Weight of "Goods and Services" Equipment?

[Mok]

I'm trying to figure out the weight for the wide array of items under the "Goods and Services" area of equipment.

There isn't listed any weight difference in items, save for one specific exception. If you look at the footnote on page 159 it states that certain items are only x0.25 in weight for small sized characters.

When you look over the list of items that have this footnote, it seems that the theme was "soft" items or something made of cloth are what get this reduction in weight. My guess is that because these items are made of some kind of cloth-like material the weight drops off very quickly because these items aren't very dense.

Everything else which is "hard" weighs the same regardless of size. This seems odd because there are a wide variety of items that ought to fit to certain sizes, just as weapons do.

My guess is that the designers didn't want to have to break things into three different categories:

First, small cloth items.

Second, items that can scale between small and medium (such as a miner's pick).

Third, items that are the same regardless of the size (such as a 10' pole).

It seems that the designers felt that this stuff was close enough, that even scaled it isn't worth the detail.

But what happens if you want to simulate things beyond the "human-centric" experience?

Examples:

How much should clothing for a large sized humanoid weigh? Normally weapons are two times the weight, but this "soft" factor would imply that it wouldn't be as heavy, perhaps 1.5 times the weight?

Swing to the other end, what happens with tiny sized clothing? With a weight reduction of x0.25 for small, and tiny sized armor has a weight reduction of x0.1, it seems as if tiny sized cloth items would be minuscule in weight, like x.025!

Another tricky situation is volume. In the footnote it details that containers for small characters are one-quarter the volume, but the only containers that have this footnote are things like waterskins. This footnote isn't detailing things like flasks of oil, or acid flasks. These are evidently a once sized fits all category.

What happens though if these get upscaled to large size? Double the damage on acid burns, etc?

[d20pfsrd.com]

I see weights here...

[Mok]

d20pfsrd.com wrote:

I see weights here...

Yeah, but there are no guidelines on modifying the weight for different sizes, beyond the "soft" items.

Like, how heavy is a fine sized Artisan's outfit?

[Kilbourne]

Take your kitchen scale, and then two sweat-socks into it.

That's the weight of a Fine-sized outfit of cloth.

[Gorbacz]

I'm not seeing that as an issue, unless you are playing a Halfling who just got jumped on by Shadows ...

[Mok]

Gorbacz wrote:

I'm not seeing that as an issue, unless you are playing a Halfling who just got jumped on by Shadows ...

I don't want to spoil things for players, but one issue in my current campaign is that you can play Tiny sized and Large sized races right from the start.

So part of it just trying to establish the weight for all of the equipment at those scales.

But yeah, the weight of fine sized clothing will come into play eventually in the campaign :)

The problem is that the rulebook, and it seems every version from 3.0 on, has never properly laid out the whole scale of weights for all of the objects, and even when armor is provided with a complete scaling it doesn't seem to follow a clear pattern to establish "game physics."

[Gorbacz]

It likely more has to do with the Core Rulebook being designed with players playing Small and Medium races in mind, with Tiny and Large being usually reduced to occsional use of Enlarge/Reduce Person :)

Personally, I never worried about the weight, unless extreme situations are involved (Belkar and his mountain of coins from OOTS). Also, D&D goes rather quick into Bag of Holding/Handy Haversack, Teleport, Shrink Item territory, making encumbrance and other mundane issues moot. So might want to consider the need of making a realistic physics system in light of magic taking over the problem at some point. :)

[Mok]

Gorbacz wrote:

Personally, I never worried about the weight, unless extreme situations are involved (Belkar and his mountain of coins from OOTS). Also, D&D goes rather quick into Bag of Holding/Handy Haversack, Teleport, Shrink Item territory, making encumbrance and other mundane issues moot. So might want to consider the need of making a realistic physics system in light of magic taking over the problem at some point. :)

I hadn't really either, until confronted with it due to players playing at these sizes from the get go. Suddenly the players were asking lots of "nitty gritty" questions, thus the need to figure out the complete "physics" of the game.

But to top it off... it's a low magic game, so finding just one bag of holding will likely be a revelation to the players. The campaign has a big focus on the mundane, so sorting out all of this so that the players have clear guidelines on how to scale all of their equipment becomes important.

That is another aspect of the world, because there is a tiny race, there is an economy of tiny things out there, the tiny race isn't being forced to have to deal with human or hobbit scale mundane items, so there is kind of a need to work it all out.