Sorry if this has already been asked, but the search turned up 270+ pages for masterwork, and I wasn't willing to scour over a decade's worth of threads. We've been taking a "rules as written" approach and tried to limit houseruling as much as we can because we're all pretty new.
I was running Rise of the Runelords last night, and a player of mine had looted a masterwork horsechopper, and some dogchoppers off of the goblins at the Swallowtail festival, and was hoping to sell them off at the Armory. I told him the items would be bought by the vendor at 50% of the stated cost, and that because the horsechopper was masterwork, it's cost was worth the base item +300gp (so 50% of that.) One of my other players took issue with this because he felt that goblin smiths would not be capable of crafting an item that would be considered masterwork by humans/elves/dwarves, and that an item that would be masterwork in the eyes of a goblin would just be a standard item as far as a human smith would be concerned, and thus should not fetch a higher price.
My interpretation of the rules is that "Masterwork" is a game term, like a meta-designation from the player/GM perspective that imparts the properties +1 on attack and +300 to base cost, regardless of the culture of origin of that item. I get where he's coming from that the standards of a goblin craftsman would be far below the standards of a dwarven smith, however as a game mechanic "Masterwork" is not subjective, but a specific property like +1 or "reach weapon" or "fragile." Basically in much the same way as a character in game wouldn't say "Ohhh that's a +1 longsword" but rather "Hmmm that's an enchanted blade" the characters wouldn't say "that's a masterwork horsechopper" but instead something like "Ohh this is a finely crafted horsechopper" or something along those lines.
My lore justification for this is that every race is capable of producing prodigies or geniuses, and that while the average tribe-smith churning out dogchoppers for raids is the musician equivalent of a guy at a house party picking up a guitar and strumming out "wonderwall", there also exist the Mozarts of the goblin smithing world, and they would surely be capable of churning out a masterwork item. Anyways sorry for the long post, but other GMs please weigh in, is Masterwork a specific item category that always has the same properties regardless of origin? OR is the Masterwork quality of an item subjective of the culture that crafts it?
