04-22-2015, 04:31 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
|
[Low-Tech] Material or quality
This is really just a footnote but it puzzled me - why is Silver listed under Weapon Quality and not under Weapon Composition?
__________________
“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius |
04-22-2015, 05:03 AM | #2 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
Quote:
One possible expanation is that silver is basically a crappy material to make a sword out of, and no matter how skilled you are as a smith, you can't make a better-than-average sword, i.e. Fine and Very Fine are flat-out-impossible to achieve. And in fact unless you're a very skilled smith who knows a lot about silver or has tried to pull that silly stunt multiple times before, you can't achieve anything more than cheap... |
|
04-22-2015, 06:58 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
I would personally go with the idea that historically, no-one seems to have made weapons out of silver as it is far too expensive given its poor metallurgical qualities. Any weapon like objects made of silver would probably be purely artwork and better priced as such.
Yes, this is a pain for fantasy where you need silver weapons to kill things, but you'd probably need magic to make a sensible weapon out of silver anyway. Silver coating on the other hand... I would guess adding an appropriate CF for decoration. |
04-22-2015, 07:12 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
Silver coated weapons are listed as +2 CF.
__________________
“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius |
04-22-2015, 10:52 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
Or a liberal attitude towards alloying; there are probably a lot of options if you're willing to go well below the 92.5% of sterling silver.
|
04-22-2015, 11:58 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
For bronzes sure, copper and silver mix quite well. Magnesium silver alloys can be pretty good too. You can forget steels - silver isn't very soluble in iron at all. Still copper or magnesium alloys as tough as low end steels and 5 or 10% silver content ought to be achievable. Some platinum group metals apparently do pretty well too.
__________________
-- MA Lloyd |
04-22-2015, 08:26 PM | #7 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
Quote:
It may be that a 5% or 10% silver alloyed with bronze or copper is preferable to a weapon coated in silver, in terms of maintenance or the like. It might also look quite nice, although my guess would be that 10% silver 90% copper will look quite like normal bronze. |
|
04-22-2015, 08:42 PM | #8 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
In Sagatafl, my homebrew RPG system, the severity of the problem with making bladed weapons out of silver - or bronze - depends on how long the blade is.
Knives and daggers are fine, but a silver shortsword gets a Durability penalty, relative to one made of iron, and a silver broadsword even more so, same way a bronze broadsword does. You can use Enchantments to compensate, increasing the Durability to match that of a mundane "iron" weapon, but you can use the same magic on a mundane iron weapon to increase its Durability too, to be above par. Craftsman's skill, of course, can also affect the final Durability, but the craftsman has to be familiar with the material used (in GURPS that's be a Perk for each exotic alloy, including bronze, silver, meteoric iron, and post-medieval steel, each regarded as a separate alloy, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to apply the usual limit on how many Perks a character is allowed to have). A weapon with Durability slightly below par for its type isn't a serious problem, unless you want to parry with it (e.g. if you're of a Keltic inclination, disdaining shields and armour as being for wusses), but if your enemy suspects his weapon is significantly stronger than yours, he might deliberately try to "match" his weapon against yours again and again, hoping to break your blade. But all that is about sword type blades. What about an axe head made of silver, or a flanged mace head of silver? I can't see much problem with that. It'd be notably heavier, of course (mass of iron IIRC is about 7, vs 11 for silver), so the mace would count as a lead-weighted mace, which I presume GURPS has rules for, but I'm not sure if there are rules for axes with extra-heavy heads. Ones can probably be devised if needed. Or you can make most of the axe head out of iron or primitive steel, and just weld a silver axe blade onto it. Then you get an axe not appreciably heavier than one with an iron head (average density probably comparable to bronze, which isn't denser enough than iron to warrant any special "heavy weapon rules"), and the "functional bit" that hits the werewolf is still pure silver (or 75%-92% silver anyway, which is good enough to get the job one). |
04-23-2015, 07:05 AM | #9 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
Quote:
GURPS doesn't have any rules for weapons with extra-heavy heads, outside of the general rules for extra-heavy weapons. A full-sized silver mace is going to weigh more, but even if the weapon were originally made entirely out of iron switching over to silver (for x1.33 to weight) it's not going to be enough for even a +1 to damage. Last edited by Varyon; 04-23-2015 at 08:45 AM. |
|
04-23-2015, 08:26 AM | #10 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
|
Re: [Low-Tech] Material or quality
Quote:
And there really should be something in the RAW. Weren't lead-filled maces used historically? |
|
Tags |
low-tech |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|