Talk:Reinforced Plastic (3.5e Equipment)

Medium->Light
So this is a really cheap version of mithril? You do know that changing heavy->medium or medium->light doesn't affect arcane spell failure or armor check penalty, right? --Foxwarrior (talk) 03:34, 10 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Strange, the Mithral page says they do. Yet, you are right it should not change speed. With the reductions to damage and AC, it is much weaker, not to mention how much lower the hardness and hit points are. --Franken Kesey (talk) 03:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)


 * No, the Mithral page says that it reduces the category, and it says that it reduces arcane spell failure and armor check penalty. --Foxwarrior (talk) 03:52, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

"Spell failure chances for armors and shields made from mithral are decreased by 10%, maximum Dexterity bonus is increased by 2, and armor check penalties are lessened by 3 (to a minimum of 0)."


 * Why would anyone ever want to use Glass or Fiber? --Foxwarrior (talk) 06:30, 10 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Cheaper. Do you have a better suggestion? --Franken Kesey (talk) 06:56, 10 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Past level 2 or so, any price difference less than a pound of platinum is negligible for an item you're only going to buy 1 of. --Foxwarrior (talk) 17:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

This hurts my brain...
This has the same problems as Bone in a different way. It's a material whose mechanics don't make sense for the fluff. With bone you had a typically cheap material and made it stronger than normal (maybe, it's still unclear) without a reason to back it up. Here you have a typically strong material and made it unexplainable weaker than normal (maybe, just... keep reading). This is like making a material: Paper... with hardness 8, extra damage against earth elementals, and no fluff about why it's not acting like any paper we know. Or Titanium, which cuts your damage in half, is super effective against purple things, and weighs 10x as much as steel. None of it makes any sense...

I'm.... I'm not sure what's going on here. Besides being hard to comprehend, if I understood it correctly the benefit for armor is ala mithril, but far cheaper with minor penalty (and thus, why is that balanced?). But the benefit to weapons seems no benefit at all. It seems only like a debuff.

I mean... what is going on. Kevlar makes you weaker. Diamond, badass material it is and synonym for adamantine, makes you weaker. Steel makes you weaker, when iron/steel is the default material. Nevermind how exactly one blends all these materials. I know you can blend material but plastic doesn't seem like it's blend friendly, you can't alloy it like two metals. Maybe it doesn't work like that, but the fluff isn't helping me figure out how that goes.

You could argue that the debuffs are made up in the mithril-esque effect on armor, but for weapons, you might as well stick with iron. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 08:34, 10 October 2012 (UTC)


 * The vulnerabilities are in assumption that less than 15% is made up of the added material. A plastic knifes edges may have particles of the sharpest material known to man, yet it is still mostly a plastic knife! Only so much force can be placed on the blade, and not all the blade is diamond. Will work on fluff, and am open to suggestions on price. --Franken Kesey (talk) 15:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Then I question it's purpose. If the amount of impurities is so minor as to not provide sufficient benefit, why have them?  On that note, why not use a stronger plastic?  Plastics can come very durable and hard.  Maybe not weapon-grade hard, but certainly armor-grade hard.  Even if you want to go with el cheapo disposable plastic knife type plastic, I have to ask why?  If its strictly inferior to iron, no one would get it.  Now, there are inferior-than-iron items out there, bronze, bone (WotC's version), and the like, but they're inferior because those are intended for primitive games where iron is not the norm.


 * Plastic can be so much more interesting (check out my Dilatantoplastic (3.5e Equipment), where I took all the best properties of plastic, added a splash of fantasy, and got this). But these right now are just expensive downgrades... -- Eiji-kun (talk) 16:30, 10 October 2012 (UTC)