Pathfinder 1E Does magic overcome silver damage reduction?

[DMBrendon]

I always thought that if you had a magic weapon, you could damage lycanthropes without any penalties, overcoming their damage reduction. I'm reading the rules now, and I don't see this at all, it seems like a non-silver magic weapon would still have its damage reduced. Which is it?

 

[Razjah]

A weapon with a bonus equivalent to +3 will pierce DR/Silver. Link

 

[billd91]

In AD&D, 1e and 2e, anything only hit by silver weapons was also hit by magic of any intensity. +1 weapons were enough to hit anything hit only by silver. That pretty much devalued the hit only silver defense so 3e did something different.

In 3.0, being immune to weapons was replaced by DR (a static amount deducted from weapon damage) and magic weapons didn't pierce silver DR. 3.0 still had DR based on escalating magical pluses (DR 10/+1, DR 15/+2, DR 30/+3, whatever). But they found that the way the numbers typically scaled, it was too much like being immune to weapon below a certain plus so in 3.5 they reduced the range of the DR's value and turned +x DR into simply magic. So instead of DR 5/+1, the creature was DR 5/magic.

Then they found that doing this (magic is magic, no need to track the size of the bonus) that tended to devalue the higher pluses of the weapon so PF kind of split the difference with AD&D. DR x/magic is still overcome by any level of magic, but higher pluses (+3 or better) could also overcome other types of DR. I find this a pretty nice idea since it provides real value (other than numbers bloat) to having a high plus to your magic weapon.

 

[Evenglare]

Useful info in this topic. Still learning stuff even after 13 years.

 

[DMBrendon]

Thanks, this is exactly the info I was looking for.