Sovereign Glue as Armor?

[Ivor_The_Mad]

Theoretically would you be able to coat armor or make armor with sovereign glue? it forms an unbreakable bond so wouldn't that mean no weapon can pierce it? Also does sovereign glue act more like contact cement or a glue. I assume the latter. If you coated certain sections of your self with the stuff and waited for it to harden (leaving it off your joints) you could be immune to most damage and have an indestructible armor set right?

You have to be careful though because you don't want your hands permanently stuck to your @$$

[McSkrag]

I think the answer to this depends on how much mead your DM has had.

[Aimeryan]

Queue the stream of bludgeoning and magical damage enemies!

[Greywander]

it forms an unbreakable bond so wouldn't that mean no weapon can pierce it?
By this logic, simple clothing is enough to make you immune to bludgeoning damage. I mean, you can take a mace to the chest, and your shirt isn't even damaged!

A lot of this would depend on the nature of sovereign glue. How hard does it harden? Is it flexible? No matter how impervious it may be, a big enough hit from a blunt (or heavy, rather) object is going to hurt.

[Friv]

So, there are a few things to keep in mind.

The first is that sovereign glue is extremely valuable. You only get 1d6+1 ounces of the stuff, and a single ounce can only coat a 1-ft square surface. A typical human has a surface area of 18-20 feet, so on average you would need 5 legendarily rare containers of sovereign glue just to try to make this armour. So the magic armour that you're making is going to, roughly speaking, have the same value as five suits of +3 armour.

Now, as you also noted, you can't coat any of the joints of your armour in glue, or else you won't be able to put it on, take it off, or move in it. So right off the bat, there are vulnerable areas, and they're the same areas that people usually aimed for when fighting an opponent in plate mail. And it's not just the big joints - take a look at a suit of armour. Most of the pieces are designed to slide over each other so that you can, for example, bend over slightly, move your arms and legs, see around you, and so on. Every one of those spots is a spot you can't afford to glue.

And then there's the question of whether the glue absorbs blunt-force trauma, or just passes it straight through itself without taking harm. If the former, it'll be good armour. If the latter, it could actually be worse than not having armour against a lot of stuff.

If someone actually got the materials together to do this in a game I ran, I would probably let them treat a fully-coated suit of armor as +3 Armor of Invulnerability and call it a day. They used a lot of stuff, so they get two legendary item benefits in a single suit of armour.

[ImproperJustice]

I have this funny mental image of the glue armored knight getting stuck to the first thing his chest or back touched.....

[Kadesh]

Hit Points do not necessarily equal 'meat', and being hit doesn't necessarily mean bleeding. It can be used to represent how capable you are at fighting in general, which mirrors quite well with how damage and death saves are modelled in game.

Also, no. Ever shaken a tin of beans around and heard them slosh about? That's you in sovereign glue armour, because momentum

[No brains]

If it forms an unbreakable bond, how will you get the glue out of the cast?

Which raises an interesting question about the unbreakability of the bond vs the objects bonded. Two feathers glued together will still be fragile, so what value is the unbreakable glue between them?

As for glue and energy absorption, maybe it would be best to laminate layers of steel, or some other already good shock absorber with the glue. Then you still have steel armor, but its inside and outside are permanently bonded, which basically amounts to impenetrable. Too bad materials don't really matter in 5e, so glue-reinforced plate is still plate. AC 18 and you smell like a hobby shop. (Ultimately this is in the hands of the DM on how they want to abstract armor failure.)

Also, who wins: Sovereign Glue or Sphere of Annihilation?

[StorytellerHero]

There is such a thing as drying/hardening too much. The glue might end up flaking off the armor surface due to having overexposure to air, becoming too brittle to last.

[Ganymede]

You gonna print out the results of this thread and show it to Brazenburn? Just cut out the middleman and ask him/her directly.

[Nettlekid]

You seem like the kind of person to like this idea - what do you think about using Arcane Lock to fortify a barricade? Make wall out of doors and Arcane Lock them all, making a much harder wall than normal.

[Maelynn]

I have this funny mental image of the glue armored knight getting stuck to the first thing his chest or back touched.....

It's like the Golden Goose, except everything sticks to the goose and not each other.

[qube]

Theoretically would you be able to coat armor or make armor with sovereign glue? it forms an unbreakable bond so wouldn't that mean no weapon can pierce it? Also does sovereign glue act more like contact cement or a glue. I assume the latter. If you coated certain sections of your self with the stuff and waited for it to harden (leaving it off your joints) you could be immune to most damage and have an indestructible armor set right?

You have to be careful though because you don't want your hands permanently stuck to your @$$I like the idea! Considering


so on average you would need 5 legendarily rare containers of sovereign glue just to try to make this armour.
I'd say ...
AC 21
base AC 18: as full plate. Considering the idea behind full plates is that of inpenetrable stuff.
+3 bonus (so AC 21) - as highest magic armor ...
crits become normal hits - as adamantine armor
no stealth disadvantage, light weight, and everyone can be considered proficient with it
resistance to nonmagical damage (as latent ability of Armor of Invulnerability)
when you use the dodge action as action, you become immune to non-magical damage (variant on the activated ability of Armor of Invulnerability)

[Deepbluediver]

Clearly the way Sovereign Glue works is that on contact with the air it actually turns into a kind of acid, dissolving each material slightly and then allowing their mass to fuse together on a molecular level- that's why it can bind anything to anything else with an unbreakable bond.

Using it on your armor would probably cause all the joints and seems to lock up, leaving you with a very nice looking but rather useless statue.
:P

[napoleon_in_rag]

The Ancient Greeks made Linothorax armor out of linen and a glue. I understand modern testing has shown it to be quite effective.

Fiberglass, after all, is just an epoxy resin spread over a fiber lattice and you can build things like boats out of it. Use carbon fiber and you can make some of the strongest materials out there.

So a magically strong glue would make an unbelievable strong armor, especially if you used some kind of magical fiber for the lattice structure.

[Greywander]

especially if you used some kind of magical fiber for the lattice structure.
Tiny immovable rods.

[napoleon_in_rag]

Tiny immovable rods.

I was thinking something exotic and dangerous to acquire like the nose hairs of a legendary red dragon.

[Ivor_The_Mad]

What if you just coated a set of armor with the stuff making sure not to glue the pieces together then you don't have to worry about casting it or avoiding the joints. Also now all I can picture is a knight who is sort of like a cadaver collector. I can just imagine while he's fighting the other guys weapons just keep sticking to him. It would be quite useful.

[Kadesh]

What if you just coated a set of armor with the stuff making sure not to glue the pieces together then you don't have to worry about casting it or avoiding the joints. Also now all I can picture is a knight who is sort of like a cadaver collector. I can just imagine while he's fighting the other guys weapons just keep sticking to him. It would be quite useful.

Ask your DM for homebrew. Sovereign Glue makes no mention of increasing your AC when cured.

[Ganymede]

Sovereign Glue makes no mention of increasing your AC when cured.

Yeah, Sovereign Glue creates supernaturally powerful bonds between objects. It does not somehow prevent objects from being damaged or create an invincible coating in and of itself.

[Unavenger]

Just watch out for weapons coated in universal solvent.

[the_brazenburn]

You gonna print out the results of this thread and show it to Brazenburn? Just cut out the middleman and ask him/her directly.

Thanks for your lack of support in either me or my friend!:smallmad:

Actually, I'm guessing this was just a random question he decided to post. I certainly never heard anything about this.

td;rl: Not everything me and Ivor post is directed to the other one of us.