Damage Reduction / Magic Missile clarification


Rules Questions


A creature with DR 5/cold iron is hit with 3 bolts from a full round Magic Missile. Does the magic missile lose 5 damage overall, or 5 for each missile?

Contributor

"Damage reduction (DR) applies to kinetic damage—any bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage—that a character takes, regardless of that damage’s source. It does not apply against damage with no damage type or any other damage type, including acid, cold, electricity, fire, or sonic, though these can be mitigated by energy resistance (see page 264)."

Since magic missile is force damage, it isn't reduced by DR.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

If a creature existed with Force Resistance (none does), it would subtract per missle.


Magic Missile is a force effect, therefore it isn't affected by Damage Reduction.


DR only affects bludgeoning, piercing, slashing damage (grouped together generally as kinetic damage for starfidner).

If you had Energy Resistance (force) it would reduce the damage from magic missile.

DR does nothing against magic missile.


Though to the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as "Energy Resistance ( Force )", either. Energy Resistance only gets to come in five flavors.

Force damage is sort of the "ignore all defense" damage type.


It appears you are correct.

There is no such thing as energy resistance force that I coudl quickly find reference to, the entry for ER only mentions fire, cold, elec, acid, and sonic.

DR mentions bludgeoning, piercing, slashing, and other places refer to these generically as kinetic damage.

But it appears force damage is it's own thing completely.

Sovereign Court

However there are the tetrad rings small arm that do force damage for effects, but counts as bludgeoning damage for DR. I imagine that is more of a specific case, but something to consider.


If if someone held a gun to my head and made me choose between kinetic or energy, I would say force is kinetic. It doesn't damage by discharging energy into the target; it damages by slicing or piercing or impacting something solid into their flesh.

Sure, that solid is generated by an energy field or by magic, but it's still solid at the time it damages the flesh.

That sounds an awful lot like kinetic damage.

Of course, that's not how the rules are written and currently DR doesn't apply to force damage. But I hold that it's a reasonable argument, in my mind anyway, to lean away from calling it energy or trying to apply any kind of ER to it.

Also note that while force damage seems to be its own category with no applicable resistance, it is also usually dished out in smaller amounts (most energy spells do more damage, roll more or bigger dice, than force spells of the same level, etc.). So it seems the devs offset the unpreventable nature of force damage by making it generally do less damage in the first place.


Basically, if anyone has played a Shin Megami Tensei video game, particularly the Persona series?

Force damage in Starfinder is like All Mighty damage from there. Less damage per cost, in exchange for essentially no defense. At least until you face a secret bonus boss who gets to drop a 20d6 fireball as a reaction every time they get hit with Force damage. *cough*

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