PF: Price of Mithril items by weight: before or after weight reduction?

[Thrair]

Copied over from a post on the Paizo forums:

Question is in the title. I have a character I made with a Mithril Scimitar. And yes, I know this does not natively make it count as a light weapon. It's for the hardness increase, weight decrease, and rule of cool. Bypassing DR silver is a nice perk.

Anyway, Mithril items are stated to have half the weight of items made out of other metals. And if it's not armor or a shield, the price is 500g/lb. So... my question is: Is this price based off the BASE weight of the item, or the weight of of the mithril in the end product?

A scimitar is 4lbs. So if it's base-weight, it cost 2000g. While if it's based on the weight AFTER halving the item's weight, the cost is only 1000g. Saving 1000g would be a nice perk.

[Yora]

I would say prices are by mithril weight. If they meant by weight of an iron item, they should have wrote "per pound of an item made from iron" or "1000 gp/pound of mithril".

They say 500 gp/pound of the item, and the weight of a mithril scimitar is 2 pounds.

[Thrair]

I'd still like more opinions, because if that's the way it goes, it leaves a few undesirable loopholes.

Under RAW, for example, that would means a Small MW Dagger made of Mithril is only 125g (since MW is automatically included in the costs of Mithril items, and a small dagger weighs 1/2 lb, and 1/4 lb as Mithril), while a simple MW Dagger would cost 302g.

Although that might just be a situational example of unintended rules interactions, as even if the price is off the base weight, the small Mithril dagger is STILL cheaper (at 250g) than a flat MW.

[Trinoya]

Consider that the cost of that dagger is your average trained commers pay for an extremely long... long.... looooooooooooooooong time (over a year)

Consider that you could buy over 12,500 pounds of wheat...

Or you could buy 1,250 pounds of iron for that same cost.

Essentially you hold a fortune in your hands at a mere 125 gold for a dagger.

At the end of the day if a DM wants that fortune to be even more absurd (by increasing the cost/weight) by all means, the rules are pretty vague on it, but just remember how much that one dagger could do for so many people.

[Keneth]

Last I checked, the cost was considered according to default weight, not mithral weight.

[Thrair]

According to the responses I received on the Paizo forums, there's an example of a Waffle Iron in Ultimate Equipment that comes in plain Iron and in Mithril varieties.

According to that:
Waffle iron, common: Weight: 5lbs. Cost: 1g
Waffle iron, mithral: Weight: 2-1/2lbs. Cost: 1,251g.

Discounting the 1g base price of the item, that leaves the Mithril Waffle iron at 500g per/pound. Which suggests you go by final weight, not base weight.

That said, I don't want to be a munchkin, so I'm thinking I might just accept the more conservative ruling to avoid being an ******* that cherrypicks the rules.

[Keneth]

Yeah, there's a couple of items in UE that suggest differently, but guys at Paizo aren't exactly known for consistency. There was a forum post from one of the devs a while back (I think it was JJ) that said special materials are basically modifiers to an existing item, so all values are based off of original item. They've actually fixed the wording for Darkwood which works in the same manner, but apparently still haven't gotten around to sorting out Mithral.

And it certainly doesn't help that there are people writing splat books who don't even understand their own rules. :smallbiggrin:

[Trinoya]

According to the responses I received on the Paizo forums, there's an example of a Waffle Iron in Ultimate Equipment that comes in plain Iron and in Mithril varieties.

According to that:
Waffle iron, common: Weight: 5lbs. Cost: 1g
Waffle iron, mithral: Weight: 2-1/2lbs. Cost: 1,251g.

Discounting the 1g base price of the item, that leaves the Mithril Waffle iron at 500g per/pound. Which suggests you go by final weight, not base weight.

That said, I don't want to be a munchkin, so I'm thinking I might just accept the more conservative ruling to avoid being an ******* that cherrypicks the rules.

Oh but sir, it should actually be even less after all you're also paying for the cost of such a wonderful non-stick surface (I swear to god I'm not making this up, go read the description :smallbiggrin: )