Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 8943961" data-attributes="member: 23751">Read the 1e PHB and DMG sometime.  Gygax is hard to understand, poorly organized and quite frankly contradictory in multiple areas.  He repeatedly tells DMs that they can change whatever they want and should make the game theirs, and also that they shouldn't change anything and follow what is written.Living things have always been more difficult to affect/repair in D&D than inanimate objects.A 1 inch crack is a 1 inch crack is a 1 inch crack.  Whether it's in a slender dagger, a short sword or a battle axe, you can still have identical 1 inch cracks. Mending should be able to repair all of those, but some some bizarre reason it can only affect the 1 inch crack in the dagger?3.5 also makes a distinction between cracks and breaks.  This is from the petrified condition."Petrified: A petrified character has been turned to stone and is considered unconscious. If a petrified character cracks or breaks, but the broken pieces are joined with the body as he returns to flesh, he is unharmed. If the character’s petrified body is incomplete when it returns to flesh, the body is likewise incomplete and the DM must assign some amount of permanent hit point loss and/or debilitation."Flesh to Stone also makes a similar distinction.If you throw a vial of acid or oil, it has to break before the contents are released.  That doesn't mean cracks.  Cracks aren't going to be effective at releasing the contents quickly.  It has to shatter(break).  It's pretty clear that even in 3.5, break/broken can be both cracks or clean breaks and mending does not make a distinction.  So long as the break(even clean breaks) is small, it can be mended.Mending would be to fix a single clean break, and then only if it was something small like a slender dagger, a rope or a stick.  Make whole would repair a shattered arm.  The inanimate equivalents anyway.All it says is that the object is ruined at 0 hit points.  If I have a sewing needle and I break it in half, it's ruined.  If I have a slender dagger and I break it in half, it's ruined.  Ruined doesn't have to mean shattered into lots of pieces or beyond the ability of mending to fix.Ruined and broken are not conditions. Hell, they aren't even mutually exclusive even if they were conditions.  Things can be ruined and not broken, broken and not ruined, or both broken and ruined.Home brew has no weight in my eyes when talking about official rules.  We all have ideas of what thing should mean or even could mean.  Perhaps the person who wrote that simply wanted more granularity when it came to breaking things, rather than out of a belief that mending can't repair something at 0 hit points.</blockquote>

Verification