Are the tower shields made of wood only or can they be made of metal as well. The reason I ask is I have a tank dwarf who wears adamantine hellknight plate and a tower shield. The main question is can he get a adamantine tower shield as well or at least mithral to reduce the weight?
As written, they explicitly state it is made of wood.
As a houserule, we have allowed it to be made of other materials. You have to agree on a 'steel weight' and then modify from there. We use 60lbs if it's not made of wood...
Note: For some reason they halved the weight of wood when applying mithral to this item, it's not unreasonable to houserule it to weigh more because it likely should (metal items may be thinner than wooden ones, but there's a practical limit to that reduction, and comparing the few items that exist with both materials suggests steel increases the weight by ~50%; the 60lbs suggestion seems quite reasonable in this regard)
It's also enough weight, that I'd consider increasing the ACP as well, since we're already talking houserules and the item was never really intended to be made from metal.
Sadly, there is little logic to how wood/steel weights scale, it's a 20% increase for a light shield, but 50% for large...
We just arbitrarily stated that 60lbs was a good 'steel weight' for the tower shield and have used it ever since.
So yes, mithral would only be 30lbs, but DAMN are you gonna pay for that. :D
The reason I was thinking of doing this was because of the fact that I play for the purpose of roleplaying and not just whats on the paper. So I came up with the idea of a dwarf who would tank to keep his comrades safe and so he picked the sturdiest materials he could for each aspect so adamantine hellknight plate for his body, but noticed that the towershield was wood only which confused me since the other shields had a steel version.
There is a specific magic item (the Force Tower) that is a mithral tower shield with magic abilities. It weighs 22 lbs.
EDIT: missing parenthesis
I agree, it's fairly hard to adjudicate based on available examples.
From a simulationist standpoint, a quick search indicates that iron is 9-10x more dense than oak, so the question primarily becomes one of difference in volume, because equal volume would be nearly impossible to use in combat.
It likely wouldn't be as thick, because iron/steel is far tougher than wood.
The tower shields in pathfinder are a little more than twice the weight of Roman Scutum(your basic phalanx shield) which are laminated wood. I'm pretty sure that's as close as we get to a proper tower shield, even boosting the weight for people larger than a roman you end up with a shield not much heavier.
for some other shield references, there's this list giving us a weight by square foot breakdown of 2.75 lbs. That makes our pathfinder tower shield 16 square feet of shield. You shouldn't need an action to take cover behind a house door.
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/shield_and_weapon_weights.html
I think the weight is just random and basing the steel shield weight directly off the wood weight makes as much sense as anything else. I'd recommend dropping the weight down to the 20lbs for a roman tower and not letting that change at all based on material type.
I'm not sure on that. Looking through that thread at the pavises the full sized ones have Y-shaped grips on the back that are quite high and probably couldn't be used while moving around. The smaller ones are small shields strapped to the forearm and don't look like anything special.
Mantlets don't look like single person objects either, and some of the art in the pavise thread shows many people huddled behind pushing mantlets forward.
I agree that the pavise is probably what inspired the shield design, but its use seems to be more like a Scutum. Maybe it's some fantasy hybrid of the two.
Putting aside real world conversations, 20lbs would be wildly light in the context of the existing rules...
As is, a WOODEN tower shield is already 45 pounds.
The heavy steel shield is 15.
For the sake of game balance, I suggest 60lb. We have used it for a while and it seems to work.
That being said, I hate tower shields, always have. :D