Ok, maybe I’m going crazy, but I thought I read somewhere something about items being destroyed if a character is ‘taken out’ by a AOE/Fireball/Lighting Bolt/Etc.
Am I nuts, or crossing the streams from somebody’s house rules? Is there something in RAW about it? Or can you fireball your enemies and clean their ashes out of their platemail+1?
Labrynth Lord has a pair of optional rules for it (p. 55), and it is a really common house rule.
ACKS doesn’t even have saves listed for items, as near as I can tell: sundering uses the wielder’s save, for example.
In some earlier editions, like AD&D, items had to make saving throws on a failed save. In 3rd, they only had to make a save on a natural 1. This does not appear to apply to the Rules Compendium. http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2011/07/spells-through-ages-fireball.html