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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5542819" data-attributes="member: 4937">Really interesting topic.First, while the face hardness of objects is of some use 'hardness' in engineering really only means 'resistance to deformation' where as hardness in the D&D context means 'resistance to damage'.   To understand the difference, note that in engineering terms glass is a very hard material (it doesn't deform) but that it is not a very hard material in game terms because it doesn't bend it just breaks.   Game materials which are hard are those that are both hard (they don't bend) and not particularly brittle (they don't break).   It's going to be hard to take a single value and turn it directly into a table.Secondly, one thing I've always felt is that both hardness and hitpoints ought to scale with thickness.   The easiest example for this is glass.   According to D&D, glass has a hardness of 'zero'.  In fact, this is only true for very thin glass.   Thick glass has an appreciable resistance to damage.  You can't take a 5" thick glass panel and expect to bash it with your fist.  The problem with glass isn't so much lack of DR as it is lack of hit points.  It may be hard to damage, but once you do damage it just shatters.   However thin glass has little resistance to impacts so clearly glass hardness scales with level.The same is equally true of things like wood and stone.  Thin wood and thin stone have relatively low DR.   An average person can splinter thin wood with a kick, or smash thin stone with a hammer.   However, thick wood and stone not only takes more sizable blows to smash, but it takes more sizeable blows to even dent, deform, or damage.  The same blow with a hammer that might shatter a 1" thick stone slab may do no damage at all to one that is 3' thick. It doesn't follow that if 1 blow smashes a 1" thick stone that 36 of the same will break through 3' of stone.</blockquote>

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