The Spatzworld Exotic Material System

[Kerrick]

The best part is that I intentionally took the Aristocrat level, even though I could have taken a PC class instead.

I mean really. It's a class with full armor and weapons, some nice class skills (including Speak Language, which was important since in our world there was no Common tongue), and 4+INT skill points. It's actually not a bad choice for a 1st-level character, although it obviously doesn't scale up nearly as well beyond that. And since my character was a nomadic Sorcerer from a family of wealthy merchants/craftsmen, it actually fit really well.

Yeah, aristocrat is one of the better NPC classes, nearly the equal of a PC class.

It's not very difficult for a PC craftsman to hit 35 DC well before 20th; my 3.5E Shaper (with a high INT, an Artiste psicrystal and a luck ring that gave +1 to all skill checks) wouldn't have a problem at 15th level or earlier. Generally speaking, though, the DC modifiers match pretty well to what level the material is made for (+10 DC materials are balanced for ~10th level, etc.)

I assume you mean by taking, not rolling a d20 and hoping for a high roll? Wow... no wonder people were telling me the DCs in my artificing system were too low.

How do you equate materials with levels of masterwork? I mean, I know you don't really use "levels of masterwork", but how do you determine the bonuses from, say, mithril or adamantium or star metal, as far as attack/damage, ACP, and max Dex?

I don't agree with the +1 to attack. Silver is softer than iron no? I can't see why it would have the bonus. I could see the reduced ACP. I do believe it is lighter. of course silver armor would prolly have a lower ac...

Silver is softer than iron, but it's a good deal heavier - iron is 26 on the periodic table, whereas silver is 47. Have to agree, though, that silver weapons would probably do less damage - they'd become deformed on a critical hit.

[qoute]*really what is the dif between iron and 'cold' iron?* [/quote]
Cold iron (the textbook definition, not the DMG one) is iron that's been forged at a lower temperature than normal - cold-forged iron, or wrought iron. It's a little weaker and more brittle than normal iron, and so not often used beyond decoration, but it's great against the fey. I still wouldn't recommend making a large weapon like a cold iron sword, because it runs a chance of breaking (say, 10% chance on a critical hit).

 

[Spatzimaus]

Silver:
I don't agree with the +1 to attack. Silver is softer than iron no?

Silver ALREADY gets the +1 to attack (if you make it as a masterwork item); in 3e, it's only slightly penalized on damage. And also, don't confuse alloys with elements; pure gold, for instance, is soft, but mix in a few minor elements and it's hard enough to use for jewelry. Diamonds may be the hardest natural substance, but we've made three artificial materials that are even harder.
Also, the "silver" in the PHB (the one that gets -1 damage) is an alchemical coating for existing weapons; you're not getting a sword made out of pure silver. What I'm talking about is mixing actual silver into the iron as it's being forged (which HAS happened; just about every metal can be used as a minor ingredient in steel, not counting the carbon. Nickel, Manganese, Chromium, Vanadium...)

The same goes for Cold Iron. The +1 attack/+1 ACP are given by the fact the item's masterwork. By removing the "masterwork" rules, I simply made it so that anything other than the base item MUST be masterwork, which is already how it sort of went.

*really what is the dif between iron and 'cold' iron?*

"Cold iron" is iron that was never forged/heated; the iron is pounded/bent while cold. It's a LOT more work, but the impurities in the metal (especially carbon) aren't destroyed in the process. In reality, this usually resulted in inferior metal. In mythology, this somehow made it ideal against fey. There's no real logic for it; why is "starmetal" (metal from a meteor) chemically different from metals found on Earth? It's just nickel-heavy iron ore. And why silver for lycanthropes?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I assume you mean by taking, not rolling a d20 and hoping for a high roll? Wow... no wonder people were telling me the DCs in my artificing system were too low.

Right. If something's going to take 30 days to make and they make one check per day, you might as well assume they're Taking 10, because it'll all average out otherwise.

How do you equate materials with levels of masterwork? I mean, I know you don't really use "levels of masterwork", but how do you determine the bonuses from, say, mithril or adamantium or star metal, as far as attack/damage, ACP, and max Dex?

I have a finely-balanced, horribly complex algorithm derived from years of painstaking... actually, I just guess.

Well, not quite. As I mentioned, many of these metals were drawn from AD&D materials, so in some cases, I just attempted to translate the existing bonuses to a 3E system. Then, I used those as my framework, and basically said that if element Y had a DC that fell between elements X and Z, its benefits should also fall between. A few elements were then specifically skewed towards armor or weapons.

Silver is softer than iron, but it's a good deal heavier - iron is 26 on the periodic table, whereas silver is 47.

Right answer, wrong reason.
Silver's density is ~10.5 times water, Iron's about 7.8, and most steels are about the same.
Silver is heavier on a PER ATOM basis, but that's kinda meaningless; in many of the larger elements most of the nuclear charge is shielded from the outer electrons (or other nearby atoms) by the filled inner electron shells. So, the silver atom is larger, and there's a little more space between the atoms.

Have to agree, though, that silver weapons would probably do less damage - they'd become deformed on a critical hit.

I'm pretty sure that's the logic they used in 3E. The reason I dumped that (and jacked up the price to compensate) is that I'm trying to steer away from the Golf Bag O' Doom, where you need half a dozen weapons to beat the various DRs.
(Ironically, like a lot of the other things I've added, this seems to be what they've done in the NWN 2 game; the negative aspects of silver and cold steel don't apply.)
Also, to be fair, pure silver has a Mohs-scale hardness of 2.5, while iron's at 4.0. Gold's also a 2.5; so, if you can harden up gold by adding a small amount of other stuff (jewelry), you can do the same for silver. (After all, copper and tin are both softer than iron, but put them together and you get bronze, which is marginally harder. It doesn't always have to make sense.)

 

[Crashy75]

By removing the "masterwork" rules, I simply made it so that anything other than the base item MUST be masterwork, which is already how it sort of went.

Ooooohhh. I missed that.

 

[Kerrick]

Right. If something's going to take 30 days to make and they make one check per day, you might as well assume they're Taking 10, because it'll all average out otherwise.

*nods* I ruled that if the crafting time is over 1 week (however long that is in your world) you can make checks by the week instead - so instead of rolling 30 times, you only have to roll 3-4 times. Not sure how well it'd work with the existing system, though.

I have a finely-balanced, horribly complex algorithm derived from years of painstaking... actually, I just guess.

Well, not quite. As I mentioned, many of these metals were drawn from AD&D materials, so in some cases, I just attempted to translate the existing bonuses to a 3E system. Then, I used those as my framework, and basically said that if element Y had a DC that fell between elements X and Z, its benefits should also fall between. A few elements were then specifically skewed towards armor or weapons.

I came up with an idea a couple nights ago for our system. Ours uses size and complexity - the larger it is, or the more parts (generally) it has, the harder it is to make and the higher the DC. The complexity principle would apply to materials - the rarer it is, or the harder it is to make and/or work, the higher the Craft DC adjustment would be, and thus I assigned complexities to all the materials, ranging from Simple (iron, bronze, steel) to Very Complex (orichulum and arcanium, stuff that's extremely rare/expensive and hard to work by less than a master smith). The problem is, I can't figure out how to apply a "minimum craft level" AND a Craft DC adjustment - the two won't mesh properly.

(Ironically, like a lot of the other things I've added, this seems to be what they've done in the NWN 2 game; the negative aspects of silver and cold steel don't apply.)

More like they sidestepped the issue entirely. D&D uses alchemical silver, which is basically silver plating, not pure silver, and cold iron is some metal that's "mined deep underground" instead of true cold-forged iron.

 

[Spatzimaus]

*nods* I ruled that if the crafting time is over 1 week (however long that is in your world) you can make checks by the week instead - so instead of rolling 30 times, you only have to roll 3-4 times. Not sure how well it'd work with the existing system, though.

Well, also remember that there's very little benefit for succeeding by a large margin, but there IS a consequence for failure. So, most crafters I've known (myself included) Take 10 whenever possible, and don't attempt anything they can't Take 10 to succeed at.

The problem is, I can't figure out how to apply a "minimum craft level" AND a Craft DC adjustment - the two won't mesh properly.

There's three ways I can think of, of the top of my head.

The first is to explicitly tie the two together, say with a factor of 1/2. That is, if it's DC+16, you need to be at least character level 8 to even attempt it. There are some serious downsides to this, but at least the math is simple. Remember, if someone has kept a Craft skill maxxed and has masterwork tools, he can hit a DC of 15+level+INTmod on a Take 10. Non-heros (and most of us) won't have an INTmod of more than 4, at least until they can afford a Headband of Intellect, and there aren't many items that boost craft skills.

The second is, you could penalize failure more. As it is, losing part of a rare, expensive material can be rough, but what if there was a chance of losing the entire item? This wouldn't result in a hard cap of any kind, but it WOULD keep most players from doing anything other than Take 10.

Third, you could split things up. Say, for instance, that the material's size adds +X to the DC, and the complexity adds +Y. Mundane materials would mostly be decent X but low Y, really rare stuff increases Y drastically but might even have lower X. Other circumstances could modify each of these on the fly; making a sword for a Large race might increase X by 1, and having to work with certain magical materials without an assistant might increase Y.
Then, just say that the minimum level to attempt a Craft check is the larger of X and Y. This adds a little more complexity to the system, and effectively keeps DC and minimum creation level from being linked directly.

More like they sidestepped the issue entirely.

Right. My point was, though, that NWN's take on the materials is actually closer to how it'd work in the Real World, and is also closer to the system I'm using here. And, watching how well it worked out in NWN encouraged my group.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

Another wrinkle

I really like this system. I am thinking of adding it to my own game in addition to the supply and demand rules I modified from the Expeditious Press folks (Magical Medieval Society, I think). The materials may be more or less expensive depending on on the supply, demand, and size of the location you're attempting to get it from.

Have you considered writing all of this up into a PDF for easy access?

 

[Spatzimaus]

The materials may be more or less expensive depending on on the supply, demand, and size of the location you're attempting to get it from.

Sure, local prices can make the prices increase or decrease; just make sure your supply/demand equations don't affect things like how much time it'd take to Craft. In the PHB equations, mutliplying the item's cost also multiplies the crafting time; it shouldn't take the crafter twice as long to finish his work just because there was unusually high demand for the material when he bought it.
In my system, it doesn't scale like that; the cost multipliers for exotic materials are effectively applied after the fact, to the final item. Only the base (PHB) cost for the item and the DC modifier of the material affect Craft time.
(And while the material's DC affects its price, under the logic that a difficult material requires you to find a high-level crafter, the price is also affected by whether the material is alchemical, comes from another plane, and/or is harvested from an intelligent creature.)

Have you considered writing all of this up into a PDF for easy access?

Well, we're continually tweaking the system as we go along. For instance, the original post was from over a month ago, but it's a system we've been using the a couple years now, and it's gone through several heavy revisions in that time. The only real reason I posted it now was because I had been bringing it up in various threads, and kept getting the "sounds cool, can we see it?" response. The main point of the thread wasn't to present the system as a finished product. It was to give people who were developing their own Craft rules some ideas, and to get more feedback on mine.

To make things worse, the 2-component armor system (in post #7) is only a week old, and we haven't implemented it yet in-game, and it definitely changes game balance. Basically, I still have to go back through all the materials and split the armor benefits between the Primary and Secondary. For instance, Dragonplate (the Hard dragonskin material) is currently +3 AC, +2 MaxDEX, +2 ACP, -5% SF, and elemental resist of (10+age), where "age" is the age category number (1-12?). So, I'd probably split it something like:
Primary: +2 AC, +1 MaxDEX, +1 ACP, element resist (5+age/2)
Secondary: +1 AC, +1 MaxDEX, +1 ACP, -5% SF, element resist (5+age/2)
For most of the low-end materials, it's easy to split the bonuses, because there are so few. But with the mid-range materials, there's not always an easy divide, especially once you include the magical Cost Reductions. And then there's the weight-reducing ones, like mithral. Do both halves have to be made of Mithral before the item's weight class decreases, and if not, do you at least limit it to the Primary? Still working on that.

------------

Maybe someday I'll PDF it. This is just a small part of the larger Spatzworld homebrew system (and it's almost the only part that can be translated easily to core D&D); we use entirely custom races and classes, a slightly different level system, a very different magic system, a different cosmology (planar system)... so, before finalizing this bit, I'd rather also post the other pieces.

 

[Kerrick]

Well, also remember that there's very little benefit for succeeding by a large margin, but there IS a consequence for failure. So, most crafters I've known (myself included) Take 10 whenever possible, and don't attempt anything they can't Take 10 to succeed at.

Yeah... In our system, crafting times are all set - a simple weapon takes 2 days, a martial weapon takes 5 days, etc.; the DM can apply an optional modifier (based on the item's size/complexity) if he wishes. A failed check means you lose a day (at least); success by 10 or more means you get more work done, and gain a day (or 2 days, if you're doing the check for a week. This gives them a little more incentive to make the d20 roll instead of just taking 10, makes them actually want to try using some of the higher-end materials, and simulates a master crafter making simple stuff much faster than a novice ("Masterwork daggers! Bah, I can do those in my sleep!")

The first is to explicitly tie the two together, say with a factor of 1/2. That is, if it's DC+16, you need to be at least character level 8 to even attempt it. There are some serious downsides to this, but at least the math is simple.

I was thinking of tying it to minimum number of ranks - same concept, basically. Say, a +0 modifier (and below*) requires 3 ranks, +1 7 ranks, up to +10 at 39 ranks. That would limit the really high-end stuff to master smiths. Obviously it wouldn't work for anyone who doesn't play epic; I suppose for those groups, you could halve it again (round up) so the highest stuff requires 20 ranks. I think the problem I was having is that I was trying to tie them to the existing rank system we have for mastercrafting - a +1 masterwork item requires 7 ranks, +2 is 14, all the way up to +10, which is 68 ranks. By dropping the rank requirements, it makes them mesh a lot more easily.

*I actually ruled that basic stuff like bronze and iron have a negative craft mod - -2 for bronze and -1 for iron, since we're using steel as the baseline.

The second is, you could penalize failure more. As it is, losing part of a rare, expensive material can be rough, but what if there was a chance of losing the entire item? This wouldn't result in a hard cap of any kind, but it WOULD keep most players from doing anything other than Take 10.

That's what I'm trying to avoid (forcing them to take 10, not losing the item). I think if they want to take the chance and roll the die, they should benefit from a lucky high roll.

Third, you could split things up. Say, for instance, that the material's size adds +X to the DC, and the complexity adds +Y. Mundane materials would mostly be decent X but low Y, really rare stuff increases Y drastically but might even have lower X. Other circumstances could modify each of these on the fly; making a sword for a Large race might increase X by 1, and having to work with certain magical materials without an assistant might increase Y.

Oooh... I like that idea. Right now, DCs are figured on a combination of the item's size and complexity - a generic small difficult item (a gold and diamond tiara) is DC 18. The only problem I can see here is how to simulate small, complex items being more difficult to make - a pocketwatch will be just as hard to make as a grandfather clock because of all the tiny springs, gears, and whatnot, despite there being less to work with.

What do you mean by "the material's size", though? Do you mean "How much of the item is made from X"?

Right. My point was, though, that NWN's take on the materials is actually closer to how it'd work in the Real World, and is also closer to the system I'm using here.

You mean, they don't worry about where the material came from or what its properties (softness, ductility, etc.) are, just how it works vs. DR? I suppose you could do it that way; I'm not a realist Nazi, but I kind of like the thought of someone with a solid silver sword not being able to use it in every combat unless it were magically hardened (which is why I came up with the silversteel spell).

Do both halves have to be made of Mithral before the item's weight class decreases, and if not, do you at least limit it to the Primary?

Depends how you split Primary and Seconday. If Primary is "the majority of the item", then yes, it should.

 

[BobbyMac]

I really like this system. I am thinking of adding it to my own game in addition to the supply and demand rules I modified from the Expeditious Press folks (Magical Medieval Society, I think). The materials may be more or less expensive depending on on the supply, demand, and size of the location you're attempting to get it from.

Have you considered writing all of this up into a PDF for easy access?

/slight thread hijack...


I would like to see this system. Could you perhaps post it somewhere? Thanks.


/we now return you to your regularly scheduled thread...