3.5 [?Epic?] - How to Damage Especially Large Objects?

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Is there a way to damage and break especially large objects, such as buildings or non-creature machines, in their entirety, without AoEs? I don't mean only a single 5' or 10' section or cube, but cleaving buildings in twain like Cloud Strife in FFVII: Advent Children or FFVII Remake, Sora or Roxas in Kingdom Hearts, or any number of anime characters. Or even sundering mountains in the case of epic fighty types like the characters in Fate/Stay Night.

It just seems rather underwhelming that massively powerful characters can't do more than put a dent in a wall due to only being able to attack a small bit of it (as well as the massive mountains of hp objects have, although it's easy enough to deal infinite damage, as needed).

[Edea]

Not that this is what you're looking for, but my immediate first thought was 'get a Hulking Hurler to meteor smash it'.

It's also possible that an epic spell is developed allowing you to go Colossal-ultra+ and then just sit on whatever it is you want disintegrated.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

1. Your Hulking Hurler uses the object you want to break as a weapon.

2. He throws it at the party caster who has Starmantle up.

2a. That caster has readied an action to cast Greater Dispel Magic or similar on the object if it's magical, to temporarily render it nonmagical.

3. The object is harmlessly converted to starlight when it hits the Starmantle and is utterly destroyed.

[unseenmage]

Hmm.

What's the swarm-but-for-troops thing called in 3.x again?
In PF it's the Troop subtype

One could apply that to an affected group of ten foot by ten foot building sections so as to destroy all their hp at once.

Alternatively animating them all as the same object allows them to be attacked at the same time as well.

Additionally, the rules do state that hardness is overcome by appropriate measures and that damaging objects is to be intuited. Paper should burn and be easily cut by a knife. String or rope cut in the proper direction should be easily severed. Etc.

With that in mind, if anime swords are supposed to be to buildings as a knife to butter then that's just how they should be treated.

Or, you know, just rule of cool the scene entirely. That's usually what we do.

[Gauntlet]

The Rockburst spell causes a stone object of any size to explode into shards.

[Psyren]

Hmm.

What's the swarm-but-for-troops thing called in 3.x again?
In PF it's the Troop subtype

Mob template IIRC

[Kalkra]

With sufficiently long reach and a liberal interpretation of Whirlwind Attack or War Hulk's Great/Mighty/Massive Swing, you could do a lot of damage to a pretty large region. The problem is that by RAW those attacks only hit creatures, which is why a liberal interpretation is necessary.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

With sufficiently long reach and a liberal interpretation of Whirlwind Attack or War Hulk's Great/Mighty/Massive Swing, you could do a lot of damage to a pretty large region. The problem is that by RAW those attacks only hit creatures, which is why a liberal interpretation is necessary.Well, between metamorphosis, polymorph any object, polymorphed warforged, mimics, hagunemnons, city druids, masters of many forms, animated objects, intelligent magic items, animated walls, and all sorts of other things that look like objects, stretches of wall, floors, ceilings, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, et alia, et cetera, you can't really say it's not a creature until you've already attacked or otherwise interacted with such things...

[icefractal]

Even destroying a 10' cube is pretty difficult. In order to make smashing through them more than a trivial matter, walls have a lot of HP, more than many high-level foes. If a character was able to smash an entire mountain via HP damage, they'd be able to one-shot-kill pretty much any foe, including epic ones.

Therefore, I think the best way would be homebrew. Make some feats with level (or BAB) requirements, and give them effects reasonable for a character of that level. For example, Earthquake is an 8th level spell. So a feat that required BAB +15 could reasonably have that magnitude of effect. Given how niche this type of effect is, you probably want to bundle them with a smaller-scale usage that's more often applicable.

Destroying an entire mountain is a bit higher end - possibly Epic if you're using that. On the one hand it's not often useful, but on the other it's not something that even the highest level (non-epic) monsters or spells can do. So it depends a bit on your campaign.

[The Insanity]

I could have sworn there were rules for this in Stronghold Builder's Guidebook, but I can't seem to be able to find them. Basically what they said was - if you destroy a (10-by-10 ft.) part of a wall you deal half of the excess of the damage you did to all surrounding parts of the wall. So if you do a sufficiently high amount of damage you could possibly destroy a whole building.

[ExLibrisMortis]

The earthquake spell deals "100 damage to structures in the area", which is a spread with an 80' radius. While that's not enough for thick stone walls (180 hp per foot of thickness), it'll take care of wooden structures and un-reinforced brick walls (less hp per foot thickness, and also thinner). As laid out in the spell description without reference to hp values (but results matching the SBG figures!). You can always Twin your earthquake to get through stone walls. Or cast it twice.

Black blade of disaster is basically a sword of annihilation. Not big enough to destroy structures, but definitely capable if you scale it up.

[Mnemius]

Ages ago I remember hearing about some iajitsu build that could cleave a planet in twain...
but that was back on gamefaqs in the mid 2000s.

[Kalkra]

Ages ago I remember hearing about some iajitsu build that could cleave a planet in twain...
but that was back on gamefaqs in the mid 2000s.

Iajutsu Focus caps out at +9d6 damage, so I don't really see how you can destroy a planet.

[ben-zayb]

Animate Object, then kill it.
If it's not considered a single object, use Fiend of Possession's ability to animate it as a non-continuous object, then kill it.

Or just animate the entire inner core of the planet it's in, and kill the animated core.

Or animate the sun/galaxy/universe as a non-continuous object, then kill it.

[Endarire]

A properly-worded wish or miracle.

Or a Treant. Those things can do extra damage to objects.

What about something very big with many, many attacks using adamantine or hardness ignoring weaponry?