Trigger While you have your shield raised, you would take damage from a physical attack.
You snap your shield in place to ward off a blow. Your shield prevents you from taking an amount of damage up to the shield’s Hardness. You and the shield each take any remaining damage, possibly breaking or destroying the shield.
While a "Physical Attack" is not clearly defined in the rules, Physical Damage is:
Physical Damage
Damage dealt by weapons, many physical hazards, and a handful of spells is collectively called physical damage. The main types of physical damage are bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. Bludgeoning damage comes from weapons and hazards that deal blunt-force trauma, like a hit from a club or being dashed against rocks. Piercing damage is dealt from stabs and punctures, whether from a dragon's fangs or the thrust of a spear. Slashing damage is delivered by a cut, be it the swing of the sword or the blow from a scythe blades trap.
There is a Core Rulebook Clarification (4th printing) regarding Shield Block:
Shield Block can only be used against physical damage from attacks, since non-attack effects can't trigger the Shield Block. For instance, if you walk over a square of hazardous terrain that deals piercing damage to you, having your shield raised doesn't help you, nor does it help if you need to make a Reflex save against a spell that deals bludgeoning damage. Some abilities let you use Shield Block with other triggers, as seen in the shield spell and the fighter's Reflexive Shield feat, but these exceptions are noted. Also note the 4th printing errata to spellguard shield (page 588) allows it to apply in this way.
If a Good-aligned creature with Shield Block used it with a Steel Shield (Hardness 5/HP 20) against a Cacodaemon's jaws attack that dealt 3 Piercing + 3 Evil damage
, how would the damage resolve? And does that change for Mental, Poison, or Positive/Negative Damage
?
Best Answer
Hardness Applies to *All Damage
You could certainly use Shield Block against the cacodaemon's jaws as a physical attack with the piercing damage being dealt, and the rules for Hardness make no exception for the type of damage being dealt.
More reasonably, this means that you could block something like a red dragon's jaws to protect yourself from the physical and fire damage. This is explicitly called out in the description for the dragonslayer's shield:
However, alignment damage and positive/negative damage have their own exceptions:
Unless your shield is a creature with the Good trait it can't be affected by the evil damage, so the shield's hardness wouldn't apply regardless of the normal rules for Hardness. It also wouldn't be affected by any positive or negative damage unless it's actually a creature and alive or undead.
Object Immunities
If your shield has a mind then it could block mental damage for you, but otherwise items are similarly unaffected by mental and poison damage
Hardness Reduces Total Damage
Finally it's worth noting that Hardness lacks any special behavior for multiple instances of damage like in this case, so the item only reduces the total damage by its Hardness rather than reducing each damage type individually. For an adult red dragon dealing
20 piercing and 7 fire
blocked with the same steel shield you'd take 22 damage rather than 17.