Darkwoord or Mithral?

[K-kun the Insane]

A scythe has a long wooden handle and a metal blade...Is it mostly metal and thus costs 5000gp to halve it's weight (and count as silver), or is it mostly wood and thus cost 418gp to halve it's weight? Or worst case scenario, is it partially wood and not primarily metal and thus unable to weigh half except if it's a smaller size category?

[wraithstrike]

A weapon with a metal blade such as a sword is going to need mithral.

[Ashram]

By RAW, the functional piece is the blade, which means that to get the half weight reduction you'd need to make it mithral.

[Nefreet]

It's a two-handed weapon whose bulk is in its shaft. I'd say Darkwood would qualify just fine.

If we look at the cost of Darkwood, we see that it's priced as a masterwork weapon with an added cost of 10gp/lb.

So, for a Scythe, all you're really doing is grabbing a masterwork blade and paying extra for the handle. It should cost a total of 418gp.

Makes sense to me.

[Imbicatus]

From the PRD:

Darkwood wrote:

This rare magic wood is as hard as normal wood but very light. Any wooden or mostly wooden item (such as a bow or spear) made from darkwood is considered a masterwork item and weighs only half as much as a normal wooden item of that type. Items not normally made of wood or only partially of wood (such as a battleaxe or a mace) either cannot be made from darkwood or do not gain any special benefit from being made of darkwood. The armor check penalty of a darkwood shield is lessened by 2 compared to an ordinary shield of its type. To determine the price of a darkwood item, use the original weight but add 10 gp per pound to the price of a masterwork version of that item.

Darkwood has 10 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 5.

Since a battleaxe is clearly called out as not having any special benefit from being darkwood, and a scythe has more in common with a battleaxe than a spear, I'd rule on needing mithral.

[default]

I would almost allow both at the cost of Mithral...Lacquered darkwood handle with mithral blade...oooh shiny...

[B. A. Robards-Debardot]

I'd buy it at the cost of darkwood, if you really need the silver effect you could have the blade made of silversheen.

That being said, you should get both for the price of mithral.

Now if you wanted an all metal scythe (and if you're going to use a scythe you might as well go Metal, dude), things get even fuzzier.

[Joesi]

It specifically says that if a significant portion of weight is from metal than it will not benefit from being dark wood (will not half weight).

That said, since maybe only half the weight is in the blade, you'd only need to spend somewhere around 2500-3000 gold for the blade part.

At that point using common sense, one should reason that the other half should be able to gain the haf-weight benefit from dark wood (around 350 gold)

It's unnecessarily expensive to make a weapon mithral in my opinion, so might as well cut them a break.

A half-weight greatsword or falchion might cost more, but not much more (since they weigh less), and they do more damage, so I'd say it's balanced.