Renduaz
2021-04-13, 07:15 AM
Having revisited one of my builds which employs a strategy of hiding inside or behind barricades and boxes carried via Tenser's Floating Disk or Genie's Vessel at lower levels, I decided to pay a visit to the Objects suggested AC and HP table to get an idea of how effective some items would be under the 'official' guidelines in case the DM just looks it up instead of assigning the statistics based on personal judgement, and I realized they've done a terrible job at advising DM's about object integrity assessment.
The first and foremost problem is that they chose to evaluate HP based on size, seemingly oblivious to the fact that size does not account for volume and therefore leads to absurd equivalences whereby a hollow 1-inch thick Small box of iron has exactly the same HP as a cube of pure iron, or at least an iron safe or bunker with a comparatively small interior. Damage thresholds exist, yet are officially applied only to very sizeable objects such as castle walls.
There's a much better metric to go by which does account for both size and volume as far as most materials are concerned, it's called weight. Secondly, the HP gap between material types itself is pretty stupid and lazily assigned. An Adamantine small chest only has 7 more hp than a glass chest? Seriously?
I think a much more realistic HP table could be designed like this:
Brittle/Weak Object ( Ice, Cloth sheet, etc ) - 5hp per 1lbs
Tough Object ( Wood, Porous Rock, etc ) - 25hp per 1lbs
Resilient Object ( Iron, Mithral, etc ) - 50hp per 1lbs
- Increase/Decrease individually based on average
- Damage Threshold = HP to damage 1lbs when appropriate
I would also probably increase the AC of Adamantine to 25 at least and work down the intervals from there. On the HP front, I think it now reflects object integrity much more adequately. You can burn some tent flaps or cut off some rope fairly quickly, you can shatter a rock or break a board with enough power but you're not just vaporizing a wardrobe or carving a small boulder any time soon, and destroying an Adamantine safe will take days or require astronomical damage output, as it should be.
The first and foremost problem is that they chose to evaluate HP based on size, seemingly oblivious to the fact that size does not account for volume and therefore leads to absurd equivalences whereby a hollow 1-inch thick Small box of iron has exactly the same HP as a cube of pure iron, or at least an iron safe or bunker with a comparatively small interior. Damage thresholds exist, yet are officially applied only to very sizeable objects such as castle walls.
There's a much better metric to go by which does account for both size and volume as far as most materials are concerned, it's called weight. Secondly, the HP gap between material types itself is pretty stupid and lazily assigned. An Adamantine small chest only has 7 more hp than a glass chest? Seriously?
I think a much more realistic HP table could be designed like this:
Brittle/Weak Object ( Ice, Cloth sheet, etc ) - 5hp per 1lbs
Tough Object ( Wood, Porous Rock, etc ) - 25hp per 1lbs
Resilient Object ( Iron, Mithral, etc ) - 50hp per 1lbs
- Increase/Decrease individually based on average
- Damage Threshold = HP to damage 1lbs when appropriate
I would also probably increase the AC of Adamantine to 25 at least and work down the intervals from there. On the HP front, I think it now reflects object integrity much more adequately. You can burn some tent flaps or cut off some rope fairly quickly, you can shatter a rock or break a board with enough power but you're not just vaporizing a wardrobe or carving a small boulder any time soon, and destroying an Adamantine safe will take days or require astronomical damage output, as it should be.