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I get where you're coming from, but the Oberoni Fallacy is not exactly an accepted fallacy, is it? It actually kind of goes against the spirit of table top gaming for many fans, the idea that unlike a video game or game of chance like you would find at a casino, the rules are mutable and you can bend or even break them to have fun or suite the narrative. The existence of Gods in these game systems is really just a vector to give the GM a "divine intervention" option.
CAN bend, break, or modify the rules is one thing.
REQUIRING those modifications so the game is even FUNCTIONAL is something else entirely.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I get where you're coming from, but the Oberoni Fallacy is not exactly an accepted fallacy, is it? It actually kind of goes against the spirit of table top gaming for many fans, the idea that unlike a video game or game of chance like you would find at a casino, the rules are mutable and you can bend or even break them to have fun or suite the narrative. The existence of Gods in these game systems is really just a vector to give the GM a "divine intervention" option.CAN bend, break, or modify the rules is one thing.
REQUIRING those modifications so the game is even FUNCTIONAL is something else entirely.
I get that. But the rules are pretty transparent, at least to me, that a certain amount of GM improv is going to be required.
And you are really using rules that already exist, just repurposed to fit the situation. You can strike an object. A fireball will damage things in it's radius. How much of that a GM wants to model, or how they want to go about ruling that you strike that object is up to them, but you do have guidelines to follow if you want to try and model everything as realistically as possible.
Take the fireball and chairs example all the way back at the beginning of the thread.
You can assume that chairs would take a certain amount of damage from that fireball. The GM has several options. They can simply state that the fireball leaves the chairs in various states of disrepair, likely on fire. Or you could give the chairs a reflex save based on a level based simple dc, roll it for each chair, apply the damage vs. the woods hardness, figure out how much HP each chair will have using the materials section, and figure out which chairs are broken or destroyed or miraculously unharmed.
All of that would use rules resources in the book to accomplish. But I would probably lean towards just telling the wizard that they broke stuff. Paint a new picture, now with a fireball shaped hole in the room, and be done with it.
If however the objective of the fireball was to accomplish a specific goal, and that goal has stakes, then I'd be more inclined to use some variation of that second option. Say they wanted to burn down a stand of trees that their opponent has planted to block the party for whatever reason. Now we are in a situation where the Fireball NOT dealing damage has importance. So the trees get "saves" and the fireball has to deal enough damage to get them to broken or destroyed, or the obstacle isn't dealt with.
the rules are pretty transparent, at least to me, that a certain amount of GM improv is going to be required.
This is a theoretical position that is pretty far removed from the issue of this thread.
There are rules for attacking objects, they are inconsistent and leave many players and GMs uncertain about even the theoretical approach that the game intended.
By RAW Strikes cannot target objects. There is one action approximate to attacking objects physically (force open) but it is incredibly specific in what it does and doesn't relate to the situation of just trying to break things. A fair bit of attention was given to letting spells target objects.
The core rulebook doesn't give GMs a host of options for attempting to arbitrate targeting objects, clearly presented as options, it presents a confusing block of almost answers. The GMG doesn't explain that these are intended to be different approaches GMs can take for targeting objects, it doesn't address it. Interpreting the silence around this confusion as the intended final plan for what the rules will say about it doesn't cast the developers in a kind light. It could likely be an issue still in discussion in house, or about to change with the next Errata. Both are reasonable situations that will be addressed eventually. Even if your end goal is for this to remain a more open ended GM centered process, there needs to be more guidance to help navigate it so that a player does have to say, sure I can attack any creature in the world, and have basic rules for knowing exactly how to do so, but if I want to cut a rope to stop my enemies from climbing up behind me, well then I guess my GM is on their own for making something up.
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I feel that you are asking for exactly what I am against: an extra 50-100 pages of super deep complex rules that cover each and every little circumstance that could be possible during an adventure.
If however you are asking for general guidelines on how to deal with a situation that isn't explicitly covered in the rules, then I once again point you at Adjudicating the Rules.
"If you’re not sure what action a task uses, look for
the most similar basic action. If you don’t find one,
make up an undefined action adding any necessary traits."
This is as simply put as it can be, and does cover things like attacking an object. The inverse, that you are asking for, would be dozens of extra pages of rules, charts and examples that could very well be useful, but would really only truly serve to pigeonhole a GM into running each situation a very specific way.
And that just isn't that interesting to me to be honest. You have tools that you can use to adjudicate every situation brought up so far in this thread. If you want to cut a rope to stop your enemies from climbing up behind you, that situation obviously has stakes, so a check would be required. Your GM could very well rule that you make an attack check against a simple or level appropriate DC, depending on the circumstances. If you succeed, they very well could decide that maybe you could fail to damage the rope enough to make actually cut it, so he may even roll damage against the ropes stats, which are readily available on page 577 of the CRB.
Or the GM could decide that you are of a level where a check just isn't necessary, and you do enough damage with your weapon that a check just isn't necessary, and you JUST cut the rope.
And they can use resources in the book to come to that conclusion.
And worst case they can pop onto the advice forum on and post their question about how to deal with a situation and I'm sure within 3 posts they'll get... wait. Looks at post count on this thread
Maybe they shouldn't do that.
By RAW Strikes cannot target objects.I think it is worth asking "How many GMs are actually aware of that?"
Because I wasn't aware of that.
Right, it's only noticeable by its absence. ie: not very. I only discovered because when I got the game I asked myself 'I wonder what they did with sunder?' (because I've always personally viewed sunder as problematic in 1e).
It does seem that this omission is deliberate: that attacking (attended) equipment and items seems to have been intentionally removed. In which case, GMs should be cautious inserting it back in. I would be curious to hear the reasons why that design decision was made, right now I only have personal assumptions.
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It does seem that this omission is deliberate: that attacking (attended) equipment and items seems to have been intentionally removed.
But it’s not fully removed. There are spells that involve attacks and are explicitly stated to be able to target unattended items.
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I feel that you are asking for exactly what I am against: an extra 50-100 pages of super deep complex rules that cover each and every little circumstance that could be possible during an adventure.
I understand this fear, but it is stated pretty hyperbolically. Especially when the real issue is that there are pages scattered all throughout the Core Rule Book already that start to address this issue, but never do so in a succinct, consistent or direct manner.
A GM in play might be able to make an arbitrary ruling for a specific situation in play, but then afterwards, when they go back to look at the book to decide how they want to do it consistently in the future, they get contradictory ideas and no specific guidance.
Why has the game decided you cannot generally strike objects?
Personally, I hope this is intentional, and that the goal is not to have characters attacking a stone statue with rapiers and whips, rolling against AC and dealing with hardness and HP. But if you take away strike as a mechanic for dealing damage to things that are not creatures, you have to have some kind of replacement mechanic clearly laid out. PF2 was nearly there. One additional action under athletics, or in the general actions section of the book talking about "destroy" or "sabotage" with a couple of paragraphs for setting general expectations for having 4 degrees of success when trying to break an object, with a simple short breakdown of untrained/Trained/Expert/Master/Legendary types of situations you would use the action for, would pretty much cover 90% of the confusion and add maybe half a page.
The real issue is that we have "targeting" spread out over several pages, some more than 100 pages apart, repeating much of the same content, using specific language like creature and object, that is used in all actions and spells, but is never clearly defined. I think there is room to save half a page simplifying this situation, and then providing clear definitions of how creature and object are different and why targeting them is different as well.
I feel that you are asking for exactly what I am against: an extra 50-100 pages of super deep complex rules that cover each and every little circumstance that could be possible during an adventure.
50 is obviously too many, but how about 5?
Is 5 too many?How about 1?
Still too much? How about a single entry in the index telling people where to look for the rules that already exist?
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Something along the lines of "unattended objects will typically have an AC of 10, and immunity to critical hits but for exceptionally difficult or distant targets, like firing an arrow at a taut rope, the GM may assign an AC based on the Simple DC table on page 503" would not require 50 pages of tables with individual object stats.
Just one sentence.
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All I'm saying is that all you need is the section on GM Adjudication in all reality. Have you really had a game grind to a halt because a player decided they wanted to strike a door with their axe? Or did you just roll with it?
I am against having a hard and fast rule for this sort of mundane issue, just like I am against having a 3 page list of flavors that Prestidigitation can reasonably apply to a food: It doesn't feel needed to me. An unexpected situation arises, you figure out a quick and easy solution and apply it. If that means figuring out the AC, Hardness and Hit points of your standard door to you, then so be it: You successfully identified the information you need to know and can easily find it.
If that means figuring out the AC, Hardness and Hit points of your standard door to you, then so be it: You successfully identified the information you need to know and can easily find it.
But, by the rules presented in the book already, it doesn't matter if the GM makes up an AC hardness and hit points for the door. The player has no specific or clear action to take to attack the door with a weapon. By the rules, there are a couple of spells that can, but nothing a martial character can do except take the athletics action to force the door open.
For that, you don't need to know the AC or the hardness or the HP of the door. The GM is already doing needless work because they didn't realize that striking the door with a weapon was not intended as a way of resolving this situation by the rules. They can decide to make that up, but there would be a much easier way to handle the situation if it was more clearly stated that attacking objects was not the intended way to handle this situation.Doors are actually one object that is relatively easy to figure out by the rules because the force open action is clear in how it works. The barbarian who never takes athletics might be in trouble at level 15, because the DC will be too high for them to have a chance at untrained, but they chose never to take athletics or thievery or invest in magic items to help them handle this situation after many levels of play, so it is a conundrum of their own creating. And the GM can decide either to make up a work around on the fly, or let the player realize that they deliberately gave themselves a weakness by assuming that being great at killing creatures means that they will be competent at destroying objects without investing in being able to do so.
The issue is that force open doesn't really translate very well into other situations where a player might need to destroy an object and it would be nice for there to be something that can help GMs quickly arbitrate situations where players want to bring down chandeliers, smash tables that the enemy is standing on, etc. It really won't take 50 pages to do so.
I suppose I can agree that there could be more guidance given, but at the same time, I don't find it necessary.
A player wants to drop a chandelier. Is the chandelier nice and fancy, suspended by a chain? Then it will be harder to drop, unless there happens to be a handy crank mechanism nearby that you can interact with to drop it.
Want to smash a table that an enemy is standing on? Why not shove it to try and flip the table on the enemy instead? Make an Athletics check against the opponents Reflex DC to see if you flip it in such a way that they fall. If you are dead set on trying to smash the table, prepare to roll a Strike against the table.
Gasp! A strike you say!?
Yeah. Because that is the "most similar basic action" to what you want to accomplish.
What I'm trying to say is, the Rulebook doesn't have to tell you that a Barbarian can use their axe to solve their problems with doors. They can. The onus is on you to adjudicate how that works.
Could there be a section dedicated to advice on how to adjudicate the rules for specific situations? Sure. But it isn't strictly necessary imho.
As a GM, I wouldn't know how to respond "consistently"...You do what seems right given the circumstances you first need to make a ruling in, and you make a note of what your ruling was (in your head, if not literally on paper). If you need to make a similar ruling later, you check your noted ruling and apply it if the circumstances are similar enough that it makes sense.
Just like checking the rule-book or trying to remember what it says.
I mean yeah, I know how to do it, I've been doing it since I started GMing fourth edition in 2010, but its annoying because I have high standards for my rulings on how crap like that should work.
"What effect is this ruling having on my game?" is an important consideration for me, and while I'm willing to home brew and house rule, those high standards mean I refine them a lot to make sure I understand what I'm doing before I do it, which makes stuff like this labor intensive--
I recently had to do something similar to work out a system that didn't bust open the earn income rules when a player wanted to try haggling, and honestly I wound up having to go back on it and refine it later.
Something like this feels like something I should be able to have guidelines for in the rules-- e.g. when a spell calls out it damages objects, how am I supposed to balance those against the spells that don't when the spells that don't cause more damage?
I'm happy to improvise a wooden chair getting blown up by a fireball in the middle of combat, but when i say a door is locked and my players decide to try and blast through the stone wall beside it (AKA, four sessions ago) I'd love to know what they can and can't do.
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Gasp! A strike you say!?Yeah. Because that is the "most similar basic action" to what you want to accomplish.
What I'm trying to say is, the Rulebook doesn't have to tell you that a Barbarian can use their axe to solve their problems with doors. They can. The onus is on you to adjudicate how that works.
It makes a pretty big difference in power levels if players can reasonably assume that being good at attacking with their weapons will allow them to resolve all challenges they face/ There is no reason to buy crowbars or other equipment for dealing with the environment, or developing a broad range of skills as a party, if my barbarian can just expect to smash through everything with strike rolls.
Not everyone loves the follow through in PF2, but the game expects someone in the party to be competent with a certain base set of skills including athletics, medicine, thievery, arcana, occultism, nature, society, religion, diplomacy, survival, and not for the GM to just hand wave every situation that can't be resolved with an attack roll.
I think a fair bit of the rule 0 stuff is there to make sure that new tables don't feel like they have to learn all the rules at once, and that it is ok to "get it wrong" and push through, but that it is also ok to go back afterwards, look at the rules that have been presented and see how the game is intended to work and why it works that way. The vast majority of situations tables face have something like this available to look at and figure out "do we like these rules? would we rather house rule something else?"
Attacking objects is in PF2 is currently arbitrated like a very complex legal code that is so confusing that 90% of tables are just making up their own rules and not even aware that they are not actually following the expectations of the game. At the very least, everything referencing targeting objects should be removed from the game if the end goal is:
"Attacking objects is always going to be a process of the GM setting a DC in the moment and deciding what check you can make to overcome that DC, with very little consistency between tables on what kinds of checks can be made and what the DCs will be like."
Personally, I think that answer would not fly very well with most PF2 players.
It is especially problematic because tables that don't allow strikes against objects (requiring appropriate skill checks instead) are making skills more important for the party to make sure they cover, while tables that do allow weapons to be used to strike objects are basically saying that crafting/thievery/athletics/relevant lore skills are much less important skills to worry about.
Many GMs probably wouldn't even think about that when trying to decide which direction to go.
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But, by the rules presented in the book already, it doesn't matter if the GM makes up an AC hardness and hit points for the door. The player has no specific or clear action to take to attack the door with a weapon.
Check out Wall of Stone. “Each 5-foot-by-5-foot section of the wall has AC 10, Hardness 14, and 50 Hit Points, and it's immune to critical hits and precision damage. A destroyed section of the wall can be moved through, but the rubble created from it is difficult terrain.”
It is hard to believe that Wall of Stone was designed with the expectation that only a few spells could be used to damage the wall.
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A simple line in the book that says "If something has an AC, you can Target it as a Creature." would solve most of this.
It is hard to believe that Wall of Stone was designed with the expectation that only a few spells could be used to damage the wall.
Agreed. But no where in the rules does it say HOW a non-spell can damage the wall. It might have an AC value, but nothing a martial character can do actually targets it unless the Strike action was meant to also damage objects.
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Agreed. But no where in the rules does it say HOW a non-spell can damage the wall. It might have an AC value, but nothing a martial character can do actually targets it unless the Strike action was meant to also damage objects.
Right. This seems like a clear oversight. The right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. I love 2E, but there are issues for certain.
So there's plenty of rules on damaging and breaking objects. Hardness, hit points, broken threshold, special materials, walls, special cases, etc. in the Core Rulebook.
However, there appear to be next to no rules on ATTACKING objects with weapons or spells (excepting specific cases, such as a spell that only targets objects). There are even a few rules that seem to actively prevent it (such as the Strike rules only allowing for the targeting of creatures).
Therefore, I'm inclined to just say a player who spends the actions can automatically deal normal damage to an unattended object equivalent to their chosen attack form. For example, a longsword would deal 1d8 + other mods, a fireball would deal fireball damage; no attack roll or save in most circumstances (I might ask for an attack roll to, say, shoot an object moving along a conveyor belt or something). Some things might be so simple that I would only ask that an appropriate amount of actions be spent, perhaps with a skill check, such as when using Force Open. In the case of an attack with a weapon, I would not consider it a Strike, but an Interact action with the Manipulate trait.
For something to be unintentionally destroyed, it would have to further the plot. For example, the mud slide damages the bridge creating an encounter in which you need to rescue people from the failing bridge. Otherwise, it would need to be something extremely susceptible to the attack in question. A careless fireball might set important papers on a desk on fire, for example--however, I would not punish the players with something like this if I had failed to inform them that there were important papers at risk, only if the player was genuinely careless with his actions (that would be my fault, not theirs, and it's not the GM's place to punish players in any event).
Anyways, until we get further clarification on how all of it is supposed to work, that's just my two cents that I plan on implementing in my games.
I'd probably just give the item a basic DC depending on how difficult the task seems like it should be (10, 15, 20, 30, 40). So 10 for hitting a giving object right next to you like a tree and 40 for getting a clean blow on the one ring. Then just compare with the hardness values given in the game along with any sensible weaknesses like fire vs. wood/paper.
Spells like fireball without attack rolls are a bit trickier, not exactly sure what the best course of action would be. On one hand it might be best to just follow what the rules say in this case, only affecting items meaningfully if they specifically say that they should. So the fireball might scorch things in the radius and have some other minor effects but not actually damage anything unless the caster specifically wanted to achieve that effect. Or to have every object be considered to fail or even critically fail its save against the spell.
I'd probably just run it the first way unless it would feel unsatisfying, like igniting a bar with a fireball. Even then I would probably hand-wave over the destruction mechanics and describe the effects of destroying or badly damaging the items.
@thewastedwalrus
It all really does come down to the Narrative moment you are trying to illustrate. I doubt any GM has stopped a combat to describe the effect of a fireball on the cobwebs and rocky features of a dark dank dungeon, so why would they do so for a tavern?
If they want to, then it's easiest just to assume that the chairs took damage: Describe that. What doesn't make sense is a fireball going off in a room with wooden features, and nothing even being scorched. If there is some mechanical reason for you to track the damage of a chair, in my opinion it's simple enough to do so. You figure out what works best for you at your discretion.
Unless specifically called out by an effect, Paizo has decreed that all items possess general magic immunity. In conjunction with the lack of "attacking an item" rules, it's any wonder Paizo opted to publish item hit points and hardness at all.
I guess we now know why wizards wear conical hats; dispel the shrink item effect on it and your tent makes you immune to fireballs and other hazardous spells!
To quote the relevant section as it took me a while to find it.
Pages 316-407 and 573: Damaging spells and items meant to harm PCs do way too much damage for your gear to survive if it could be targeted, so such spells almost never are supposed to be able to damage objects. A few target lines slipped by with "creatures or objects." Remove the ability to target or damage objects from acid splash, acid arrow, eclipse burst, polar ray, sunburst, fire ray, moon beam, force bolt, and the horn of blasting. Limit hydraulic push to "creatures and unattended objects."
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Paizo is really caught between a Roc and a Thunderbird on this one.
On the side of verisimilitude and classic play, of course we should damage any unattended items and terrain. The AD&D finale of Lost Caverns made a point of collateral damage determining treasure output. On the other hand, a PF2 high level Fireball can destroy a (temporarily) dead PC's gear pretty easily (except a few items perhaps), and the bad guys won't stop throwing them. Plus Frost Worms & Balors. Floors, ceiling beams, mezzanines, they'd all make a blaster's calculations quite difficult.
In brief, the power of creatures & their AoEs escalates beyond what the backdrop can handle, so the backdrop's immune, much in the same way attended items have to be in order to facilitate balanced play. I'd prefer a sidebar deferring to GM adjudication when story-appropriate and which mentions such ramifications. A Fireball in a library still seems too wrong to allow.
This also may be why Sunder has gone away. "I sunder his Apex item!"
And that's an interesting point about "hat tents" as, yeah, there are some horrible ramifications of NOT letting effects damage objects. Every party needs a martial simply to get through rice-paper walls. :/
Just make sure the tent's large enough you don't have to touch it, otherwise it's party of your hurtbox. :P
So yeah, GM adjudication needed pretty badly.
This is like the Halflings hiding in backpacks, unharmed until they choose to present themselves. "No, no, wait until the dragon breathes before coming out."
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One interesting thing to note about this is how several sections of AP books have scene details about how at least magic fire would affect a particular structure/substructure, with a room likely burning down and some paper treasure being incinerated to an entire building burning like wildfire if exposed in the slightest.
Might go to show that the rule for magic not affecting terrain/objects is to cover the most general case where only aesthetic damage makes the game better and that exceptions should be called out in the scenes description and more specific rules elements or by the GM on a case-by-case basis.
So now we know why those fortress walls have any meaning, huh?
Figures... o_o;;
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I apologize for using Evil necromancy to revive a long-dead thread.
The other day, I found an interesting tidbit on page 456 of the CRB:
"Many area effects describe only the effects on creatures in the area. The GM determines any effects to the environment and unattended objects."
This which reminded me of this thread and the discussion surrounding collateral damage. Turns out the game more or less handles it like I wanted it to after all, which was a pleasant surprise to be sure. Fireballs do in fact destroy unattended chairs (unless the GM is a hardass about it).
The only reason I bring this up is to the benefit of future 2E GMs who stumble onto this thread - it took me two years before I even found this passage after all.
EDIT: Wait... Did Lethe really bring up this passage on the second comment??? How did I miss that back then??? Then why did I even...? Anyway, don't mind me, carry on.