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So I'm just wondering if you have a mithral weapon/armour can you plate it to change the look while still retaining its weight properties. Say you wanted gold armour rather than silver could you theoretically get mithral armour then gold plate it so it looks like gold armour, is still light and all you give up is its acting as silver since you've covered it over?
Same with other exotic metals like adamantium can you plate all or part of them to adjust the look get a purple dragon on the armour chestguard, make an adamantium sword more silvery than black?
Aesthetical choices are always up to the players and/or DM... there are no rules for altering aesthetics outside of the use of the Glammered enchantment, but that is meant more for disguising one's armor or weapon rather than altering the aesthetic.
Gold plated items in the real world have a negligible difference in weight from the non-gold plated original item, so with that information at hand, there is no mechanical reason to disallow it. So long as an understanding is made that plating only provides an aesthetic, no mechanical benefits. Meaning if someone had an Adamantine plated Mithral Breastplate, it would only have the stats and benefits of a Mithral Breastplate.
Yup.
Something like Gold Plating the GM might add a cost to, but if you can afford Mithral the gold plating should be a negligable cost. I'd probably just make it a part of the cost for MW armour (so no extra cost if your armour is masterwork).
On a related note, for all your non-shiny aesthetic needs, try Kikko Armour! Any relatively heavy garment you want with handy plates inside it to keep you safe! Goes perfectly with mithral for a less weighty pseudo-light armour!
If you want the gold-plated aesthetic, I'd rationalize it being not ACTUAL gold in order to keep the weight and price down. And hey, I'm sure there's some Shocking Grasp Magus sitting around with a metallurgy hobby to help you invent an electroplating process!
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Well I was thinking plating as in the actual plating process not plate as in plate armour as it were. If my memories of learning about it are ccorrect your looking at .5 to 2.5 microns thick when its plated and that's thinner than a human bloodcell (a human hair is 75 microns thick). So plating a full suit of plate probably wouldn't even use that much gold.
I'm pretty sure they had gold plating in the golarion equivilent period it just wouldn't be that common. I mean you've got the 2,000+ year old Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar which also has over 4,500 diamonds the largest of which is 72 carats.
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Actually gold was largely an example of special materials since I'm not sure you can brass plate things.
What got me thinking about this my work on making a swashbuckler character and looking far more indepth on swords than I have in the past and finding out a bunch of basic facts about guards specifically bowl ones where one of the biggest issues is weight vs strength. Make a solid, strong guard and you increase the weight, make a lighter guard for a better sword (in terms of using it) and you wind up with a guard that can crumple or provide insufficient protection. So I was thinking about replacing the steel guard/hilt with a mithral one that would be just as strong as steel but far lighter for the same amount of material. Say the guard is 1/5 of the total sword weight and you switch that to mithral you now have a guard weighing a bit over a tenth of the total weight without reducing the size/protection capability.
However while silver guard, steel/silver blade does have a certain appeal I prefer the silver/steel blade, brass/goldy guard, red leather padding inside and white sharkskin hilt. Possibly with a katana's black silk wrapping, some jewels and the like on the pommel though I'm not sure what that would do to the weapon function. Research continues.
So I was wondering could you brass plate mithral for the look while retaining the function of a lighter guard but still very strong guard and that got me pondering in general what are the rules on plating one material over another in pathfinder.
EDIT
Picture this with a bowl guard over the top of the hand instead of the extended crossguard, some red padding inside, a silvery mithral blade, white sharkskin instead of the gold hilt and maybe a jewel in place of that orb at the bottom.
http://myarmoury.com/talk/files/10.jpg
Any sort of plating is going to get scratched up really fast the way adventurers use their armor. A yellow varnish of some sort might be the most field-repairable form of golden armor.
Mithral is hard and light. If you want to add heavy and soft metal on top, you are kinda negating the advantage of mithral to begin with.
Why are you trying to use modern scientific methods in a fantasy game? In a world where wizards can create pocket dimensions or grant wishes, they should be able to alter the appearance of an item.
The cantrip prestidigitation can color an item for 1 hour per level of the caster. Talk to your GM about using that as a basis for creating a custom magic item that alters the appearance of the item to what you want it to look like. The enchantment glamored is fairly cheap and this is a lot less versatile so should be even cheaper.
Plating is going to look like crap after the item is used. After a few hits the plating is going to be so scratched up that it will make it look cheap. If this is done on the edge of a weapon it may also degrade the edge. Also the act of sharpening he weapon is going to remove the plating from the edge.
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I'm not thinking of plating the blade just the guard. Also its not modern the earliest plating (as opposed to wrapping one metal in another) go back to Roman times.
Pliny the Elder was the first to describe the process in the first century CE. In this process, also called fire gilding, small pieces of gold were mixed with mercury in a one-to-eight ratio, creating a viscous amalgam that could be brushed onto the surface of a substrate. Once complete, the object was then heated until the mercury vaporized, leaving behind the gold plating. This technique was also called the Lost Apprentice Technique because the process created toxic mercury fumes, which, when combined with poor ventilation, resulted in mercury poisoning that destroyed the sanity of and then killed gilders after about four coatings.
I assume in Golarion with magic, alchemists and the like I can plate the guard of a weapon.
Plating is very thin as in thinner than human hair so it wouldn't do much to weight though it would impact the siler ability but on the guard that's not a big deal.
By RAW gold plating increases normal weight by 50%.
Are you looking for a specific mechanical benefit for this mithral guard plated in gold, or is this just some in-depth descriptive stuff?
If it's the prior, then...masterwork. a plus 1 on attack rolls is about as much benefit as I think would be reasonable to expect for something so small.
If it's the latter, then who cares? your sword is awesome because you spent lots of money on it and it looks like you want it to.
if you haven't before, I would suggest taking a look at The Princess Bride. The novel, that is. the passages that involve sword making Could possibly give you some ideas.
Plating is very thin as in thinner than human hair so it wouldn't do much to weight though it would impact the siler ability but on the guard that's not a big deal.By RAW gold plating increases normal weight by 50%.That's debatable as to whether that applies to gold-plated objects, too, or just to objects made of solid gold, at least based upon the wording I've seen.
Unless we have some specific, direct statements by the designers?
Oh yea read that too fast. 50% looks like it's for pure gold items.
For a slashing weapon, you would probably want a heavy basket and little to no pommel. This puts more momentum into the blade during chops and swings.
Oh yeah, you can probably just explain that the basket is made of Mithral from the Yellow Mountains or whatever...
This is a fantasy game that has magic available, and magic pretty much makes anything possible. And magic is the most permanent solution.
An Alchemist would absolutely be able to do the fire gilding process, but the durability of literally gold plating is suspect, at best.
Weapons and armor can be crafted using materials that have innate special properties. If you make a suit of armor or a weapon out of more than one special material, you get the benefit of only the most prevalent material. However, you can build a double weapon with each head made of a different special material.
While you can replace steel with mithral, it will have no mechanical benefit. Not weight, strength, or anything else.
If you want to design a new homebrew weapon, with these changes, you can with GM approval, but any mechanical changes will have to be approved.
/cevah
Palo Iovinus in book 4 of War for the Crown AP wears a +2 gold-plated adamantine full plate. So it is definitely possible in universe.
It does not however mention the extra cost or weight the item may have.
Plating is very thin as in thinner than human hair so it wouldn't do much to weight though it would impact the siler ability but on the guard that's not a big deal.By RAW gold plating increases normal weight by 50%.That's debatable as to whether that applies to gold-plated objects, too, or just to objects made of solid gold, at least based upon the wording I've seen.
Unless we have some specific, direct statements by the designers?
We do, and it supports your interpretation:
The rules shown are for the rare item constructed entirely of gold rather than being gold-plated. Gold-plated items triple the base cost of weapons and armor and have the same properties as the item the gold is plating. Items constructed purely of gold cost 10 times the normal cost for items of their type. Gold items weigh 50% more than typical weapons or armor of their type.
So, plated items are just regular items that cost more, while solid items are heavier and cost waaaay more (and have other drawbacks if weapons or armor).
A housey suggestion: Since you're only plating the guard of a sword, I'd just chalk it up to being especially ornate and add an arbitrary amount of value to the sword. Adventurers find fancy jeweled weapons/armor all the time that work identically (or worse) than normal stuff but is worth more for its artistic or raw materials value. I'd also suggest that the extra price not be halved on sale as it's akin to a trade good at that point. (The price of the "normal" item plus any non-cosmetic enhancements would still be halved.)
A housey suggestion: Since you're only plating the guard of a sword, I'd just chalk it up to being especially ornate and add an arbitrary amount of value to the sword. Adventurers find fancy jeweled weapons/armor all the time that work identically (or worse) than normal stuff but is worth more for its artistic or raw materials value.
That's part of what we called Masterwork.
A housey suggestion: Since you're only plating the guard of a sword, I'd just chalk it up to being especially ornate and add an arbitrary amount of value to the sword. Adventurers find fancy jeweled weapons/armor all the time that work identically (or worse) than normal stuff but is worth more for its artistic or raw materials value.That's part of what we called Masterwork.
Eh. Masterwork has other connotations, namely that the sword is especially good at being a sword, with the expense coming from the superior craftsmanship and better quality (rather than simply more expensive) materials. But gold-plating the guard doesn't make it better; it only makes it prettier and more expensive.
But Pathfinder RPG economy isn't even close to an exact science (really, any weapon costs exactly the same to make masterwork?), and since I was speaking from housey-land, it doesn't really matter much. : ) Approximating it with the masterwork cost is good enough for most purposes.