Damaging Objects (PSR Supplement)

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	Substance	Defense
	Paper	5
	Cloth, Cardboard	8
	Rope, Clay Pot	10
	Leather, Ice	12
	Bone, Chitin	14
	Wood	16
	Stone	18
	Steel	20
	Adamantine	22
Size	Examples	Fragile HP	Sturdy HP
Tiny	bottle or lock	2 (1d4)	5 (2d4)
Small	chest or sword	3 (1d6)	10 (3d6)
Medium	barrel or door	4 (1d8)	20 (~4d8)
Large	cart or boulder	5 (1d10)	25 (~5d10)

A typical item has 15 defense and 15 hit points.

Outside of encounters, damaging or breaking an object is resolved with a simple ability check—usually a Strength check.

During encounters and critical moments, it may be helpful to add nuance, or to numerically specify how damaged an object is. Sometimes spells or other effects create objects with specific statistics. While the narrator is encouraged to improvise an object's hit points and defense if needed, this section offers deeper guidance.

Defense. While a creature's defense represents how difficult it is to hit in the first place, an object's defense represents how difficult it is to break through its sturdy exterior. Anyone can swing an axe at a tree and effortlessly, but a solid hit will make much more progress in chopping through it. Objects made of sturdier stuff have higher defense. Examples appear in the adjacent table.

Hit Points. While a object has less than it's full it points, it is damaged. When an object's hit points drop to 0, it is destroyed. Larger objects have more hit points than small ones, but in some cases destroying a small part of the object is just as effective as destroying the whole thing—for example destroying a cart's wheel. Hit point examples appear in the adjacent table.

Resistance & Immunity

• All objects are immune to poison and psychic damage.
• Objects made of stone or steel have resistance to pierce and slash damage.

Your narrator might otherwise add other damage immunities or Damage Resistance to an object, or decide it takes max damage from some sources. Something that's easy to smash like glass might take max bash damage, but something like a pillow might have resistance to bash damage.

Repairing Objects

If an object is merely damaged and not destroyed, you can restore its hit points yourself over a phase with the right tools, or pay for repairs during downtime trading. If the object is destroyed, restoring it instead takes an entire downtime enterprise—a greater degree of time and effort.

Damaging Armor & Weapons

In the midst of combat, Sundering can be used to directly damage an item a creature is wearing or wielding, rather than the creature itself.

Damaged Armor. Armor is attire that provides an increase to the wearer's defense (called an armor bonus). While any armor is damaged, its armor bonus is reduced to 1, if the armor bonus would otherwise be higher.

Damaged Weapon. When you hit using a damaged weapon, the weapon's damage roll has disadvantage. That is, you roll the weapon's damage dice twice and only use the lower result.

Armor or weapons that are destroyed become completely unusable, and confer no benefits to any creature wearing or wielding them.

Structures

An object of greater size than Large is a structure, such as a building or a colossal statue. Most structures are particularly difficult to destroy.

Structures are Partitioned. In most cases each structure is segmented into parts each no larger than a Large 10-foot cube. For example a Gargantuan wall is divided into multiple 10-foot squares, each of which has its own hit point pool. Destroying one of these squares breaches the wall, but doesn't destroy the whole thing.

Damage Threshold. Normal weapons are typically of little use against structures. Felling a oak tree for example takes many strikes with proper technique. For sturdier structures like thick castle walls, often only artillery or Gargantuan creatures are capable of damaging structures. This is represented with a damage threshold. An object with a damage threshold has immunity to all damage unless it takes an amount of damage from a single attack or effect equal to or greater than its damage threshold, in which case it takes damage as normal. Any damage that fails to meet the object's damage threshold is superficial and doesn't reduce the object's hit points. For example a castle wall with a damage threshold of 30 loses no hit points from an attack that deals 29 damage or less. Particularly durable structures like this might be practically impervious to attacks outside of particularly powerful artillery or spells. In the previous oak tree example, it might make sense to have a damage threshold of only 5; impervious to most attacks, but solid blows can eventually cleave through it.