Bizarre item weights

[Sutremaine]

Description: Inside an intricately carved teak box, a set of unusual objects rests upon a red velvet cushion. The items are an ivory chalice, a bronze serpentine knife, and three perfectly spherical crystals.
Weight: 10lb.

Ten pounds? Were those crystals hewn from the body of a neutronium golem? Is the box the size of a suitcase? There's an illustration there you know, I can see the relative item sizes. Or is that a Colossal masterwork dagger and the text doesn't mention it? That would be pretty cool I guess, especially if you got the 930gp version.

Any other things where you have to wonder if the typist was asleep at the numpad?

[Vegan Zombie]

I can't remember the exact weights, but in pretty sure empty flasks weigh more than flasks filled with potions.

[Cicciograna]

Many items have strange weights, often overestimated: that is because, to simulate bulk but not desiring to add another number to calculate (the actual volume of the items), the game designers chose to incorporate volumetric dimension in items' weight.
Thus the objects you presented do not actually weight 10 pounds, but since they're unwieldy, fragile and bulky (a teak box is not foldable, pliable or else, it's simply a box), they count 10 pounds against your carrying capacity to simulate their volume.

[Dexam]

Description: Inside an intricately carved teak box, a set of unusual objects rests upon a red velvet cushion. The items are an ivory chalice, a bronze serpentine knife, and three perfectly spherical crystals.
Weight: 10lb.

Ten pounds? Were those crystals hewn from the body of a neutronium golem? Is the box the size of a suitcase? There's an illustration there you know, I can see the relative item sizes. Or is that a Colossal masterwork dagger and the text doesn't mention it? That would be pretty cool I guess, especially if you got the 930gp version.

Any other things where you have to wonder if the typist was asleep at the numpad?

Clearly the teak box is lead-lined to prevent Detect Magic and similar detection spells. Also, multiple hidden compartments concealing the truely valuable items.

Obvious, really, when you think about it. :smallwink:


I can't remember the exact weights, but in pretty sure empty flasks weigh more than flasks filled with potions.

According to the PHB, an empty flask weighs 1.5 lbs, whereas a flask of alchemists fire, acid, or holy water weighs 1 lbs. Alchemical and special substance liquids have negative mass? :smallconfused:

[Knaight]

According to the PHB, an empty flask weighs 1.5 lbs, whereas a flask of alchemists fire, acid, or holy water weighs 1 lbs. Alchemical and special substance liquids have negative mass? :smallconfused:

This one actually makes sense. The standard flask is intended to hold things, and not to break. The alchemists fire, acid, and holy water flasks are designed to shatter easily, and as such are made of much thinner glass. All of these are still way too heavy, but the discrepancy works.

[Eldan]

It gets even more interesting when you see that a component in making holy water is a pretty large bar of silver, which is apparently dissolved in the water.

[Jeraa]

Material components are "annihilated by the spell energies in the casting process". Its not dissolved into the water, its totally gone. No 5 pound vials of holy water.

Potions and 1 ounce vials of ink are weightless, but empty potion or ink vials are 1/10th of a pound.

Weights for Small sized equipment are either 1/2 (weapons, armor) or 1/4th of the weights of Medium items. But Small creatures carrying capacity are 3/4 that of a Medium creature. A Small creature with Small equipment is proportionately less encumbered by his gear then a Medium creature wielding the same (but Medium sized) equipment.

[Knaight]

Weights for Small sized equipment are either 1/2 (weapons, armor) or 1/4th of the weights of Medium items. But Small creatures carrying capacity are 3/4 that of a Medium creature. A Small creature with Small equipment is proportionately less encumbered by his gear then a Medium creature wielding the same (but Medium sized) equipment.
It gets worse. The items are either 1/2 or 1/4 the weight, the carrying capacity is 3/4, and actually scaling each dimension down to half (which makes sense) would produce a 1/8 value, which doesn't show up in any of these numbers. Weight scaling by size is all sorts of weird, and makes little to no sense at the best of times. It gets absolutely hilarious at the extremes. For instance, a Fine character is a few inches tall, if that. A Fine sword weighs 1/16 as much as a Medium sword by the rules, which comes to 1/4 of a pound for a D&D longsword. That's a little under a cubic inch of steel. Now, assume a Medium sword can be modeled as a bar of steel, 4 feet long, 2 inches wide. This is, admittedly over sized, and could contain the entirety of a typical blade. Knocked down to Fine, this would be 3 inches long, and 1/8 of an inch wide. That means that the blade would have to be 2 2/3 inches thick to meet the mass. That's absurd.

Now, take those dimensions again, and look at the other extreme. A colossal sword would weigh 16 times as much, and as such 64 pounds. It would need to be 64 feet long, and 2 2/3 feet wide. The blade, in total, should be .13 cubic feet. As such, it needs to be less than 1/1000th of an inch thick. Again, this is absurd. Scaling things linearly when dealing with volume and constant density doesn't work, and produces stupid results.