I'm removing alignments as per this blog-post.
One of the effects of this is that outsiders (or anyone else for that matter) can't have damage reduction bypassed by aligned weapons.
Thus, I have decided to add a new material, besides adamantine, cold-iron and silver, which bypasses appropriate damage reduction. The working name is azure bronze, made from ordinary copper and a special type of of tin originating in worlds beyond the material plane.
I need help with writing appropriate rules and pricing the material in a balanced way. I want it to be considerably better than cold-iron or alchemical silver. It would also be nice if azure bronze could give something nice to martials, a way for them to help casters.
Azure bronze can be used to make any item normally made from metal.
Weapons made of azure bronze disrupts magical defences. A creature damaged by an azure bronze weapon have a 10% risk of loosing 5 points of spell resistance until the end of its next turn. This effect does not stack, nor can it reduce spell resistance below 5.
HP/inch 30; Hardness 10; Weight as steel
Is this reasonable at all? How should I price weapons made of azure bronze? I'm guessing it should at least cost as much as adamantine, i.e. +3000 gp.
If alignment is gone, why bother trying to create a separate fix for items that ignore DR at all? There are already (theoretically) balanced items and magic enhancements in place for this.
If nothing else, change the Bane property from a +1 enhancement to a +2 enhancement and allow bane weapons to ignore the DR that used to be based on alignment for the chosen creature type. (Same price as if a weapon were both Bane and Holy/Unholy)
If you'd rather not go this far, than use the same crafting rules as for reliquary items, and make the weapon "attuned" vs a given creature type, as a sort of "bane light". Same way that aligned weapons turned out to be a sort of "holy light" weapon.
No need, necessarily, to overthink the loss of alignment restrictions.
If alignment is gone, why bother trying to create a separate fix for items that ignore DR at all? There are already (theoretically) balanced items and magic enhancements in place for this.
I'm doing it because the third part of the instructions on removing alignments I'm using suggests inventing a forth DR-relevant material for this purpose.
I will consider your suggestions and talk it through with my players.
No matter the outcome, I'm still rather curious about my intended property for azure bronze. Is it reasonable to have a chance of reducing spell resistance? Is it overpowered, or completely irrelevant?
Sorry. Was approaching it from the primary standpoint of the loss of alignment as a factor in bypassing DR, not so much from the standpoint of having a non-magical material that bypasses spell resistance.
There is already something that does this in game, for a minimum price of around 32,000GP.
This special ability can only be placed on melee weapons. A nullifying weapon suppresses a creature's spell resistance for a short amount of time. Anytime the weapon strikes a creature with spell resistance and the creature takes damage from the weapon, the target's spell resistance is reduced by 1 for 1 minute. On a confirmed critical hit, its spell resistance is instead reduced by an amount equal to the weapon's critical multiplier. Multiple hits from a nullifying weapon stack.
With the nullifying magic property it would probably take several rounds of attacks (at least) to build up the deficit in SR to -5, given that anything that has a large enough SR to be a problem will probably have a corresponding AC that is also a problem. - (Whoever has the Nullifying weapon will have to be able to hit 5 times within 9 rounds, in order that the 10th round will have the -5 deficit)
Azure bronze can be used to make any item normally made from metal.
Weapons made of azure bronze disrupts magical defences. A creature damaged by an azure bronze weapon have a 10% risk of loosing 5 points of spell resistance until the end of its next turn. This effect does not stack, nor can it reduce spell resistance below 5.
HP/inch 30; Hardness 10; Weight as steel
Now, from the way I'm reading your suggested implementation of "Azure Bronze", I would tend to interpret this as more or less equivalent to the nullifying magic weapon property. - It's better in the respect that a single strike has the benefit of causing a -5 deficit to SR, where the magical property would take several round to build up. - It's worse in that (theoretically), a higher level character create a deficit to SR equivalent to 10 rounds of his iterative attacks striking the target- if he were extremely lucky. - Given that the chance of 'activation' of the special property is 10%, lasts for one round, and the deficit is pegged at -5... I would tend to interpret this as being equivalent on the whole.
Is this reasonable at all? How should I price weapons made of azure bronze? I'm guessing it should at least cost as much as adamantine, i.e. +3000 gp.
I'm not great with statistical analysis, however, so you may want someone else to do the number crunching in comparison. - I would cost your special material as a percentage relative to the Nullifying enchantment. - If your idea is only half as good as nullifying magic property, for example, than your "Azure Bronze" should cost about half as much as this magical property.
As far as relevance. A means to defeat SR of an opponent is always nice, so your suggested material might actually have a worthwhile niche to fill.
If you were looking at a material that would provide SR to a character, than I would call the effort pointless. (I've never seen a point to having SR as a character, as in my experience nothing ever gets stopped by player character SR, except for other player character spells. - By the time someone can afford an SR granting item, everything else is already more than powerful enough to bypass that level of SR easily.)
Why not making more exotic effects than the usual "get hit, lose that" or "get hit, ignore that" of the standard materials?
Maybe the azure bronze is poisonous for creature with spell resistance and when they are hit, they get an affliction which reduces progressively their SR.
It should be an injury poison with no onset time. It should cause the loss of 1d4 or 1d6 points of SR per tick (your choice). Heal with two consecutive saves. DC 10 + 1/2 BAB of the attacker + Str (for melee weapons) or Dex (for ranged weapons) modifier. Duration of the affliction based on the base die of the weapon (the DM rolls that die on the first hit and each subsequent hit acts as an additional dose of poison adding to that roll).
Lost SR returns at 1d4 or 1d6 points per day (same die as the poisonous effect), double if assisted by a healer.
Since it's a material with at least partial extraplanar origin, azure bronze should be pretty high in price. It's not something you can find at the market or mine from an underground vein.