Does Transfer Charge bypass hardness?


Rules Questions


The description of the Transfer Charge spell states that transferring more charges than the item can hold causes damage to the item.

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Transfer Charge

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You must declare how many charges you are transferring before casting this spell. If you transfer more charges from the source than the receiving item can hold, the receiving item must succeed at a Fortitude saving throw or take 1d6 electricity damage. This spell provides no knowledge of how many charges a receiving item can safely hold, but you can choose to transfer fewer charges than the maximum allowed to reduce the risk.

In Breaking Objects, under Hardness it states:

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Hardness:

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On average, a sturdy piece of equipment (such as a weapon or a suit of armor) has a hardness equal to 5 + 2 × its item level. Any other piece of equipment has a hardness equal to 5 + its item level.

Which means that a level 1 weapon has hardness 7 and a typical level 1 item (say, a battery) has hardness 6. This means that the damage from Transfer Charge will always be resisted by every item. If it doesn't bypass hardness it never causes any damage and as such, there's no downside to transferring the wrong amount. That said, by RAW there's no downside to a battery that has the broken condition; it would only be a problem if you did this enough times to fry the battery completely.


I don't think it does. The battery rules in the CRB are a mess, especially in the Technomancer section and spells, and have some elements drawn from the Pathfinder technology guide that apparently became obsolete during development but weren't removed from the Technomancer battery interactions. (See also "power cells.")

I'd just ignore it. Beyond whether it matters, it boggles belief that weapons/batteries/chargers don't have a function to show how many charges are in a battery so that it wouldn't come up anyway.


I'd definitely agree that the battery rules need a fully formed errata to clear it up.

My table has been ruling that you can't tell the number of charges in a battery itself until you slot it into something like a weapon which will have a read-out. I think that strikes the best balance between managing random batteries you find on the ground and not having to keep track of the precise charge levels of every battery in the game world...

It's a bit of a shame. I kind of liked the idea that a Technomancer could gently fry a weapon by laying hands on it, similar to hacking a smartgun in Shadowrun and ejecting the mag mid-fight.


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Here we go

Vulnerability to Certain Attacks: Certain attacks are especially strong against some objects. In such cases, attacks deal double their normal damage and might ignore the object’s hardness.

You could easily rule double damage and or ignore hardness in the case of an electric surge in battery powered equipment

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