So, the remaster changed darkwood --> duskwood, but did not take the chance to fix the absurdity insanity of the gold value.
This actually derailed a Strength of Thousands session for a lengthy tangent. The price is so disproportionately ludicrous, none of us players were interested in capitalizing on this, as it would still be too absurd to bargain through a partial value gain.
Note that the Cost of Living for adventurers claims that Comfortable is 52gp a year. The Earn Income chart shows that a L14 Master ___ at their most efficient will be earning 20 gp a day.
So, a single branch of a duskwood tree being 500 gp of value kinda just breaks the world. How many statuettes of solid gold will adventurers retrieve worth less than a raw branch?
Even cutting that value to 1/10, an order of magnitude, it is still world-breaking at 50 gp per branch. A year of comfortable living for an adventurer.
A 99% reduction is still insane at 5gp per branch.
How do yall handle this? Pretend you never saw it? Try to RP some "fair" price? This is legit so much gp I cannot imagine many (any) tables actually just go with it, and allow PCs to harvest a growth of duskwood trees they come across.
There's even existing text talking about the lumber consortium harvesting these trees en masse, which deconfirms the possibility of these being magically spontaneous solo unicorn trees.
They are just magic trees that spread and grow slowly, but as normal trees do. This means that where there's one, there are many others nearby in almost all circumstances.
There's other material price issues when monsters have things like adamantine bones or whatever, which is where tables are more likely to stumble into this economy issue.
What do you do?
I do nothing, as there's no problem.
Pathfinder 2e is perfect as it is.
Earn income and its meagre results is the reason why adventurers go adventuring ;)
This. The focus on Earn Income is irrelevant to the price of items for adventurers because you're not supposed to be able to afford level appropriate items without adventuring. There may he a case to be made that duskwood is overpriced in relation to other magic items or precious materials, though.
Pathfinder isn't an economic simulator, so a better question to ask is "if I reduce the cost of duskwood, what will be the impact of cheap bulk reduction for PCs?" Whether or not that's a balance consideration you're comfortable with is kinda a personal choice, but there are some subtle changes. Obviously being able to carry more, but also being able to technically use 1 bulk weapons to cut your way out of being Swallowed Whole. Stuff like that.
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I deal with the issue by never using precious materials in Pathfinder 2nd Edition.
This is in contrast to my PF1 Iron Gods campaign. The seven skymetals--abysium, adamantine, djezet, inubrix, noqual, orichalcum, and siccatite--are important in that story. The PCs soon acquired adamantine weapons in order to cut through the hardness of robots. They never had to worry about the price of those materials, because the metals could be found in the crashed spaceships that they explored and the PCs could craft the items themselves (Iron Gods has a lot of downtime between modules.) Later, my NPC party member Val Baine eventually made herself a mithral armored coat for weird rules reasons discussed at PF1 Bloodrager Val Baine Converted to PF2.
PF1 Val's armored coat was a weird story that lost its weirdness in PF2. She decided to try a technological scatterlight suit for armor against energy weapons. The suit was merely +1 armor against physical attacks, so she wore a PF1 armored coat over it for its +4 armor bonus. But an armored coat was medium armor, and her PF1 sylph's Wings of Air let her fly only while wearing no armor or light armor. So she would take off her coat and carry it in her arms for non-combat flight. She gave up on the scatterlight suit and switched to a Robe of Arcane Heritage under her armored coat. And she made a mithral armored coat that counted as light armor for movement purposes, such as flight. PF2 Val kept the armored coat to maintain her style, but had no reason to make it out of mithral.
The ridiculous price of duskwood comes from the ridiculous economics of Pathfinder, which were copied from the similar economics of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Magic items and precious-material items are level capped. We don't want a 1st-level wizard becoming overpowered by casting 3rd-rank spells from a wand nor a 1st-level fighter becoming especially hard to hit with +2 fundamental armor runes. But rather than making a blatant rule that player characters cannot buy items higher than their level, the rules hid the restriction by making those items too expensive for the low-level characters to buy.
The price of items from 2nd level and up is based on their level, not on the difficulty of crafting them or the cost of materials. 2nd-level permanent items cost 35 gp, 3rd-level permanent items cost 70 gp, 4th-level permanent items cost 100 gp, 5th-level permanent items cost 150 gp, 6th-level items cost 200 gp, 7th-level permanent items cost 300 gp, 8th-level permanent items cost 500 gp, etc. The prices vary within a band of prices, and consumable items have their own cheaper price schedule. The prices roughly double every 2 levels, just like experience points from defeating a Level+2 enemy, except that the developers like round numbers for prices; therefore, over 6 levels the multiplier is 10 rather than 8.
A duskwood branch can be used to make a duskwood shield, an 8th-level item, so the branch is an 8th-level item, too, costing 500 gp. Strangely, an 8th-level duskwood shield requires only 55 gp of duskwood, so that branch provides enough material for 9 shields. Equally strange, an 8th-level duskwood shield has the same stats as a 0th-level steel shield rather than a 0th-level wooden shield.
But why is a duskwood shield an 8th-level item? What marvelous advantage does it give? Its only advantage over the 0th-level steel shield is lightness, bulk L rather than bulk 1. If we go back to PF1, the Darkwood entry says, "The armor check penalty of a darkwood shield is lessened by 2 compared to an ordinary shield of its type." And as a reminder about PF1 armor check penalty:
Armor Check Penalty: Any armor heavier than leather, as well as any shield, hurts a character’s ability to use Dexterity- and Strength-based skills. An armor check penalty applies to all Dexterity- and Strength-based skill checks. A character’s encumbrance may also incur an armor check penalty.
Shields: If a character is wearing armor and using a shield, both armor check penalties apply.
Duskwood is 8th level because it reduces a shield's armor check penalty that does not exist in PF2. An equivalent bonus in PF2 would be, "Duskwood is so light that Raise a Shield with a duskwood shield is a free action," but no-one wrote that rule.
In contrast, PF2 duskwood armor does offer a real advantage in a very narrow niche: "It’s easier to wear than normal wood armor, reducing the Strength modifier necessary to ignore its check penalty by 1 and reducing its Speed penalty by 5 feet." Thus, a character trained in light and medium armor but with low attribute scores of STR +1 and DEX +2 could upgrade from Studded Leather Armor (+2, dex cap +3, STR req +1) to Duskwood Wooden Breastplate (+3, dex cap +2, STR req +2) to increase their AC by 1 without an armor check penalty. I don't know why anyone would build a character with such stats, but it might be plausible for an Inventor or Thaumaturge.
I deal with the issue by never using precious materials in Pathfinder 2nd Edition.
This is us too.
I deal with the issue by never using precious materials in Pathfinder 2nd Edition.This is us too.
Lmao kinda valid. They do mostly suck anyways with the grade system.
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Honestly that's a much better argument for revising precious material costs. They are really expensive for how niche they are.
Especially since you have to refine the material grade before you improve your fundamental runes, which is just *frustrating*.
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consider also this: the high grade of duskwood is probably the heartwood, so to be able to cut a tree you need to get a tool with at least 8, possibly more hardness
which leaves mostly skymetals and high quality alloys where an ingot of 1 bulk (possibly the heft of a lumberaxe head) costs between 6000 and 9000 gold and which are often hard to work or have downsides using them
so to get that on a 'big scale', which is still restricted to mostly 1 big forest on 1 continent in the whole world, which on top is guarded by fey, werewolves, (magical) beasts and other stuff
you need to invest tens of thousands of gold, just for the tools
then pay the guards that deal with the creatues
possibly get silver and cold iron equipment for them which also costs a ton of money
and then you still need to find a market for that stuff which relies on a likely limited number of craftspeople who can even work those materials and likely need those skymetal tools for themselves too, so likely veterans of the business or people who inherited presttigious workshops
the terming of extracting duskwood on a 'big scale' must be weighed carefully
the upfront investment alone makes it a business that, even with such prices, needs a while to pay back
every tree taken from the duskwood takes probably hours on an end before even transport
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I'm confused if people are complaining about the game mechanics (special materials have a cost to acquire in order to get a special effect on equipment made from it) or if people are complaining about a particular bit of lore (this particular material doesn't have any in-game reason for being expensive or hard to find).
If the benefit of Duskwood isn't worth its cost (mechanics), then that is one thing to look at. With Druids no longer needing non-metal equipment, the value of Duskwood may be diminished quite a bit. But that is something to look at on a case by case basis for each material.
But I don't understand why people are thinking that Duskwood is equivalent to a random tree branch.
Duskwood is a very lightweight wood found primarily in old-growth forests in south-central Avistan
It is from a regional tree that requires a specific environment to grow. You don't just stumble across it in any forest or have people growing it accidentally as a decorative tree in their yard. There may be farms for it. There might not be. Harvesting of it may be closely monitored and guarded by a Druid guild.
The issue is unavoidable at times; adventures will take you into regions where these trees exist, as in Strength of Thousands.
Our GM read the info on the screaming jungle, then a few seconds later, the recognition dinged for us to check the price.
There are other occurrences like the adamantine claws example in Abm Vlts.
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As stated in the OP, there is both the player gp mechanical issue, and the world of Golarion being a believable place as two different harms done by this wood price.
Clearly the problem exists with the price itself, and not the writing around these dumb trees. I really did not expect anyone to try to reach for flimsy in-world excuses like "guarded by druids" to justify the notion that the branch of a tree could be worth almost 10 years of comfortable living.
A single tree is more than enough gp to set an entire family for life.
Forget dungeons, there would be humans razing the planet to the ground looking for those trees.
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Like, for a modern comparison, War of Immortals added Dreamweb as a material. This comes from a single creature, and has the same concept of being abnormally strong, so it's mechanic is to reduce the bulk of gear by 1. But for cloth/fabric style gear.
I'm pretty sure someone looked at Duskwood / other precious materials, and said, "That's insane" because while a branch of duskwood is 500gp, a bolt of dreamweb is 50 gp, a full 90% reduction.
Spoilers if you click on the linked source creature, so don't do that.
https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=3517
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Again, the [Rare] tagged Dreamweb, made from one throax in all the universe, is 1/10 the gp price of the [uncommon] duskwood.
No amount of lore explanation can cover how disproportionate this is yall.
My take is that any GM should *start* with that 90% reduction in price, and only then should consider other measures in case players get derailed to make some extra cash.
[Swears removed and edited by Maya from Paizo]
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Yesterday, I wrote:
A duskwood branch can be used to make a duskwood shield, an 8th-level item, so the branch is an 8th-level item, too, costing 500 gp.
Today, I realized that Paizo's math is wrong. 500 gp is the price of an 8th-level permanent item. The duskwood branch is a consumable item, since it is consumed in making a shield, armor, weapon, or other object. (It can also count as a trade good, which affects resale price.) Consumables are cheaper by level. An 8th-level consumable item costs only 100 gp.
So part of the shocking price of a duskwood branch is an error.
Ironically, this error does not affect crafting with duskwood. Duskwood is not measured by bulk for crafting. Instead, the duskwood items measures duskwood by price, such as "The initial raw materials must include duskwood worth at least 200 gp + 20 gp per Bulk [of the armor crafted]." If a duskwood branch cost 100 gp instead of 500 gp, then the crafter would need 2.2 branches for one-bulk armor rather than 0.44 branches.
The Duskwood material entry in Archives of Nethys leaves off the size of a duskwood branch and duskwood lumber, but the GM Core says on page 254: Type duskwood branch; Price 500 gp; Bulk L; Type duskwood lumber; Price 5,000 gp; Bulk 1. Needing 2.2 branches for a suit of armor does sound more realistic. Otherwise, we have as shroudb said:
also do note that the "branch" is not a small twig, given that a 1 bulk object (which is alredy processed) is only 350gp, it's safe to assume that the "branch" refers to one of the main branches of a tree at least.
The other precious materials in the GM Core are metals sold in light-bulk chunks and one-bulk ingots. Adamantine and dawnsilver are also 8th-level materials, and they have the same 500 gp for a light-bulk chunk error. Cold iron and silver are 2nd-level materials, and they cost 10 gp per chunk. 2nd-level consumables typically cost 7 gp, but 10 gp is closer to that 7-gp consumable price than the 35-gp permanent item price. 17th-level orichalcum is the other precious material and costs 1,000 gp per chunk. 17th-level consumable items typically cost around 2,500 gp, and 17th-level permanent items typically cost around 13,000 gp.
If I came across a whole g++$#*n dusk wood tree and cut off some seven foot long hunk of branch, I would just quit if you told me I somehow only harvested 28gp worth of duskwood. If you’re going to b@*&~*@% that hard don’t have the f@!!ing tree in the first place. Don’t jangle it in front of me like shiny car keys and joink it away with some b+$!+@!$ subsystem roll that doesn’t model the in world situation in the slightest.... The way I would "handle" PCs trying to harvesting it for profit would be fairly simple: Earn Income, of a sufficient high level Task, with maybe a big circumstance bonus on the roll due to the availability of the rare material to begin with, and then the result would be simultaneously how much "usable" wood is both harvested and you found a buyer for.
also do note that the "branch" is not a small twig, given that a 1 bulk object (which is alredy processed) is only 350gp, it's safe to assume that the "branch" refers to one of the main branches of a tree at least.
I had to improvise mechanics for harvesting raw materials in my campaigns. One factor that shroudb overlooked is that the Earn Income downtime activity is for a downtime job that typically spans weeks. Imagine someone with a job as a duskwood lumberjack. Duskwood trees are rare. Their locales are guarded: the Verduran Forest is tended by druids who make treaties with lumbering companies, Darkmoon Vale is inhabited by kobolds, dire wolves, and werecreatures, and the Screaming Jungle is a deadly jungle flanked by natives who dislike outsiders. Thus, seeking duskwood as a job would involve a great deal of time negotiating with the natives and then searching for a duskwood tree. Finding the tree is a jackpot, a payoff for weeks of work, say 5 weeks. Thus, 34 days of no harvest followed by one day of 35-fold harvest. An 8th-level master of Nature would earn 3 gp per day, so multiply that by 35 to get around 105 gp, about one branch of duskwood (the druids wouldn't let the lumberjack cut down the entire rare tree).
But if an 8th-level adventuring party ran into a duskwood tree as part of their adventure, such as the tree serving as a landmark on a treasure map they had obtained at great risk, then they get the 105 gp each (420 gp total) in a single day without spending the 34 days prospecting the forest.
The math breaks down in that a tree can have its location recorded and a lumberjack can be sent out once per year to cut off a branch. With 52 trees known, the lumberjack could harvest one branch every week (mostly travel time). That comes to 105/7 = 15 gp per day, which is 13th-level income on the Income Earned table. This does not happen with precious metals mined out of the ground, since ore does not grow back. I won't worry about the re-harvesting flaw in my math, because adventurers have to finish their quest and won't return. And the rules are for adventurers rather than for lumber companies.
I just read that part. Unless I missed it Duskwood is not mentioned at all.The issue is unavoidable at times; adventures will take you into regions where these trees exist, as in Strength of Thousands.
Our GM read the info on the screaming jungle, then a few seconds later, the recognition dinged for us to check the price.
Duskwood is just another type of tree present within the screaming jungle.
Checking the map, it appears our party's destination is ~100 miles into that green blob of jungle.Whatever the distribution of [other trees] vs [duskwood], it's not a question of if a party will spot a grove of duskwood trees, but a question of how many will the party stumble across before reaching their destination. And again, trees do not grow solo; where you find one, you find a whole population of them.
Idk if SoT's AP book mentions duskwood or not, but that's kinda the problem with having such a crazy gp landmine of a tree that just exists in the setting.
Again, trees are not like ore deposits, you don't need to go spelunking or carefully inspect/analyze river sand in order to see trees.
It's not fair to GMs & AP writers if they need to know every forest and jungle in Golarion with the level of scrutiny to de-confirm the presence of some rare uncommon dusk or peach wood growing in it.
(Peachwood seems to have copied duskwood as a base, but that writer decided it should be 20% even more expensive, lol.)
Instead, those material prices should be set at a low enough value that "hey, doesn't ___wood grow here?" is not a campaign disrupting observation.
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I really wish they had removed the different grades of materials and also the rune-gating, and made precious materials a lot cooler. At least if the effects were awesome the wildly out to lunch prices could be justified.
I ignore rune-gating at my tables so no one has to bother with special materials if they don't want to.
As-is, precious materials are essentially another monetary loot drop that is hard to slot in anywhere it'd actually be exciting without unbalancing party wealth.
I just read that part. Unless I missed it Duskwood is not mentioned at all.The issue is unavoidable at times; adventures will take you into regions where these trees exist, as in Strength of Thousands.
Our GM read the info on the screaming jungle, then a few seconds later, the recognition dinged for us to check the price.
In my childhood I played in a forest in Michigan, and I know that trees are hard to identify. I can distinguish between a maple and an oak, but most fruit trees I would fail to identify unless the fruit is hanging on them. Fortunately, a Strength of Thousands party is likely to have a druid who can identify trees. The party will be 14th level when they enter the Screaming Jungle, so a druid is likely to have Nature +25 (14 level + 6 master rank + 5 wisdom). I would view a duskwood tree as an 8th-level identification challenge, with +5 adjustment for rarity, so DC 29 to identify. No problem.
Secrets of the Temple-City says, "The trip through the Screaming Jungle takes several weeks on foot, and even with their adventuring prowess, the heroes are still bound to encounter a few notable dangers along the way." Several weeks means lots of opportunity to encounter a rare duskwood tree, even if the party is not searching.
The module does not mention duskwood nor darkwood (I word-searched the PDF). It does mention Kilia Mwibo trees, so those odds of encountering strange trees works against the party, too. Lost Omens The Mwangi Expanse also does not mention duskwood (or darkwood). In contrast, Lost Omens Shining Kingdoms mentions Darkmoon Vale as a source of duskwood five separate times (no mention of duskwood in the Verduran Forest). The Pathfinderwiki page on Duskwood credits Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, published August 2008, as the source for duskwood trees in the Screaming Jungle. That was back in the days when Paizo adventures set in the Mwangi Expanse treated the expanse as unexplored territory to be exploited for its natural resources and ancient ruins, based on 19th-century European tales of Africa. Nevertheless, a precious material mentioned in the GM Core should have a source on every continent, so I favor finding duskwood in the Screaming Jungle.
I asked my wife, who plays in my Strength of Thousands campaign, what her character would do if the party found a duskwood tree, whose branches could be sold for 500 gp. She said she would mark its location and report it to the Magaambya for future research. My Strength of Thousands campaign has a weird attitude toward loot and wealth. I have all their gear, except for a few personally-owned items, on loan to them from the Magaambya Academy for their mission. They will be fully equipped with 14th-level gear for the trip through the Screaming Jungle without having to spend a copper piece of their own. They will be carrying a 14th-level item costing 4,200 gp and some 12th- and 13th-level items costing 1,600 gp and 3,000 gp, so a duskwood branch worth 100 gp (I will correct the price) will look minor to them.
Upon further thought, the Magaambya has had sent researchers into the Screaming Jungle for millennia. They probably harvested seeds and have their own secret duskwood grove somewhere near Nantambu. Xhokan in the supply center will ask the party in advance to collect seeds and cuttings if they find a duskwood tree in the Screaming Jungle to compare the Magaambya's domestic variety to the wild variety.
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If I feel like the player would like one, I give it to them as treasure or enough material if they want to make it themselves. Material prices are too expensive in my opinion for what they provide, especially with the rules for material that you can put runes on by power level.
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I mean, wood harder than steel will definitely require some very special tools that party will almost certainly not have, and to maximize the value it will also most likely require some very specialized skills the party will also probably not have.
Not really. All you need is a shovel, time, and shrink item.
If I feel like the player would like one, I give it to them as treasure or enough material if they want to make it themselves. Material prices are too expensive in my opinion for what they provide, especially with the rules for material that you can put runes on by power level.
Same. I like to add this stuff as part of treasure. Unless you foreshadow "you're gonna need X metal in this campaign", people don't tend to go get it. But if you give them a nifty material item, they're more likely to use it.
(Some APs do make this obvious, like Spore War.)
I really wish they had removed the different grades of materials and also the rune-gating, and made precious materials a lot cooler. At least if the effects were awesome the wildly out to lunch prices could be justified.
I ignore rune-gating at my tables so no one has to bother with special materials if they don't want to.
As-is, precious materials are essentially another monetary loot drop that is hard to slot in anywhere it'd actually be exciting without unbalancing party wealth.
Have you experienced any issues with everyone having precious material weapons for dealing lots of bonus damage? IIRC that's the reason for the grades and rune-gating; precious material cost increases because the value of the weaknesses they trigger, and resistances they bypass, increase as the game progresses.
I dunno how much of an issue it'd actually be in play, and I'm interested in making precious materials more accessible in my games because I think they're neat, so I figured I'd ask. (Still need to come up with a new benefit for adamantine armor, too. Being built Tonka tough doesn't help a ton in a game where almost nothing targets your armor.)
My players don't tend to pick out a bunch of backup weapons, so whatever their "main" weapon is made from is what they've got. Since they're usually just upgrading their favorite weapon from level 1, it's pretty rare that they even have special materials. Thinking back, I've thrown a number of enemies with Holy weakness and Cold Iron weakness that they never even found out about, and enemies with resistances the martials didn't have a way around that they just switch to support against with athletics, or try to crit through.
Our group is probably not a good one to draw conclusions from, though, because they get really into the story and spend gold on non-combat stuff rather than getting excited about new items.
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Given the ways paizo's added to bypass having a weapon made of a special material, it isn't really worth having a weapon made out of the stuff. Just grab some silver salve and cold iron transmuting ingots and you're done.
Yeah, in the current system, the only way players will choose to make or upgrade their gear with precious materials is if the GM has them encounter a cache of said materials, but somehow makes those materials invalid for sale.
That almost happened once in Stolen Fate, but the GM hesitated, re-read something, and then decided the stuff was real and sell-valid metals. The players immediately stopped reading and considering the options it added, and pivoted to a "oh, okay we will just sell it for cash then" decision.
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Again, it really does always come back to the gp price needing to be cranked way the hell down. Higher gp price means higher cash-in value when found.
The way the mechanics work, finding a cache of Adamantine/whatever means that the players are presented with the chance to make something out of that material at a 50% discount. This is the other side to the 50% sell value rule, everything is cash, and using the found thing is to do so at a 50% discount.
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I also highly recommend GMs take any time an AP provides a discovery of a single precious material, and instead edit that to be an "upgrade kit" containing a mixed variety of precious materials with the same total gp value.
That change allows players to at least browse a list of options to see what different effects are possible to get with that 50% discount.
A single precious material type will simply never match a player's desire via sheer coincidence. But if you give them an options list, that will multiply the chances of a desired match.
There are genuinely a lot of neat ~magical effects to be gained from precious materials, it's just a waste that most players / GMs think of them as existing just for matching foe material weaknesses.
Have you experienced any issues with everyone having precious material weapons for dealing lots of bonus damage? IIRC that's the reason for the grades and rune-gating; precious material cost increases because the value of the weaknesses they trigger, and resistances they bypass, increase as the game progresses.
I dunno how much of an issue it'd actually be in play, and I'm interested in making precious materials more accessible in my games because I think they're neat, so I figured I'd ask. (Still need to come up with a new benefit for adamantine armor, too. Being built Tonka tough doesn't help a ton in a game where almost nothing targets your armor.)
The only builds that would be able to actually maintain multiple precious material weapons at a reasonable cost would be ones that use doubling rings, thrower’s bandolier (which is already pretty bad tbh) and to some extent blazons of shared power (swapping once/day).
Everyone else is priced out of it by the rune system. So I don’t think it’d be a big issue, for the most part people would choose one precious material and that’s it. Main effect is making duel wield builds better and enabling some weird thrower’s bandolier build that has every precious material type. If that turns out to beat shadow sheath I’d be surprised though, returning rune tax is steep.
There are genuinely a lot of neat ~magical effects to be gained from precious materials, it's just a waste that most players / GMs think of them as existing just for matching foe material weaknesses.
Ehh, most of them are pretty meh. The only good ones are:
Orichalcum weapon has a great effect but costs more than your mortgage - overall I think not worth the money but I wouldn’t call it bad, it does actually do something good. The armor is just flat out too expensive and a forth armor property rune is pretty mid.
Dawnsilver/Mithral is good for shenanigans involving bulk, that’s about the only use. Stuff like cramming a normally 1 bulk weapon into a shadow sheath or getting shield thaumaturge a fortress shield through esoteric arguably not even RAW tech involving tiny items and how the rounding works.
Keep stone is really good for shields because it lets them block magic. Goes hard on a fortress shield.
And warpglass is good for high crit chance characters like fighters and flurry rangers. Pricey but the crit effect is strong.
Something you may notice about all these is that they mostly don’t have to interact with the grade system.
I think one of the issues is how 'steel' the 'common' item, is the item which is of the finest grade and used for the best items.
So if you want to add a powerful rune on an item, you have to be using steel, or if you are using a special material, you have to pay for an even more expensive special material.
Instead, I'd have been fine with the concept of finer grade of material for weapons, move some of the cost of the runes implementing grades of weapons, and make it clear that you can take your grandfather's old axe and take it to the blacksmith and they can upgrade it to a higher grade, and add the rune in a short time, just needing the money.
Really, I don't see how mitral or adamantine could be anything but a high grade? at least they don't, as far as I can tell have low grade. But if you had to make sure to upgrade physical properties of your weapon to use stronger runes, then it might make more sense to pay a little extra for high quality Dawnsteel than high quality steel. But having the steel sword made by the local farming blacksmith being the highest quality material that can naturally take on a major striking rune and a +3 potency rune, but 'sorry', that Dawnsteel sword made by a master dwarven craftman, it isn't made well enough to have those runes work on it. It kind of leaves an odd taste in the conceptual mouth. I think when they simplified it from the playtest they pulled the rug out from under the special materials.
Given the ways paizo's added to bypass having a weapon made of a special material, it isn't really worth having a weapon made out of the stuff. Just grab some silver salve and cold iron transmuting ingots and you're done.
Well, you run into action economy challenges if you aren't scouting and prebuffing. But I generally agree with you, unless you've had a particular enemy type sign posted. My players invested in cold iron weapons before a certain floor of the Abomination Vaults.
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I think one of the issues is how 'steel' the 'common' item, is the item which is of the finest grade and used for the best items.
So if you want to add a powerful rune on an item, you have to be using steel, or if you are using a special material, you have to pay for an even more expensive special material.
Yeah this is an issue. Material only matters if it's not the base material. If it's that, for some reason a random 2s dagger has the material quality to become +3 major striking when a mid-grade special material item can't despite costing massively more.
Instead, I'd have been fine with the concept of finer grade of material for weapons, move some of the cost of the runes implementing grades of weapons, and make it clear that you can take your grandfather's old axe and take it to the blacksmith and they can upgrade it to a higher grade, and add the rune in a short time, just needing the money.
I think the playtest had an idea for something like this but it was pretty clunky. It's been a long time.
I get that they don't just want everyone to have a special material weapon late game because the cost is trivial so why not, but the net outcome made it really hard to use instead.
Maybe the special material effects should have had tiers instead. Like "low grade dawnsilver" can only trigger a max weakness of 5, and the tiers above it increase maximum effect. That's giving you something for the investment but runes work normally in any case so it's not required for the weapon to function as you gain levels.
I agree, if they wanted to, limiting the bonus damage of lower quality materials to certain values seems completely reasonable to me, although it is a notable enough complexity I might understand why they might have felt like not implementing it. However, I think the weird complexity situation where steel or just normal oak for a staff is the 'best' material, and all these other materials are problematic. It might open up questions like, ohhh... this creature has weakness to water 10 do I have to have special purified water in a flask to throw it on the creature and do the full weakness damage.
Sure some materials might have weird magic interactions and some you could argue might require more special refining to interact with magic, but it feels like it shouldn't be the norm for all materials except for steel or normal wood.
edit
Can't remember for sure, but I'm thinking it might have been that in the original playtest, instead of the potency runes, was the material/manufacturing quality, and the striking and property runes limitations were limited by the quality of the weapon (instead of a potency rune) But I think they may have also made it sound like you couldn't upgrade a weapon/armor, you had to replace it with a newer higher quality one if you needed to upgrade. I think people really didn't like the idea that a character couldn't use their grandfather's sword through their entire adventuring career without sacrificing significant capabilities. (or beginning the game with something no first level character should be able to afford to have)