“If I cast a fireball spell and fill a room with a giant explosion that incinerates a half goblins, shouldn’t the curtain in the room catch on fire? And how did the delicate potion bottles the goblins were carrying all manage to survive the explosion?”
“If I fell into a vat of acid… even if I survive, isn’t there a risk that my boots of elvenkind would be damaged?”
“So if I stabbed him through the chest, which is mithril shirt in perfect condition and ready to be worn into combat?”
Good questions!
Questions like this have been asked since at least the dawn of D&D (and I wouldn’t be shocked if they date back to Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign), so by asking these questions you’re part of a tradition that’s entering its sixth decade!
And, traditionally speaking, there are several broad approaches that have been taken to answering this question:
- Let’s just ignore that sort of thing. It’s not worth the hassle.
- The GM can just apply that sort of thing ad hoc when it seems appropriate. (GM intrusions are a great mechanic for handling this!)
- Whenever we cast a fireball or someone gets hit by a black dragon’s acid attack, we should (a) resolve the attack and then (b) have some sort of procedure for applying (or potentially applying) damage to every single individual piece of equipment carried by the character, tracking the hit points for each individual piece of equipment. It probably makes sense to have a threshold of damage at which the item’s utility is impaired and then another at which it’s totally destroyed. Oh! We’ll also need repair rules, so that damaged equipment can be recovered before it’s lost forever!
The great thing is that anyone actually doing #3 inevitably discovers that it’s a huge pain in the ass and they rapidly circle back to #1. So it turns out there’s really only one solution, it’s just a question of how long it takes for you to reach it!
… but there are a couple things to think about.
First, it turns out that “you can cast fireball or meteor swarm and unleash overwhelming hellfire upon your enemies, but if you do that you risk losing all the kewl lootz they’re carrying” was actually an interesting balancing mechanic that varied gameplay and created interesting strategic choices.
Second, the verisimilitude of “your acid arrow melts a hole through the goblin’s chain armor!” or “as the flames of fireball clear, you can see that all the books in the library are aflame!” is appealing. It just makes sense! That’s why, after five decades, we’re still asking these questions!
Plus, it can really make the wizard’s player feel like a badass.
Is there a way we can have the best of both worlds?
Maybe.
LOOT DAMAGE!
When looting an NPC’s corpse, roll 1d6 for each:
- Armor
- Weapon
- Magic Item (or other significant item)
- Container (e.g., a backpack)
On a roll of 1, the item was damaged. (Their armor is rent; their blade broken; the potion bottle shattered.) If a container is indicated, the container is ruined and you should additionally make a check for each item bundle in that container.
Non-Fragile Magic Items have advantage on this check. (Roll 2d6, and both dice must roll 1 for the item to be destroyed.)
Fragile Items or items that are particularly vulnerable to the attack(s) suffered (e.g., paper blasted by a fireball) have disadvantage on this check. (Roll 2d6, and a 1 on either die means the item has been destroyed.)
Area Effects, like a fireball or dragon’s acid breath, trigger a check for all unattended loot in the room / area of effect. You can wait until the PCs start looting to make these checks, but a check is made for each area damage effect! (If there are valuables about, use with caution!)
DESIGN NOTES
The advantage of a loot-focused approach is that the bookkeeping is pushed to the point where the party is, in fact, looting the bodies. Listing, distributing, and recording loot is, of course, already a moment in the session that’s focused on bookkeeping. So rather than bogging down the action-focused combat sequences, this system.
By using a simple binary check (destroyed or not destroyed?), we’re also simplifying the mechanic so that it can be resolved quickly and efficiently. Simply grab a fistful of d6s, roll them all at once, and check the condition of each item as you list it for the players.
You can easily tweak this procedure by varying the dice size until you’ve got a frequency of loot damage that feels right to you.
GRITTY VARIANT: PC EQUIPMENT
In addition to checking for loot damage, when a PC is slain or brough to death’s door, make a damage check for their equipment (as per the loot check).
These checks might be triggered only if a PC is actually killed. (“We were able to raise you from the dead, Norgara, but not your plate armor.”) Alternative thresholds might vary depending on what edition of D&D you’re playing, and in some cases you might have multiple triggering events:
- D&D 5th Edition: When the PC has to start making death saves.
- D&D 3rd Edition: The PC has negative hit points, even if they haven’t reach their death threshold.
- D&D 3rd Edition: The PC suffers massive damage.
- AD&D: The PC is reduced to 1/10th their maximum hit points.
For a truly brutal variant in any edition, you could also trigger an equipment damage check any time the character fails a saving throw against an area effect. (Or, for a less painful version, when they roll a natural 1 on a saving throw.)
DESIGN NOTES
In D&D 5th Edition, in particular, triggering an equipment damage check on death saves gives them an extra bite. You REALLY don’t want to be popping up and down on the battlefield! Get some healing to your allies!
INCIDENTAL DAMGE
Incidental environmental effects and damage — e.g., curtains being set on fire, windows being blown out, spilled oil being set aflame — is still be handled by via GM fiat and the whim of description.
If you want a rudimentary procedural generator for this, however, you could roll an additional 1d6 for each area effect and, on a roll of 1, make a point of including a significant environmental effect (e.g., the dragon’s acid breath melts the floor, creating difficult terrain; or the fireball spell causes the barrels of oil in the room to explode).
ADDITIONAL READING
Shields Shall Be Splintered!
5E Encumbrance by Stone
Disclaimer: I am not entirely sure how serious I am about this.
Item saving throws have been around for a long time – check the 1e DMG
IIRC, AD&D includes item saving throws. That would also be worth checking out.
Not going to lie, I use this quite often as the excuse for why that group of goblins that were *definitely* fighting with swords and bows, and even have their equipment listed in the statblock, only have a handful of coins between them. Yeah, their boots are rotten and their swords broke in combat. Shame… but there’s 5 platinum coins in the leaders boots. You may want to wash them… with fire.
I’m pretty sure that I remember there being item saving throws in AD&D…
Yes, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (in effect 1st edition) has item saving throws based on the material it’s made from. And yes, in the fireball spell description it does say everything the targeted creatures hold has to roll to survive the fire and that all coins are lost as they’re melted down. So fireball definitely has some risk/reward in that it’ll clear the trash but you likely won’t get much loot out of it (and AD&D is *very* much about looting. Also if you don’t read the spell description right you may kill your own party because of the blast radius…
Apparently the article’s reference to the detailed mechanics of previous editions was a little too subtle.
I didn’t ask how big the room is. I said I cast fireball!
For the longest time I’ve wanted to let my characters risk their equipment to get in lucky hits or dodges on near misses, but never felt I had a really good resolution mechanic to pair with it. That all changed tonight! Thank you!
I think this should only be done if it drives interesting choices (with the understanding that different people have different ideas about what is interesting). I would argue that damaging loot is interesting, because players have to take that into account when choosing attacks.
It’s a little less clear what interesting choices result from destroying stuff the party already possesses. It may make sense in the limited case where the job is to safely get a McGuffin from point A to point B. It might make sense if DM and players enjoy scenarios where players have to function with less gear (like the module A4). If a big part of the adventure relates to loot extraction, damage to *containers* could be interesting. Or if it should be obvious that something is fragile, and you expect players to take basic, common sense precautions (like wrapping the crystal goblet, or putting paper items in scroll tubes, and what about the materials that you are mapping with?). Or if you are going for a sort of sword and sorcery easy-come-easy-go vibe.
But if you do this, I think you also need to increase the amount of loot that is available, so that players have an opportunity to replace stuff that is lost.
Roll fistfull of d6 method.
1 all robust items – as many dice as items. Collect all the 1s and reroll them. Any that are still 1 represent an item damaged. Choose which items in the set are damaged.
2 similarly for regular items but the 1s in the first roll are how many items are damaged.
3 for the fragile set, after the first roll then reroll all the dice that are not 1. Then count all the 1s for how many fragile things are busted.
Different attack types determine what is fragile or robust. Scrolls are fragile in a fireball blast for example.
In my current fantasy campaign (warning – not D&D!) I track shield damage, but not other items. This applies both to PCs and NPCs/monsters. So shields definitely fall into Option 3 territory for me.
For other items, I might call for a health check/save on an ad-hoc basis, depending upon the nature of the item and the source of the damage. OTOH, scrolls left unprotected in a raging fire for several turns would be gone, no save. Unless the scroll was carved on a stone tablet or something. So everything else potentially falls into Option 2 territory in my games.
When I saw the title, I thought it was an article about loot *causing* damage.
So is there a middle ground between “fragile” and “non-fragile” items? And if so, where do you draw the line? What items would you consider to be especially “non-fragile” as opposed to merely not “fragile”?
Suggestion for rolling less dice with comparable results:
Roll 1d6 when a dead monster is looted. Bump the die to 1d8, 1d10 or 1d12 instead if the damage was especially massive/shattering/corrosive.
1 – nothing damaged
2 – armor damaged
3 – weapon damaged
4 – container damaged
5 – magic item damaged
6,7 – die explodes, roll it twice
8+ everything was utterly destroyed.
As for environmental damage, in my homebrew system I found it useful to include it not as an additional effect, but as a full-fledged part of attack resolution. When enemies roll a dice pool to attack, one of the result on the dice is to “hit target”, while other is “hit environment”. Multiple environment hits can lead to progressively scarier results, such as: bystanders get pushed around or thrown to the ground,debris are sent flying, walls shatter, ceiling collapses etc.
The consequences are:
– big monsters feel like they have more physical presence in the world, being a force of destruction, rather than just a numerical damage generator
– skilled human-sized NPCs feel like they are smart, cutting ropes, kicking barrels and doing other tricks to get tactical advantage
– combats feel more cinematic, as the rule generates the prompts for me to include engaging environment effects
– combats can get more tactical, as environment damage can set up various threats that players have to take into account and/or deal with.
How is Justin Alexander too subtle some days? Here:
“AD&D: The PC is reduced to 1/10th their maximum hit points.
For a truly brutal variant in any edition, you could also trigger an equipment damage check any time the character fails a saving throw against an area effect. (Or, for a less painful version, when they roll a natural 1 on a saving throw.)”
IIRC there is no equipment fails in 1EAD&D no matter where you get harmed to, unless you are using AOE spells. So the guy who gets to 1/10th their HP from a dozen goblin daggers has no problems with their equipment RAW (thus is a brutal optional rule added in)
I think the problem is in the Writing linking “Brutal optional rule” to one of Gary’s notably favorite rules: “triggers a Magical Item destruction check any time an unattended item is in the AOE or any character fails a saving throw against an area effect damage based attack.” Although not ice in particular as long as the items are allowed to ‘naturally’ return to room temperature according to Ernie. Which was one of the reasons the ice based spells were set too high in 1EAD&D, they had a portable hole to take the treasure out of the dungeon without exploding from rapid temperature changes.
Many Grognards are _particularly_ persnickety when it comes to details among the rules especially for older editions.
When playing AD&D, our Wizard players always considered the Lightning Bolt spell as the “surgical option” because it was easier to determine what was going to be hit by it, and the Fireball spell was the “nuclear option”, because it would raze and set aflame everything on its area of effect. We house-ruled that the ball of fire consumed almost all the oxygen in the affected area, so the fires generated in its aftermath would be easily extinguished IF we got to it immediately (if let unattended, or being unable to extinguish them because there was still a combat ongoing, it was an excellent opportunity to suddenly find yourself fighting in a building fully on flames).
I feel a bit of disconnect when reading the 5ed description of the Fireball spell and seeing that it says “It ignites flammable objects in the area THAT AREN’T BEING WORN OR CARRIED”. I understand the frustration of losing valuable loot or equipment, but in our playing group, that wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Are these “discriminating flames” (a book held in your hands will be safe from the Fireball, but a book on a table won’t) a dissociated mechanic?