Cost of Metal


Homebrew and House Rules


Hey folks,

I'm about to start a campaign in a very dark suns-esque setting. The campaign is low magic, with an emphasis on survival and crafting over the traditional murder-monsters dungeons. I have changed the crafting process/time to make it more viable as a player option and plan on giving out crafting materials as part of monster kills, like skinning a dragon [only in this case they would probably be skinning wolves]. Some monsters might have things useful for making weapons like sturdy bones, or chemical things like pheromone glands for alchemy.

Which brings me to a small problem.

One of the things I want to do as a really good reward is give them metal [rare in this world] but I'm having trouble placing a Gold cost per pound of metal that is consistent with crafting costs of items. The weight per gold value is important because they will need to haul the resources from where they found it to where it is usable.

An example of the problem;

The crafting cost of full plate armor is 500 gp and weighs 50 pounds while the crafting cost of half-plate is 200 gp and weighs 50 pounds.

The gp per pounds of full plate is then 10, while the gp per pound of half plate is 4. This is a very large difference and I have a few ideas but would like some input before proposing them to the group/

1. Decide on some price per pound for the carry weight but then not care about it during crafting. They can spend 50 pounds worth of metal to make a 25 pound item or they could spend 25 pounds of metal making a 50 pound item, as long as the gold value works out.

This makes for less complexity at the cost of realism, especially if players start wondering where the extra pounds are coming from/going.

2. Set a very low cost per pound based on the crafting cost of a dagger. This puts the price per pound at about .60 gp per pound. Then when crafting require them to spend the minimum pounds of the metal for the item and then allow them to use ''universal'' crafting materials [ie fuel cost, sanding, chemical finish, etc...] that I don't track as strictly to pay for the remaining crafting cost.

This option seems to be more realistic and avoids the losing/gaining pounds issue, but does end up making them track more materials.

Any ideas/comments?


Don't go by a gold piece value/weight system. It just falls completely flat. Especially when you start looking at weapons. Instead just get a rough estimate of how much metal weight they have, and if they have access to a place where they can forge metal, let them rework the metal they have with a slight loss, say 10 to 20% depending on how well they roll their craft skill.

One thing to think of in a Darksun type world, not very many people would be very skilled working hard metals like steel, the characters might need to have an entirely separate skill for working metal items, and use the regular craft skills for making things out of bone, wood, obsidian.

I hope you have good fortune with the survival type aspect of the game. Although I love trying to do that as a GM, players just never seem to like it. They don't want to keep track of food and water, fatigue, heat stroke, etc.


Thanks. I have one player who's already not happy about tracking inventory weight but the rest are pretty excited.

I did rearrange crafting to go by material used rather than what's made. So Craft; Bone can make anything conceivably made of bone assuming they roll high enough, while craft Wood or Metal is the same. So in a sense they have a separate skill, except I didn't include a softer metal.

Hmmm... I was hoping not to do a rewrite of value.


So there's a table here (scroll down quite a bit) for treating metal as a trade good. But it basically leads to what you already noticed, similar weights clearly can't have the same amount of iron in them. Some of it is probably extras (I think plate mail usually came with its own chain mail?) but much of it is probably time and effort needed to craft it just right.

Honestly, with metal rarer you probably need to recalculate the costs of all of the armors based on how much metal is used in them. I really do not recommend doing that though. It sounds like a lot of work for little benefit.

So, do what Pathfinder has always done in this situation. Abstract away. Require a certain amount of metal to make metal armor of that category. Maybe 5 lbs of iron for light armor, 10 for medium, 20 for heavy? Maybe make plate special at 30 lbs?


I did see that table and thought it clearly must be wrong. Even in a non-rare scenario, it means only 5 gp of the 500 gp crafting cost of full plate is the iron... leaving 495 gp to nebulous crafting materials.

I will suggest to my crew something more arbitrary like you suggested, with light armor needing X amount, medium needing Y amount, and heavy needing Z amount.

Of course, then I'd need to decide amounts for simple, martial, and exotic, etc...

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