Animated Objects

[Teric neDhalir]

Rules lawyers needed!
I'm making a creature blueprint that is an animated object. SRD says that they have hardness the same as the object they are created from. Do I make that by just giving Damage Reduction equal to the hardness? And is that against all attacks, or not magical, or what?
Thanks
Teric

[t-ice]

Far as I know, hardness is just like DR/-
I don't recall why exactly, but I do recall I made a DR90/magic(+5), or somesuch, in the toolset when I wanted to make swarms that were invulnerable to weapon damage. Maybe directly DR90/- didn't work. And NWN2 does have the oddity of allowing to specify the plus an item needs to be able to cut through DR/magic.

So DR X/magic(+5) should do hardness X on the tools we have. Doubt we'll be seeing +5 weapons

[Brokenbone]

Hardness could be done as plain old DR.

Hardness tables are pretty clear, at this link: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/exploration.htm#hardness

I would recommend DR/Adamantine though, since that is the main special material which "beats" (or really, ignores) hardness under 20. I really hope you wouldn't find yourself doing really beefy animated objects with massive hardness DR (which fortunately spells and other sorts of non-physical attacks will ignore), yes, those tables of hardness are by inches of thickness, but even an armoire or dining table, it's big, but legs, cabinet doors, tabletops, you'd hope they're at most an inch or two thick. A man sized statue would be enormously thick (even be conservative and say any spot you could hit being 6 inches of solid stone, 15/inch, DR90?), and a tougher challenge to damage than an actual Iron Golem in melee though. Not an actually challenge in combat though since these things often have wussy damage output, AB etc.

So yeah, fool around with "modest" DRs maybe, perhaps as DR/adamantine. I forget what kind of feedback messages people get from high DR, is it the "my weapon has no effect?" dismayed cries? Heh, maybe focus on rickety wood ones first!

[Zelknolf]

Hardness is per material; hit points and break DC is per thickness. Gotta note which columns have the annotations attached to them.

A man-sized stone animated statue has a DR of 8/Adamantine, and about 31 hit points.

[Brokenbone]

Come to think, after Z's post, I guess hardness is unambiguous.

Hitdice, since this is a critter, are actually as defined in the creature entries in the SRD for animated stuff. Like little 2hp candleabras running around slamming you. You wouldn't be getting out a ruler and measuring candleabras at home to worry about how many inches of brass were involved. You'd only care about hardness, hp are defined.

[t-ice]

Good point there on magical damage, though...

Looks like you would want to add :
Resistance to [Energy] / X
For all possible [Energy] types for your object, as well as DR, to get hardness X. (Also full immunity to negative and positive damage on the object, I'd think, but that's part of construct properties.)

Or would you?

[Zelknolf]

Not to all energy types-- that's in the same SRD article.

In the example animated statue, the full set of properties we'd want would be:

Darkvision
Low Light Vision
Immunity: Critical Hits
Immunity: Sneak Attack
Immunity: Mind-Affecting
Immunity: Poison
Immunity: Sleep
Immunity: Paralysis
Immunity: Disease
Immunity: Death
Immunity: Spell School (Necromancy)
Immunity: Reduced Ability Score
Damage Immunity: Electricity, 50%
Damage Immunity: Fire, 50%
Damage Immunity: Cold, 75%
Damage Resistance, Electriciy: 8/-
Damage Resistance, Fire: 8/-
Damage Resistance, Cold: 8/-
Damage Reduction: 8/ Adamantine

I'm not aware of any good way to reduce damage only from ranged attacks-- but if it's in the engine somewhere, 50% damage from ranged attacks too.

(basically, it's very hard to hurt constructs-- the best answers are force magic, sonic or acid damage, or heavy melee weapons).

[Teric neDhalir]

Thank you everyone for your replies, as usual I'm more confused than when I started

To throw an extra spanner in the works at the bottom of the SRD reference it also says;

"Animated Objects: Animated objects count as creatures for purposes of determining their Armor Class (do not treat them as inanimate objects)".

which suggests to me that Zelknolf's extra list of damage immunities is probably going a bit over the top. An Iron Golem, for example, doesn't have that long list of extra immunities even though it's made of metal and is "an object". The monster description only says that the animated object "has the same hardness" as the original material.

I've had a track back through blueprints in the OC and found some animated weapons that have basic construct properties and a straight damage reducion of 5/(-) which is fine by me. At the end of the day I'm trying to find a way of making an idea for an unusual challenge/trap rather than a perfectly designed monster.
T

[Zelknolf]

Well, most constructs also don't say to apply the original object's hardness to the creature. The suggested list amounts to how hardness manifests on objects.

Not that constructs need any help with that stuff; they (obviously) have a laundry list of immunities anyway, and most of them add just-plain-strange things on top (like iron golems having fire and electricity working as throttles) per creature type.

[t-ice]

At the end of the day I'm trying to find a way of making an idea for an unusual challenge/trap rather than a perfectly designed monster.

On the other hand, if you do make a well-designed monster, please do share to all servers. It can serve other roles for other DMs and builders. We totally should have a UTC dump for such.