Is Wall of Thorns subject to damage reduction?

[Pielorinho]

Last night, I cast Wall of Thorns on some nasty half-dragon trolls we were fighting. "Heh heh heh," I thunk. "By the time they reach us, they'll be ready for a coup de grace."

My DM ruled, however, that since they had damage reduction of 5/+1 (I think), they wouldn't take the damage from the Wall of Thorns. He basically treated each individual thorn as a separate 1 point of damage that couldn't penetrate damage reduction.

And I wanted to get folks' thoughts on it. Here are the arguments I can think of:

They Don't Take Damage
-Each thorn is obviously gonna be doing less than 5 points of damage: considering that the thorns are less long than a dagger, and that a dagger does 4 points maximum, the thorns won't be doing enough damage individually to penetrate damage reduction.

They Do Take Damage
-The spell's description doesn't mention that the thorns do individual damage, unlike (for example) creeping doom, in which each bug does 1 point of damage.
-If a tiger swipes at one of these critters with a paw and does 10 points of damage, you don't divide that by 5 individual claws and figure that each claw does 2 points of damage, none of which penetrate damage reduction.

Any feedback from people? I can see both sides of the argument and would likes some thoughts.

Thanks!
Daniel

 

[kreynolds]

It's a spell, so it bypasses damage reduction. A similar question was asked about blade barrier too, which motivated me to email the sage. Check it out...

Does Blade Barrier bypass damage reduction since it's "slashing" damage? I would think so, since it's like, you know, a spell and all, but I wanted to be sure.

It's a spell, DR does not apply (but it also doesn't t work against foes immune to slashing damage).

Skip Williams
RPG R&D

There you go. If it's a spell, it bypasses DR.

 

[Xarlen]

How the heck did Trolls get damage reduction?

 

[dcollins]

There are some spells (see creeping doom) which specifically state that the damage applied is nonmagical, and that DR is therefore applicable. Wall of thorns is not one of those spells.

 

[kreynolds]

How the heck did Trolls get damage reduction?

Note that he mentioned they were Half-Dragon Trolls.

 

[StealthyMark]

If it allows SR, then it is definately a spell effect and is not subject to DR. If it doesn't allow SR (as Wall of Thorns) then it is often a physical effect, and is subject to DR.

IMO, apply the DR to the damage. Remember, Wall of Thorns deals 25 points of damage per round minus the flat-footed AC of the subject. The half-dragon/trolls should survive this easily. If they were "reds", they could even burn it down and wait 10 minutes.

 

[Dr. Zoom]

Yeah, the DM should not have allowed the DR to work at all against this spell. But the damage would have been subdual, too, since they are trolls. And Xarlen has a good question. How did these trolls get DR? Half-dragons do not get it. Were they special trolls created by your DM? Perfectly legal for him to do. Just curious.

 

[Pielorinho]

How the heck did Trolls get damage reduction?

With the half-dragon Template.

Eek.

That also got them immunity to fire.

Double-eek.

And I didn't realize that until I'd finished summoning a big fat salamander, who could barely affect them.

Yikes.

We eventually got them to negative hit points and CDG'ed them by pouring half of our only flask of acid into each of their chest cavities. It was a nasty battle.

Thanks for the replies!
Daniel

 

[Pielorinho]

Oh, and I just assumed they were half-dragon. They may've been something else: my DM described them as looking like Frankensteinian trolls, with red scaly body parts grafted onto them. For fun, I sometimes try to guess what critter he's using, but he's pretty good about changing descriptions to make the guessing hard and to make fights scarier and more cinematic. They may have been fiendish trolls; I dunno.

I may ask him to do a little bit of retconning: the trolls coulda survived the thorns just by taking long time to worm their way through them, resting for a couple rounds in between move attempts. This would have allowed them to heal up damage they took (since it woulda been subdual damage). The blade barrier answer (thanks, kreynolds -- I appreciate the response!) sounds pretty definitive, and makes sense: magical effects like this aren't subject to damage reduction.

Daniel

 

[Xarlen]

Um, Dude, I don't see *anywhere* where it mentions damage reduction in the Half Dragon template.

For work usage if your books aren't there: http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/srd/srdmonsterstemplates.html