I'm reading over dragonhide armor. It doesn't seem to have any better hardness than leather. It doesn't seem to provide any other benefit than the following:
1. Armor is immune to an energy type.
2. You get a +1 circumstance bonus to AC and saves against the energy type.
You pay an exorbitant amount for just the above? Is it really that bad or am I missing something?
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Point #2 - the bonus to AC and saves - is the primary benefit. Having the armor itself immune to an energy type is mostly flavor, though perhaps it would be relevant in some rare scenarios.
The other main benefit that I see for it is that it is not metal. Druids would like it for that.
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Acid is a common damage type that wrecks armor. Armor that is immune to acid damage is pretty useful.
Standard grade is about as durable as lethargic, but it can be upgraded. But a +1 circumstance bonus to AC is the big prize. You get the AC bonus of a buckled without ever having to spend actions raising a shield.
IMO it's an interesting option that I would use if playing a lightly armored character and found one during an adventure. But I would probably never buy one.
And that kind of goes for a lot of Precious Materials items. The vast majority aren't worth the price, but if I find one that suits me, I'd probably keep using it as long as possible (usually not for long as the quality of the precious material limits the usable runes).
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I was just reviewing the precious materials and thinking about how the exorbitant price for increasing grades of precious materials makes them not worth using in almost all cases.
Having to pay a lot more for the weapon to use higher level runes is bad. And in some cases it reduces your available property rune slots.
Precious materials are in a rather disappointing spot.
Acid is a common damage type that wrecks armor. Armor that is immune to acid damage is pretty useful.
Yes and no. Great against oozes and the like, but corrosive does jack all against most armor thanks to hardness.
Take your typical metal armor for example. With hardness 9, you'll deal an average of 1.5 damage per critical. With a broken threshold of 18, you'll need an average of 12 critical hits just to get the armor past it's broken threshold.
Even the greater version will require so many critical hits, that the target will most certainly die before their armor wears out. Note that this is largely still true even if you believe the acid ignores the hardness.
Acid is a common damage type that wrecks armor. Armor that is immune to acid damage is pretty useful.Yes and no. Great against oozes and the like, but corrosive does jack all against most armor thanks to hardness.
Take your typical metal armor for example. With hardness 9, you'll deal an average of 1.5 damage per critical. With a broken threshold of 18, you'll need an average of 12 critical hits just to get the armor past it's broken threshold.
Even the greater version will require so many critical hits, that the target will most certainly die before their armor wears out. Note that this is largely still true even if you believe the acid ignores the hardness.
Versus leather though it performs much better, 6.5/17 per crit on average vs 8hp.
I've seen a greater corrosive rune completely destroy the armor in one hit, removing the AC bonus entirely and also getting the bonus to saves as well removed.
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Precious materials are in a rather disappointing spot.
Pretty much this.
The final boss in Fangs of War, 2nd module of PF1 Ironfang Invasion, is an adult black dragon. This is no surprise, because the players encountered victims of the dragon early in the module. The dragon is pictured on the cover, typical for the final boss.
At 6th level the party had a chance to loot dragon-fighting gear out of an armory. One item there was "a suit of green dragonhide banded mail," crafted from a dragon defeated a century ago. That's the wrong kind of dragon, so I expected the PCs would be a little disappointed. Nevertheless, I liked the flavor of finding dragonhide armor among dragon-fighting weapons.
In PF1 dragonhide armor is merely double-price masterwork armor that is immune to damage of its matching dragon's energy, essentially a 4th-level item. On the other hand, in PF2 standard-grade dragonhide armor is a item 12 worth at least 1600 gp. It had better be impressive to justify it ranking 6 levels above the party's level.
Well, I had to convert some of the other treasure from PF1 versions to PF2 versions, so I meddled with the armor, too. The green dragonhide armor gained, "This armor grants you resistance poison 10," since the breath of green dragons deals poison damage. I also switched it to +1 resilient leather armor, since most party members wore light armor.
The rogue who claimed the armor still wears it at 18th level, though he has upgraded the armor runes on it. it came in handy against venomous creatures.
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Level 12 permanent items cost 1750 to 2000 gold. A suit of Dragonhide Leather armor would be 1920g, so it's well within reason for the level.
The bonus to reflex saves is probably the best thing about having Dragonhide armor, as it's extremely rare to be able to get a circumstance bonus to saves. If you know you're going to be going up against a certain damage type, it's well worth the investment in my opinion. There is a good hardness increase with it as well (slight decrease compared to metal armor), but the save is the primary bonus.
Also, the other bonus (which isn't really an issue now days thanks to stone armor), is that it allows Druids to wear Breastplate.
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As for crafting such armor, the DC would be 32 to craft the armor. I would say it's reasonable that an Adult Dragon would have enough suitable hide to craft a suit of Leather Armor, so that would be at least 240g of materials taken care of right there. The GM could also allow for more of the item's cost to be reduced if they like, maybe with a Survival or Crafting check to harvest the hide and scales from the dragon. If we just go with the minimum, the out of pocket cost to craft would be 720g.
At level 12, an Int based Master Crafter would likely have +25 Crafting, and if they have Specialty Crafting in Leather, that's +27. That gives only a 20% fail chance, and with Impeccable Crafting that's a 80% chance to crit. If you crit you earn 15g per day, so it would only take 4 + 64 days to finish crafting the armor with only the minimum amount of gold spent.
I know that sounds like a lot, but I have heard of some APs that give the players months of downtime at a time. It isn't applicable for some campaigns, but the ones that take a long time could be worth investing in Crafting items like this.
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As a GM I wouldn't give the party a bunch of free raw materials without some sort of check. A crit makes it reasonable for a few suits of armor, or for extra raw material to lower the additional price even farther, maybe even to the point of it being "free" to start off. Depends on how much gold I would want to give the party, really.
Level 12 permanent items cost 1750 to 2000 gold. A suit of Dragonhide Leather armor would be 1920g, so it's well within reason for the level.
For my resist-poison-10 green dragonhide armor, I figure that the crafter incorporated the enchantment for a greater Ring of Energy Resistance into the armor, using the armor's own resistance to poison for the affinity. The ring is item 10, 975 gp, so it would bring the combined price up to 2895 gp, an item 13 rather than an item 12.
Does PF2 have any other items that grant Resist poison? That is not one of the five damage types ordinarily found on a Ring of Energy Resistance.
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A Ring of Energy Resistance typically wouldn't be able to give poison resist. There is the Wyrm on the Wing Tattoo though.
The problem with combining items with armor is that they typically are both individually invested, so combining them saves an invested slot. It would be best to modify the Energy-Resistant Rune to add poison resist to the armor.
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As a GM I wouldn't give the party a bunch of free raw materials without some sort of check. A crit makes it reasonable for a few suits of armor, or for extra raw material to lower the additional price even farther, maybe even to the point of it being "free" to start off. Depends on how much gold I would want to give the party, really.is it really that much?
I mean, let's consider an adult red dragon which is lvl 14
adventurers might be lvl 11.
The dragons would drop dragonhide worth 240gp ( your case ) or 240*3 ( my case ).
It would be 480g difference, in materials, which would be worth 240g if sold to a vendor ( and they are going to, because nobody would use a leather/hide armor ).
by that level, 240g/4 would be 60g each.
the lowest consumable oil lvl 11 is worth 210g.It doesn't seem that impactful in terms of "reward".
Dragons typically have a hoard of items, which is the real reward for killing them. Adding 1000g of raw dragon hide on top of that might be a bit much.
I would probably have a level based DC to skin the dragon, with the following results:
Critical Success You are able to skillfully skin the dragon, obtaining (X*2)g in raw dragon hide.
Success You successfully skin Xg in raw dragon hide
Failure You ruined some of the hide, but were able to recover (X/2)g of raw dragon hide.
Critical Failure You completely ruin the hide while attempting to skin the dragon, resulting in a total loss of usable materials.
Also, Raw Materials should sell for full price really. It just makes more sense that way.
Thanks the input people. I'll probably do some GM modification to make this more worthwhile to my player who built up his crafting skill and specifically carried skinning tools so he could collect dragon skin to make items. It's much too high a price for what you get at the moment.
I'll have to do it like we did it back in the 1E and 2E days where we made up what the player could do with something like this.
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The rules about special materials are in my opinion made in the wrong direction. It shouldn't be: "If you don't have the proper grade of material you can't put high level runes". It should be: "If you don't have the proper type of material you can't put high level runes".
Steel shouldn't be the best material, but the worst. There should be a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a basic steel weapon, like level 8. At these levels, you're supposed to move to cold iron or silver. Then a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a cold iron or silver weapon, like level 15. At these levels, you're supposed to have mithral or adamantine.
It would make Dragonhide Armor a must have, as you'd need such high quality material just to get your high level runes. Players would fight to get one even if the actual bonus of the armor would not imbalance the game.
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I feel the same, but it would indeed require some adjustements:The rules about special materials are in my opinion made in the wrong direction. It shouldn't be: "If you don't have the proper grade of material you can't put high level runes". It should be: "If you don't have the proper type of material you can't put high level runes".
Steel shouldn't be the best material, but the worst. There should be a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a basic steel weapon, like level 8. At these levels, you're supposed to move to cold iron or silver. Then a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a cold iron or silver weapon, like level 15. At these levels, you're supposed to have mithral or adamantine.
It would make Dragonhide Armor a must have, as you'd need such high quality material just to get your high level runes. Players would fight to get one even if the actual bonus of the armor would not imbalance the game.
Definitely.
I think what I'd do (if I ever do that) is to give the bonuses from APB automatically up to material level (or material level +X).Overall, I feel that the grade thing is just really bad and should be removed. In my opinion, having a Cold Iron weapon at level 10 shouldn't be anything incredible but something basic. After all, you can't have a Cold Iron Silver Adamantine weapon, so there's no need to limit the levels of runes as players will have to make a choice anyway.
But Temperans is right that we are not in homebrew.
The rules about special materials are in my opinion made in the wrong direction. It shouldn't be: "If you don't have the proper grade of material you can't put high level runes". It should be: "If you don't have the proper type of material you can't put high level runes".
Steel shouldn't be the best material, but the worst. There should be a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a basic steel weapon, like level 8. At these levels, you're supposed to move to cold iron or silver. Then a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a cold iron or silver weapon, like level 15. At these levels, you're supposed to have mithral or adamantine.
It would make Dragonhide Armor a must have, as you'd need such high quality material just to get your high level runes. Players would fight to get one even if the actual bonus of the armor would not imbalance the game.
I agree that making high-grade steel (or leather or other basic stuff) free creates a weird disincentive against using different materials.
It should have a cost, too.| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The rules about special materials are in my opinion made in the wrong direction. It shouldn't be: "If you don't have the proper grade of material you can't put high level runes". It should be: "If you don't have the proper type of material you can't put high level runes".
Steel shouldn't be the best material, but the worst. There should be a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a basic steel weapon, like level 8. At these levels, you're supposed to move to cold iron or silver. Then a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a cold iron or silver weapon, like level 15. At these levels, you're supposed to have mithral or adamantine.
It would make Dragonhide Armor a must have, as you'd need such high quality material just to get your high level runes. Players would fight to get one even if the actual bonus of the armor would not imbalance the game.
I agree that making high-grade steel (or leather or other basic stuff) free creates a weird disincentive against using different materials.
It should have a cost, too.
No no no, let's not go that direction.
I'd really hate to see weapon and armor prices go up even more because now your super pure steel is a costly part of the construction.
Instead what needs to be done (as already stated) is to give the special materials some sort of effect that increases with the increasing grade that justifies the price, and doesn't limit the number of runes.
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For example let's think about mithral. A standard grade mithral object generally gets it bulk reduced by 1, regardless of whether it a weapon, shield, or armor. It also counts as silver in the case of weapon/shields.
If we wanted to expand to make the price increase worthwhile for higher grades (while removing the effects on runes) I would say standard grade effect is okay, although we might need to adjust the price.
For high grade, you could reduce the strength score necessary to negate it's check penalty by 4 and reduce the speed penalty by 10. Remember this is a 19th level item that currently costs 16000 gp + 1600/bulk, so mithral full plate is 24000 gp. 24,000 gp is about 7% of your wealth of a 19th level character. That's a lot for the effect. And most characters don't need the additional strength reduction (right now) because if you're investing in heavy armor you've (probably) decided for high strength. The speed penalty reduction is very good though, so high grade heavy armors would definitely be a thing. You probably wont see it on medium or light armors though, but that's okay IMO. Medium armor might stick to standard grade and that would make sense too.
Maybe standard grade mithral weapons and shields can function as standard grade silver too, in addition to eliminating rune restrictions and that would be okay. For high-grade, I would propose a change to how silver items works (which would also affect how mithral works) such as standard grade silver/mithral items maybe increasing a creatures weakness to silver by 2 and a high grade item increasing it by 5.
Something along those lines would make purchasing special material items much more attractive.
For example let's think about mithral. A standard grade mithral object generally gets it bulk reduced by 1, regardless of whether it a weapon, shield, or armor. It also counts as silver in the case of weapon/shields.
If we wanted to expand to make the price increase worthwhile for higher grades (while removing the effects on runes) I would say standard grade effect is okay, although we might need to adjust the price.
For high grade, you could reduce the strength score necessary to negate it's check penalty by 4 and reduce the speed penalty by 10. Remember this is a 19th level item that currently costs 16000 gp + 1600/bulk, so mithral full plate is 24000 gp. 24,000 gp is about 7% of your wealth of a 19th level character. That's a lot for the effect. And most characters don't need the additional strength reduction (right now) because if you're investing in heavy armor you've (probably) decided for high strength. The speed penalty reduction is very good though, so high grade heavy armors would definitely be a thing. You probably wont see it on medium or light armors though, but that's okay IMO. Medium armor might stick to standard grade and that would make sense too.
Maybe standard grade mithral weapons and shields can function as standard grade silver too, in addition to eliminating rune restrictions and that would be okay. For high-grade, I would propose a change to how silver items works (which would also affect how mithral works) such as standard grade silver/mithral items maybe increasing a creatures weakness to silver by 2 and a high grade item increasing it by 5.
Something along those lines would make purchasing special material items much more attractive.
The problem with upgrading Mithril in this fashion is that these increases have diminishing returns.
Taking Medium Armor, the standard Mithril already removes the speed penalty (if you don't have the Strength), and reduces the Strength score requirement (which shouldn't be that difficult to reach, given Medium armor's niche). I mean, you could reduce the bulk even more (and making L bulk items negligible), but that's such a minor gain for that price. The upgrade just exacerbates this for Heavy Armor, which is overkill as-is given the level(s) you reach this item availability and general optimization.
In my opinion, the change from a static material cost to a quadratic material cost is what hurts the most. I'm fine with more basic materials like Silver and Cold Iron being cheap and not giving much benefit, with Adamantine and Mithril being more expensive, and Orichalcum being the most expensive there is. That's how PF1 ran it, and it honestly wasn't broken. If anything, it made certain materials interesting, and made way to customizing and creating materials.
But making it to where you have to pay up each time just to maintain what you currently have from these materials is a feelsbad paradigm, and it honestly makes no sense given that the materials are relatively static in their benefit, even if they are unique.
The rules about special materials are in my opinion made in the wrong direction. It shouldn't be: "If you don't have the proper grade of material you can't put high level runes". It should be: "If you don't have the proper type of material you can't put high level runes".
Steel shouldn't be the best material, but the worst. There should be a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a basic steel weapon, like level 8. At these levels, you're supposed to move to cold iron or silver. Then a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a cold iron or silver weapon, like level 15. At these levels, you're supposed to have mithral or adamantine.
It would make Dragonhide Armor a must have, as you'd need such high quality material just to get your high level runes. Players would fight to get one even if the actual bonus of the armor would not imbalance the game.
I agree that making high-grade steel (or leather or other basic stuff) free creates a weird disincentive against using different materials.
It should have a cost, too.No no no, let's not go that direction.
I'd really hate to see weapon and armor prices go up even more because now your super pure steel is a costly part of the construction.
Instead what needs to be done (as already stated) is to give the special materials some sort of effect that increases with the increasing grade that justifies the price, and doesn't limit the number of runes.
I mean, adding a single price would be a much simpler fix than changing how every other special material works. To be honest, you would probably also need to tweak the wealth per level table, but it's not strictly necessary.
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I also find it a bit annoying when the module writers toss in some precious material item without a grade given how the rules are written. Even the module designers don't seem to bother to follow this poorly developed rule.
I mean, adding a single price would be a much simpler fix than changing how every other special material works. To be honest, you would probably also need to tweak the wealth per level table, but it's not strictly necessary.The rules about special materials are in my opinion made in the wrong direction. It shouldn't be: "If you don't have the proper grade of material you can't put high level runes". It should be: "If you don't have the proper type of material you can't put high level runes".
Steel shouldn't be the best material, but the worst. There should be a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a basic steel weapon, like level 8. At these levels, you're supposed to move to cold iron or silver. Then a hard limit on the level of Runes you can put on a cold iron or silver weapon, like level 15. At these levels, you're supposed to have mithral or adamantine.
It would make Dragonhide Armor a must have, as you'd need such high quality material just to get your high level runes. Players would fight to get one even if the actual bonus of the armor would not imbalance the game.
I agree that making high-grade steel (or leather or other basic stuff) free creates a weird disincentive against using different materials.
It should have a cost, too.No no no, let's not go that direction.
I'd really hate to see weapon and armor prices go up even more because now your super pure steel is a costly part of the construction.
Instead what needs to be done (as already stated) is to give the special materials some sort of effect that increases with the increasing grade that justifies the price, and doesn't limit the number of runes.
You're not wrong. I was trying to keep the existing frame work in place as much as possible...but the simplest thing to do is to eliminate grades of special materials altogether, eliminate the effect on runes from the rules, and to tweak the price based on the effect of the material. But finding the right price for the effect is going to be challenging.
Are you willing to share an example of this? Bonus points if you share the other treasure awarded with the ~mysterious~ silver item
I can think of two from age of ashes (book 1 and 4 respectively) however any example before abomination vaults isn't really fair.
I also find it a bit annoying when the module writers toss in some precious material item without a grade given how the rules are written. Even the module designers don't seem to bother to follow this poorly developed rule.Are you willing to share an example of this? Bonus points if you share the other treasure awarded with the ~mysterious~ silver item
Just random items tossed in to treasure in Age of Ashes and Agents of Edgewatch and Kingmaker. Just says cold iron longsword or silver hatchet, no listing of what grade. I usually make it the lowest grade.
It isn't mysterious. It's some item tossed in without any seeming regard for the rules other than the writer seems to think this is still PF1 in regards to special material items.
I also find it a bit annoying when the module writers toss in some precious material item without a grade given how the rules are written. Even the module designers don't seem to bother to follow this poorly developed rule.Are you willing to share an example of this? Bonus points if you share the other treasure awarded with the ~mysterious~ silver itemJust random items tossed in to treasure in Age of Ashes and Agents of Edgewatch and Kingmaker. Just says cold iron longsword or silver hatchet, no listing of what grade. I usually make it the lowest grade.
It isn't mysterious. It's some item tossed in without any seeming regard for the rules other than the writer seems to think this is still PF1 in regards to special material items.
Given who is behind those APs in terms of writing, I just look at it as more evidence the special material rules are to be ignored.