Sunder -- The most useful useless feat

[Benben]

I love sunder.

Why I use sunder on my players:

• It keeps a character from being defined by a piece of equipment. With all of the new enchantments available to magic weapons, armor, and items it's very easy to design a character around a single item. This creates very boring characters, and since I hand out RP experience, this can actually slow down a character's advancement. By eliminating a character's items every so often, my players have learned not to rely on equipment.
• Magic Items in 3E are very common, and therefore disposable. This is one of the paradigm shifts of 3E. Playing through Sunless citadel, Forge of Fury, the party picked up a number of magic weapons that they just sold off so they could purchase or make items, they actually wanted. If the players are just going to sell them off, break them.

 

[Asheron]

I used it when I first DMed a 3e adventure. The Sunless Citadel. I loved it. Smash! There goes your sword. Crack! Goodbye Axe.

Don't let your players be such cry-babies. Drow are nasty! I would have killed the player who got upset at something like that. Oh, boo hoo, your bow is gone. TOO BAD! Sounds like that PC needs to retire and open up an inn in more civilized lands. He could call it the....

need I say it?

Aluvial

C'mon say it,man!!!! Say it, ya know you want to.................say it!

 

[Vaxalon]

Try this trick. It's really sarcastic, but it works to get the crybabies in line.

Run a monty haul adventure. Have a pile of +1 shortswords guarded by a tribe of four kobolds armed with toothpicks. Give them a sleeping dragon. Every encounter is a complete pushover.

Then ask them if they had fun.

 

[Mistwell]

No, I don't think so. Guy 2 doesn't get an AoO with his bow, since it doesn't threaten an area. The event looks like this:

Guy 1 runs up (without sunder feat) to Guy 2 and attempts to break his bow.
Guy 2 watches helplessly (or makes an unarmed AoO such as Trip or Disarm, and thus incurs an AoO himself - unless he is part Monk or has unarmed combat feat)
If Guy 2 made a desparate attempt to keep Guy 1 off, then Guy 1 might get an AoO against him which he takes just before his actual attempt to break the item.

Yeah, I was gonna say (before you spoke up) that this whole thread makes little sense to me. No feat was needed to sunder a bow. Anyone with a melee weapon could safely do it.

 

[Vaxalon]

What he's really complaining about is the tactic of attacking a weapon, which many people call "Sunder" because that's the feat for it.

The rest of his complaint makes sense. It's wrong, but it makes sense.

 

[AuraSeer]

Your players are whining because you Sundered one weapon? Bah! What a bunch of weenies. They don't know a lenient DM when they see one.

I think you need to introduce them to a little spell called Mordenkainen's Disjunction. "Yeah, Mr. Archer Dude, make a Will save for that bow of yours. Plus one for your backup bow. Also for your armor, the Bag of Holding, your magic quiver, those Gloves of Dexterity you like so much, and every potion you've got. Your DC is 24, hotshot."

 

[the Jester]

Your player's complaint reminds me of the guy who complained cuz the dragon used its snatch feat.

COME ON... the feat is in the PH. It's there to be used. On pcs and npcs alike. It might be fun to have a villain who likes to sunder the pcs' best items and teleport away, again and again, just to build him up as an unforgettable nemesis type. "Ooh, there he is again! Let's get him before he breaks my holy flail +3!"

Do your pcs object when a monster power attacks?

Look at earth elementals... the bigguns all have the sunder feat, should they never use it? If so, WHY DO THEY HAVE IT???

Whiney players piss me off. It's one thing if they have a legitimate beef, but one of the cool things in 3e is how easy it is to get magic stuff. Ooh, one bow broken- WAH! Blah. One of the design standards of modules in 3e (I think it was Monte that said this, but I could be wrong) is that, due to the prevelence of magic items, every adventure should have at least one opportunity to take stuff away from the pcs, whether via an ooze, a rust monster, the sunder feat or whathaveyou.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Sunder is a great option for NPCs and PCs in adventures. It's the sure cure for an archer who thinks that a bow is a weapon to use five feet from melee. It's also the way to deal with characters who think that +1 Holy flaming frost shock, screaming, weapons of speed are good ideas. Finally, it's a good way to underscore that reliance upon a single weapon is a sacrifice--if you're focussed, specialized, improved criticalled, and a weapon master with a battle axe, how good are you without the battle axe?

Both as a DM and a player, I tend to use sunder, trip, disarm, bull rush, tumble, and bluff. If you don't do that, combat simply becomes a matter of I swing. I hit. 8 points of damage. He swings, he hits, 9 points of damage. How boring. It's much more fun if the bad guy tries to sunder your greatsword and in return, you bull rush him off the dock into the water. . . .

 

[Rackhir]

Whiny Players? What about whiny GMs. If you guys all love sundering magic weapons, because they are so cheap and prevalant, maybe you are handing out too much magic.

The last campaign I was in I spent a year and a half of the campaign (real time) trying to get together the gold and resources to finally make a nice magic bow. It was supposed to be a weapon that would be intimately associated with the character.

I certainly would have been pissed off if after all that, I'd gotten it hacked in half by a mook monster in the first battle.

According to the logic most of you are presenting, it would be fine to just sunder Excaliber, Stormbringer or Blackwand, because the whiny players should learn to live without magic items, no matter how closely they are tied to the character or how much they are symbolic of the character.

If all your magic items are simply generic easily replaceable items then the "sunder everything" approach makes sense. Not everyone wants them to be like that, some people would prefer that items have a background, significance and sense of style. If the items have value, then trashing them left and right is going to seriously and justly annoy your players (they are people too after all).

 

[reapersaurus]

Elder Basilisk -I also prefer a combat maneuver to just hacking something.
I wish 3E made the other maneuvers a little better alternative than they are.

About the Archer player -
He has a archer PC in close-quarters combat, and he doesn't expect the bow to be taken out?
He'd better be keeping his ranged PC well out of combat if he expects that not to happen.