D&D 4E 4E Item price parity.

[Kzach]

I think that is a more realistic abstraction of starting items anyway- everyone the PCs know get together and help him/ her out with what he needs. Cost isn't that relevant because the village blacksmith/ tanner works pro-bono for such a brave adventurer as the PC.

What if you put your 8 into Charisma?

If you really want to simulate more realistic prices, you could always say that the generic armours are just that, very generic.

The armours are just not that good. They're whatever you can pick up from your local travelling merchant. The leather armours are generally scavenged from bandits and the plate pieces are just scraps of suits from a hundred-hundred battles over the years left to rust on a battlefield somewhere before being picked up.

Prices of the lesser armours are driven up by demand since more people can use them, but who's gonna buy a crappy set of ill-fitting plate?

Once you get past those initial outfittings, the prices for new armour become irrelevant since they're going to include magic item costs. You could always justify it by saying the more metal there is in an armour, the easier it is to enchant if you really want to be picky about it.

 

[Surgoshan]

In order to make leather armor you have to hunt and kill an animal with thick skin. The skin, filthy with gore, is soaked in water to clean it. Then it's pounded and scoured to remove any remaining flesh and fat. Then the hide is either coated with a caustic or allowed to rot for several months to allow the hair to be removed. Then it's thoroughly imbued with dung to make it supple, a process that takes hours. Next they actually tan it, by soaking the leather in baths of vegetable tannin increasing concentrations over a period of several weeks. FINALLY they boil the leather in water, then mold it into a suitable shape when it's removed from the water...

All told it's a very labor and time intensive process. It's not like you can kill an animal, skin it, and say "Hey! I gots leather armor!" So, yeah, I think it should be more expensive.

 

[KKDragonLord]

How hard do you think making full plate is then?
i can tell you, a lot more, lot more work and time too
and it needs some mad skills to fit the person who will use it.
by the end of the dark ages only 6 places in europe (and the world) were known to have crafters good enough to make them.
A fully plated knight and warhorse cost enough to equip 100 soldiers.

so yeah, if they still make plate out of steel, it should be a bit expensive.

 

[fuzzlewump]

So, in your game Mr. Dragon, make it so plate-bearers have to travel to one of 6 places in your world in order to get plate mail, and acquire an insane amount of gold in order to buy it. That's two adventure hooks right there!

 

[keterys]

As a suggestion... give every starting character a suit of armor appropriate to them, a melee and ranged weapon of choice (which includes a rod/staff/orb)... then make the prices whatever you want and watch it _never matter again_.

 

[shadowguidex]

The romans equipped all their soldiers in plate chestpieces etc 2 thousand years ago - they aren't that expensive. Plate in many ways is easier to make than scale or chain, but require a bit more in raw materials.

To make chain you need to take the iron and wrap it in hundreds of rings, cut each, and splice them together.

In plate you just need to hammer the metal into a formed plate and and the needed fasteners. This is actually arguably the easiest type of armor to make.

To make leather actually is a very long and involved process that requires a lot of time and the correct chemicals (You know how expensive leather shoes/wallets/purses etc are, don't pretend that leather is easy to make or purchase).

If I give you some iron ore and tell you to make a piece of iron plate, at the very least you all have some idea of what you need to do. If I give you a dead cow and ask you to make me some leather, you likely have only a vague concept of what to do to make hardened leather, or what chemicals you need. You'd most likely end up with rotten cow flesh and not leather.

Also, in ancient times metal ores were much more readily available - and over time when successive generations of people come along and mine it out it disappears and becomes much rarer - but in D&D times, one can assume that ores of all types were pretty common to find. Leather, on the other hand, is just as easily acquired at any point in history given that almost all leather comes from domesticated animals that are housed in proportion to the population. Hence, metals were cheaper long ago than they are today, so don't base costs of plate armor on standards of the modern worlds.

 

[KKDragonLord]

In my game not only currency is commonplace but also weapons, armor, the need of those and very skilled smiths that can make them, most of all this was learned from the dwarves, who also have a habit of selling them to human lands. For those reasons, a full plate costs 200gp, since i added the bronze piece, thats about 2000gp, my characters are already at level 3 so they dont have any equipment issues, but if i had to rule it, i would perhaps say that characters start out with equipment worth about 100gp or whatever is the norm in the PHB, alternatively i would tie their acquisition of equipment to their background, such as passed down from father to son or as it was suggested, Earned through a sort of heroic deed or as a gift or whatever. But yeah, the access to it would be pretty standard as per the normal rules, the only difference is that there is not a street vendor selling fullplates making less money than a Lantern vendor.

 

[primarchone]

Hi!

I've DM'ed for 28 years and I agree with those, that beyond the initial outfitting of the PC, the prices never come up again. Mostly they find or make their own after that.

One HUGE reason, at least for me, is that the lower price means the resale value is also low and PC groups who love to scavenge looted armor will not be "insta-rich" anymore reselling a few suits of ordinary plate.

Now they can ignore mundane items they already have and truly go for the "treasure" and I don't have to worry about outfitting my bad guys with plate that may fall in their hands and give them inappropriate amounts of gold.

Primarchone

 

[Korgoth]

One HUGE reason, at least for me, is that the lower price means the resale value is also low and PC groups who love to scavenge looted armor will not be "insta-rich" anymore reselling a few suits of ordinary plate.

You beat me to it! If Plate costs a billion gold (and trust me, I've been tempted in the past... 50gp is also what it costs in OD&D, and it costs only 60gp in Classic) then plate-armored bad guys are walking lottery tickets.

Also, if you like to bleed money from your PCs (who doesn't?!) you can always charge them upkeep on their armor. The more expensive armors cost more to repair, of course!

Btw, is that figure of "4gp per year" average income stated in 4E officially? Sounds about right, anyway.

 

[KKDragonLord]

Shadow guidex
The roman plates were made of two types of material, mostly. One was bronze, relatively easy enough to make a mold and shape it through it.
the other was the Lorica Segmentata, which was strips of metal attached to leather straps.

The roman thecnology for armor was indeed very superior to the armor from the dark ages, but the crafting of it was lost.

nevertheless, even then, only commanders and special units had such armor, they did not equip 2000 legionares with it.

Also, if you guys remember Ad&d and mayber even the Ad&d equipment guide, you ll see that both the bronze breastplate and the Lorica segmentata were inferior kinds of armor to the Field Plate and the Full Plate

The techniques for the full plate and the superior grooved gothic fullplate were only developed at the very end of the middle ages, (right about the same time when the techniques for making greatswords were also developed), at that time, fire arms became more and more common, and armor became largely obsolete and too restrictive.

Making Articulated Pieces of Metal that effectively cover Most of the parts of the human body While allowing it flexibility and movement, Was VERY hard to do. The techniques developed for fullplates were researched and used to make Space suits for NASA, because they couldnt figure it all out themselves.

Leather was indeed much easier to find, because you could somewhat mass produce it, making several armors at the same time and it didnt need full days of work for months at a time on one piece of armor (you just had to wait for the chemicals to act for great part of the production time.) That and the fact that it was A Lot easier to learn how to make it, and also, a lot easier to fit different sizes of people with the use of leather straps and such....

Edit addition:
My group at the present likes to travel light and they are adventuring in a very hostile environment (cold mountains) they dont seem as interested in scavenging bulky pieces of hobgobling made armor to bring back to the poor mining community and try to sell it to the Rock Gnome merchant who is a trader of Dwarvish weapons and armor. That, and the fact that most superior magical equipment they will get they will have to find, or make themselves, since there arent magic item traders roaming around the dangerous contrisides with enough valuable equipment to buy an entire city block.