D&D 3E/3.5 Reworking 3e armour; need help!

[Arkhandus]

Hey, how about Displacer Beast leather for the more flexible kind? Or Krenshar leather, since they have flexible but tough skin, or Hydra leather?

Spatzimus, how do you determine whether an armor is light, medium, or heavy though with your system? Couldn't someone get a suit of hard/hard armor for +7 AC yet count as light? (perhaps made of mithril)

 

[Terath Ninir]

A bunch of good suggestions on the leather. I might leave it a multiple choice option, actually. Thanks.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Spatzimus, how do you determine whether an armor is light, medium, or heavy though with your system? Couldn't someone get a suit of hard/hard armor for +7 AC yet count as light? (perhaps made of mithril)

The weight class is hard-coded just like before. You couldn't just arbitrarily make a light plate armor. (After all, almost all of the things in the Weight table are penalties, so why would you take the heavy class?) The first four options are Light, the next three are Medium, the last three are Heavy. If you wanted you could add a "weight index", i.e.
Soft: 0
Flexible: 1
Hard: 2
where Light is a total of 0 or 1, Medium is 2, Heavy is 3-4
But that just gives you what we already had. I suppose you could try spreading it out a bit further, and make Mithral a -1 to this or something, but I don't like that; either the -1 is enough to lower you to the next weight class (in which case it's a big bonus) or it doesn't (in which case it's worthless). So I make it easy; if the Primary is Mithral, you're one weight class lighter. Secondary doesn't matter for this; putting mithral studs on your leather isn't going to drastically reduce its weight.

Anyway, I've got a table of 44 materials, ranging from Bone (DC -4) to Orichalcum (DC +20), in seven material categories (Metal, Crystal, Plating, Wood, Bone, Leather, Cloth) and three origins (Mundane, Planar, Alchemical). For each, there's a DC modifier, a cost multiplier, a hardness, a list of general bonuses (if any), a list of weapon bonuses, and a list of armor bonuses (soon to be two lists of bonuses, one for Primary and one for Secondary). It seems like a lot, but it's really not bad in practice.

 

[Terath Ninir]

Spatzimaus, that is an interesting system, too. 44 materials? Man, I'm stressing on the five I have.

 

[Wolf72]

now that's a table CZ ...

 

[Spatzimaus]

Spatzimaus, that is an interesting system, too. 44 materials? Man, I'm stressing on the five I have.

It's not as bad as it sounds.
You have the basic materials (Bone, Bronze, Wood, Iron/Crude Steel, Leather).
Then you have common "masterwork" equivalents for some (Fine Steel, Fine Leather, Darkwood).
Add a few everyone knows about (Silver, Cold Iron, Ironwood, Mithral, Adamantium).
Add a few from the Psionics handbook (Ferroplasm, Substare).
Add a set of "gem" crystals (Obsidian, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Garnet, Amethyst, Topaz, Diamond) for high-end style, with each tied to a different damage type (lethal, fire, cold, acid, electrical, sonic, psychic, and subdual respectively).
Add some organic materials (Illithid skin, Anhkeg Chitin, Dragonhide, Dragonbone, Dragonscale(large), Dragonscale(small), etc.), to use as guidelines for similar materials.
Then, find an old copy of some 2E planar/exotic metal rules to add a bunch more (Cinnabryl, Dlarun, Dajaava, Tanar'ri Bloodsteel, Silver-Iron, Arandur, True Mithral, Starmetal, Cranor, Laen, Darksteel, true Adamantine, planar Oak).
Oh, and to top it off I invented/stole a couple new ones (Orichalcum and Gartine).

End result, big-ass table, full of all sorts of things my players like. After all, it's nice to say you're wearing a heavily-enchanted breastplate, but saying that it's a BP made from Emerald worn over an Illithid-skin leather... well, it just sounds cooler. And as long as you work out the stats when you make the item, you can "black box" it and never have to deal with the minutae of the rules ever again.

 

[Zoatebix]

That is really, really cool. Can we see your table sometime, Spatzimaus?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I'll attach the Excel file I use, but the problem is that it's intricately tied into some house rules I use; the table refers to item enchantments that aren't in any of the standard books (all the ones with a * next to them). So you'd probably just make up your own or insert something similar.

I need to explain the Cost Reduction columns: One of the ways I wanted to make materials useful was to make them bond to magic better. If the weapon/armor includes one of the enchantments listed in this entry, the total enchantment price of the item is reduced by +1; you can only get this bonus once per item, even if the material lists several enchantments. Feel free to dump this if you don't like the concept, and raise the material's stats a bit to compensate.

If a weapon includes a DR(X) entry, those are the types it bypasses.

Under this system, there's no separate "Masterwork". You take the normal DC of the non-masterwork item (12/15/18 for weapons, AC-based for armors), add the DC modifier for the material, adjust the price based on the listed gp/lb, and do a single Craft check. There's a bit more to it than that, but the other rules are their own topic.

 

[Terath Ninir]

Interesting. Very interesting, Spatzimaus.

I'm going to have to tone down my magical leathers. I did some sample armours using the second type of leather and mithral brigandine, and the results were gross.

 

[Limper]

I'll give this a test run next session. Its not to far off from what I was doing and follows a better logical progression.

Hurry up on the materials section... bronze vs iron vs steel kind of stuff.