Material Magica

[Kvetch]

Ha, got you!  This is nothing about magic - or is the properties of these materials magical in themselves?  Bascially, the crafting system got me thinking about what things are made out of.

Currently we have:
 1) glass                 2) iron                  3) gold                 
 4) silver                5) copper                6) zinc                 
 7) cromium                tungsten              9) carbon               
10) coal                 11) basalt               12) silica               
13) diamond              14) plastic              15) tin                 
16) leather              17) hair                 18) wool                 
19) wood                 20) magic-wood

with 0 being "base material".

But if we go in depth with the crafting system, why not go indepth with some materials things can be made out of - and perhaps get benefits for being made out of it.  For example, what if someone found a mine of mithril (is that really a material you can mine?  I assume it is as you can make armour out of it - dang it, she's got me spelling armor with a u now) way off in never-never land.  why wouldn't they be able to forge it into armor (or have someone forge it for them).  Below are some ideas (ripped off a D&D wiki website) with the basic benefits (if you're talking D&D) to having the item made out of said material.  Note, some things can not be made out of some of these materials - ie: a wooden staff can not be made out of Adamantine as that is a metal, but it can be made out of darkwood.  Note 2, some of these I've not even heard of as they were scavaged from various sources - not that I don't have the sources, I just haven't paid enough attention to them.

Adamantine - DR, improved sundering
Darkwood - ½ normal weight of wood
Dragonhide - can make metal armors that count as hide
Cold Iron - 2x heavy has bane to magical creatures
Mithral - Makes armors that weigh ½ as much, and count as a lighter type
Alchemical Silver - maintains weapon, and bane to lycanthropes
Pandemonic Silver - causes scream that makes others cower in strong winds
Thinaun - traps soul of those slain by it
Baatorian Steel - +1 to damage on slashing and piercing
Baatorian Greensteel - Counts as Wounding if magically enchanted
Morghuth Iron - -1 attack, but poisons opponent
Truesteel - +1 on roll to confirm critical hits
Dendritic - armor made of growing crystal
Astral Driftmetal - 25% chance of working against incorporeal creatures
Blended Quartz - -20% arcane failure rate
Bronzewood - wood that can be made into plate armor and weighs 10% less
Chitin - plate armor made from insect exoskeletons
Darkleaf - special worked Darkwood made into light plate armor
Elukian Clay - removes weight penalty for swim checks
Entropium - +2 max dex -10% arcane failure, +2 AC penalty and added weight.
Urdukar - +2 DC on scry attempts per 5 lbs carried
Aururum - Pieces meld back together if broken
Frystalline - Good aligned
Serren - Branch wood that has ghost touch
Green Starmetal - Adamantine that deals 1d6 extra damage to outsiders.
Blue Ice - +1 damage slashing weapons, Mythrial type armor but cold as ice
Rimfire Ice - Glows like torch, +1 cold damage, explodes 1d6 cold damage
Stygian Ice - deals wisdom than consitution damage
Pearl Steel - functions better underwater than normal weapons
Riverine - ½ AC becomes deflection bonus, provides force affect
Abyssal Bloodiron - Cold Iron, +4 Critical Confirm

Just ideas and thoughts to keep the brain working.

Kvetch

[Tocharaeh]

These are great choices. Any chance we could also get come more futuristic choices as well?

[Molly]

Again, Kvetch is raising an interesting subject.

The list that Kvetch presents has potential, but since D&D never was a big part of 4D, it is of course too different to the system we already have. It could however easily be adapted to better suit our world.

Actually Material is not an entirely new idea to 4D, it's one that we had some years ago, and as usual it was left half finished, just like the crafts and other professions. Which is why we now have those half-assed materials in the OLC code.

Materials with different properties were planned to be an integrated and important part of the Craft system, and as it happens I have a pretty large file where the thoughts about it were all put together. I'll e-mail you the file, Kvetch, but I'll post a short summary here.

The Material idea was based on the same 6 basic categories as the Crafts.
Each object in the game can already have the material set in OLC. If you don't set it, the material comes up as Basic, which is what most items in the game are set as.
Then each material would have sub-categories set as values in OLC, and each value was supposed to follow the material through the crafting process, and influence the properties of the finished object.

BASIC MATERIAL GROUP: Textile, Leather, Metal, Stone, Glass, Wood.
Each MAIN MATERIAL GROUP could have 4 values. (You don't need to set all of those).
1. SUB_GROUP
   (Example Metal: gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, plasteel, alloy (brass, bronze etc.), oxide)
2. STAGE_OF_PROCESS
   (Example Textile: fibre, thread, yarn, rope, cloth, garment)
3. TEXTURE
   (Example Wood: rough, sawed, planed, smooth, sandpapered, polished, varnished, painted
4. COLOUR 
   (Use the code list of 133 colours, or just combinations of the 3 basic colours blue, red or yellow )
Other possible variables could be things like SHAPE, SIZE, DENSITY, WEIGHT

Different Materials could have different values, since the same things are not always important for all materials. (For instance colour would only matter for textiles, that could be dyed, or wood that could be painted)

The properties of an End Product should be set as a combination of value 1, 3 and 4,
where the value 1 is the same throughout the process, except possibly for metal, where an alloy would change value 1.

Anyhow, there was a lot more to the system, but this is the basics, and I'll mail Kvetch the entire file.

[horus]

See my post in the other thread, I think this overcomplicates things way too much. If you really want to use materials, then you need to cut it down to only a handful of various materials - yes its not as realistic, but seriously, we already have different innate ranks, different crafting ranks, different eq with different number of slots, different "gems", etc etc

[Kvetch]

Yeah, I didn't want that many materials - I think D&D overcomplicates that - but I thought for ideas that list would be handy.  Personally other than the basics of things like wood, iron, glass, leather, I could see having things like mithril - which makes metal things lighter (aka: gives good AC, but doesn't drop your speed/DEX by as much as the original non-mithril armor would), silver (good against them there were-beasties - at least according to legends), Chitin (just wearing bug exoskeletons sounds eerie - would have a use for those Ankehgs), Dragonhide (who doesn't want dragonhide armor?  Raise your hands, I need targets), Darkwood (makes wooden things lighter).  Other than that, I'm not sure if there's any historical or fantasy reason for any other material - except maybe gold - everything should be made of gold to make me rich!!!!  (said king midos...)