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View Full Version : [3.5] Mundane Weapon Modifiers (Expanded, PEACH)



Drakevarg
2010-12-23, 12:40 AM
First thing I need to point out here; this material is intended for a low-magic setting. I'm well aware that things could get out of hand fast if magic was applied to these items.

That aside, this is an expansion on a thread I made a week or two ago. That last one was a way to describe different calibers of weapons besides simply "masterwork" and "not masterwork." This rendition further describes items made out of higher-quality materials. This is specifically to allow players to posess level-appropriate gear without violating the low-magic clause of my setting.

-----

{table=head]Weapon Description|
Modifier|Cost


Masterwork|
+1 Atk/+1 Dmg|
x2

Fine|
+1 Dmg|
x1.5

Balanced|
+1 Atk|
x1.5

Normal|
--|
--

Imbalanced|
-1 Atk|
/1.5

Poor|
-1 Dmg|
/1.5

Crude|
-1 Atk/-1 Dmg|
/2[/table]

{table=head]Armor Description|Modifier|Additional|Cost


Masterwork|
+1 AC/-1 AP|
Hardness x2|
x2

Reinforced|
+1 AC|
Hardness x2|
x1.5

Fitted|
-1 AP|
--|
x1.5

Normal|
--|
--|
--

Poor Fitting|
+1 AP|
--|
/1.5

Weakened|
-1 AC|
Hardness /2|
/1.5

Crude|
-1 AC/+1 AP|
Hardness /2|
/2|[/table]

{table=head]
Material Name|Bonus to Weapons|Bonus to Armor|
Material Cost

Bronze|
-2 Atk/-2 Dmg|
-2 AC|
5 sp/lb

Iron|
-1 Atk/-1 Dmg|
-1 AC|
1 gp/lb

Steel|
--|
--|
2 gp/lb

Titanium|
+1 Atk/+1 Dmg|
+1 AC|
25gp/lb

Thunderbolt Iron|
+2 Atk/+2 Dmg|
+2 AC|
100 gp/lb

Astral Steel|
+3 Atk/+3 Dmg|
+3 AC|
250 gp/lb

Cocytan Iron|
+4 Atk/+4 Dmg|
+4 AC|
500 gp/lb

Red Titanium|
+5 Atk/+5 Dmg|
+5 AC|
1000 gp/lb[/table]

{table=head]Material Name|Bonus to Armor|
Material Cost


Snakeskin|
-2 AC|
5 sp/lb.

Deerskin|
-1 AC|
1 gp/lb.

Leather|
--|
2 gp/lb.

Yak Hide|
+1 AC|
5 gp/lb.

Rhino Hide|
+2 AC|
25 gp/lb.[/table]

{table=head]
Item Name|
Use|
Cost


Whetstone|
Slashing/Piercing Weapon gains +1 Dmg. No effect on Fine or Masterwork items. Requires DC 15 Craft (Blacksmithing) Check to use. Effect is lost after first critical.|
2 cp

Weight|
Bludgeoning Weapon gains +1 Dmg. No effect on Fine or Masterwork items. Requires DC 15 Craft (Blacksmithing) Check to use. Effect is lost after first critical.|
2 cp

Counterweight|
Weapon gains +1 Atk. Balanced or Masterwork items gain -1 Atk. Requires DC 15 Craft (Blacksmithing) Check to use. Must be balanced to the weapon in question.|
/4 Weapon Cost|[/table]

{table=head]
Item|
Craft DC

Simple Weapon|
10

Martial Weapon|
15

Exotic Weapon|
20

Armor|
10 +AC


--|
--

Masterwork Item|
+5

Fine Weapon|
+2

Balanced Weapon|
+2

Reinforced Armor|
+2

Fitted Armor|
+2

Poorly Fitting Armor|
Miss AC by 2, 50% Chance

Weakened Armor|
Miss AC by 2, 50% Chance

Imbalanced Weapon|
Miss AC by 2, 50% Chance

Poor Weapon|
Miss AC by 2, 50% Chance

Crude Item|
Miss AC by 5


--|
--

Bronze Item|
-5

Iron Item|
-2

Titanium Item|
+2

Thunderbolt Iron Item|
+5

Astral Steel Item|
+10

Cocytan Iron Item|
+15

Red Titanium Item|
+20

--|
--

Snakeskin Armor|
-5

Deerskin Armor|
-2

Yak Hide Armor|
+2

Rhino Hide Armor|
+5[/table]

-----

I suspect the costs will need to be heavily reworked.

Does anyone know how to fix those stupid formatting errors?

Quirken
2010-12-23, 03:59 AM
this is a pretty cool idea, but I think they're gonna be too cheap. there might not be much in the way of magic weapons in your campaign, but then why not just use the +1,+2, etc prices?


One thing that might be cool is that having the craft check affect the quality (not sure how crafting works cuz i've never had to look it up)... but rather than having "imbalanced" be a -2 to the check, if you fail the check by x or more, it becomes imbalanced instead of flat out failing?

Iituem
2010-12-23, 06:43 AM
First up - Bronze has a higher tensile strength and is harder than iron, but not steel. The Iron Age wasn't because iron was a better metal for war, but because it was cheaper and more widely available. Stick iron in the first slot and bronze in the second for metallurgical accuracy. The increased cost of steel comes from the skill required to smelt it, mostly.

Additionally, make sure your nation either has electrolysis or can produce extremely hot forge fires - you'll need it if you're trying to get titanium out of rutile (its main ore).


The masterwork/improved quality modifiers to cost work well, but I think they're just not high enough. MW weapons are +300gp in the base game for a reason. Put MW up to x10 or so and the others to x3, it'll make the difference, especially when you're dealing with the more exotic materials.

Agree with general region of costs, despite them seemingly being low compared to magic items, though they all need shifting up in the basic levels. Why? Labour time. If a craftsman who takes ten and has an effective skill of 10 in his craft is working against DC 20 (say 6 skill ranks, Wis 13, Skill Focus) normally he can produce a steel longsword (15gp, 4lbs) in (20 x 20 cp = 40sp, 4gp) in 4 solid days of work. A titanium alloy longsword (40gp, 4lbs) will take 10 days of work, which seems a bit light for a +1 sword unless the listed price is for materials cost. If so, the final worth of the sword is actually 120gp and will take 1 month to forge. I still think that's a bit light, but let's continue.

Your thunderbolt iron longsword (400gp, 4lbs) gets a +2 bonus and takes either 100 days or 300 days of work. Bearing in mind that this ties up a smith's work for over three months or a whole year respectively. Now what you have is a rare weapon simply because most smiths will not have the luxury of the time to work on this. Only smiths with powerful patrons (nobles, guilds) can consider crafting a weapon like this.

This only gets moreso the case as we go along; a red titanium longsword (4000gp, 4lbs) might take years to forge properly due to the insane difficulty of working with the material.

Actually, your Red Titanium longsword would require a DC of 35 to be made regularly, giving a 12.25gp/day production value. A grandmaster smith could be done with it in less than a year if 4k was the actual value, or over two years if it's 12k. Since 12k is the cost of a manor house, I would not say no to the 2 year mark. If you want to go down this route, just triple all finished product costs with the expert materials.

The primary advantage of this system is not cost, but rarity. Finding a sword that took three years to make is going to be hard, and its owner will not part with it willingly. If you think that's bad, consider that the most powerful weapon in your world (basically an artefact) would cost (using the x10 masterwork suggestion) 120,000gp and do +6/+6. It would also be almost impossible to find and have taken twenty years to make, using the rarest of materials.

My first recommendation with that system then is to bring up titanium alloy costs to 25gp/lb so at least your theoretical +1 longsword is going to cost you 100gp.


Alternatively; have swords take no more than a month to complete, but jack material and labour costs up to be equivalent with magic item values.

Drakevarg
2010-12-23, 10:40 AM
First up - Bronze has a higher tensile strength and is harder than iron, but not steel. The Iron Age wasn't because iron was a better metal for war, but because it was cheaper and more widely available. Stick iron in the first slot and bronze in the second for metallurgical accuracy. The increased cost of steel comes from the skill required to smelt it, mostly.

Additionally, make sure your nation either has electrolysis or can produce extremely hot forge fires - you'll need it if you're trying to get titanium out of rutile (its main ore).


The masterwork/improved quality modifiers to cost work well, but I think they're just not high enough. MW weapons are +300gp in the base game for a reason. Put MW up to x10 or so and the others to x3, it'll make the difference, especially when you're dealing with the more exotic materials.

Agree with general region of costs, despite them seemingly being low compared to magic items, though they all need shifting up in the basic levels. Why? Labour time. If a craftsman who takes ten and has an effective skill of 10 in his craft is working against DC 20 (say 6 skill ranks, Wis 13, Skill Focus) normally he can produce a steel longsword (15gp, 4lbs) in (20 x 20 cp = 40sp, 4gp) in 4 solid days of work. A titanium alloy longsword (40gp, 4lbs) will take 10 days of work, which seems a bit light for a +1 sword unless the listed price is for materials cost. If so, the final worth of the sword is actually 120gp and will take 1 month to forge. I still think that's a bit light, but let's continue.

Your thunderbolt iron longsword (400gp, 4lbs) gets a +2 bonus and takes either 100 days or 300 days of work. Bearing in mind that this ties up a smith's work for over three months or a whole year respectively. Now what you have is a rare weapon simply because most smiths will not have the luxury of the time to work on this. Only smiths with powerful patrons (nobles, guilds) can consider crafting a weapon like this.

This only gets moreso the case as we go along; a red titanium longsword (4000gp, 4lbs) might take years to forge properly due to the insane difficulty of working with the material.

Actually, your Red Titanium longsword would require a DC of 35 to be made regularly, giving a 12.25gp/day production value. A grandmaster smith could be done with it in less than a year if 4k was the actual value, or over two years if it's 12k. Since 12k is the cost of a manor house, I would not say no to the 2 year mark. If you want to go down this route, just triple all finished product costs with the expert materials.

The primary advantage of this system is not cost, but rarity. Finding a sword that took three years to make is going to be hard, and its owner will not part with it willingly. If you think that's bad, consider that the most powerful weapon in your world (basically an artefact) would cost (using the x10 masterwork suggestion) 120,000gp and do +6/+6. It would also be almost impossible to find and have taken twenty years to make, using the rarest of materials.

My first recommendation with that system then is to bring up titanium alloy costs to 25gp/lb so at least your theoretical +1 longsword is going to cost you 100gp.


Alternatively; have swords take no more than a month to complete, but jack material and labour costs up to be equivalent with magic item values.

This is looking awesome. I'll have to sit down and deal with it in detail later, when I'm not in the middle of preparing for a roadtrip.

ForzaFiori
2010-12-23, 11:06 AM
First up - Bronze has a higher tensile strength and is harder than iron, but not steel. The Iron Age wasn't because iron was a better metal for war, but because it was cheaper and more widely available. Stick iron in the first slot and bronze in the second for metallurgical accuracy. The increased cost of steel comes from the skill required to smelt it, mostly

While bronze has a higher tensile strength, iron kept an edge longer, and didn't dent as easily. Bronze was very malleable, and had a hard time keeping it's shape, and so weapons dulled easy, and armor would dent. It's why you see very few swords longer than the spatha or khopesh. When it was learned how to smelt iron, and to vary the carbon amount to harden it (not to the point of steel, but halfway between pure iron and steel roughly), the wrought iron weapons were superior to bronze, though not to the point of steel. Tin and Copper eventually became as common and cheep as iron, but weren't taken back up. There's a reason for it.

Spiryt
2010-12-23, 12:32 PM
While bronze has a higher tensile strength, iron kept an edge longer, and didn't dent as easily. Bronze was very malleable, and had a hard time keeping it's shape, and so weapons dulled easy, and armor would dent. It's why you see very few swords longer than the spatha or khopesh.

Some bronze alloys can be made much harder than iron, although I think that point about keeping edge etc. still stands.

Your point about spatha or kopesh is however confusing, as :

- there were no bronze spathas at all, swords that can be called like that are Roman swords appearing about 1 century BC. Pretty much Roman swords are steel then, obviously.

- Some spathas were pretty damn long as far as 1 handed swords go, could exceed 1 meter.

Anyway, it's complicated stuff, and 'superiority' or 'inferiority' are not good words to use here.

For simplified model like in 3.5, either material can play the role of "-2" without problem.

If you really want "metallurgic accuracy", then titanium doesn't make much sense as better material, especially for weapons.

Some armors, particularly scale one, could be made nice, I guess, keeping the same weight as steel/iron ones.

Pretty much any weapon would make no sense though, particularly edged ones - to keep similar resistance to different stresses, and similar weight it would obviously need to be almost twice as wide/thick compared to steel ones - it's almost two times less dense, so would result in weapon that won't cut anything really well.

It also wouldn't really hold edge too well at all.

Check any high end/snobbish 'survival' knifes they make today, and none are really make out of titanium, but rather expensive steel alloys.

ForzaFiori
2010-12-23, 02:01 PM
there were no bronze spathas at all, swords that can be called like that are Roman swords appearing about 1 century BC. Pretty much Roman swords are steel then, obviously.

- Some spathas were pretty damn long as far as 1 handed swords go, could exceed 1 meter.

My mistake. I was thinking of the Xiphos, or however you spell it, which was 50-60 cm.

Bronze swords were typically between 50-90 cm, with most cultures making swords 50-70 cm, though a few were as large as 1.1 meters.

Iron swords, however, were longer. The gladius, an iron sword that is known for being a "short sword" was 60-70 cm long, and the spatha, which replaced it, was .7-1 m, and made of iron. Swords in Germany during the iron age were 70-80 cm, with some larger.

While it wasn't by a large amount, Iron allowed larger weapons (about 10 cm), and was as good, if not better, than bronze in what it did.

Drakevarg
2010-12-24, 04:18 PM
Added material tiers for leather armor. Since leather is logically not going to compare favorably to metal, it only goes up to +2.

Increased Titanium to 25gp/lb.

All prices are now material costs. Including labor, that means the finished product is worth three times that.

Poorly constructed items are now the result of missing the DC, as opposed to an intentionally lowered one. Higher quality items still need to be intentional.

Still a bit iffy about increasing the masterwork costs, but I'm open to arguements.