Critical hits to items

[DanMcS]

Stone: hardness 8, 15 hp/inch thickness.
Heavy Pick: 1d6, 20/x4

Problem: Someone with less than strength 14 will never chip stone with a pick, a tool designed for chipping into stone. (1d6 base, str 14= +2, wield the thing two-handed gives 1d6+3, every 36 seconds they will do 1 point of damage to a stone surface). It will take 9 minutes to punch a hole in a 1-inch thick slab of stone.

Do you allow picks to do critical hits to stone, or axes to wood? I suppose scythes or sickles to soft plant matter, too. Someone might then be able to take a full-round action to hit a stone wall, similar to a coup de grace, and do 4d6 damage even if they're an average guy. A guy with an axe could do 3d8 to a tree with a swing, average of 13.5, or most of an inch deep cut with one good swing, which isn't unreasonable on the trees I've cut down in real life.

This would also allow appropriate weapons to critical some constructs- stone golems or wooden animated objects perhaps.

 

[mmu1]

Nah... It's not necessary. The object hardness/hp rules are there strictly for things like breaking through objects with brute force on a combat time scale - the speed at which they allow you to break through stone (with a big enough weapon and high strength) are probbaly higher than realistic digging/tunneling speeds by an order to magnitude.

Just use those for combat, and use common sense for someone actually using tools to carve stone.

And the pick you describe is one designed for use as a weapon, not tunneling, anyway... Big difference between a "knight's hammer" type of weapon and a pickaxe.

 

[Hypersmurf]

If you want to do extra damage to inanimate objects, take Power Attack...

What's a -10 on your attack roll when you hit automatically?

-Hyp.

 

[Angcuru]

And the pick you describe is one designed for use as a weapon, not tunneling, anyway... Big difference between a "knight's hammer" type of weapon and a pickaxe.

A military pick pierces metal plate, not stone.
A war hammer smashes heads, not nails.
Etc. Etc.

 

[Belbarrus]

"A military pick pierces metal plate, not stone.
A war hammer smashes heads, not nails."

Yup, good point. You may want to add a different damage scale for different purposes. A Pick tool may do 1d12 damage versus objects but 1d3 as a weapon (with -4 to attack). A sledgehammer may do 2d6 as a tool but 1d6 as a weapon (with -4 to attack) and so on.

I also have a rule that weapons are used as tools (e.g. chopping or battering down doors, breaking bars, breaking objects) they also take the same damage (reduced by hardness of course). Therefore using a mace to smash a wall of stone will break the mace itself. Tools that are designed for this type of work are considered to a have a higher hardness and take a lot less damage.

 

[mmu1]

A military pick pierces metal plate, not stone.
A war hammer smashes heads, not nails.
Etc. Etc.

Isn't that what I was saying?