How much dungeon wall do you break with a strength check?

[killem2]

My character has the possible strength check of 39, this is going to allow me to break quite a few different types of walls.

My question is though, how much can I actually break with each successful check?

Under dungeons in the SRD, it references a 10ft x 10ft square when attacking a wall to refer to hit points but it doesn’t even say how much wall you break. My character has the possible strength check of 39, this is going to allow me to break quite a few different types of walls.

 

[Celebrim]

My character has the possible strength check of 39, this is going to allow me to break quite a few different types of walls.

My question is though, how much can I actually break with each successful check?

Just as an off the cuff ruling, a medium sized creature breaks a single tiny section of wall per round of breaking. This is enough for a difficult squeeze space through a 1' thick wall, or a small door to stoop through in 3-4 rounds or a full sized door in about 15-20 rounds. Apply a penalty of -5 cumulatively for hasty breaking to get larger sized openings. Failure means you took on too much wall at once. Your character could potentially just crash through thinner walls and leave character sized (or larger) openings behind him. Or he could more reliably spend a few rounds bashing the wall to get the openning he wants.

Very thick walls (10' thick laid or even solid stone) are going to be alot more resistant. I'm not sure what typical DC's for breaking a stone wall look like, but if they are anything like the default rules they don't properly increase the hardness of an object with thickness. Thicker objects require more force to do any damage to them, as well as break them. Glass for example may have hardness 0 when thin, but 6 inch thick glass does not have hardness 0.

 

[Derren]

Under dungeons in the SRD, it references a 10ft x 10ft square when attacking a wall to refer to hit points but it doesn’t even say how much wall you break. My character has the possible strength check of 39, this is going to allow me to break quite a few different types of walls.

No, it allows you to do more damage to the wall when attacking it than other people. But you still have to reduce its HP to 0 to get a usable passage through it. There is no "instantly destroy wall" strength check.

 

[killem2]

Just as an off the cuff ruling, a medium sized creature breaks a single tiny section of wall per round of breaking. This is enough for a difficult squeeze space trough a 1' thick wall, or a small door to stoop through in 3-4 rounds or a full sized door in about 15-20 rounds. Apply a penalty of -5 cumulatively for hasty breaking to get larger sized openings. Failure means you took on too much wall at once. Your character could potentially just crash through thinner walls and leave character sized (or larger) openings behind him. Or he could more reliably spend a few rounds bashing the wall to get the openning he wants.

Very thick walls (10' thick laid or even solid stone) are going to be alot more resistant. I'm not sure what typical DC's for breaking a stone wall look like, but if they are anything like the default rules they don't properly increase the hardness of an object with thickness. Thicker objects require more force to do any damage to them, as well as break them. Glass for example may have hardness 0 when thin, but 6 inch thick glass does not have hardness 0.

I respect the need to create a rule, but I like to first make sure a rule doesn't exist before homebrewing stuff.

Under your house rule, hardness should have zero to do with strength checks, I think

 

[Celebrim]

No, it allows you to do more damage to the wall when attacking it than other people. But you still have to reduce its HP to 0 to get a usable passage through it. There is no "instantly destroy wall" strength check.

This is a debateable point.

3e D&D generalized the 1e D&D 'bend bars/break chains' check, to allow the character to 'break' things without attacking them - for example by bursting a set of manacles you were bound with. In many cases the act of breaking something isn't definable as an attack, and if it was defined as an attack that functioned against hardness/hit point, even to produce realistic results it would make an attack like 'rend' more effacious than it should be. It's not clear to me that every object can't be treated as having a break DC - even a wall. In any event, the rules do sometimes provide for a break DC for walls - for example read the description of 'Wall of Stone'. This suggests the break DC for a typical 1' thick stone dungeon wall is 44. The break DC for a 10' thick laid stone wall (such as the bailey wall of a castle) is for example by this formula DC 260. This implies that even truly titanic and epic creatures can't push down a stone wall by brute force. However, thems the RAW.

However, it's never been really clear what breaking a wall in D&D means. Even back in 1e, you had this problem. A 10x10 section of wall may have a certain amount of structure points, but if you break it does the whole 10x10x10 block of curtain wall disappear. Does breaking it leave rubble than now much be cleared? Does it leave a hole in the wall or does it cause the upper wall and maybe part of the ceiling to collapse to?

Some of these questions may have to be answered on a case by case basis.

 

[Celebrim]

I respect the need to create a rule, but I like to first make sure a rule doesn't exist before homebrewing stuff.

I wouldn't have made a house rule if I thought there was an official rule on this stuff. Or rather, I probably would have but first I would have told you the official rule and then tried to explain to you why it was wrong.

Under your house rule, hardness should have zero to do with strength checks, I think

That isn't just my house rules. Under the RAW, hardness has zero to do with strength checks. Again, check out the description of wall of stone. Regardless of thickness, by the RAW, all stone walls have hardness of 8. But the break DC varies with thickness - 20 + 2/inch of thickness. The two numbers - break DC and hardness - have nothing to do with each other.

Now, they could and maybe should, but that's another house rule. That in my game, the hardness of the wall would be determined by the thickness of the laid stone blocks. This reflects my experience with smashing rocks and splitting wood IRL (to say nothing of my knowlege of physics and engineering). If the rock is sufficiently large, beating on it with a sledge hammer does not noticably reduce its hit points. The force of the blow gets distributed throughout the rock without propogating cracks, chipping it, or other damage in the rock. If a rock can be broken by a single blow of a sledge hammer, it doesn't imply that the same rock but 10 times thicker can be broken by 10 blows - or any. And if the hardness did scale with thickness, then the break DC could possibly be derived from it in some consistant manner. But right now, the RAW don't work this way and so hardness and strength checks have nothing to do with each other.

 

[killem2]

AH ok ok I was confused by the comment about having to reduce it to 0, because there is a bonus you can get to strength checks to break if you drop it below half.