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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6634087" data-attributes="member: 4937">My focus is more on getting the physical interaction right, though acid's hardness bypassing mechanic was taken account in the discussion.Copper is harder than silver.  More importantly, it pretty much across the board has higher shear strength and resistance to deformation, and not by a little but by a lot (50% or more higher).  I have no idea what 'alchemical silver' is so I would not use it as a reference point.  I think the more appropriate reference point is iron.  Copper has very different properties than iron, but overall I think 75% of the hardness and 2/3rds the hit points is reasonable.   I don't think it is reasonable to classify iron and steel as the same material, but that's a different problem.Brass refers to too wide a range of materials to say anything definitive about it.  Some of them are softer than copper, and some of them much harder.Bronze varies from about the strength of copper to roughly the strength of a steel depending on the quality and exact alloy.Agreed, though again, wood is a material that gains a lot of hardness with thickness.  During the great age of sail, they'd have overlapping oak planks up to 24" thick, and would bounce shot from 12lb smoothbore cannons with no appreciable damage.  That suggests a hardness much higher than 8 is possible.I think you misunderstand what I'm saying.  Both a spear and a battle axe do base 1d8 damage.  Each is equally effective at damaging soft tissue.  In terms of game mechanics, each is equally effective against wood as well.  But as a practical matter in the real world only the battle axe is going to effectively deal damage to wood because the mechanisms involved in dealing the damage are very different.   Soft tissue is very vulnerable to piercing damage, but wood is very resistant to it.  A spear, which relies on tissues inability to resist being punctured, doesn't have to deal a heavy blow, so is fairly terrible for chopping on wood regardless of how effective it is as a weapon against a person.  An axe on the other hand deals the same sort of blow that is necessary to split the grain of wood and sever and splinter it.  If your goal is high verisimilitude in the interaction with objects, hardness alone does not account for this difference.  It is, but only for cases where you are using the tool for its intended purpose.  I would for example ignore degradation of an axe being used to chop wood, because the tool is designed to do that.  If you took a spear or a sword and tried to chop wood, then I tend to handle that by apply the damage you inflict to the tool as well.  If this damage exceeds the hardness of the tool, then you inflict damage on the tool as well.   That isn't particularly hard to keep track of, and it doesn't come up often because it tends to cause players to simply not try to damage an object with an inappropriate tool.   No more chopping through 10' of stone with your basic longsword, which is perfectly feasible in the RAW.   By my rules, to do damage to the stone at all, you'd have to inflict so much damage that you'd be guaranteed to also damage your sword.   Now of course, you could have a +5 adamantium sword and maybe that stone wall doesn't stand a chance, but now you are superhero probably, so chopping holes in stone is just something you can do.</blockquote>

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