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Thread: 4e encounters sundering help.
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2010-12-26, 05:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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4e encounters sundering help.
Hey guys, my DM is running an adventure in which we fight dragons, I want to know what the sunder rules have to say about natural weapons so that I can literally knock it's teeth out. However I'm looking at the rule book PDF and can't find any rules on it. may I have some help?
Last edited by Shinizak; 2010-12-26 at 05:59 PM.
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2010-12-26, 06:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
4e doesn't have sundering, only bull rushing and grappling.
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2010-12-26, 06:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
What? why?
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2010-12-26, 06:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
They didn't implement any rules for it. Disarming is sort of done by a few powers that disarm enemies, but objects can't be broken in combat.
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2010-12-26, 07:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
So you can disarm enemies? what powers do it?
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2010-12-26, 07:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
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2010-12-26, 08:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-26, 09:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
Any opponent falls into one or two categories:
1) Monster that doesn't use weapons or armor. You can't sunder its stuff, and if you specialized in sundering, you're dead weight.
2) Intelligent being using equipment. There are two cases here:
--It relies on its magical equipment. Congratulations, you can sunder it. You also just cost yourself cool loot, and the rest of the party will hate you if they wanted to take it.
--It doesn't need magical equipment. It can have backup weapons, since mundane equipment is cheap. You're dead weight again.
There's no situation in which sundering is a good option, except possibly when fighting something like a hydra, but people assume that since the option is there, they should try it. There aren't rules for it in 4e, because one of the dev team's goals when writing 4e was to remove "trap" options like that.
There are, however, a number of powers, many for martial characters, which are described as disarming an opponent, breaking equipment, or mangling a limb. There are even more which you can choose to describe as doing the same.
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2010-12-26, 11:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
I'm sure if you want to forgo doing damage or healing an ally on your turn to spend you standard action attempting to disable one of the many attacks a dragon has, your DM will be more than happy to homebrew something for you.
That said, if your character is good at his job, he could most certainly do something more useful on his turn.Last edited by DragonBaneDM; 2010-12-26 at 11:08 PM.
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2010-12-26, 11:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-27, 01:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
You could always request to make an athletics check and explain to your DM what you're trying to do.
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2010-12-27, 01:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
I'm not sure how true this is though. Poorly optimized melee (the majority of NPC foes in most games) rely heavily on magic items to hit and deal damage. Going by the treasure tables, even factoring in the triple treasure NPCs get, any NPC is going to have magic weapons far below the level the PCs have, so an NPC who isn't a boss won't be carrying actual upgrades or "cool loot", especially since the NPC's gear will likely be split among the various magic items suggested by the NPC tables. At best you're losing yourself the money you would get selling the thing, or the XP your artificer could get by eating it. Against ordinary mooks that will generally still be worth it.
It's still not really worth an action, since there are much better ways of disabling humanoid enemies. The loot-destroying isn't really much of a problem though.Lord Raziere herd I like Blasphemy, so Urpriest Exalted as a Malefactor
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2010-12-27, 01:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
Sundering doesn't really strike me as something that makes all that much sense. After all, it only happens a handful of times in most fantasy. It doesn't seem like something that should become a staple, unless you're specifically trying for a Vash-style "disarm, not kill" approach.
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2010-12-27, 01:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
Why break the sword when you can break the person who holds it?
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2010-12-27, 02:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-27, 03:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
Except in 4E there's also the third category of an intelligent being using equipment that simply disappears at the end of combat because it's irrelevant. For example, if you're paragon tier, any city guards you're fighting can be assumed to have magical weapons. However, since your party already has better magical weapons, those aren't relevant.
That said, 4E has several equipment-destroying powers (most of them for either tieflings or warlocks), they tend to give a save-ends penalty to attack rolls.Guide to the Magus, the Pathfinder Gish class.
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2010-12-27, 06:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-28, 05:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-28, 06:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-28, 06:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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2010-12-28, 07:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
They got rid of the sunder rules in 4E, because sundering was a pain in the neck in 3.x, and hurt the game more than it helped.
- If an enemy used sundering on you, you're basically ineffective for the rest of the fight, and get pissed at the DM.
- If you use sundering on enemies, the DM gets pissed, and starts using monsters without weapons, or gives NPCs ridiculous numbers of backup weapons.
- If both DMs and PCs use sundering, so much money and effort is spent on back-up weapons and anti-sundering techniques, that it just gets annoying and frustrating for everyone involved.
4E is also simple enough to improvise, that I'd say it'd be a simple deal to let a PC say "I want to try and break the monsters teeth" or whatever, let the PC do an attack vs. Fort (with a penalty), and if the attack succeeds, use the damage table in the DMG as appropriate, and give the monster a penalty to hit for the next couple of rounds. Done.Last edited by Hzurr; 2010-12-28 at 07:36 PM.
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2010-12-28, 09:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: 4e encounters sundering help.
There's a cleric power called Iron to Glass which reduces damage a monster does for the rest of the battle. It's fairly close to what you were looking for.