Two quick notes from last session.
How does healing, etc. work with the odd downtime?
The PCs didn't go through a gate, but a lot of time elapsed. In game, the PCs finished their delve December 12th/13th, and we finished the session March 9th. Healing - and weapon and armor repair - dates from that time. No one sits around not healing. Fixing gear is the same to me as healing.
Enchantments and special orders, though, happen from 3/9/25. It's a sanity-saving device where I can date from my actual emails and notes when something was ordered. Letting people back-order means I have to be stricter with travel time, rest time, etc. and it rewards people who count the days and buy accordingly. I just don't love that aspect of the game in the first place enough to add more of it on top.
Re-assembling armor
I ruled that re-assembling the suit of mail they'd found was a simple task of lots of time, and the Armoury (Body Armor) skill. Thor will learn it and assemble the suit. Costs are minimal - it probably should be 5%-ish of the cost of a suit - but the container did say it contained everyone for a suit.
The players wanted to know if they could re-assemble the suit into a dwarf-sized suit of mail instead of human, since both are SM 0. No. The armor is fine, and thus exactly tailored to a specific build. You can't just swap pieces. This is mail, so I get the idea that you can just move rings from here to there, and here to there, and so on, but a) I'm not sure that would actually realistically work, b) fine says no, and c) it seems iffy to claim that mail armor is just a square footage that is totally fungible into new shapes. Same with making "adjustments" to a different size - at that point, you're paying a substantial premium to have the armor rebuilt and extra, matching quality/enchantment pieces need to be made. In this case, that's Fine, Elven, and Fortify 3. Not cheap, not by a long shot. Better to just put it on one of the humans that it will already fit.
"Disassembled" mail implies, to me, a pile of rings waiting to get riveted together. Saying this is tailored to a specific build is like saying a spool of thread is a disassembled shirt that can only be resewn to make a size medium polo. Of course, that spool of thread wouldn't necessarily make a fine quality shirt, and neither would a pile of rings; quality of the rings would matter, but just as important would be the way they were interwoven.
ReplyDeleteFine doesn't say it's better quality, it says it is expertly fitted and has no waste material. These aren't just some rings that could, potentially, become a fine suit of mail. They're a fine suit of mail that someone has disassembled. It can be put back together as it was to be what it was, but anything "new" would be trickier at best because there isn't a ring to spare anywhere. It's not the raw materials that could make a suit, it's a suit not in wearable condition. If everyone needs to know how that happened, it's due to someone critically casting Undo on it, and then storing the bits instead of reassembling it.
DeleteOkay, so it's a Fine suit of Elven Chainmail that has been Disassembled (but not reduced to a pile of rings, belts, buckles, and padding).
DeleteSo, what was it (maybe) probably consists of is a hooded coif with mantle, a sleeveless hauberk, separate arms, separate legs, and a pile of belts, buckles, and spent rivets. Also a Fine Padded suit of armor which is missing it's stays, ties, belts, buckles, etc (in a pile with the others).
So while someone could put on the hauberk the way it is, it wouldn't be considered Fine anymore (no belts or ties to make it form fitted), and the hoods and mantle could possibly be worn as 'is' just fine without too much issue (I wouldn't allow it to be Fine, though arguably there is not much to fitting that...).
So yeah, an armorer just needs to take the pieces and reattach belts, ties, stays, etc, with rivets or stitching them back together (the padded gambeson, hooded mantle, and pants).
Realistically (hiss! boo! realism!) it should require an armorer who can make Fine //and// Elven armor to adjust it to fit someone it wasn't already fitted for it... mostly because it's "Fine", so it should require adding/removing rings... basically refitting it since it's not a "one size fits no one well" suit. However for DFRPG 'verisimilitude' I'm generally okay with it as long as it's not Very Fine, then I do require all that extra hassle (the way I see it, regular 'not Fine or Very Fine' can be worn by anyone of the proper SM*; Fine has belts, ties, etc to give it a better fit and I might also need someone to be 'relatively close to the original wearer's size (so if the original wearer was 6'5" and a massive beefcake, the scrawny 5'2" guy isn't going to wear it and it fit as Fine); and Very Fine is fitted to a singular wearer and needs complete refitting).
* Barring Features that prohibit this.
There isn't any Very Fine armor, though. Just Fine. And Fine specifies that it must be a match in height and weight. If you start allowing that to mean, "but you can modify it to fit someone of a different height and/or weight or build" it loses its meaning. Either that's how it works, or not, and we're playing with the former. Attempts to end-run around it might be logically possible, but once that starts coming around I stop getting cute by handing out disassembled armor as loot or putting fine mail to be found, because all I get is headache and bypassing the rules as written and intended for my trouble.
DeleteI don't think it is easy to reassemble a Fine suit of mail without loosing the Fine quality. There are no indications what rings should go where (and they look more or less the same). And an expert armorer could probably reassemble mail to make it fit for anybody SM0, including Dwarves.
ReplyDeleteThe text of DF and the DFRPG on Fine disagrees, though. As I said above, either the words mean what they mean, or they don't, and I went with they do.
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