Quote Originally Posted by NeoSeraphi View Post
And now you're probably thinking "Well okay, in that situation the DM certainly wouldn't bother Sundering". And I stop you there. If you can ever think of a situation where a mechanic would just ruin the entire game for everyone, especially one player in particular, you as a DM shouldn't employ that tactic.
This logic would keep me from allowing Wizards, Clerics, liches, the Tarrasque, and PC deaths in my games, just to name a few off the top of my head.

Seriously, if your Fighter doesn't have a backup blade in case of emergency breakage and the Cleric has no backup holy symbol in case of daring Rogues with high ranks in Slight of Hand, that's the player's own fault, and by extension the GM's fault for not poking him about it (or at least for making a hidden check to see if his character thought he might need one (a simple Int check)). Besides, if the battle is so heated his weapon is Sundered and he has no backup, PC death is fairly unavoidable unless you took Improved Unarmed Strike.

The only time Sunder is unforgivable is if you didn't let your players know it was a possibility before hand. If you told them it could happen and they didn't prepare, their character's death and/or damsel-in-distress state is their own fault. All my players know that their weapons can be sundered (and no, I won't stop making sunder attempts just because I broke the first weapon or you have no Mending prepared for the day); combat is there to kill either the PCs or the NPC monsters, and dirty tactics like weapon breaking is perfectly acceptable on both sides.

Of course, this is also coming from someone who generally only throws a set of baddies at the PCs once every day or two at most (my campaigns are very heavy on the RP side of things, usually at the player's request), so a broken sword is far less of a problem than it would be if you had 3 fights a day.