Armor like scale mail doesn't need to be made from metal.
You won't get the performance of metal out of mundane alternatives available at a D&D level of technology, though monster parts (such as the traditional ankheg armor) or magic items can have whatever performance the DM wants.
Says who? What level technology are you trying to say a fictional setting has? Is your default assumption that D&D is early medieval, late medieval, or renaissance? Eberron is arguably closer to industrial revolution. And how does magic alter the economy and technology level?
It doesn't matter if your shield is made of metal or wood. Nor does it matter if it's as small as a buckler or targe, or as big as a kite shield or pavise. They all offer the same protection. So why can't other materials offer the same protection?
Says who? What level technology are you trying to say a fictional setting has?
One where the armor types described in D&D exist at all, which is faux-late-medieval to renaissance. You don't get mundane materials that would be adequate replacements for metal until the 20th century.
Full-bodied plate armor fell out of vogue after the renaissance. But cuirassiers still rode in regiments through World War I. Heck, early ballistic vests were introduced in the 19th century and they used metal.
None of which actually addresses the point that the strength of the material doesn't necessarily matter. Wood (AC 15) isn't as strong as iron or steel (AC 19), but the only mechanical differences when it comes to a worn shield is whether or not shocking grasp attacks with advantage and if heat metal can affect it.
And as others have already pointed out, it's a pointless obsession to try and squeeze out one or two more points of AC that you can just buy in a store for storytelling purposes when (A) any use of Wild Shape renders the armor meaningless and (B) the already baked in taboo is just as valid a story. It's like saying it's actually a good thing that someone breaks the window of a bakery because now the baker must pay the glassmaker for a new window, and that's good for the economy because it moves money around. Except the baker now can't invest as much of their profits back into their business, or pay rent, or must take a pay cut for a bit. All it does is divert funds from one enterprise to another.
And as others have already pointed out, it's a pointless obsession to try and squeeze out one or two more points of AC that you can just buy in a store for storytelling purposes ...
Either AC doesn't matter, in which case it's fine to limit druids to hide, or AC does matter, in which case discarding that restriction on druids is worth something. You can't have it both ways.
And as others have already pointed out, it's a pointless obsession to try and squeeze out one or two more points of AC that you can just buy in a store for storytelling purposes ...
Either AC doesn't matter, in which case it's fine to limit druids to hide, or AC does matter, in which case discarding that restriction on druids is worth something. You can't have it both ways.
Also it just seems needlessly limiting considering more and more subclasses are forgoing wild shape for other stuff (fire druid, Star Druid, Spore Druid)
Yes the DM can, but not the character ( or the player). This not a character option but a DM/World option. So yes you can speak to the DM and ask but no you can’t just rule it so yourself (unless you are the DM) and make it stand. Yes the DM CAN change things to suite their world, BUT it also doesn’t mean the DM WILL change to suite the player. That rule - as many others have stated, is where you switch from RAW/RAI to homebrew. When invoked by a DM you are no longer in a purely RAW/RAI game you are now in a homebrew however slightly.
Okay, so they just wanted to make druids lives difficult? Sure you can wear better armor, but you have to go on a quest to find this exotic material whereas everyone else can buy it from a store or take it off of the corpse of a dead enemy. This also means that if the party finds a suit of magical armor, the Druid gets left out because 99.99999% of all Medium Armor that is worth being magical is going to be metal.
And what about the other six Circles that are not Moon that likely won't be using Wild Shape in combat as much? What about Spores and Wildfire that can use their Wild Shape for something other than turning into an animal? It just seems like a really arbitrary rule that puts more work on the DM to either create a quest for the Druid, retcon the reward he just gave them to say "Oh it's actually made of shell/chitin/wood/stone", or just handwave it and say that why, yes, this store DOES sell armor made of exotic materials because reasons. If this just gets handwaved most of the time, why make it a rule at all? Why not just handwave this arbitrary rule that just causes headaches and has no mechanical, balance, logical reasoning behind it?
No, this isn't about making anyone's experience difficult. Everything has a trade-off. If you're not spending money on stupidly expensive metal armor, then your share of the rewards goes towards other things. That's one of the things that makes monks and rogues so awesome. They hardly need anything. As for the rule being seemingly arbitrary, you could attempt a similar argument with almost any other class in the game. For example, arcane magic and divine magic are not the same. In game purposes, magic is magic. But in terms of lore and how they interact with the world, the difference is like night and day. Restrictions can be good, actually. They force you to focus, which facilitates roleplaying. Some classes learn more heavily into their story than others, but they all have a story.
Every bard is a skilled musician, even with instruments they don't start with. Barbarians, despite not being literally barbarians (people who don't speak the language), all have breathtaking anger management issues. Clerics expressly draw their power from deities. Fighters are paradoxically "well-rounded specialists" who excel at killing things because they get more actions and attacks than anyone else. Monks hail from communal living. Paladins don't need deities for their power, it comes from conviction in their ideals, but many still dedicate themselves to a deity anyway. Rangers are the bulwark between civilization and the wilds, and that can take many forms. Rogues, as they're presented in the PH, are scoundrels who are at least tangentially connected to crime families and thieves' guilds. Sorcerers won the genetic lottery while warlocks strike a bargain and cheat to get ahead in life while wizard study their asses off.
And, RAW, no a druid will not wear metal armor. It's taboo for them, and if you really need an answer that badly then talk to your DM about it. They'll help you, if you need it, though the PH can help. Druids are about the balance: between the elements, between life and death, and living in harmony with nature. And like every other class, electing to play a druid means buying into that story. At least, if you care about playing your role. And as a player, you make an informed decision based on what's on the page. In other words, it's informed consent. And there's nothing wrong with that. If the DM decides they want to hand-waive it, or change how druids work in their game, that's up to them. Players are free to ask, but the DM is well within their rights to disallow it. And there are legitimate alternative materials that do not break from the RAW: alchemically treated stone, petrified wood and fungus, dragon scales, chitin, bone...the list goes on and on.
I am repeating contributions from pages one through five, some of which are mine, many that aren't, and most of which articulated better than I'm doing right now. And it's head-bangingly frustrating that people have resurrected this thread yet again without reading what came before.
Okay, so they just wanted to make druids lives difficult?
It's a deliberate restriction on their power level, similar to all the other classes that are limited to armor that is less than would be useful to them (barbarians would find heavy armor useful, bards would find medium armor useful, monks would find light armor useful, sorcerers would find medium armor useful, wizards would find light and medium armor useful), it's just that it's not worded in a way that corresponds to the armor types in D&D 5e, probably because hide armor exists.
And as others have already pointed out, it's a pointless obsession to try and squeeze out one or two more points of AC that you can just buy in a store for storytelling purposes ...
Either AC doesn't matter, in which case it's fine to limit druids to hide, or AC does matter, in which case discarding that restriction on druids is worth something. You can't have it both ways.
If you want to fully grasp the meaning of my words, don't cut them off as soon as you think you've landed on a point. That's the second time you've done that today. It's disrespectful. Do it a third and I simply won't respond to you ever again.
I'm saying AC doesn't matter nearly as much as these people think it does. And, no, the druid isn't limited to hide. I don't know how many times I and others have to say this for it to sink in. There are always alternatives.
RAW, there's a prohibition on metal armor. If you have to beg your DM to allow metal armor, then you can just as easily work with your DM to come up with nonmetallic alternatives. So the real question is why are people so obsessed with defenestrating this one detail?
“And?” while the DMG does give the DM the right to overrule selected sections of the RAW/RAI overruling large amounts basically makes the game something other than straight DnD in my mind. The key piece here is that yes the DM can choose to rule that Druids can wear metallic armor in their world but players can not, because of their character design schemes simply state that their Druid wears metallic armor without (prior) DM approval.
Druids are a somewhat special case for DnD as we know almost nothing about them. Here is the main historical reference ( from Julius Ceaser):
Caesar wrote that the druids recognized the authority of a single leader, who would rule until his death, when a successor would be chosen by vote or through conflict. He remarked that they met annually at a sacred place in the region occupied by the Carnute tribe in Gaul, while they viewed Britain as the centre of druidic study; and that they were not found among the German tribes to the east of the Rhine. According to Caesar, many young men were trained to be druids, during which time they had to learn all the associated lore by heart. He also said that their main teaching was "the souls do not perish, but after death pass from one to another". They were concerned with "the stars and their movements, the size of the cosmos and the earth, the world of nature, and the power and might of the immortal gods", indicating they were involved with not only such common aspects of religion as theology and cosmology, but also astronomy. Caesar held that they were "administrators" during rituals of human sacrifice, for which criminals were usually used, and that the method was by burning in a wicker man. this is from Wikipedia but is matched by Britannia in a somewhat less direct format. This and the few other classical notes on Druids suggest that they actually wore NO armor and refrained from battle/combat. While later (after their effective dissolution) references paint them as wizards/seers/sorcerors like Merlin from the tales of King Arthur. From those sources perhaps WOTC should have established the Druid class as having no armor proficiency which would have eliminated this entire discussion.
As written (RAW) Druids do not wear metallic armors. A DM is (obviously) free to change that for their own world if they feel like it but that is the base lore/rule for all official published settings. A player that wants to have a Druid that runs around in metallic armor can’t claim it by their own choice but must get their DM’s approval for the exception.
“And?” while the DMG does give the DM the right to overrule selected sections of the RAW/RAI overruling large amounts basically makes the game something other than straight DnD in my mind. The key piece here is that yes the DM can choose to rule that Druids can wear metallic armor in their world but players can not, because of their character design schemes simply state that their Druid wears metallic armor without (prior) DM approval.
Druids are a somewhat special case for DnD as we know almost nothing about them. Here is the main historical reference ( from Julius Ceaser):
Caesar wrote that the druids recognized the authority of a single leader, who would rule until his death, when a successor would be chosen by vote or through conflict. He remarked that they met annually at a sacred place in the region occupied by the Carnute tribe in Gaul, while they viewed Britain as the centre of druidic study; and that they were not found among the German tribes to the east of the Rhine. According to Caesar, many young men were trained to be druids, during which time they had to learn all the associated lore by heart. He also said that their main teaching was "the souls do not perish, but after death pass from one to another". They were concerned with "the stars and their movements, the size of the cosmos and the earth, the world of nature, and the power and might of the immortal gods", indicating they were involved with not only such common aspects of religion as theology and cosmology, but also astronomy. Caesar held that they were "administrators" during rituals of human sacrifice, for which criminals were usually used, and that the method was by burning in a wicker man. this is from Wikipedia but is matched by Britannia in a somewhat less direct format. This and the few other classical notes on Druids suggest that they actually wore NO armor and refrained from battle/combat. While later (after their effective dissolution) references paint them as wizards/seers/sorcerors like Merlin from the tales of King Arthur. From those sources perhaps WOTC should have established the Druid class as having no armor proficiency which would have eliminated this entire discussion.
As written (RAW) Druids do not wear metallic armors. A DM is (obviously) free to change that for their own world if they feel like it but that is the base lore/rule for all official published settings. A player that wants to have a Druid that runs around in metallic armor can’t claim it by their own choice but must get their DM’s approval for the exception.
Sure, that is the base rule. Actually, my comment was directed to both sides of this argument.
As. for what is and what is not authentic DND, in a world with everything from Planescape to Eberron, Dark Sun to the Underdark, Asia to Mesoamerica, I think that boat has sailed.
Authentic in the sense that it has some official support from WOTC - granted many of those settings have little or no real recent support but at one time or another they were official settings with some sort of official support then.
A quick note to follow up on metallic magic items. I do recognize the inconsistency of not allowing metallic armor then allowing metallic magic jewelry so let me address that somewhat. In a game where most magic is some lost and found ancient item that can’t be created today you sort of have to make some exceptions in rules and so yes I would allow the enchantment process to overrule the human worked effect creating 3 classes of materials - “natural”, refined/worked by humanoids and enchanted/magical. In a world where you can still create magic items it can be stricter but then the Druid could be making their own cloak, boots, rings, wands, staves etc from natural materials and then enchant them themselves getting around most of the problem. That still leaves metallic weapons but there a case can be made that the Druid is normally not coming in contact with the metal directly nor are they trying to cast magic thru it ( sword grips etc are typically wrapped in leather, sometimes shark/ray leather that is naturally “grippy”.
The idea in "rare magic" games that a magical item almost or de facto "transubstantiates" the material it is made out of actually has some appeal. It's not a metal ring, it's a magic ring (and it doesn't matter what it's made because the magic is the real matter). I appreciate the idea, and it's a good one, but it's still sorta DM retconning what I still think is an inconsistent insistence in the RAW regarding armor.
I don't insist upon or police my games' druids, most of them play along to the standard tropes best they can actually. I think it's actually the one class where players tend to play to stereotype more than any other in my games.
Hey guys, did you see how good serpent scale armor is? And it’s made from shimmering scales.
This armor consists of a coat and leggings (and perhaps a separate skirt) of leather covered with overlapping pieces of metal, much like the scales of a fish
Hey guys, did you see how good serpent scale armor is? And it’s made from shimmering scales.
This armor consists of a coat and leggings (and perhaps a separate skirt) of leather covered with overlapping pieces of metal, much like the scales of a fish
That's not what the text of the item says in the book.
Serpent Scale Armor
Armor (Scale Mail), Uncommon
This suit of magic armor is made from shimmering scales. While wearing it, you can apply your full Dexterity modifier (instead of a maximum of +2) when determining your Armor Class. In addition, this armor does not impose disadvantage on your Dexterity (Stealth) checks.
You need to be careful when relying on D&D Beyond for all your information. The company has a tendency to add things which shouldn't be there, and it routinely leaves broken functions in the character builder as they are. Barbarians who wear armor can still benefit from their Unarmored Defense if they wear armor, gaining a higher AC than they should be. School of Illusion wizards who know minor illusion from another source, such as being a forest gnome, do not get a replacement cantrip via their Improved Minor Illusion feature. Similarly, the Transmuter's Stone for the School of Transmutation isn't an explicit magic item, so DDB didn't make one up. But they also didn't bother creating a toggle for giving the mage any of the bonuses, so players have to homebrew it. And more recently, the Battle Smith's Steel Defender doesn't line up with the one from Tasha's. It was revised almost a year and a half ago, and the company is just shrugging its shoulders. I had to build it myself, and I'm going to have to scale it up with each new level.
The tools here are wonderful, but they're not without their limitations. And invoking any link comes with the risk of appealing to authority which does not exist.
Functionally, it's a nonmetallic alternative to Mithral Armor. If you need another context clue, the Serpent's Fang is similarly nonmetallic, being made from "the scrimshawed fang of a giant serpent". Or are you actually trying to say the beast's scales are metal?
Hey guys, did you see how good serpent scale armor is? And it’s made from shimmering scales.
This armor consists of a coat and leggings (and perhaps a separate skirt) of leather covered with overlapping pieces of metal, much like the scales of a fish
I'm sorry that you're relying on an erroneous addition to the text.
Hey guys, did you see how good serpent scale armor is? And it’s made from shimmering scales.
This armor consists of a coat and leggings (and perhaps a separate skirt) of leather covered with overlapping pieces of metal, much like the scales of a fish
That's not what the text of the item says in the book.
Serpent Scale Armor
Armor (Scale Mail), Uncommon
This suit of magic armor is made from shimmering scales. While wearing it, you can apply your full Dexterity modifier (instead of a maximum of +2) when determining your Armor Class. In addition, this armor does not impose disadvantage on your Dexterity (Stealth) checks.
You need to be careful when relying on D&D Beyond for all your information. The company has a tendency to add things which shouldn't be there, and it routinely leaves broken functions in the character builder as they are. Barbarians who wear armor can still benefit from their Unarmored Defense if they wear armor, gaining a higher AC than they should be. School of Illusion wizards who know minor illusion from another source, such as being a forest gnome, do not get a replacement cantrip via their Improved Minor Illusion feature. Similarly, the Transmuter's Stone for the School of Transmutation isn't an explicit magic item, so DDB didn't make one up. But they also didn't bother creating a toggle for giving the mage any of the bonuses, so players have to homebrew it. And more recently, the Battle Smith's Steel Defender doesn't line up with the one from Tasha's. It was revised almost a year and a half ago, and the company is just shrugging its shoulders. I had to build it myself, and I'm going to have to scale it up with each new level.
The tools here are wonderful, but they're not without their limitations. And invoking any link comes with the risk of appealing to authority which does not exist.
Functionally, it's a nonmetallic alternative to Mithral Armor. If you need another context clue, the Serpent's Fang is similarly nonmetallic, being made from "the scrimshawed fang of a giant serpent". Or are you actually trying to say the beast's scales are metal?
I mean, I literally quoted the link the poster used to talk about the armour. Not sure how you're expecting anyone who posts here to also have all the books to cross reference for everything they talk about.
Correction is fine. Suggesting I need clues or that I'm saying that a fang is metallic is just... I don't know what you're doing.
Says who? What level technology are you trying to say a fictional setting has? Is your default assumption that D&D is early medieval, late medieval, or renaissance? Eberron is arguably closer to industrial revolution. And how does magic alter the economy and technology level?
It doesn't matter if your shield is made of metal or wood. Nor does it matter if it's as small as a buckler or targe, or as big as a kite shield or pavise. They all offer the same protection. So why can't other materials offer the same protection?
One where the armor types described in D&D exist at all, which is faux-late-medieval to renaissance. You don't get mundane materials that would be adequate replacements for metal until the 20th century.
Full-bodied plate armor fell out of vogue after the renaissance. But cuirassiers still rode in regiments through World War I. Heck, early ballistic vests were introduced in the 19th century and they used metal.
None of which actually addresses the point that the strength of the material doesn't necessarily matter. Wood (AC 15) isn't as strong as iron or steel (AC 19), but the only mechanical differences when it comes to a worn shield is whether or not shocking grasp attacks with advantage and if heat metal can affect it.
And as others have already pointed out, it's a pointless obsession to try and squeeze out one or two more points of AC that you can just buy in a store for storytelling purposes when (A) any use of Wild Shape renders the armor meaningless and (B) the already baked in taboo is just as valid a story. It's like saying it's actually a good thing that someone breaks the window of a bakery because now the baker must pay the glassmaker for a new window, and that's good for the economy because it moves money around. Except the baker now can't invest as much of their profits back into their business, or pay rent, or must take a pay cut for a bit. All it does is divert funds from one enterprise to another.
Either AC doesn't matter, in which case it's fine to limit druids to hide, or AC does matter, in which case discarding that restriction on druids is worth something. You can't have it both ways.
Also it just seems needlessly limiting considering more and more subclasses are forgoing wild shape for other stuff (fire druid, Star Druid, Spore Druid)
And..?
Everything is a GM call, as it should be.
No, this isn't about making anyone's experience difficult. Everything has a trade-off. If you're not spending money on stupidly expensive metal armor, then your share of the rewards goes towards other things. That's one of the things that makes monks and rogues so awesome. They hardly need anything. As for the rule being seemingly arbitrary, you could attempt a similar argument with almost any other class in the game. For example, arcane magic and divine magic are not the same. In game purposes, magic is magic. But in terms of lore and how they interact with the world, the difference is like night and day. Restrictions can be good, actually. They force you to focus, which facilitates roleplaying. Some classes learn more heavily into their story than others, but they all have a story.
Every bard is a skilled musician, even with instruments they don't start with. Barbarians, despite not being literally barbarians (people who don't speak the language), all have breathtaking anger management issues. Clerics expressly draw their power from deities. Fighters are paradoxically "well-rounded specialists" who excel at killing things because they get more actions and attacks than anyone else. Monks hail from communal living. Paladins don't need deities for their power, it comes from conviction in their ideals, but many still dedicate themselves to a deity anyway. Rangers are the bulwark between civilization and the wilds, and that can take many forms. Rogues, as they're presented in the PH, are scoundrels who are at least tangentially connected to crime families and thieves' guilds. Sorcerers won the genetic lottery while warlocks strike a bargain and cheat to get ahead in life while wizard study their asses off.
And, RAW, no a druid will not wear metal armor. It's taboo for them, and if you really need an answer that badly then talk to your DM about it. They'll help you, if you need it, though the PH can help. Druids are about the balance: between the elements, between life and death, and living in harmony with nature. And like every other class, electing to play a druid means buying into that story. At least, if you care about playing your role. And as a player, you make an informed decision based on what's on the page. In other words, it's informed consent. And there's nothing wrong with that. If the DM decides they want to hand-waive it, or change how druids work in their game, that's up to them. Players are free to ask, but the DM is well within their rights to disallow it. And there are legitimate alternative materials that do not break from the RAW: alchemically treated stone, petrified wood and fungus, dragon scales, chitin, bone...the list goes on and on.
I am repeating contributions from pages one through five, some of which are mine, many that aren't, and most of which articulated better than I'm doing right now. And it's head-bangingly frustrating that people have resurrected this thread yet again without reading what came before.
It's a deliberate restriction on their power level, similar to all the other classes that are limited to armor that is less than would be useful to them (barbarians would find heavy armor useful, bards would find medium armor useful, monks would find light armor useful, sorcerers would find medium armor useful, wizards would find light and medium armor useful), it's just that it's not worded in a way that corresponds to the armor types in D&D 5e, probably because hide armor exists.
If you want to fully grasp the meaning of my words, don't cut them off as soon as you think you've landed on a point. That's the second time you've done that today. It's disrespectful. Do it a third and I simply won't respond to you ever again.
I'm saying AC doesn't matter nearly as much as these people think it does. And, no, the druid isn't limited to hide. I don't know how many times I and others have to say this for it to sink in. There are always alternatives.
RAW, there's a prohibition on metal armor. If you have to beg your DM to allow metal armor, then you can just as easily work with your DM to come up with nonmetallic alternatives. So the real question is why are people so obsessed with defenestrating this one detail?
Frankly, if a player were this argumentative at my table, they’d no longer be at my table.
Any player who thinks that any rule trumps Rule 0 is not worth a GM’s time.
“And?”
while the DMG does give the DM the right to overrule selected sections of the RAW/RAI overruling large amounts basically makes the game something other than straight DnD in my mind. The key piece here is that yes the DM can choose to rule that Druids can wear metallic armor in their world but players can not, because of their character design schemes simply state that their Druid wears metallic armor without (prior) DM approval.
Druids are a somewhat special case for DnD as we know almost nothing about them. Here is the main historical reference ( from Julius Ceaser):
Caesar wrote that the druids recognized the authority of a single leader, who would rule until his death, when a successor would be chosen by vote or through conflict. He remarked that they met annually at a sacred place in the region occupied by the Carnute tribe in Gaul, while they viewed Britain as the centre of druidic study; and that they were not found among the German tribes to the east of the Rhine. According to Caesar, many young men were trained to be druids, during which time they had to learn all the associated lore by heart. He also said that their main teaching was "the souls do not perish, but after death pass from one to another". They were concerned with "the stars and their movements, the size of the cosmos and the earth, the world of nature, and the power and might of the immortal gods", indicating they were involved with not only such common aspects of religion as theology and cosmology, but also astronomy. Caesar held that they were "administrators" during rituals of human sacrifice, for which criminals were usually used, and that the method was by burning in a wicker man. this is from Wikipedia but is matched by Britannia in a somewhat less direct format. This and the few other classical notes on Druids suggest that they actually wore NO armor and refrained from battle/combat. While later (after their effective dissolution) references paint them as wizards/seers/sorcerors like Merlin from the tales of King Arthur. From those sources perhaps WOTC should have established the Druid class as having no armor proficiency which would have eliminated this entire discussion.
As written (RAW) Druids do not wear metallic armors. A DM is (obviously) free to change that for their own world if they feel like it but that is the base lore/rule for all official published settings. A player that wants to have a Druid that runs around in metallic armor can’t claim it by their own choice but must get their DM’s approval for the exception.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Sure, that is the base rule. Actually, my comment was directed to both sides of this argument.
As. for what is and what is not authentic DND, in a world with everything from Planescape to Eberron, Dark Sun to the Underdark, Asia to Mesoamerica, I think that boat has sailed.
Authentic in the sense that it has some official support from WOTC - granted many of those settings have little or no real recent support but at one time or another they were official settings with some sort of official support then.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
The idea in "rare magic" games that a magical item almost or de facto "transubstantiates" the material it is made out of actually has some appeal. It's not a metal ring, it's a magic ring (and it doesn't matter what it's made because the magic is the real matter). I appreciate the idea, and it's a good one, but it's still sorta DM retconning what I still think is an inconsistent insistence in the RAW regarding armor.
I don't insist upon or police my games' druids, most of them play along to the standard tropes best they can actually. I think it's actually the one class where players tend to play to stereotype more than any other in my games.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Hey guys, did you see how good serpent scale armor is? And it’s made from shimmering scales.
This armor consists of a coat and leggings (and perhaps a separate skirt) of leather covered with overlapping pieces of metal, much like the scales of a fish
That's not what the text of the item says in the book.
You need to be careful when relying on D&D Beyond for all your information. The company has a tendency to add things which shouldn't be there, and it routinely leaves broken functions in the character builder as they are. Barbarians who wear armor can still benefit from their Unarmored Defense if they wear armor, gaining a higher AC than they should be. School of Illusion wizards who know minor illusion from another source, such as being a forest gnome, do not get a replacement cantrip via their Improved Minor Illusion feature. Similarly, the Transmuter's Stone for the School of Transmutation isn't an explicit magic item, so DDB didn't make one up. But they also didn't bother creating a toggle for giving the mage any of the bonuses, so players have to homebrew it. And more recently, the Battle Smith's Steel Defender doesn't line up with the one from Tasha's. It was revised almost a year and a half ago, and the company is just shrugging its shoulders. I had to build it myself, and I'm going to have to scale it up with each new level.
The tools here are wonderful, but they're not without their limitations. And invoking any link comes with the risk of appealing to authority which does not exist.
Functionally, it's a nonmetallic alternative to Mithral Armor. If you need another context clue, the Serpent's Fang is similarly nonmetallic, being made from "the scrimshawed fang of a giant serpent". Or are you actually trying to say the beast's scales are metal?
I'm sorry that you're relying on an erroneous addition to the text.
I mean, I literally quoted the link the poster used to talk about the armour. Not sure how you're expecting anyone who posts here to also have all the books to cross reference for everything they talk about.
Correction is fine. Suggesting I need clues or that I'm saying that a fang is metallic is just... I don't know what you're doing.
Let's keep things civil and not resort to personal attacks
Find my D&D Beyond articles here