Why I'm done with 4e

[Celebrim]

In 3e, a 10 foot unworked stone wall can be tunneled through by four Strength 20 fighters wielding greataxes in about 10 minutes...

Cheers!

The problem here isn't so much the basic idea that everything has a hardness and a toughness. The problem is instead:

1) Assuming a weapon designed to cleave flesh does equal damage to all non-flesh targets.
2) Not having rules for damaging/dulling your weapon when striking a hard surface.
3) Not understanding that an inanimate objects 'hardness' depends in part on its thickness - especially for brittle substances like glass, stone, ice, etc. One-hundred and twenty one inch thick stone plates are not equal to a 10' block of stone.
4) Assuming that a person can keep up the same intensity of labor that they do in a brutal melee to the death for the span of 10 minutes or an hour or the like. This is like suggesting your rate of overland travel should be based on your run speed.

Some suggestions:

1) If the weapon isn't designed to function as a tool for damaging that particular surface, it does only half damage (at best). So, pick axes are fine for busting down the wall. Battle axes on the other hand do half damage and weapons like longswords and arrows do but 1/4. Axes on the other hand would do full damage to wooden doors.
2) If the damage you do to an inanimate object with a blow exceeds the hardness of the weapon you are wielding, the weapon takes damage as well. This also nicely resolves the problem that a high strength individual can also tunnel through a wall without tools under RAW.
3) Scale both the hardness and the hit point of materials by their thickness (up to some reasonable maximum). Even glass actually acquires a fairly reasonable hardness (resistance to damage) after a certain thickness because it stop yielding (and hense shattering). Really hard objects are generally nearly impervious to brute force. Instead, you have to wear them down slowly using very specialized tools.
4) Assume that over a span longer than a minute or two, a character will keep up at most half as many strong attacks as they would in melee. Force endurance checks if the player wants to hustle.

Returning to your legitimate gripe, if 4 strength 20 characters started attacking a solid stone wall with axes made for battle rather than chopping something, I'd apply a hardness about 17 to the wall and cause the axes to do half damage. Without power attack or similar feats, they just aren't going to do credible damage that way, and their axes are going to quickly break if they start forcing them to do work they aren't designed to do. Moreover, even if they get pick axes or other legitimate tools (bag of holding, right?), the work would go slowly. Probably faster than it would in real life, but these are str 20 superheroes after all.

 

[Crothian]

There are times when the DM needs to be able to say "no!"

However, he doesn't have to say that out loud. The universe does not tell me I am unable to fly before I try by jumping out a two story window. So, as DM I never tell the players ahead of time if something is impossible. I'll tell them it looks really difficult and perhaps they've never heard of anyone doing it. I'll usually explain the consequences of failure if the PCs would know them. Let them roll the dice and fail if they want to.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Are you saying that you in the real world could poke a whole in a steel door with a steel dagger? I must admit that I know little of such things, so I am asking, because my guess would be "no".

I didn't say squat about the real world. I can't fly around, fight dragons, or cast spells in the real world, either. The game lets me do all sorts of crazy stuff that no one in the real world could do. Suddenly, breaking down a door is taboo?

Nah, there's only a problem with this if somehow that door is there for a metagame reason (to keep the PC's out) and the PC's find a way around that using in-game logic.

In which case you're boned from the beginning, putting up an absolute barrier where there should be a permeable membrane.

Rather than asking a DM to be a killyjoy and say "NO YOU CAN'T IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE," it would seem to me to be the better option to tell the DM to not be a pansy about it when players go off-map.

This is a pretty decent example of an idea that 4e did wonders to embrace: "Say yes."

 

[Jack99]

I didn't say squat about the real world. I can't fly around, fight dragons, or cast spells in the real world, either. The game lets me do all sorts of crazy stuff that no one in the real world could do. Suddenly, breaking down a door is taboo?

I think we are talking past each other. My original comment was in response to a poster who used real life as an example. For what it is worth, I agree that you should never place a door and say that players can not get past it no matter what idea they come up with.

 

[PoeticJustice]

It disrupts my suspension of disbelief no matter which side of the screen I'm on.

If I'm DMing and using a game that does not allow for a full range of sensible answers, or even allow for the possibility of ludicrous things (ie, give me rules for how long it will take to use a spoon to dig through a stone wall [or at least give me the means to calculate it], rather than tell me "it can't be done," even if it takes so long to the point of being completely unreasonable to think that someone would attempt it), that game will rapidly irritate me to the point of either (1) me house-ruling the crap out of it, or (2) I no longer run the game if there are enough such instances.

That's what you want in your RPG manual? Rules for digging through walls without a shovel? The game effects of Adamant Spoons?

They omit these things not because they are impossible, but because it's patently ridiculous to waste space with corner case rules and expect DMs to obey them. Far better to be vague and let people running games to decide the exact meaning of a rule than too specific.

 

[Vurt]

Sure, but I can pretty much assure you that they didn't dig out through the steel door.

Ah, so that's what you meant when you wrote "stell". And see, here I was thinking I could safely ignore that word and the rest of the sentence would still make sense... ;D

 

[Jack99]

Ah, so that's what you meant when you wrote "stell". And see, here I was thinking I could safely ignore that word and the rest of the sentence would still make sense... ;D

Haha. My bad. Lots of beers and wine tonight, after a long day of work. Gives me fat fingers and my perception (spot) takes a -5 penalty, at least.

 

[GnomeWorks]

That's what you want in your RPG manual? Rules for digging through walls without a shovel? The game effects of Adamant Spoons?

In effect, yes.

What I want from a rulebook is a solid framework covering a wide variety of possible actions that may arise in-game. I do not expect every action to be covered by the rules; but I expect that, through extension and extrapolation, most actions should be resolvable without resorting to making something up whole-cloth.

Do not give me rules directly for digging through a wall with an adamantine spoon. Give me rules regarding item and object hit points, rules for dealing damage to objects, a general idea of how many hit points and damage resistance various materials have, a general damage table for improvised weapons, and rules covering how making an item out of adamantine changes its properties.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think we are talking past each other. My original comment was in response to a poster who used real life as an example. For what it is worth, I agree that you should never place a door and say that players can not get past it no matter what idea they come up with.

Fair 'nuff. Though I think if you look at the seed at the core of this conversation, it's not really about what one can accomplish in the "real world," either. It's about giving the DM the tools to say yes. GW wants item stats for that, which is reasonable, but complex. I'm perhaps more comfortable with a more abstract way of dealing with it myself, but either way, we both want something that helps us make that decision. A simple "no" doesn't suffice, but a reasonable way to figure out exactly what it would take certainly does (though I'd like to to be easier than it was in 3e, I do need something there!).

The point of my "psychological distance" post was to point out that putting in place a reasonable challenge is often a much more satisfying way to run the game than to just prohibit the action (however you justify that prohibition).

I'm really OK with high-strength characters digging through walls with adamantine spoons, because in actual play, that only ever becomes an actual issue for metagame reasons.

 

[Pbartender]

A simple "no" doesn't suffice, but a reasonable way to figure out exactly what it would take certainly does (though I'd like to to be easier than it was in 3e, I do need something there!).

The point of my "psychological distance" post was to point out that putting in place a reasonable challenge is often a much more satisfying way to run the game than to just prohibit the action (however you justify that prohibition).

Rather than simply "yes" or "no", it's "No, but..."

Prohibit the completely unreasonable action ("No, you can't dig through solid stone with a wooden spoon, no matter how strong you are."), but throw them a bone by hinting at another more reasonable course ("One of the iron bars in the window of your prison cell is a little looose in its mortar. Given time, you might be able to use your raw strength to wiggle it out.").