| JDCalvert |
| 1 person marked this as FAQ candidate. |
I'm confused by the special raw material costs from the Unchained alternate crafting rules. I've had a good look and can't find anything that actually answers my question so far.
How much of a raw material do I need for, say, mithral full-plate using easily worked mithral? The normal value of mithral full-plate would be 10500 (1500 + 9000) gp, so it would cost me 2625 gp (1/4 market value as per Unchained rules) to craft it.
However, the special raw materials only give prices in per-pound quantities. For example, easily worked mithral is 800 gp/lb. There are a couple of ways you could work out how much you need.
Weight of Original Equipment
Full-plate armour weighs 50 lbs. so I need 50 lbs. of easily worked mithral to craft it. This means I have to spend 40000 (800 * 50) gp on easily worked mithral, or around 15 times as much as normal, which sounds a bit unreasonable.
Weight of Crafted Equipment
Mithral equipment weighs half as much as normal, so I only need 25 lbs. of easily-worked mithral to make it. Calculations as above, I still have to spend 20000 gp on mithral instead of 2625.
I think this makes more sense than the first option (though still unreasonable), as the various special mithral materials are the most expensive per-pound from all the special materials, even more than adamantine despite normal adamantine being more expensive than normal mithral.
Double the Usual Cost
Mithral full-plate requires 2625 gp of mithral to craft from. I buy it for 2625 gp and it is worth 2625 gp for crafting purposes. Special materials are only worth half their value for crafting purposes. I still need 2625 gp craft-worth of mithral, which means I need to spend 5250 gp on easily-worked mithral to make my full plate.
While this, I think, is more reasonable on a cost-benefit level, it seems to defeat the point of the different special materials having different prices.
Like I've said, I had a good look and couldn't find any satisfactory answers for this, so I'm really interested to hear what people have to say.
Cheers,