Talk:Better Sunder Rules (3.5e Variant Rule)

Ratings

Tarkisflux likes this article and rated it 3 of 4.

I don't know what Ghost is on about here. Allowing sundering to target body parts means your fighter has a built in debuff that is useful against pretty much everybody. Spellcaster? Sunder their arms and laugh as they can't use somatic components anymore. Turtle? Sunder their shell so others can hit them too. Scary clawed thing? Cut off their claws. And since the damage counts against their normal hit point pool, the only potential damage reduction you suffer is the one where you missed. There's a couple of things that could be better though, like the limb hit point pools and target ACs. But I'll talk about those elsewhere. This is not the standard "sunder to screw yourself out of treasure" model, and in general I'm for it.

My philosophy is, if the players have access to it, so does the DM. Tell me again how you're going to play your level 3 wizard after he's got both arms chopped off :-P
This is why I don't like long-lasting debuffs and strong effects in general. They screw over the target, and it can be frustrating on either side of the DM screen. Bad for the system, and the game in general, IMO. --Ghostwheel (talk) 17:30, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree entirely with that "access on both sides of the screen" philosophy. I want tools to exist on both sides of the screen, because it helps with immersion IMO. Your unspoken corollary that "I don't want this to happen to me, therefore it can't be in the game at all" is what I don't agree with. My tolerance for a target getting screwed over is much higher than yours, as has been discussed to death already. And "chopping his arms off" seems a pretty reasonable course of action if you need to do it "before he glitterdusts/webs me".

But let's take a look at what it would take for your example to even happen in this setup. To remove an arm you have to do 23 damage (15 hp + 8 hardness) with a -10 to hit vs an AC of 10 + 4 (size) + 1 (wizard BAB), twice. Possible I suppose, but difficult to do before the fight is over for the other side. This would deal 30 points of damage to your level 3 wizard. I'm pretty sure wizards don't have 20 hit points at level 3, so you wouldn't get to play your armless wizard because they'd be dead.

If you just wanted to go for disabled instead, you can disable arms by dealing 12 damage (of their 15 max) to them. That's much more likely since it doens't have the "all at once", "hardness", and "-10 to hit" requirements, just deal 24 damage and call it good. Your wizard might actually survive that one, so your question of how you would play that is actually relevant. Well, you'd get it healed and not worry about it. "A body part or object regains functionality when it's hp are restored" is part of the rules here. It's a very short term debuff if you have any in-combat healing worth mentioning. Losing a limb is potentially longer lasting, but it's unclear if you can reattach a limb by healing it all back up at once. I'll ask down in the comments for additional clarification on that, because there might be a couple of levels where you could deal that damage to a guy reliably but they wouldn't be able to recover from it easily, or at all.

Now some of that might be nitpicking your example, but other than an example where they could take a limb off before you could easily recover from it (i.e. no longer than 1 day out of combat) I don't see any potential problems with this setup. Aside from it maybe being too easy / hard to hit limbs and messing up damage expectations as a result, but that seems pretty solvable. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 18:40, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Sundering limbs is countered by Regenerate. So make the chopping off part be only allowed at 13 BAB or 13 CR, whichever is lower (y'know because monsters can have tons of HD but still be CR 13). Now the party has a defense against it, so it's fair game. --Aarnott (talk) 18:43, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Well, it used to be. Since there wasn't an actual way to reliably remove limbs before, it seemed likely that would get updated in something like this. And then he added a level 1 spell that can do it, so it should be pretty available at any level. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 06:24, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

	Ghostwheel opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	Making sundering even easier is bad. I strongly dislike this, and on top of that, it could do with more professional use of the English language (grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc).

Comments

Why are limb hit point pools fixed like that? 1 HD commoners don't survive losing a limb, but you've barely scratched the surface of a 20 barbarian's hit points when you hack his arm off. Why no pools relative to hit dice in addition to size? - Tarkisflux ^Talk 16:59, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Additionally, the targeting of limbs is odd. Since you treat them as weapons, their AC is just 10 + attack bonus + size modifier, and doesn't include things like deflection bonuses or natural armor, things which would otherwise make hitting a part of their body more difficult. The weapon thing also defaults to Str mod to avoid a sunder, instead of Dex, and that's a bit weird. Is that intentonal, and if so, why? - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:19, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

And a couple more things I guess. The current sunder rules completely ignore spellcasting (other than disabled limbs). Did you consider adding spell failure checks (for somatic component spells) to impaired limbs?

If functionality is restored when healing happens, these are some really easy to remove debuffs. It makes in-combat healing more effective as a side effect, but if it's too hard to apply the debuff and it can be countered by just healing a guy it seems like it wouldn't come up all that often. I'm not suggesting you should make it harder to remove, but the ease of application might need some tweaking. You should also indicate how you recover from limb removal, since that's currently missing. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 18:40, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Okay, cleaned it up and add stuff. I really should not have posted this from my phone earlier. - grog toad