Sword vs Door: Ineffectual Weapon?

[Machiavelli]

I'm a heavy-handed, railroading DM. When someone says "I'm going to chop down that door with my greatsword", I stop them and say "okay, even your Int 8 fighter knows that this is a bad idea. Proceed?" or "as a dwarven Runeforge with 8 ranks in Craft(Metal), you know there is about a 50/50 chance those iron straps are going to tear up your sword. Try anyway?" Then, if the player decides to proceed, that's where you roll damage against the sword, enforce a skill check to see if the sword shatters, or some such thing. It just feels right, so you go ahead and do it. As long as it's not a spiteful decision, and the players know about the challenges they face before those challenges bite them in the arse, it works out well. If you have to do something to avoid frustrating the players (these guys are, after all, probably your friends, and regardless you don't want to be a jackass to them), give them some other option to pursue. Heck, if they come up with an idea you hadn't thought of, as long as it sounds like it should work, reward it with success and maybe some extra XP.

Edit: I just thought of an example. The cleric in a campaign I played in needed some sort of powder, but all we had was a whole clump of the material. The sorcerer cast Stone Fist to grind it up. We just assumed it worked, because it sounded cool. No need to consult or make up rules for it.

The somewhat broken, occasionally stupid rules for hacking through things are only a suggestion for how to model such things. In plenty of situations, they make good enough sense to just use them as-is. Otherwise, do what you have to to avoid stressing suspension of disbelief beyond its breaking point. As long as you stay true to the fun factor, and you're not introducing rules to the game to be a spiteful creep, it should be fine. Thankfully, D&D is not inherently a competitive match between players and DM.

 

[ainbimagh]

Or just house rule it the same way I house rule my min/max players when they try to do something obscene that isnt creative but blatant abuse of poor rules mechanics.

Example. Barbarian says, 'Ok well, I am going to start attacking the stone wall and try to cut through it with my adamantine XXX, Should I roll or How long will it take?'
DM 'Depends, how long do you want to do it and what do you use?'
Barbarian 'Oh I rage and power attack for full and yada yada.. for 9 rounds'
DM 'You make a nice dent'
Barbarian 'I woulda done (rolls his dice) 1000 pts of damage to it!!!'
DM 'Yeah, its a sturdy wall'
Barbarian 'Ok well, I do it for 9 more rounds'
DM 'You make a nicer dent in the wall'
Barbarian frowns at the loss of his two rages.

 

[Machiavelli]

With all due respect, where did he get an adamantine greataxe or whatever? You can avoid alot of materials/magic item issues if you don't assume that anyone can buy anything they want for the right price.

In that situation, I'd warn him ahead of time "okay, you might be a half-orc barbarian with Intelligence little better than a particularly smart cow, but even you know that your axe will be a useless lump of metal, and your back and arms will be in agony, by the time you pound your way through that wall".
If he insists that he simply MUST proceed, then he'll get through that wall you didn't want him to, possibly ruining a plot point you spent an evening planning, but now you can send the party on an adventure finding a weaponsmith who can re-forge that insanely difficult to produce axe.

Also, he'll spend the next two in-game days with -4 dex from over-worked muscles.

 

[Felnar]

Ahem...

Ineffective Weapons: Certain weapons just can’t effectively deal damage to certain objects.


Vulnerability to Certain Attacks: Certain attacks are especially successful against some objects. In such cases, attacks deal double their normal damage and may ignore the object’s hardness.

Being swung at a hard solid object is an attack many weapons are vulnerable to IMHO.

you also forgot
Immunities: Objects are immune to non-lethal damage (eg. quarterstaff)

but ya, wood vs iron should get caught by DM common sense

adamantine's ignoring hardness is a weird mechanic
its like steel turns to soft lead on contact with the stuff

 

[Aaron L]

Quarterstaffs cause nonlethal damage?

 

[Felnar]

Quarterstaffs cause nonlethal damage?

sorry, i was going through the weapon style feats in CWarrior and looked up the simple weapons in an old PHB pdf i had with me (superscript 5 looks like a 3)
good to know i havent been doing it wrong the whole time

 

[mmu1]

I guess I'm in the minority here...

I have no problem whatsoever with allowing people to use their attacks to damage objects.

If a fighter who's tough enough to trade blows with a dragon or wrestle with a purple worm announces he wants to pound a wall down with his bare hands, I'm going to let him.

Of course, at a level where he can do this kind of thing, I'm not going to design any plots that'll hinge on something as silly as whether the party is able to bust their way through a masonry wall, or (hopefully, at least) railroad and bore them so badly that they'd find it preferable to mine a shaft through a hundred feet of rock to getting involved in the encounters I'm trying to create.

No personal offense intended, but some of the solutions to the "problem" of walls and doors being broken down that have been offered in the last few posts utterly suck. Pretend you're a player and consider how fun this sounds - first you get railroaded (or forced to waste time thinking about door hardware rather than the adventure) then you get punished and condescended to for trying to get off the rails.

 

[Darklone]

Mostly agreed. The final argument in the barbarian cutting his way through a wall was that a PC of that level usually flies over the wall.

 

[Machiavelli]

"Other solutions", yes! That's what I'm talking about here. There's no need to engage in truly counter-intuitive activities when an entirely different approach will be faster and more effective, anyway. There's more fun to be had in exercising the full capabilities of a well-prepared adventuring party than in using a small portion of the game rules at face value, diligently adding and multiplying your numbers, and declaring that you just accomplished something that serves only to remind everyone they are playing out a fake story in a fake world through the actions of fake people.

D&D is epic fantasy, after all, not robotic arithmetic.

 

[shilsen]

"Other solutions", yes! That's what I'm talking about here. There's no need to engage in truly counter-intuitive activities when an entirely different approach will be faster and more effective, anyway. There's more fun to be had in exercising the full capabilities of a well-prepared adventuring party than in using a small portion of the game rules at face value, diligently adding and multiplying your numbers, and declaring that you just accomplished something that serves only to remind everyone they are playing out a fake story in a fake world through the actions of fake people.

D&D is epic fantasy, after all, not robotic arithmetic.

It seems to me like you're making an arbitrary distinction based on personal preference. How exactly is a character being able to smash through walls with a weapon of unnaturally strong material any less "epic fantasy" than a wizard flying over the wall? And why does the barbarian and his weapon not count among "the full capabilities of a well-prepared adventuring party"?

Personally, I'm just fine with it. The day that a character being able to knock a hole in a wall ruins my game is the day I quit DMing.