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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zurai" data-source="post: 3970157" data-attributes="member: 52324">Yes, mithral is rare and expensive. That's reflected in the materials cost. Does a $1,000,000 car take 100 times as long to make as a $10,000 car? No, it doesn't. Mithral equipment costs more because the mithral is hard to get, not because it takes multiple orders of magnitude longer to make something out of it. The rarity of the mithral increases the final price as it should, but it shouldn't have such a drastic effect on the creation time of the suit of armor. Let's assume you have the 40 skill check that was theorized above. A normal suit of masterwork chain mail would take 5 weeks of work for such a smith (150gp@80gp per week for the MW component, 150gp@60gp per week for the armor). A suit of mithral chain mail would take 36 weeks even if you voluntarily added 10 to the DC (120gp per week, 4,300gp total price). It simply does not make sense that mithral takes 7-8 times the amount of time to craft.Not that I'm not saying it shouldn't increase the crafting time. I just don't think the full cost should be used, especially since the price of mithral vs armor type is completely arbitrary. Chain mail is much more time consuming to make in reality, but mithral banded mail takes a dramatically longer amount of time than mithral chain mail (or, heaven forbid, a mithral chain shirt). 10 weeks for the chain shirt, 36 for the chain mail, and 78 weeks for the banded mail.Instead, there should be a flat multiplier for material type. For example, a mithral item should take 150% the time a steel item takes, and adamantine should be 200% or 250% (due to its exceptional hardness). That way makes much more sense.And, for the record, there are no explicit rules for crafting using nonstandard materials.  For example, do you add the mithral price to the masterwork component or the normal component? Is there even technically a masterwork component? If there is, adding the mithral price to the masterwork component rather than the item component actually makes the work go ~33% faster.</blockquote>

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