Materials for armor in Fantasy game

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Sounds like a good way to derail the campaign. You'll have one object worth more than all the treasure in the dungeon. I remember one game where we forgot about what we were doing and spent the remainder of the day trying to work out how to get a door (made of super expensive metal) off its hinge so we could sell it.

Gygax put adamantium doors in one of his modules deliberately. The players were supposed to figure out that they were "the treasure" for the dungeon - which incidentally required them to go through the dungeon to steal all the doors. Instead his test group complained how hard they were to break down.

So in one of the D&D novels he had the hero explicitly note how valuable the doors were as a sort of "take that".

I've not done the "door treasure" sort of thing, but I did put a big friggin gold solar disk 6" thick 30' off the ground in the "Foyer" of one dungeon (a few hundred pounds, no obvious way to get it down safely). And a 10'x10'x10' stone block trap in the front doorway to seal the players inside the dungeon :) They had to wait a day before the cleric could memorize Shape Stone to escape, so they used the time to loot the (small) dungeon and plan how to get the gold down off it's mounting point and back to civilization.


It was the finale to a campaign so giving them enough wealth to retire on was fine - wearable treasure like an Invulnerable Coat (or whatever) would likely be the entire POINT of going into that dungeon. If you need the fabled Invulnerable Coat, then you need the Coat, and everything else you pick up along the way is just something to put in the retirement fund in case you need to give the Coat back at the end of your quest.