Author Topic: Damage and Bleed vs. DR  (Read 1192 times)

Offline kevin video

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Damage and Bleed vs. DR
« on: November 02, 2012, 02:03:59 AM »
So a friend was complaining to me tonight about how his DM had them fighting something with barbs. If you didn't have a reach weapon, you took damage. They were magical, but not a spell so therefore DR applied. Question though. The argument was that despite not getting through the DR they still ended up taking just the bleed damage. We didn't see the logic behind that. If you do 10 pts of damage to me, and I've got DR 15/bludgeoning, I shouldn't be taking the bleed. Now, if you did 10 pts of damage and 1 pt of bleed, and I only had DR 10, then I could see it.

Who's right?
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Offline Jackinthegreen

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Re: Damage and Bleed vs. DR
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2012, 10:28:36 AM »
From the SRD

First is the flavor text:
Quote
A creature with this special quality ignores damage from most weapons and natural attacks. Wounds heal immediately, or the weapon bounces off harmlessly (in either case, the opponent knows the attack was ineffective).

Then there's the pertinent rules to this:
Quote
Whenever damage reduction completely negates the damage from an attack, it also negates most special effects that accompany the attack, such as injury type poison, a monk’s stunning, and injury type disease.

Based on that, I'm fairly sure almost any bleed property will be totally negated if the original attack didn't get through DR because A: The wound either closed up immediately or simply glanced off; and B: The bleed effect is almost certainly a "special effect" and thus it would fall under the second part unless it specifically mentioned otherwise somehow.

It's fairly likely the DM was wrong and you players were right.