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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 3326449" data-attributes="member: 3051">I wonder how much of that is a residual "character concept" factor.  That is, they wear heavy armor because they think a Paladin should wear heavy armor...My point was that there's no statistical benefit to 3E heavy armor.  It slows you down (unless you're a Dwarf), and you'll have the same AC as someone wearing lighter armor and a +DEX item.  With less ACP and spell failure, less weight to deal with, fewer penalties for sleeping in armor, etc...At low level, sure, heavy armor's common.  But once +DEX items (and the 4-level stat boosts, and wish) start becoming more common, it just seems to disappear in every campaign I've played.Yes and no.  The main reason we have fewer leathers is that more people wanted exotic metals for their armors and weapons, so we never bothered making too many of them.  The lower DC isn't because high-quality leathers are rare, it's more that high-quality leathers have lower DCs than their metal counterparts.And to be fair, the highest mundane metals are DC+11, except for Darksteel at +16.  Everything above 12ish is planar (Karach, Dajaava, Bloodsteel), alchemical (True Mithral, Orichalcum), or horribly limited (Adamantine, the drow metal that disintegrates in sunlight).  To pick up the slack there are elemental crystal materials at 14-15, some rarer crystals at 15-18, and a few different Dragonscale materials at 15-17.(Also, many of the metals were converted directly from an old AD&D document, so we converted a bunch that we never figured we'd use.)You can't focus too much on real-world materials.  While it might sound great to bring Titanium or Aluminum into these systems, it falls apart once you look at what chemical processes were needed to extract those materials from their ores.  (The top of the Washington Monument has a small tip made of aluminum, because at the time it was more expensive than gold.)  And yes, there are fewer types of leather, but we don't have Dragons and such around to provide variety in skins.In our opinions, they'll be a lot closer than a flat multiplier would imply.  Beyond a certain point, it's not about the quantity, it's about the quality.  A dagger made out of adamantine (DC +19, not to be confused with the lower-quality "adamantium") should cost almost as much as a greatsword made out of adamantine, because the difficult and expensive part isn't getting enough metal, it's finding someone who can make DC 34 Craft rolls consistently and is willing to spend weeks on your item.  So, we're trying to develop an equation that reflects this.The same logic applies for armors.  At low levels (mundane materials only), leather's cheap to buy (say, 1/12th the cost of plate's material) and much easier to work with, so it'll cost 50-100 times less than plate.  After all, any apprentice can whip together a suit of leather, but it takes someone with some training to make plate armor.But once you start making them out of really rare materials, I want the factor to decrease until at the top end it's pretty much right on that 1/12th material ratio, to reflect that you'd need a master craftsman for either.  Ironically, a flat addition (not multiplier) does this well at the high end, but it's bad at the low end.And we use a different Craft equation, too.  It's in the first post, under the Craft Rules tag."Fine Steel" and "Fine Leather" simply replaced "Masterwork".  That's all.  (Historically, it didn't really matter how much time you spent on the sword, if it wasn't made out of high-quality metal it wouldn't be substantially better than a crude sword.  But a good Damascene Steel could do wonders in the hands of a good smith.)We could have added mastercraft rules on top of this, but it just made things even more complex, and we were already well past the point where you'd need a calculator to keep track of everything.  So, we fudged a bit, and equated higher levels of "masterwork" to rarer materials; we figured that no one would ever make a sword out of Tana'ari Bloodsteel without spending enough time to make it a masterpiece.</blockquote>

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