Passively breaking weapons

[Nikker]

Hello sages,
I have a "flavour" question which I'd love to find some rules about [D&D 3.5], but I don't know if I'll succeed.
I apologise in advance for grammar mistakes because english is not my mothertongue (also -2 Int penalty due to long covid).

I was wondering about breaking objects "passively". Like, a wall of stone breaking a sword because that sword was mistakenly swinged against said target. Is there any rule about a sword (or any object that is not a splash weapon) breaking when hitting a surface? I know that a sword has HPs like any object, but as far as I know said HPs are taken into account by rules only when someone is actively trying to break or sunder the sword...
Shouldn't wall's hardness and sword's hardness somehow conflict? Like, the harder object damages the frailer?

Now, second question (but related). Shouldn't armors and Natural Armors kinda be treated the same way? If someone used a stick to try to perforate an armor, shouldn't the stick break? (I know a stick isn't a regular weapon, but lets say for example, a fine creature holding a fine spear trying to perforate a medium creature's iron armor).
Similarly, if someone tried to perforate a vampire's chest with a wooden stick and that vampire had 200 natural armor (just a casual number, although not impossible to obtain via shenanigans), shouldn't the stick just break?
Should hardness and armor/natural armor, in your opinion, be treated as conceptually similar?

Thank you everyone for your insight.

[Gruftzwerg]

Vow of Peace does something similar.
First the enemy needs to make a Will save to attack when near you.
Second the weapon must make a Fortitude save or instantly shatters, leaving you unharmed.

edit: I'm not a fan of over complicating the rules. Thus the question, how long should a single attack take to check what you have to roll? 3.5 is already based on oversimplified combat (e.g. you attack roll represents a sequence of swings, not a single swing), which works for me.

[Duke of Urrel]

Now, second question (but related). Shouldn't armors and Natural Armors kinda be treated the same way? If someone used a stick to try to perforate an armor, shouldn't the stick break? (I know a stick isn't a regular weapon, but lets say for example, a fine creature holding a fine spear trying to perforate a medium creature's iron armor).
Similarly, if someone tried to perforate a vampire's chest with a wooden stick and that vampire had 200 natural armor (just a casual number, although not impossible to obtain via shenanigans), shouldn't the stick just break?
Should hardness and armor/natural armor, in your opinion, be treated as conceptually similar?

It is possible to find a gap or a vulnerable spot in any armor. Think of the dragon Smaug; his nearly perfect "armored waistcoat" had a bare patch that was just wide enough for the legendary Black Arrow to penetrate. If you need to put a wooden stake through the heart of a vampire who's wearing metal armor, you're going to have to aim very, very precisely (probably under the vampire's armpit), and the higher Armor Class represents the difficulty of this task. But it's not impossible.

I think it makes some sense to say that softer materials, generally speaking, cannot sunder harder ones. If you're a dungeon master who worries about this problem, you might make a house rule that objects with lower hardness generally cannot damage objects with higher hardness.


In particular, I think it makes sense to make a rule that you cannot damage metal or stone with a thin wooden weapon, for example with an arrow or a dart used inappropriately as a mêlée weapon. You might, given enough time, be able to chip a small hole through a stone wall with a steel dagger, but never with a wooden spoon.

However, I would hesitate to make this house rule too strict. It is sometimes possible to damage a thin object made of a harder substance using a thick and sturdy object made of a softer substance. For example, metal is harder than wood, but it is also more malleable than wood. So using a stick of wood that is very thick and sturdy (such as a quarterstaff), you can do serious damage to a sheet of metal that is very thin (such as a buckler).

Finally, Gruftzwerg's point is well taken. The rules of D&D version 3.5 are already very complicated, so it's usually a good idea not to complicate them further. Besides more realism sometimes makes the game less fun.

___________________________
POST-SCRIPT: The Player's Handbook (on page 165) explicitly gives dungeon masters the authority to make judgements about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of various objects as weapons.


Ineffective Weapons: The DM may determine that certain weapons just can’t effectively deal damage to certain objects. For example, you may have a hard time chopping down a door by shooting arrows at it or cutting a rope with a club.

[ShurikVch]

Caryatid Column (Fiend Folio) have Break Weapon (Su)

Drunken Master's Improvised Weapons are break on natural 1

For a non-WotC example, Player's Guide to the Sovereign Land have Tough as Nails feat:

Weapons suffer half the damage they deal to you
Required Con 13 and two other feats - Shock Resistant and Undying (both are from the very same book, and the latter is a prerequisite for the former)

[Nikker]

It is possible to find a gap or a vulnerable spot in any armor. Think of the dragon Smaug; his nearly perfect "armored waistcoat" had a bare patch that was just wide enough for the legendary Black Arrow to penetrate.
I understand this, and I think this possibility is covered by the "Natural 20" rule: a Nat 20 always hit, regardless of how high your opponents' AC is. I was kinda talking about when you try to impale a vampire with a high natural armor and don't roll a 20. Oh well since there aren't really rules about "what happens when you roll a miss" (do you miss completely? Did the opponent dodge, or parry, or were they protected by their armor?) I'll just assume that a high NA makes the weapon bounce away.

Thank you all for advices and for quoting examples.

[Martin Greywolf]

I understand this, and I think this possibility is covered by the "Natural 20" rule: a Nat 20 always hit, regardless of how high your opponents' AC is. I was kinda talking about when you try to impale a vampire with a high natural armor and don't roll a 20. Oh well since there aren't really rules about "what happens when you roll a miss" (do you miss completely? Did the opponent dodge, or parry, or were they protected by their armor?) I'll just assume that a high NA makes the weapon bounce away.

DnD rules aren't deep enough to properly model how weapons interact with armor. No rules can be deep enough while still being bearable to all but the nerdiest physics students.

That said. Since natural armor and standard armor behave pretty much the same when you try to harm things in them, we can conclude they work similarly. This includes gaps - even a rhinoceros will have to have thinner skin on the insides of his joints - and also what happens when you hit the, well, not gaps.

And the thing is, most weapons are tools made for a purpose, and that purpose is to hit things with and without armor. If full plate armor is a thing that exists, pretty much all standard weapons that are made in that area of the world will be designed with full plate in mind. Swords will have thin, fine points, maces will be of the flanged kind, clubs will be reinforced with metal bands. The exceptions to this are rare, very specialized weapons, usually for things like ritualized combat.

And the thing is, swords will have to hit things all the time. Shields, other swords, wooden furniture and so on, and all of those hits will result in damage, from the usual rolled and dulled edge you can fix with a sharpening stone, through nicks in the blade that make cutting fabric a bit worse but are livable with, to a broken blade.

https://www.darksword-armory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/sword-blade-to-blade-contact-damage-340x340.jpg
Incidentally, if you go browsing google, a lot of articles on sword edge damage tell you that edge-on-edge parries are bad and you shouldn't be doing them to preserve your edge. You should ignore these people, it was always a dubious claim at best and is thoroughly disproven today - if you wanted to sword fight, edge damage is something you had to accept.

A real sword you either sharpen, or if it took too much damage, replace. This isn't compatible with DnD treasure, so it is quietly ignored, along with necessary maintenance of gear after adventuring day, having to handle hygiene on the road and a host of other things.

[Fizban]

I was wondering about breaking objects "passively". Like, a wall of stone breaking a sword because that sword was mistakenly swinged against said target. Is there any rule about a sword (or any object that is not a splash weapon) breaking when hitting a surface? I know that a sword has HPs like any object, but as far as I know said HPs are taken into account by rules only when someone is actively trying to break or sunder the sword...
Shouldn't wall's hardness and sword's hardness somehow conflict? Like, the harder object damages the frailer?
DnD generally doesn't do this, because it's just not fun. Some people use "critical miss" tables which frequently cause missed attacks to do things like hit allies or drop or break the weapon, but these are not default rules.

A sword is made of steel with hardness 10, so if it was a question of hardness, then the sword should "win" against stone. But realistically, trying to chop stone with a sword will ruin the sword's edge, and it may or may not actually bend or break the blade depending on how much force is used. The DM decides how effective a weapon is when trying to hit a wall, which could be anything from normal damage to no damage at all, or even no damage and also you broke your weapon if they think it should happen.

You could adapt some of the breaking object rules for a specific situation. Say that someone is swinging a sword at a rock as hard as they can: you could rule that because the rock is simply too much to break in a single blow, the sword is the one that has a chance of breaking, and the person swinging it rolls a Str check to break the sword. Except the base rules don't include Str DCs for breaking weapons on the table because as you have noticed, the rules expect weapons will be sundered.


Now, second question (but related). Shouldn't armors and Natural Armors kinda be treated the same way? If someone used a stick to try to perforate an armor, shouldn't the stick break? (I know a stick isn't a regular weapon, but lets say for example, a fine creature holding a fine spear trying to perforate a medium creature's iron armor).
Similarly, if someone tried to perforate a vampire's chest with a wooden stick and that vampire had 200 natural armor (just a casual number, although not impossible to obtain via shenanigans), shouldn't the stick just break?
Should hardness and armor/natural armor, in your opinion, be treated as conceptually similar?
Armor and natural armor already work the same way: they increase AC. If you beat AC, your attack got past their armor/scales/whatever and did at least a scratch (because any damage is enough to deliver injury poison)- but the important thing to remember is that until you drop into negative hit points, no attack causes significant injury. Without a special ability, no attack will cause continual blood loss, significant broken bones, or anything other than a scratch and loss of hit points which will recover naturally in a few days. It doesn't matter what sort of weapon you're using: if you make a successful attack that deals damage, you've bruised or scratched them through whatever armor/scales/etc they have, even if it seems physically impossible you're either just that skilled or strong or got lucky. It might be a particularly large or painful cut or bruise which slows them down so much that it's very easy to make your next hit kill them (because you dealt a lot of hp damage and they only have a few hp left), but that's it.

Hardness and Damage Reduction are different, reducing damage from every hit that gets past AC. A creature with 200 AC still has weak spots that you can hit, for full damage, and indeed anyone has a 5% chance of rolling a natural 20 and getting lucky. A creature with 200 damage reduction*, if you hit them with a stick nothing happens unless you somehow made that stick deal 200 damage. But the stick still doesn't break, because it would be a bunch of extra work tracking little fiddly details, with the only result being that the player characters' weapons would sometimes break, which isn't fun.

*Or hardness, but hardness is normally just for non-creature objects, and only a couple of creatures (particularly the Animated Object) have hardness. Hardness is also special because it works against damage from magic, while Damage Reduction only works on physical attacks. Most Constructs use Damage Reduction.

As mentioned, a couple of creatures such as the Caryatid Column have special abilities which can break weapons that hit them.


So what happens when you fail to beat AC and your weapon hits the armor/scales/etc? Well the thing is, you weren't trying to hit the armor. You were trying to get through the armor to the vulnerable bits so you could deal damage. Those curved surfaces on metal and scale plates are there to deflect swings. If you hit a wide, flat, unmoving surface, all the force goes into the surface (and the recoil into your weapon, possibly breaking it). If you hit a curved or angled surface, unless it's perfectly lined up and held in place, a you're going to skip off to the side, with most of the force not going into the target and little recoil bouncing back into your weapon.

So if you're fighting someone who is trying to not be hit, and you're aiming for weak spots, and you miss the weak spot and hit the armor, you're not making a perfectly lined up hit against an unmoving target. Your swing most likely skips off to the side in a way that causes no damage to your weapon, or to their armor.

Thus, the rules do not have any rules for weapons breaking when you hit things with lots of armor: it would be both unfun and unrealistic, so there's no reason to do so.

Maybe it could be slightly appropriate for attacks that fail to beat Damage Reduction to instead cause damage to the weapon- and indeed, some abilities that reflect attacks or damage weapons are triggered when a weapon fails to beat DR, but it's still a punishment for players that are tying to do what they're supposed to do. A tiny increase in "realistic" simulation of fantasy monster abilities, but a large decrease in fun.


A real sword you either sharpen, or if it took too much damage, replace. This isn't compatible with DnD treasure, so it is quietly ignored, along with necessary maintenance of gear after adventuring day, having to handle hygiene on the road and a host of other things.
Also this.

And considering how magic items often seem to last for hundreds or thousands of years in crumbling ruins and still work perfectly fine as soon as they're found, one can take this to mean that magic weapons simply don't suffer the minor damage a mundane weapon takes during normal or even abnormally self-destructive use.

[rel]

If equipment destruction is an element of the game then it should be applied consistently.

It's fine to have the fighters sword break when they hit an iron golem if the rogues potions break when they fall into a pit, the wizards spell components are fouled by the engulfing slime and the rangers bowstring is ruined by a plunge through a river.

So what you actually want is a blanket rule for equipment damage, not a specific sword breaking rule which unfairly penalises anyone trying to fight with a sword.