not the same thing. Adamantine quality on weapons confers the ability to ignore HARDNESS. Adamantine quality on armor confers DR to the armor (NOTE: NOT NOT NOT DR 20, which is its hardness). The two things are not the same.

In short, an adamantine gauntlet is better at punching through a door than attacking a construct with DR. 1d3 to the door (under 20 hardness) every round versus DR 5 = never getting hurt, ever, even if +2 Str bonus.

Notable that if an object has hardness 21+, Adamantine doesn't ignore any of it. Where would you find hardness higher than 21? Recall that magical enhancement adds to hardess. A +1 adamantine weapon or armor is immune to the adamantine ability to deny hardness due to having hardness 22. +3 Mithril weapons will have hardness 21 too.

DR from adamantium armor applies to the wearer, not the object. Sunder attempts are not affected by the DR of adamantium.

Elemental Damage deals half damage to objects BEFORE applying hardness. This is CRB under the rules for damaging objects.

Anyway, if you are looking to pierce hardness with melee attacks, the best I've seen is the Oracle's Wrecker Curse Combined with favored class bonuses that increase your level for curse purposes, like on the halfling. At 20th level (effectively 30th level for curse purposes), you can deny 30pts of hardness with every attack. Plus they also deny DR on objects and constructs (unless they have DR/epic).

[WagnerSika]

Barbarian rage power Gear breaker lets you ignore hardness of constructs by barb level once per round. A Numerian liberator barbarian with the rage power can ignore 30 points of hardness at level 20.
If a 20th level barbarian with this rage power has an admantine weapon can he ignore 39 points of hardness(49 points for Numerian liberator) ?

[Pax Miles]

WagnerSika wrote:

If a 20th level barbarian with this rage power has an admantine weapon can he ignore 39 points of hardness(49 points for Numerian liberator) ?

Up to the GM.

My reading is that adamantine weapons only ignore hardness if the actual hardness of the item is less than 20. This wouldn't stack with character abilities to ignore hardness. Players could choose the best one to apply.

That said, I've encountered many GMs that stack the two. And it rarely matters.

[WagnerSika]

This is odd, universal monster rules about hardness state that adamantine weapons bypass hardness of 20 or less. But the description adamantine says that it bypasses hardness less than 20. So, which is it? Under 20 or under 21?

[Volkard Abendroth]

WagnerSika wrote:

This is odd, universal monster rules about hardness state that adamantine weapons bypass hardness of 20 or less. But the description adamantine says that it bypasses hardness less than 20. So, which is it? Under 20 or under 21?

FAQ wrote:

Adamantine: Adamantine says it bypasses hardness less than 20, but hardness says adamantine bypasses hardness of 20 or less. Which one should I use?

Use “less than 20” from the adamantine entry. Adamantine, which has 20 hardness, is strong enough to stand against adamantine (this is also why adamantine armor provides DR/— rather than DR/adamantine).