bare-fingered digging and damage to hands?

[Varyon]

I wouldn't try to twist and contort things like the Hurting Yourself, HP of homogenous objects, etc rules into something that works here. Rather, I'd just look at things a bit more distantly.

In this case, we're going with the assumption (not a bad one, and certainly would work in a cinematic campaign) that you may be able to dig faster with your bare hands if they're sufficiently armored, or you're willing to accept the risk of hurting yourself. Certainly, there should be some level of DR where this isn't the case. Metal tools can work just fine without risk of breakage by the rules, and metal tools often have DR 4, so let's go with DR 4 to be more-or-less proof against damage from this rapid digging. Digging without regard for damage to your hands is roughly comparable to digging with bone tools (that's basically what you're doing, you just have some fleshy bits around it), which should be comparable to wood, which is itself canonically half speed. A quick balance check tells us this puts this option right smack dab between default and the Burrower Perk, which sounds about right.

So, if you have DR 4+ on your hands, you can dig barehanded at double speed compared to normal, while a character with dedicated digging ability is at 4x default (for Burrower) or faster (for those with Tunneling). Quick, easy, done.

... except we want characters with DR less than 4 to be able to benefit. So, thinking about it, on average DR 4 will prevent 1d of damage. That means putting 1d cr damage to the hands somewhere in the equation will accomplish what we need (note if you dislike using averages and want to use maximums instead, you'll either need DR 6+ to avoid the damage or reduce the damage to 1d-2 cr). My inclination is to say you suffer 1d cr for every 20 minutes - or fraction thereof - of digging, and DR protects normally. Determine which hand this affects randomly.


As for digging through stone and the like with bare hands, a normal human can't really do that with bare hands alone. However, I'd treat that as a case where the character is instead prying out a loose stone (which typically is doable with bare hands) and using that to beat on the other stone to break it up. His improvised tool isn't likely to survive terribly long, but that's fine - by the time it's too worn down to use further, he'll have basically created a new one from the stones he's been beating on with it.