Let's talk special materials

[16bearswutIdo]

Special materials referring to things like mithril, adamantite, monster hide, etc.

Is it reasonable for these materials to not be readily available from blacksmiths? For mithril and adamantite especially, aren't they supposed to be very rare material? Generally I've played the acquisition of mithril/adamantine gear as "There's a guy who knows how to work the metal, if you bring him some he can forge you something" and then offering up the location of a cave with such metal to the PCs. I was recently discussing this tactic with another DM, and he said that's unreasonable because I wouldn't do the same for an iron weapon or steel weaponry.

How do y'all handle special materials if your PCs are looking for it, but aren't really suitably high enough level to just start with it or something like that? Obviously, the availability is fairly setting-specific, but I was wondering how other DMs feel.

[Diarmuid]

The rarity/scarcity is basically worked into the cost for these things. If you make your players jump through all kinds of hoops to get the metal and then find a special person who can work it, are you still going to charge them the full price for the item in question?

Do you similarly make casters jump through hoops for their bracers of armor and/or headband of wisdom/intelligence?

[16bearswutIdo]

The rarity/scarcity is basically worked into the cost for these things. If you make your players jump through all kinds of hoops to get the metal and then find a special person who can work it, are you still going to charge them the full price for the item in question?



Solid point. Nope, generally the PCs would get the item at a severe discount (I'm talking like 90+% discount, charged only for the time/labor of the smithy). I guess I just find it pretty difficult to imagine that a smithy has mithril or adamantite just sitting around his shop, ready to be worked when some adventurer comes sauntering in. Even less likely that he has fully forged mithril/adamantine items ready to sell. To me, it's a bit like walking into a blacksmith and buying dragonhide off the shelf.



Do you similarly make casters jump through hoops for their bracers of armor and/or headband of wisdom/intelligence?

Yeah, kind of. If there's no wizard in town, they're not just gonna be able to go to a random blacksmith and buy a magical headband. If the only wizard in town has a low CL, the town probably doesn't have Wands of Greater Invisibility available.

[liquidformat]

honestly I think you already answered your own questions. First off depends on setting and location inside that setting; second depends on the level of your PCs and the places they visit. Sure I wouldn't expect them to be able to walk into some backwater town with a population of a couple hundred people and procure adamtine, mithril, dragon bone, and so on and so forth. However, if they are walking into the premier blacksmith shop of a metropolis then having special materials isn't out of the question, though might take a few days for a custom ordered item like that.

So in a low magic, setting going on a subquest to locate both the smith with the skills to forge your item as well as finding said materials seems like an ok replacement to WBL as long as the pricing is reduced. The thing to remember is that fetch quests like this can be fun every once in a while for very special things; however, they get to be obnoxious if you have to spend most of your sessions role playing hunting down every last piece of equipment...

[ExLibrisMortis]

The gp cost for mithril and adamantine items suggests that they are generally found in cities (gp limit 15 000+), with only the cheapest items (mithril light armour, adamantine weapons/bundles of arrows) found in large towns (gp limit 3000).

[Mister Rex]

The rarity and scarcity of "rare materials" is balanced by cost and by narrative or setting. In the Pathfinder Golarion setting, adamantine is a meteorite metal with a very small supply, which is why its so expensive.

[Falontani]

In Eberron those rare metals are seemingly much more abundant, I'd expect every smith certified by house Cannith knows how to procure and work both adamantine and mithril. Other material types such as Dragonbone, Dragonhide, and byeshk are the rarer materials.

[Fizban]

DMG2 has a provision for making some "materials" extra rare: the weapon and armor templates (which are basically a second layer of modifications like a material) which require a certain species or extraplanar location of smithing have fairly low gp costs, but the cost is multiplied by x15 to determine if it's within the purchase limit of a population center.

As for the PHB materials:
-Mithral is pretty foundational to the AC limits in the base game, as it effectively increases the AC cap by +2. It ought to be available by the time those concerns are a factor, but I wouldn't mind if mithral light armor and shields were harder to find than +1s.
-Adamantine is required to bypass certain DRs without a caster but its hardness bypassing, though often inflated (adamantine doesn't beat adamantine, or mithral with a +3 bonus or higher, or magically reinforced steel), is still pretty ridiculous, and I don't like how it's often thrown in the golf bag like it's expected.
-Cold Iron and Alchemical Silver are of course much cheaper and are basically just fantasy processed iron and silver, so I don't see any reason to restrict them outside of normal.
-Darkwood I usually forget, it's so inoffensive.
-Dragonhide is a farce. It's only properties are to get around a major Druid restriction, and gum of the works of half a dozen systems and assumptions by assigning prices to pieces to one of the most iconic and intelligent monster groups in the game, practially begging you to re-orient any ethical questions around whether dragons are "people" and just being a terrible idea for any Good character to exist alongside.

Various other materials exist in regional and setting books, and restricting those to the appropriate regions is fine. Magic of Faerun has a bunch of minor metals with some energy resist or +1 damage (as well as a more expensive silver with no penalty) and I think those are just fine anywhere. Frystalline and Serren Wood (BoED) are very significant and should probably be considered, whichever way you go. I'd have no problem with widely available Chitin, except it doesn't really make sense that it's more expensive and just plain better than steel- Wildwood and Blue Ice have +dex properties with tradeoffs and could be rare-region. Pearlsteel is another material that should be more significant (I've buffed it a bit) but would be very regional. Deep Crystal also seems like it ought to only be available where there's enough psionics around for its properties to be known. Bronzewood/Ironwood/Bluewood etc are just more versions of "let the Druid have literally everything," with Bluewood also giving the weight benefit of Mithral even cheaper, I'd just ban them.

[Biggus]

I agree with the others who say that you'd generally only expect mithral and adamantine to be freely available in big cities, but there may be exceptions. Towns on a major trade route would be more likely to have unusual items for sale, likewise towns near to where they're mined or with close links to the local dwarven community.

[Crake]

When I run fairly low magic games, namely using the e6 format, I actually substitute special materials (of which there are actually a lot across all the sourcebooks) out for magic items, and I also lower the GP limit of population centers to make it so that many of them are not expected to be readily available. Then I roll off a few items, see what special items are available beyond the normal GP limit of the center, and say that traveling merchants have brought in special items to trade.

Generally speaking though, players can buy things "to order", a blacksmith will spend the time sourcing the material, and crafting the item, but as we all know, things can take a long time to craft, and it may be well over a year for some of the more expensive items before they're completed for the players. Thankfully, since these things would generally be considered "end game" items in e6, the players are more than happy to wait, either taking a bit of downtime to do some non-adventuring stuff, or simply carrying on adventuring and being excited for the day that their new weapon or armor is completed.

[RatElemental]

Adamantine in particular I like to fluff as being very hard to refine from ore, but it's still readily available in a large enough city through recycling. Once had the local smith's guild drag out a reclaimed adamantine door when my player asked to buy some to craft with. Got a few chuckles.

[Ashiel]

Solid point. Nope, generally the PCs would get the item at a severe discount (I'm talking like 90+% discount, charged only for the time/labor of the smithy). I guess I just find it pretty difficult to imagine that a smithy has mithril or adamantite just sitting around his shop, ready to be worked when some adventurer comes sauntering in. Even less likely that he has fully forged mithril/adamantine items ready to sell. To me, it's a bit like walking into a blacksmith and buying dragonhide off the shelf.

Communities already have gp limits that take care of these issues. Assuming Pathfinder standards (which are more conservative than 3.x), a typical thorpe has a gp limit of 50 gp, while a large city has 8,000 gp. If you look at the cost modifiers on things like mithril and adamantine they are simply too expensive to be found regularly in most communities. Even a mithril chain shirt is +1,000 gp. A mithril heavy armor is +9,000 gp which means you can only reliably find such in a metropolis.

Dragonhide is easier to find, but dragons are also easier to find. Not all dragonhide armor is necessarily made out of true dragons and there are lots of other types of dragons in most fantasy worlds (wyverns normally reach gargantuan size in 3.x), and the half-dragon template can very easily represent common lesser wyrms (the more traditional big dumb fire breathing lizards that don't have sorcerer casting and stuff) that are relatively low in CR and could be feasibly hunted regularly. Even with that being the case, as a special material it is subject to the same community GP limits as magic items, and since the minimum cost for dragonhide armor is twice the cost of a masterwork version of the same, you wouldn't be able to find padded (310 gp) dragonhide in thorpes or hamlets, and wouldn't be able to find full plate (3,300 gp) in anything smaller than a small city.

[Crake]

Communities already have gp limits that take care of these issues. Assuming Pathfinder standards (which are more conservative than 3.x), a typical thorpe has a gp limit of 50 gp, while a large city has 8,000 gp. If you look at the cost modifiers on things like mithril and adamantine they are simply too expensive to be found regularly in most communities. Even a mithril chain shirt is +1,000 gp. A mithril heavy armor is +9,000 gp which means you can only reliably find such in a metropolis.

Dragonhide is easier to find, but dragons are also easier to find. Not all dragonhide armor is necessarily made out of true dragons and there are lots of other types of dragons in most fantasy worlds (wyverns normally reach gargantuan size in 3.x), and the half-dragon template can very easily represent common lesser wyrms (the more traditional big dumb fire breathing lizards that don't have sorcerer casting and stuff) that are relatively low in CR and could be feasibly hunted regularly. Even with that being the case, as a special material it is subject to the same community GP limits as magic items, and since the minimum cost for dragonhide armor is twice the cost of a masterwork version of the same, you wouldn't be able to find padded (310 gp) dragonhide in thorpes or hamlets, and wouldn't be able to find full plate (3,300 gp) in anything smaller than a small city.

Worth noting that in pathfinder, communities also have randomly generated magic items, which technically Dragonhide Plate, despite being nonmagical, is still treated as a "specific magic item" on the pathfinder random loot generation, and could appear when rolling for the extra randomly generated magical items, alongside the mithril shirt, even when it might be outside the normal GP limit of the town.

Also worth noting that something under the GP limit in pathfinder isn't a 100% guarantee, it's actually only 75% that it's available in any given week.

[Ashiel]

Worth noting that in pathfinder, communities also have randomly generated magic items, which technically Dragonhide Plate, despite being nonmagical, is still treated as a "specific magic item" on the pathfinder random loot generation, and could appear when rolling for the extra randomly generated magical items, alongside the mithril shirt, even when it might be outside the normal GP limit of the town.

Also worth noting that something under the GP limit in pathfinder isn't a 100% guarantee, it's actually only 75% that it's available in any given week.

I didn't bother mentioning the randomly generated items because the odds of getting the item you want out of the sea of possibilities is like winning the lottery.

Also at a 75% chance per week of availability, that's something you can count on. It's not a matter of if but when, and statistically they probably have about 3 available, sometimes more, sometimes less.