Spatzimaus
First Post
Long, long ago, my friends and I got really sick of the existing Craft rules, especially in how they handled masterwork items and exotic materials. And, the size rules for materials harvested from creatures (dragonscale) were way off. So, we totally rewrote it all. Since this has come up in several recent threads, I figured now would be a good time to post it.
MATERIALS
We have a table of 44 materials, which I'll include in the next post. Each has the following stats:
Category: All materials fall into one of three basic categories: Hard, Flexible, or Soft. This determines what sorts of items can be made out of it. (We're in the process of redesigning this part, so that every armor has a Primary and a Secondary material, but that's going to require reworking all the bonuses).
For now: clothing, padded, leather, studded, and hide use Soft.
Breastplate, Half-plate and Full Plate only use Hard; in fact, they require a complete "plate", which some Hard materials can't provide. (More on that later.)
Everything else can use either Flexible or Hard as the main material, although chainmail and chain shirts can only use materials that can be molded into links (usually metals).
Type: All materials fall into seven basic types: Metal, Crystal, Plating, Wood, Bone, Leather, and Cloth. Almost all Metals, Crystals, and Plating fall into the Hard category; almost all Wood and Bone falls into the Flexible category, and almost all Leather and Cloth falls into the Soft category. However, there are several exceptions to this; Ironwood, for example, is a Hard material. Metals and Crystals are inorganic, while Plating, Wood, Bone, Leather, and Cloth are organic, unless specified otherwise.
These types are a bit simplified. “Crystal”, for example, includes any non-metallic, inorganic mineral, such as stone, clay, or hardened ectoplasm. “Plating” is any type of hardened animal external covering, such as insect chitin, reptile scales, and dinosaur armor. “Bone” is made from skeletal structure, ivory, teeth, and claws; while these are similar to the materials classified as “Plating”, Bone is far more flexible in practice, and so is listed separately. “Wood” includes all forms of hardened plant matter, including amber.
Source: Materials have one of three origins: they are Mundane (come from the Prime Material plane, although they may be found on some Outer Planes as well), Planar (come from the Elemental planes and are often found on Outer Planes as well), or Alchemical (multiple materials magically bonded together during the mixing process). Alchemical materials will have their constituents noted in the Notes section, and must be bonded as part of the crafting process (you can’t just buy a brick of Orichalcum and mold it into a sword; you have to bond the constituents together in the shape you want the sword to be). While most metals listed are actually alloys, the Source is classified by their primary constituent; for example, Fine Steel requires Iron and Carbon, both of which are Mundane materials, so it is also listed as Mundane. This has no effect on the statistics of the item, other than inflating its cost, but the DM might decide the players simply don't have access to most planar materials.
Cost: The raw material’s cost, in gp per pound. Note that this doesn’t increase the item’s creation time; only the material’s DC and the amount of material needed determines how much time is needed. For most crafted items, the material cost is around 1/3rd of the item’s final value.
DC: The DC of any Craft check using the material in question is increased by this amount. In addition, the total enchantment cost cannot be higher than that of an enhancement bonus equal to the total material DC of the item. This includes Artifacts; non-Epic mortals are still limited to +10 total modifier, of which at most +5 can be Enhancement bonus. Deities aren’t limited in this way.
Hardness: Deduct the Hardness of the material from all damage sources applied to it. All materials have 2 hit points per inch of thickness per point of hardness, unless specified otherwise.
General Bonuses: These nonmagical bonuses apply to all items made from this material. Generally speaking these are weight reductions, increased item HP, or bonuses to saves vs. dispels.
Cost Reductions: If any of the listed enchantments are applied to the item, the item’s Market Price modifier is reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 0). There are separate lists for armors and weapons made from each material. If an "upgradeable" enchantment is listed, any of its upgrades also qualify. Example: if a material lists Flaming, then Flaming Burst also qualifies.
Even if multiple enchantments are listed, you can only get this -1 discount ONCE per item.
Material Bonuses: All armor and weapons receive combat bonuses based on the material used. These bonuses to attack, damage, AC, etc. are nonmagical Material bonuses and stack with other sources unless specified otherwise. If a material lists DR(type) as a weapon bonus, that means it penetrates DR as if it had the specified type or types, even when dispelled or in an anti-magic field.
CRAFT RULES
Replace the PHB crafting time requirements with this:
1> Take the cost, in gp, for the base item from the PHB. This is the cost for a medium-sized, nonmasterwork steel item. The material cost of items made from exotic substances is determined in far more detail below, but the PHB price is the benchmark for this skill, so the cost multiplier for the material is not needed here. The size of the user doesn’t affect the amount of time needed.
2> Mutliply by (DC minus 10, minimum 1). Difficult items take longer to make, since the crafter has to be more careful not to make mistakes. Exotic materials raise or lower the DC.
3> Each day of work, make a Craft check. The check result is the number of gp of progress made. If the total progress exceeds the result of step 2, the item is completed. In general, assume the crafter Takes 10 each day. Assistants provide the usual +2 aid bonus.
Examples: an iron longsword (DC 15+0, base item 15 gp) could be built by a low-level crafter with a +5 Craft bonus in ((15-10) * 15 / 15) = 5 days.
An adamantium Dwarven Waraxe (DC 18+9, base item 30 gp) needs someone with a +17 Craft skill (including tools and assistants) to make, and it'd take him ((27-10) * 30 / 27) = 19 days. That same crafter could make the iron longsword in 3 days.
MATERIAL NEEDED
Armors, shields, and weapons require different amounts of material, depending on their size and effectiveness. The PHB weights are for the finished product, which isn't the same thing. All weights after this point are adjusted by the material’s weight multiplier (if any), so it won’t be mentioned again. The values given are for steel items; most woods and many magical metals weigh less.
Armors and Shields:
Armors and shields each have two components, referred to here as the "Plating" and the "Fittings". Effectively, the first is the material used for the primary damage-absorbing spots, and the second is everything else that uses the primary material. (There's a third category, of "other stuff", like the padding people wear under plate armor, but you can use cheap stuff for that and so we don't count it.)
The amount of plating isn't size-dependent; armors for small wearers tend to just be more concentrated, since a minimum plate size is needed to stop blows. Every armor requires 3 pounds of material per point of AC. (For shields, Bucklers require 2 lbs, Light Shields 4 lbs, Heavy Shields 8 lbs, and Tower Shields 20 lbs.)
This may not really be accurate, but when we tried having it be size-dependent it was WAY too abuseable. It really, really gave a big advantage to the Small races; in a system where exotic materials are very powerful AND hard to get large amounts of, it was just too much of an edge.
Fittings are only dependent on the wearer's size and the material Category. For a Medium wearer, a Shield requires 4 lbs of fittings, armors using Soft or Flexible material require 8 lbs, and Hard armors require 12 lbs. These are then modified for size:
A Tiny wearer multiplies these by x1/4, a Small x1/2, a Dwarf's armor is x3/4. For every size above Medium, "double" this. (It's D&D doubling, so Large is 8/16/24, Huge is 12/24/36, Gargantuan is 16/32/48, and so on.)
Armor can be modified to fit a wearer up to one size different than its original owner by replacing the fittings; generally, you can scavenge half the material from the old fittings for use in the new armor.
Weapons
The amount of material needed for a melee weapon is determined by adding all applicable lines in the following table:
Damage: 2 lbs per point of damage (1d4 = 5 lbs, 1d6 = 7 lbs, 2d4 = 10 lbs, and so on)
Threat range: 3 lbs per point below 20
Multiplier: 3 lbs per point above x2
+5' Exclusive Reach (can't attack adjacent, i.e. polearms): 2 lbs
+5' Inclusive Reach (can attack adjacent, i.e. spiked chain): 6 lbs
Exotic: 2 lbs per Exotic category. (We use a system where one Feat unlocks a general class of Exotics, like "double weapons" or "heavy weapons" (bastard sword, waraxe, etc.), but some splatbook exotics (the Kusari-Gama) would actually fall into more than one exotic group. For now, just call it a flat +2.)
Double Weapon: -5 lbs from the smaller weapon half (minimum 1 lb for that half)
Examples:
Longsword: 12 lbs (9 damage, 3 for crit range). Yes, the final item only weighs 4 pounds, but you lost a lot of metal along the way.
Huge Glaive (2d8, 20/x3, can hit at 15' or 20'): 31 lbs (18 damage, 3 crit range, 4 for two exclusive reach increases, 6 for one inclusive reach increase)
The result is often far more than the item itself weighs; this is how much material is needed, and lighter weapons are particularly wasteful.
Bows require twice the weight listed in the PHB, period. All projectiles take 1 pound of material per 20 projectiles. This might not be realistic, but we didn't want the headaches.
Hardness
In addition to the material's Hardness making it tough to Sunder, armors give a small amount of DR to their wearers. (This counteracts the fact that the weapon material bonuses we use are a bit higher than the armor material bonuses, and we wanted to encourage use of heavier armors.)
Large Shields and Medium Armors give DR of (Hardness/10)/adamantine. Heavy armors give DR of (Hardness/5)/adamantine. (Round all fractions down.) DRs from armors and shields stack with each other and with any other sources of DR.
If a material raises or lowers the weight class of an armor (i.e., Mithral), use the final weight class to determine DR. (A Mithral Breastplate doesn't give DR, and Mithral Full Plate only gives H/10 like other medium armors.)
HARVESTING
Every creature has a certain amount of harvestable material in it.
If HD is the creature's hit dice, and NA is the Natural Armor, then every creature gives 5*HD + 2*NA. How this is distributed depends on the specific creature.
Reptilian creatures (including dragons) generally have NA lbs of large scales (can be used for breastplate, half-plate, or full plate for someone two sizes smaller than the creature), NA lbs of small scales (can only be used for shields, scale, splint, or banded), 3*HD lbs of Hide (flexible enough to be used for Soft armor), HD lbs of Bone that is easy to get to, and HD lbs of bone that basically requires a full dissection to reach.
Exoskeletal creatures give the full amount as Chitin, a Hard material that can be used for plate armors even one size smaller than the creature.
Most mammals, fish, etc. give (2*NA+3*HD) lbs of Hide, and the remaining 2*HD as Bone.
An Ancient Red Dragon could outfit almost an entire party, while a Bison only gives enough leather for a single medium-sized suit.
Now that all the rules are out of the way, I'll post some materials. I can't do all of them, since it's a spreadsheet I can't upload easily, and I'm about to leave for a week. But if there's interest, I'll type the rest in by hand once I get back.
MATERIALS
We have a table of 44 materials, which I'll include in the next post. Each has the following stats:
Category: All materials fall into one of three basic categories: Hard, Flexible, or Soft. This determines what sorts of items can be made out of it. (We're in the process of redesigning this part, so that every armor has a Primary and a Secondary material, but that's going to require reworking all the bonuses).
For now: clothing, padded, leather, studded, and hide use Soft.
Breastplate, Half-plate and Full Plate only use Hard; in fact, they require a complete "plate", which some Hard materials can't provide. (More on that later.)
Everything else can use either Flexible or Hard as the main material, although chainmail and chain shirts can only use materials that can be molded into links (usually metals).
Type: All materials fall into seven basic types: Metal, Crystal, Plating, Wood, Bone, Leather, and Cloth. Almost all Metals, Crystals, and Plating fall into the Hard category; almost all Wood and Bone falls into the Flexible category, and almost all Leather and Cloth falls into the Soft category. However, there are several exceptions to this; Ironwood, for example, is a Hard material. Metals and Crystals are inorganic, while Plating, Wood, Bone, Leather, and Cloth are organic, unless specified otherwise.
These types are a bit simplified. “Crystal”, for example, includes any non-metallic, inorganic mineral, such as stone, clay, or hardened ectoplasm. “Plating” is any type of hardened animal external covering, such as insect chitin, reptile scales, and dinosaur armor. “Bone” is made from skeletal structure, ivory, teeth, and claws; while these are similar to the materials classified as “Plating”, Bone is far more flexible in practice, and so is listed separately. “Wood” includes all forms of hardened plant matter, including amber.
Source: Materials have one of three origins: they are Mundane (come from the Prime Material plane, although they may be found on some Outer Planes as well), Planar (come from the Elemental planes and are often found on Outer Planes as well), or Alchemical (multiple materials magically bonded together during the mixing process). Alchemical materials will have their constituents noted in the Notes section, and must be bonded as part of the crafting process (you can’t just buy a brick of Orichalcum and mold it into a sword; you have to bond the constituents together in the shape you want the sword to be). While most metals listed are actually alloys, the Source is classified by their primary constituent; for example, Fine Steel requires Iron and Carbon, both of which are Mundane materials, so it is also listed as Mundane. This has no effect on the statistics of the item, other than inflating its cost, but the DM might decide the players simply don't have access to most planar materials.
Cost: The raw material’s cost, in gp per pound. Note that this doesn’t increase the item’s creation time; only the material’s DC and the amount of material needed determines how much time is needed. For most crafted items, the material cost is around 1/3rd of the item’s final value.
DC: The DC of any Craft check using the material in question is increased by this amount. In addition, the total enchantment cost cannot be higher than that of an enhancement bonus equal to the total material DC of the item. This includes Artifacts; non-Epic mortals are still limited to +10 total modifier, of which at most +5 can be Enhancement bonus. Deities aren’t limited in this way.
Hardness: Deduct the Hardness of the material from all damage sources applied to it. All materials have 2 hit points per inch of thickness per point of hardness, unless specified otherwise.
General Bonuses: These nonmagical bonuses apply to all items made from this material. Generally speaking these are weight reductions, increased item HP, or bonuses to saves vs. dispels.
Cost Reductions: If any of the listed enchantments are applied to the item, the item’s Market Price modifier is reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 0). There are separate lists for armors and weapons made from each material. If an "upgradeable" enchantment is listed, any of its upgrades also qualify. Example: if a material lists Flaming, then Flaming Burst also qualifies.
Even if multiple enchantments are listed, you can only get this -1 discount ONCE per item.
Material Bonuses: All armor and weapons receive combat bonuses based on the material used. These bonuses to attack, damage, AC, etc. are nonmagical Material bonuses and stack with other sources unless specified otherwise. If a material lists DR(type) as a weapon bonus, that means it penetrates DR as if it had the specified type or types, even when dispelled or in an anti-magic field.
CRAFT RULES
Replace the PHB crafting time requirements with this:
1> Take the cost, in gp, for the base item from the PHB. This is the cost for a medium-sized, nonmasterwork steel item. The material cost of items made from exotic substances is determined in far more detail below, but the PHB price is the benchmark for this skill, so the cost multiplier for the material is not needed here. The size of the user doesn’t affect the amount of time needed.
2> Mutliply by (DC minus 10, minimum 1). Difficult items take longer to make, since the crafter has to be more careful not to make mistakes. Exotic materials raise or lower the DC.
3> Each day of work, make a Craft check. The check result is the number of gp of progress made. If the total progress exceeds the result of step 2, the item is completed. In general, assume the crafter Takes 10 each day. Assistants provide the usual +2 aid bonus.
Examples: an iron longsword (DC 15+0, base item 15 gp) could be built by a low-level crafter with a +5 Craft bonus in ((15-10) * 15 / 15) = 5 days.
An adamantium Dwarven Waraxe (DC 18+9, base item 30 gp) needs someone with a +17 Craft skill (including tools and assistants) to make, and it'd take him ((27-10) * 30 / 27) = 19 days. That same crafter could make the iron longsword in 3 days.
MATERIAL NEEDED
Armors, shields, and weapons require different amounts of material, depending on their size and effectiveness. The PHB weights are for the finished product, which isn't the same thing. All weights after this point are adjusted by the material’s weight multiplier (if any), so it won’t be mentioned again. The values given are for steel items; most woods and many magical metals weigh less.
Armors and Shields:
Armors and shields each have two components, referred to here as the "Plating" and the "Fittings". Effectively, the first is the material used for the primary damage-absorbing spots, and the second is everything else that uses the primary material. (There's a third category, of "other stuff", like the padding people wear under plate armor, but you can use cheap stuff for that and so we don't count it.)
The amount of plating isn't size-dependent; armors for small wearers tend to just be more concentrated, since a minimum plate size is needed to stop blows. Every armor requires 3 pounds of material per point of AC. (For shields, Bucklers require 2 lbs, Light Shields 4 lbs, Heavy Shields 8 lbs, and Tower Shields 20 lbs.)
This may not really be accurate, but when we tried having it be size-dependent it was WAY too abuseable. It really, really gave a big advantage to the Small races; in a system where exotic materials are very powerful AND hard to get large amounts of, it was just too much of an edge.
Fittings are only dependent on the wearer's size and the material Category. For a Medium wearer, a Shield requires 4 lbs of fittings, armors using Soft or Flexible material require 8 lbs, and Hard armors require 12 lbs. These are then modified for size:
A Tiny wearer multiplies these by x1/4, a Small x1/2, a Dwarf's armor is x3/4. For every size above Medium, "double" this. (It's D&D doubling, so Large is 8/16/24, Huge is 12/24/36, Gargantuan is 16/32/48, and so on.)
Armor can be modified to fit a wearer up to one size different than its original owner by replacing the fittings; generally, you can scavenge half the material from the old fittings for use in the new armor.
Weapons
The amount of material needed for a melee weapon is determined by adding all applicable lines in the following table:
Damage: 2 lbs per point of damage (1d4 = 5 lbs, 1d6 = 7 lbs, 2d4 = 10 lbs, and so on)
Threat range: 3 lbs per point below 20
Multiplier: 3 lbs per point above x2
+5' Exclusive Reach (can't attack adjacent, i.e. polearms): 2 lbs
+5' Inclusive Reach (can attack adjacent, i.e. spiked chain): 6 lbs
Exotic: 2 lbs per Exotic category. (We use a system where one Feat unlocks a general class of Exotics, like "double weapons" or "heavy weapons" (bastard sword, waraxe, etc.), but some splatbook exotics (the Kusari-Gama) would actually fall into more than one exotic group. For now, just call it a flat +2.)
Double Weapon: -5 lbs from the smaller weapon half (minimum 1 lb for that half)
Examples:
Longsword: 12 lbs (9 damage, 3 for crit range). Yes, the final item only weighs 4 pounds, but you lost a lot of metal along the way.
Huge Glaive (2d8, 20/x3, can hit at 15' or 20'): 31 lbs (18 damage, 3 crit range, 4 for two exclusive reach increases, 6 for one inclusive reach increase)
The result is often far more than the item itself weighs; this is how much material is needed, and lighter weapons are particularly wasteful.
Bows require twice the weight listed in the PHB, period. All projectiles take 1 pound of material per 20 projectiles. This might not be realistic, but we didn't want the headaches.
Hardness
In addition to the material's Hardness making it tough to Sunder, armors give a small amount of DR to their wearers. (This counteracts the fact that the weapon material bonuses we use are a bit higher than the armor material bonuses, and we wanted to encourage use of heavier armors.)
Large Shields and Medium Armors give DR of (Hardness/10)/adamantine. Heavy armors give DR of (Hardness/5)/adamantine. (Round all fractions down.) DRs from armors and shields stack with each other and with any other sources of DR.
If a material raises or lowers the weight class of an armor (i.e., Mithral), use the final weight class to determine DR. (A Mithral Breastplate doesn't give DR, and Mithral Full Plate only gives H/10 like other medium armors.)
HARVESTING
Every creature has a certain amount of harvestable material in it.
If HD is the creature's hit dice, and NA is the Natural Armor, then every creature gives 5*HD + 2*NA. How this is distributed depends on the specific creature.
Reptilian creatures (including dragons) generally have NA lbs of large scales (can be used for breastplate, half-plate, or full plate for someone two sizes smaller than the creature), NA lbs of small scales (can only be used for shields, scale, splint, or banded), 3*HD lbs of Hide (flexible enough to be used for Soft armor), HD lbs of Bone that is easy to get to, and HD lbs of bone that basically requires a full dissection to reach.
Exoskeletal creatures give the full amount as Chitin, a Hard material that can be used for plate armors even one size smaller than the creature.
Most mammals, fish, etc. give (2*NA+3*HD) lbs of Hide, and the remaining 2*HD as Bone.
An Ancient Red Dragon could outfit almost an entire party, while a Bison only gives enough leather for a single medium-sized suit.
Now that all the rules are out of the way, I'll post some materials. I can't do all of them, since it's a spreadsheet I can't upload easily, and I'm about to leave for a week. But if there's interest, I'll type the rest in by hand once I get back.
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