I am running a campaign where my characters need to destroy a roughly cylindrical stone, about a foot in diameter and a couple feet tall, with a hardness of 7 and 28HP (14 before it is broken). Hardness seems to act like resistance in general, but I would have thought that stone would have even greater resistance to slashing or piercing damage, than to bludgeoning damage. Is there any support for this in the rules, or has anyone just done it anyway?
I think the closest thing to support I see in the rules is the “GM’s discretion” bit here:
Inanimate objects and hazards are immune to bleed, death effects, disease, healing, mental effects, necromancy, nonlethal attacks, and poison, as well as the doomed, drained, fatigued, paralyzed, sickened, and unconscious conditions. An item that has a mind is not immune to mental effects. Many objects are immune to other conditions, at the GM’s discretion. For instance, a sword has no Speed, so it can’t take a penalty to its Speed, but an effect that causes a Speed penalty might work on a moving blade trap.
It doesn’t directly address slashing/piercing/bludgeoning, but does mention poison at least.
I think it’d be entirely reasonable for GM’s discretion to add resistance or even immunity to certain damage types. Material Statistics lists paper as having 1 HP, but I’m not sure hitting a piece of paper with a hammer would actually break it.
You could give it some slashing/piercing resistance. But I’d argue that is too much. Hardness 7 will make destroying the thing already pretty difficult. And unless this happens during a combat encounter/ some kind of time crunch, it really doesn’t matter at all. It will just take longer. I wouldn’t even let the players make the rolls, just decide it takes X minutes and move on.
@ParanoidAndroid I might do the reverse, and reduce the Hardness by a point or two for bludgeoning damage. Normally it wouldn’t matter, as you say, but there will be a time factor involved. Thanks!
don’t know if there is a specific rule for this, but in this situation i would just give that stone pillar some additional resistance to slashing and piercing using the normal restance rules. maybe resistance 5, so that stabbing it is really not gonna do anything ^^
But picks are piercing, and pretty famous for being used against rocks. Maybe we should just accept that if you hit something hard enough, it doesn’t matter too much what you’re hitting it with
