What's heavier, a pound of adamantine or a pound of mithril ?

[Lamoni]

Doesn't work. Adamantium armor is more expensive than mithral, and mithral is listed at 500 gp / pound.

Does work. For the same armor, you need approximately the same volume, not the same weight.

Since 1 pound of mithral has twice the volume as 1 pound of adamantine...
You need twice as many pounds of adamantine as you would mithral. That means the value of 300 gp/lb means it IS more expensive than mithral for all practical purposes that depend on the volume of the material.

Edit:
However, I would still assign a different price.
Mithral heavy armor adds 9,000
Adamantine heavy armor adds 15,000
mithral costs 500 gp/lb so that means it is using approximately 18 lbs of material. Therefore heavy armor would use approximately 36 lbs of adamantine. Divide 15,000 by 36 and you get 417.

Therefore I would rule that adamantine costs 425 gp/pound. (I like to round up)

Or you could go through a more complex method...
adamantine is harder to work with so you can say 3,000 gp is just the cost of added labor. That would mean each armor type is increased by the following
light armor 2000
medium armor 7000
heavy armor 12000
Getting the approximate weights from mithral (which isn't too much harder to work with than steel) we get approximately 2, 8, and 18 pounds which would mean 4, 16, and 36 pounds of adamantine would be needed.
Dound the math it comes to...
light armor: 500 gp/lb
medium armor: 437 gp/lb
heavy armor: 417 gp/lb

So the average comes to be 424 gp/lb. Something that I think is pretty reasonable. I'd round to 425 again.

 

[Trainz]

Or how about rounding at 500, to make a nice sweet comfortable number, and justifying it with market demand ?

 

[Sammael]

That would work too.

 

[tzor]

Actually the question could be harder than one might think. From all the general sources I know adamantine is generally considered a metal, but mithril, on the other hand, was sometimes considered a precious metal like gold and silver. I remember old 1E campaigns when some DM's used mithril coins.

If that is the case then a pound is not a pound. The unit of precious metals is the Troy Pound and 1 pound = 1.25 Troy pounds, so a pound of Anamantine would weigh more than a pound of Mithril in lands where Mithril is a precious metal and not an ordinary metal.

This is based on the old joke: which weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of gold. Feathers, because of the Pound / Troy Pound issue.

 

[Thanee]

You could derive a cost by comparing the average cost to weight ratio of light/medium/heavy armor (as above, but...) between mithral and adamantium and then multiply the factor by which adamantium comes out higher than mithral with the 500gp/lb. cost of mithral.

Oh, and don't forget to figure in, that mithral only weighs half as much as steel, while adamantium weighs the same.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Trainz]

This is infuriating. I can't beleive I'm the first one to wonder about this in 35+ years of RPG's. It doesn't make sense. The answer MUST be SOMEWHERE, in a drag mag or something.


Arg.

 

[Thanee]

By the above heuristic, a factor of 1.01 is derived, so the cost of 500gp per lb. of adamantium seems reasonable.

Bye
Thanee

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

This is infuriating. I can't beleive I'm the first one to wonder about this in 35+ years of RPG's. It doesn't make sense. The answer MUST be SOMEWHERE, in a drag mag or something.

My first answer is adamantine would be 750 gp/pound, based on Stronghold Builder's Guidebook (where adamantine is 1.5x the price of mithral). Honestly, were I you, I'd use that, since it's fairly simple. Also, since you'd expect to be buying vast quantities of either material, you can assume that labor costs are amortized along the way somewhere else, and get the true price in there. Or something.

The problem comes in that there's virtually no relationship between average armor weight and the additional cost of armors, without assuming a markup for construction time/difficulty. If you do the math, it works out to a 100% difference between light armors, and then a 25% difference between mediums. It gets one's head to hurt.

Brad

 

[Trainz]

My first answer is adamantine would be 750 gp/pound, based on Stronghold Builder's Guidebook (where adamantine is 1.5x the price of mithral).

Well, that's all I wanted to hear. A book reference and a figure.

750 gp it is.

Thank you VERY much Brad !

I knew that, somehow, the community would pull it off for me.

Thank you community !

 

[TheAuldGrump]

As for 'which is heavier, a pound of' questions - the answer isn't always what you'd expect. For example a pound of feathers weighs more than a pond of gold. (Gold is weighed and sold in troy measure, which has much smaller pounds and ounces than imperial measure.) Once upon a time every town used its own measure, as far as I know only troy measure and imperial measure are still in use.

The Auld Grump