Converting wood into iron? stats needed...

[deman9090]

im wanting to know the weight of an object if it were made iron if the only listed weight is of wood originally

Large Chest: Empty Weight: 75 lb. Capacity: 6 cubic ft./? lb.

The common wooden chest comes in several sizes, including small (2 cubic feet, 1 hit point, break DC 17), medium (4 cubic feet, 15 hp, break DC 23), large (6 cubic feet, 30 hit points, break DC 29), and huge (8 cubic feet, 50 hit points, break DC 35). Most include a simple inset lock.

tried using shields as examples for a weight ratio but the numbers bounced around to much... and mundane wood and iron dont list weights per cubic inch/foot or anything as far as i can find... math is hard lol this bugs my alot though to not know... any help would be appreciated...

[Darksol the Painbringer]

There is no actual math for this sort of thing, since you can compare light/heavy wooden and metal shields and get different scaling results. (I believe light gives a 20% increase and heavy gives a 50% increase in terms of raw weight gain.) Similarly, there's no weight for Tower Shields of differing materials, since we can have wooden and metal Tower Shields, but when made of either material, it's still the same weight, presuming no other factors (such as Darkwood or Mithril).

This makes it a GM FIAT call. So, you could use real-world scaling, but A. the Shields in the book don't follow/adhere to that example, and B. If you did, you'd find that an Iron Tower Shield would weigh hundreds upon hundreds of pounds, which is both imbalanced and also not consistent with the other rules of the game.

Personally, I'd take the current Tower Shield approach, in that the weight doesn't change, merely the material it's made out of changes, due to how much it already weighs in comparison to other similarly heavy items (Full Plate, for example).

I'm also curious why you don't just get something like a Bag of Holding. Even if it's a Type IV (which is ~60 pounds IIRC), it can store a lot more space than a typical chest, and you also don't have to worry about types of materials. Hell, if you're rich enough, you could make it out of Darkleaf Cloth, but spending 22,500 gold just to make a Bag of Holding weigh 30 pounds instead of 60 pounds isn't a particularly wise way of managing your money...

[deman9090]

super necro but... im such a terrible person i made that post extremely tired i guess... i wanted to find the hardness and hit points and stats in general for a chest made of metal i guess specifically iron, based off of the stats for the wooden ones...

[Cevah]

The density of water is defined as 1.
Wood floats, so has a density less than that, but not by much, and varies by type.
Iron has a density of 7.87.
If you made the chest from the same volume of iron, it would way 7.87 times as much.
However, as iron is much stronger, you use a lot less of it.

Since a chest is designed to hold a certain max weight, sufficient strength of wood is used to handle it. Likewise, if made of iron, sufficient iron is used. In neither case would extra material be used. Since they bold hold the same amount before breaking, they probably have the same hit points.

I would go with double the normal weight.
The hardness goes from 5 (wood) to 10 (iron).
Everything else remains the same, including hit points.

/cevah

[toastedamphibian]

Id probably go with 1.5x hitpoints (In line with wood vs metal shields). Weight? Who knows. Unless someone is using magic to turn a wooden box into metal, there is not going to be a good math formula for this. Any given box is as strong and as heavy as it's creator made it.