Adamantite Bypassing DR?

[Kaljamaha]

I'm with the crowd that says no. I say that you need a magical weapon to bypass DR.

Here's a question for the people that say yes, on the grounds that any enhancement bonus = enhancement bonus.


The SRD on Adamantine:

Adamantine: Found only in meteorites and the rarest of veins in magical areas, this ultrahard metal adds to the quality of a weapon or suit of armor based on how much of the material is used. Weapons fashioned from adamantine have a natural enhancement bonus to attack and damage. Armor fashioned from adamantine has a natural enhancement bonus to AC. These bonuses do not stack with any other enhancement bonuses. Weapons and armor fashioned from adamantine are treated as masterwork items with regard to creation times, but the masterwork quality does not affect the enhancement bonus of weapons or the armor check penalty of armor.

Also (emphasis mine):

Only a masterwork weapon can be enchanted to become a magic weapon, and its cost is added to the total enchantment cost to determine final market value. Additional costs for the materials are subsumed in the cost for creating the magic weapon-half the base price listed on Table: Weapons, according to the weapon’s total effective bonus.

Creating a magic weapon has a special prerequisite: The creator’s caster level must be at least three times the enhancement bonus of the weapon.

A magic weapon must have at least a +1 enhancement bonus to have any of the abilities listed on Table: Weapon Special Abilities.

So lets say you want to create a Keen Flaming Adamantine Longsword. It would have a +2 Enhancement Bonus. Would it cost?

a) 17 000 gp (9000 for adamantine, 8000 for +2 bonus equivalent)

b) 27 000 gp (9000 for adamantine, 18 000 for minimum +1 (magical) enhancement bonus and +2 bonus equivalent)

c) 41 000 gp (9000 for adamantine, 32 000 for +4 magical weapon)

As can be seen, cases a and b both yield a superior magical weapon (hardness, works partially in AM areas) at a lesser price. Would you let your players create such items?


K.

 

[Wolf72]

ya know if they had just put adamantine under special materials [edit: In the DR section] instead of mithral we wouldn't have this conversation ... well at least not the same exact one

 

[IanB]

I would choose d) - the normal cost of a +(total) item, plus an additional 1000 for making it out of adamantite, since that's how much more adamantite is than either the normal +1 or +2 weapon.

 

[FANGO]

The reason that they didn't put it in the special materials section in the DR section is because it's not a special material as DR is concerned, it's a +1 or +2 enhancement weapon as far as DR is concerned.

And before asking questions, Kaljamaha, look at the rest of the thread. It's been brought up before.

 

[Wolf72]

summarized?

The reason that they didn't put it in the special materials section in the DR section is because it's not a special material as DR is concerned, it's a +1 or +2 enhancement weapon as far as DR is concerned.

And before asking questions, Kaljamaha, look at the rest of the thread. It's been brought up before.

except for that pesky "... other special materials." phrase I'd almost agree.

and then they went and put adamantine in a "Special Materials" section ...

and we have two high ranking opinions: one says that an enhancement is an enhancment (SKR), the other [Sage] calls it a Natural enhancment making a distinction between natural and regular enhancement.

I think the only thing we have really agreed on is that in order to give an adamantine weapon a special enhancement is that you really do need to enchant it via normal means. The cool thing is that even a +1 adamantine battle axe with shock and frost will still get a +2 attk/dmg.

I think that's a decent summary

 

[Kaljamaha]

FANGO, I have indeed read the whole thread, and this question was not answered to my satisfaction.

You are agruing that any and all enhancement bonuses are equal. You have many times stated that the word "natural" has no bearing upon the working of the enhancement bonus. Then you go on and say:

And it is interesting that you bring up that point, about the getting magical special abilities when all you've got is an adamantine. According to the rules as written, it seems that this might be possible...however, it would be reasonable to think that they meant magical enhancement bonuses in that section, since that section does all deal with magical abilities. Personally, I've never been a fan of the "something must be +1" rule to begin with, but oh well.

So in this case it is suddenly "reasonable" to assume that they meant only magical enhancement bonuses? How can the (non-existant) descriptor, "magical", have anything meaning, when the word "natural" doesn't? You contradict yourself.

By the SRD, you only need a generic enhancement bonus to stack on further special abilities. So, following your logic, we get reduced prices for (superior) magic weapons made of adamantine. See my previous post. If that's the way you like, fine. Not in my game, though.


K.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Hmm, still not finshed with the discussion?

If you read the rules, you sometimes find things that are contradictory, or at least not clearly spoken out.
What to do then? You can argue in a thousand ways, if not every way automatically leads to the same solution, than this means, that the designers were not perfect and made a mistake by not stating something clearly out.

Anyway, you can try to find out what would be the most probably solution.

So, we read the rules. First, we learn, that DR Reduction can be negated by enhancement bonuses.
We learn that Admantite grants an enhancement bonus, which is natural and not subject to Antimagic Fields or Dead Magic Zones.
We do also learn, that it requires you to have at least a +1 enhancement bonus to add any other special abilities to a weapon (like frost, flaming and so on).
We see, that the cost for admantite is a bit higher than a "pure" enhancement bonus.
So, this gives the clue, that the advantage of better Hardness/Hitpoints and the availability in Antimagic Zones are factored in there.
But since it is not cheaper, this will probably mean that you can negate DR with the Admantite Bonus. No gurantee for it, true, but very probably considering other information (that there is no actual difference made later between natural and magic enhancement bonus, unlike with Natural Armor and Armor)

Now we ask what might the enhancement bonus mean for further enhancements. Can we add Flaming for a very cheap price (2.000) to a Admantite Greatsword?
We look at the prices. Seems to be a bit too cheap, if you compare it to a Flaming Greatsword +2. (18.000 vs. 11.000)
Okay, let us assume the Admantite Enhancement Bonus would not apply for these enhancement types. So, we have to get a Flaming Admantite Greatsword +1 (17.000 gp). Seems to be much fairer now, doesn`t it? Okay, 1.000 gp less. But on the other hand - if you want to get a +3 enhancement bonus, you have to pay the full +3. So, the most probable and "fairest" method might be:

Admantite`s Enhancement Bonus can be used for negating Damage Reduction.
Admantite`s Enhancement bonus can not be used for applying new magic abilities.

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Jeremy]

Or conversely you can choose to treat adamantine as the appropriate enhancement bonus and use the rules for adding additional enchantments to weapons.

There for if you wanted to add a +1 ability to a +2 adamantine sword, you could choose to subtract the +2 price from the +3 price to find out what the step up is and charge that, just like if you were upgrading a standard +2 sword.

Or you could decide this is too simple and not do that.

 

[FANGO]

Kaljamaha, even when you quote a post of mine, you still seem not to read it. If you actually bothered to read it, you would see that I mentioned the reason that it might be reasonable, and that is because the rules for magical enchantments are in the "magic items" section, and from this it would be reasonable to assume that the designers meant you needed a magical enhancement bonus. However, and this I also stated in the original post, it seems to be that this is not prohibited by the rules, so it would be possible to buy a +2 adamantine battleaxe and put flaming on it. I don't see why everyone keeps saying it would be cheaper, as the weapon does have the abilities of a +3 weapon now, I the total cost would be 19,000, still more than a regular +3 weapon, as Jeremy explains in his above post. I don't know if I particularly like this solution (and, like I said, I was never a fan of the "must be +1" rule to begin with), but it doesn't seem to be prohibited.

Also, since people (i.e. Wolf72) didn't seem to hear it the first few times....does a silver longsword +2 bypass DR? Yes. Thus, an adamantine longsword (which has a +2 enhancement bonus), also bypasses DR, because you don't take the lowest amount of DR that a weapon can bypass, you take the highest. And personally, I don't particularly care about either of those 'high-ranking' opinions, since I have very little respect for skr, and the sage flip-flops about so much that he can only be counted as another possibly-well-informed-but-has-no-time-to-check-the-books-so-he-really-isn't opinion.

The fact is that DR is bypassed by things with enhancement bonuses, and adamantine gives an enhancement bonus. Furthermore, adamantine costs MORE than equivalent magical weapons, even though it has less flexibility, so there is absolutely no game balance reason not to allow it.

 

[Xarlen]

For what it's worth...

Posted At: Monday, June 3, 2002 10:55 PM
Conversation: Adamantite Question
Subject: Adamantite Question

Can an adamantite shortsword bypass a vampire's 15/+1 DR?

No.
You need a magical enhancement bonus.

Skip Williams
RPG R&D