Rules for special materials in clothing?

[Stormborn]

In my campaign I have allowed the hides of various monsters to be used to make special articles of clothing with some limited benifits. They are never just for sale, though, except occasionally in truly exotic places like Sigil. Typically how it works is the PCs kill a monster, use Survival or Knowledge(nature) to field dress it. They then take it back to town and find some master craftsman to make it for a price. Green Dragon boots would take care of the acid for you.

 

[prospero63]

In my campaign I have allowed the hides of various monsters to be used to make special articles of clothing with some limited benifits. They are never just for sale, though, except occasionally in truly exotic places like Sigil. Typically how it works is the PCs kill a monster, use Survival or Knowledge(nature) to field dress it. They then take it back to town and find some master craftsman to make it for a price. Green Dragon boots would take care of the acid for you.

Hello forest, look at all those trees

IMO this is a much better solution than using mithral threads. Plus, it's got adventure hook written all over it.

 

[Set]

Green Dragon boots would take care of the acid for you.

Digester hide or Mimic hide might be easier to get without being eaten.

But yeah, great idea.

 

[Stormborn]

Digester hide or Mimic hide might be easier to get without being eaten.

But yeah, great idea.

Yeah, but that was just the first thing that I could think of, since one of the PCs made a cloak from a Red Dragon's hide to get some fire resistance one time.

Besides you could get a couple of boots out of a Large Green Dragon, and not even have to worry too much about it, provided the Pcs weer in teh midlevels.

 

[Voadam]

One of my players recently approached me about getting tougher footwear - he wants to know if he can get, for example, mithral or adamantine soles for his boots, and if possible, using mithral or adamantine threads woven into the rest of the boots.

Are there rules somewhere for using special materials in clothing?

I suppose the reason he wants them is that, well, special materials tend to stand up better than leather when you try and walk through acid puddles - they've lost quite a few pairs of boots doing that, and now that they're in a major metropolis, he wants to get more durable footwear.

Depends on the material.

for Mithral

"Items not primarily of metal are not meaningfully affected by being partially made of mithral. "

If you only threaded mithral into the booots I'd expect the non mithral parts to be eaten away by the acid leaving just the mithral threads and exposed access to the feet.

Dragonhide does not specifically say anything about acid resistance though it would not be unreasonable to house rule in appropriate resistances based on dragon type so stylish black dragon boots would be the way to go.

The entry for how acid works on objects is ambiguously written:

Energy Attacks
Acid and sonic attacks deal damage to most objects just as they do to creatures; roll damage and apply it normally after a successful hit. Electricity and fire attacks deal half damage to most objects; divide the damage dealt by 2 before applying the hardness. Cold attacks deal one-quarter damage to most objects; divide the damage dealt by 4 before applying the hardness.

After reading that I'm not sure what is applying damage "normally", whether normally like applying it to creatures which get no hardness subtracted away or normally as any other normal damage to objects which does get hardness subtracted away first. I'm not sure if acid ignores hardness or gets applied after applying hardness. I'd lean towards the latter though.

All dragonhide gives hardness 10.

 

[roguerouge]

Is there a reason he can't just take the metal footwear of full plate armor and only wear those? I have a character who goes along with no armor... except for spiked metal gauntlets, like they were bad-a$$ boxing gloves. This character could have combat boots.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

One of my players recently approached me about getting tougher footwear - he wants to know if he can get, for example, mithral or adamantine soles for his boots, and if possible, using mithral or adamantine threads woven into the rest of the boots.

Are there rules somewhere for using special materials in clothing?

Nowhere that I know of but this is your opportunity to shine in being creative and in working WITH the players on adding distinctive features to a campaign.

I suppose the reason he wants them is that, well, special materials tend to stand up better than leather when you try and walk through acid puddles - they've lost quite a few pairs of boots doing that, and now that they're in a major metropolis, he wants to get more durable footwear.

And they don't even particularly need to be made of special materials if all he wants is greater durability against one form of damage like acid. Mastercraft boots might be expensive - indeed they should be - but should not be particularly difficult to get and there's certainly no reason to add drawbacks to them.

A character is losing shoes (not even armor but just shoes) to acid puddles. He pays 300gp or whatever for TOUGH boots that will provide no protection to the wearer but will themselves survive "x" exposure to acid (whether because they're made of green dragon hide, or treated with special oils, or coated in rubber makes no difference). What would you need to penalize the PC for at that point with things like move silently penalties or even tracking penalties? That is the sort of thing that really demoralizes players - when simple, mundane problems with simple, mundane, and fun solutions become a DM's exercise in poking at players saying, "How badly do you REALLY want it?"

Ahm just sayin...

 

[Kask]

Metal soles would be inflexible and almost impossible to walk on. Slippery as hell as well.

Let him do it and have fun with him trying to move rapidly and slipping around.

 

[javcs]

In all honesty, acid puddles isn't exactly accurate ... I tried to make it clear that the streams and pools of liquid that they wanted to walk through would be hazardous, definitely not the kind of thing that you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in.


When he went to the master cobbler, he was presented with options other than mithral boots (don't remember the entire list right now, but it had most of the suggestions on this thread and some not on here) ... he turned them down, all of them, and insisted upon mithral. The cobbler even told him about drawbacks of mithral boots.
It would have made things much simpler (for everyone) had he selected one of the more mundane solutions. It would've been fun had he gone for acid resistant hides for his boots as well.

I swear, even though I'm a player in other games myself, I still don't understand why some players go for the most complicated solution to fairly simple problems.

 

[irdeggman]

In all honesty, acid puddles isn't exactly accurate ... I tried to make it clear that the streams and pools of liquid that they wanted to walk through would be hazardous, definitely not the kind of thing that you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in.


When he went to the master cobbler, he was presented with options other than mithral boots (don't remember the entire list right now, but it had most of the suggestions on this thread and some not on here) ... he turned them down, all of them, and insisted upon mithral. The cobbler even told him about drawbacks of mithral boots.
It would have made things much simpler (for everyone) had he selected one of the more mundane solutions. It would've been fun had he gone for acid resistant hides for his boots as well.

I swear, even though I'm a player in other games myself, I still don't understand why some players go for the most complicated solution to fairly simple problems.

Since he is insisting on mithral I would hazard a guess he is looking towards getting something that can be enchanted with magical abilities since anything made of mithral is automatically "masterwork".

Do not let him end up with a poor man's solution to getting masterwork armor to enchant - and don't let him bypass the "body slots" restriction.