I'm not sure if I'm in the correct forum, but here goes.
I'm looking to create a master list of Ore/Metals based on typical price paid per pound. I'm heavily interested in the mining aspect of D&D and would like to know all of the metals, in value, paid per pound. There have been several posts online about it, but they are contradictory and confusing.
I understand the currency system, but I'm more interested in playing a character that is a miner. Hell, this might not even exist. I see how Brass is a combination of Copper & Zinc. How Bronze is Copper & Tin. Steel = Iron & Coal, etc. I'm interested in the individual costs of all of these components.
Does this even exist? Am I nuts? Any links or leads are appreciated.
There's no official stats on the value of raw ore because that's not a typical player-facing aspect of the game. Honestly, D&D doesn't really support a "mining aspect" on the player side. You can find a per pound rate on a couple metals in the "Trade Goods" part of the Equipment section in the PHB, but broadly speaking D&D doesn't spend much time on the trade value of natural resources. Crafting an item is a matter of spending time and gold based on the item's value behind the black of an interlude between active gameplay, not checking off ingredients on a recipe.
Now, a player character who is a miner, present tense, is not really within the scope of the game. This isn't the kind of open world fantasy like Skyrim or Minecraft where you run around finding resources to build tools and weapons and the like. D&D is built on the premise that the player characters are in some way, shape, or form adventurers and spend the active playtime going on adventures. A character might have been a miner in the past, but in most games you're not going to have the opportunity to start mining a seam during play.
Doesn't mean someone somewhere hasn't done it, but I've never seen it.
There absolutely isn't anything "official", though. Anything would be third party/homebrew.
It's difficult just to find weights per cubic foot of metal (since every metal has a different weight, and alloys are going to vary according to percentage of each).
Some considerations: Official D&D only really has a few metals, and they never really break them down. Brass, Bronze, Copper, SIlver, Electrum, Gold, Platinum, and then different "magical" metals that depend on the game world and the name changes across different editions. THere is no earthly equivalent to Mithril, for example, or Adamant. Different supplements give different weights for the same thing.
Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Iron, Gold, Electrum, Silver, Platinum, Chromium, Aluminum, Zinc, NIckel, Titanium, Tungsten, Antimony, Bismuth -- these are what you'll be looking for in general, as they are the core metals of the general time frame along with the common alloy elements that were put into them. The Carbon, for steel, most often came from the coals they created by burning wood, and then there is also Calcium (usually as a calcite) and Bitumen.
They certainly don't have metals like Sodium, Potassium, Vanadium, Molybdenum, Osmium, Erbium, Fermium, Flerovium, Cesium, Lithium, Francium, Rubidium, Beryllium, Indium, Scandium, Gallium, Hafnium, Thulium, Yttrium, Ytterbium, Californium, Polonium, Dysprosium, Nobelium, Hassium, Lutetium, Lanthanum, Mendelevium, Meitnerium, Niobium, Neptunium, Lawrencium, Promethium, Protactinium, Bohrium, Praseodymium, Ruthenium, Rhenium, Rutherfordium, Samarium, Seaborgium, Technetium, and Terbium, as these aren't metals that would usually be thought of in a fantasy world.
The few I highlighted have been found in quantities in ancient artifacts and old smithy sites. Several of the others are theoretical elements or radioactive and deadly (e.g., polonium).
What are you looking to do with the information? Maybe people can make suggestions that would get you to about the same end result. Other than proficiency in miner’s tools, and the already mentioned chart, there’s not a lot to do with mining. Being a miner is something a character might do before they set off on their adventures, but typically not something done afterwards.
This is generally a thing to work out with your DM, as you might get a nice crowd-sourced chart but it won't be worth anything if they decide it's not right for their game.
Typically mining would be a thing you could do during downtime, making rougly the same wages as adventurers doing other jobs. If I were DMing for a miner I might also convert some of the regular loot into exposed ore veins or whatnot that you could mine out during a short rest or something. The point is that this can be integrated into a game without really changing any mechanics.
Now if you want to be making significant amounts of money or craft suits of plate mail on your own, this is where many DMs will say no because it starts to disrupt the game. PCs are first and foremost a member of a group of adventurers. They may have their own personal pursuits but those should largely happen during downtime or between sessions because the other people at the table probably don't want to sit around doing nothing while you get rich on your own.
Not exactly sure how mining during a short rest would work.
Roll a d20. On a natural 20, your character has stumbled across a handful of ore or gem-bearing rocks. Roll on a percentage chart to see what you've found, ranging from a few silvers worth of tin to a gold nugget or high quality uncut precious gem worth 10-15 gold. Must be in a rocky area of appropriate geologic formation.
Basically you're kicking over some rocks and find something slightly valuable below it.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I mean, regardless there's the question of how exactly you're getting to your mine and back to the party within an hour. And just scratching at the ground wherever you are for an hour is... unlikely to be a productive endeavor. Yes, D&D isn't real life, but there's still a certain degree of baseline realism to what's possible, and short rest prospecting is rather out there.
In a previous thread on mining, I pointed out that the average daily haul for a full 8 hours of prospecting was about 1/4 troy ounce of gold per day, if they were lucky. I was generous and made a d6 roll for it, because of the fantasy. That works out to about 1 copper a day, at most, based on coin weight versus value.
That's gold. It isn't aluminum (which is the most common metal on earth), and it isn't iron, and it isn't titanium -- all of which are far common than any of the precious ores on earth.
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Only a DM since 1980 (2000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA
Does this even exist? Am I nuts? Any links or leads are appreciated.
There isn't really anything in the official rules about mining, and very little about crafting. Just about anything you find will be Third Party homebrew, so it's not surprising that you're finding lots of "contradictory" information. There are many third party attempts at throwing Metal/Ore systems together - most are more focused on the crafting aspect and not really on mining itself, but could still be good ideas for types of metals, gems, etc and what you can craft with them.
The best third party system I'm aware of that is focused on Mining itself is the Angry Golem Games Mining Guide, I haven't actually used it but it looks fun. It's actually more based around setting up a mine, hiring NPC workers that take weeks to find anything, etc, but could probably be converted to PCs mining in shorter time frames if the DM wanted
I'm not sure if I'm in the correct forum, but here goes.
I'm looking to create a master list of Ore/Metals based on typical price paid per pound. I'm heavily interested in the mining aspect of D&D and would like to know all of the metals, in value, paid per pound. There have been several posts online about it, but they are contradictory and confusing.
I understand the currency system, but I'm more interested in playing a character that is a miner. Hell, this might not even exist. I see how Brass is a combination of Copper & Zinc. How Bronze is Copper & Tin. Steel = Iron & Coal, etc. I'm interested in the individual costs of all of these components.
Does this even exist? Am I nuts? Any links or leads are appreciated.
You are delving into the economics of D&D and that has been horribly broken since its inception some 50 years ago. I have yet to see a supplement that is D&D centric that works. Now, you should look at Harn or ACKS game systems, where the economics is built from the ground up, and is integrated into the game.
To Joecinocca I would like to ask, what metals or other ores do you think are needed to fill out your table? Do you want to include mining (quarrying) marble, granite, milky quartz, limestone, slate? Coal?
I think you might want to include Platinum, Gold, Silver, Copper, Nickle, Iron, Zinc, Tin, Lead, Mithril (which might be tungsten) and Adamantine (which might be something else). I wouldn't include Aluminum because the ore was very expensive to refine and the metal was not needed in preindustrial economies, typical of D&D.
With some license, you could say this list of metals would allow you to make the following list of alloys: Brass, Bronze, Cast Iron, Steel, Electrum, German Silver (Nickle Silver), Gunmetal, Pewter, Rose Gold, Sterling Silver, Palladium, along with the pure metals of Platinum, Gold, Silver, Copper, Nickle, Tin, Lead, and Mithril (and adamantine). Chromium and Magnesium would be needed to make "stainless steel" or "chromium steel".
To the other conversation, maybe we should begin another thread if it is worth discussing further ...
To get pure ore, it has to be processed. The yield (percentage of usable ore per mined raw ore) varies depending on the kind of ore and the method of finding it. You might have to mine 50 pounds of ore to get one ounce of usable ore. But that's not all of it. You have to excavate rock that you know will not yield any ore before you get to the part of the rock that will. Some rock you don't move because it is supporting the rock above you. The rock you leave in place is called Leaverite, as in leave-it-right-there. The rock you have to get out of the way is called Gangue (gang). The rock you want to recover and process is called Ore. The ore is carried out and then processed.
In one of the circumstances mentioned above, a rich deposit on the surface, would be extraordinarily rare. Placer deposits of gold in streams is similar.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Really, if you want mine in a hurry, your best bet is summoning an earth elemental of some kind using Planar Ally or Planar Binding. An elemental should be able to extract the ore without disturbing the surrounding rock. Probably would have to pay it half, though.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Judging by the elemental blocks I could find, I'd say you'd definitely be looking in the neighborhood of a Dao to get something with that kind of ability to manipulate the earth. Basic elemental specifically says it doesn't disturb material it moves through.
That's just movement through. There's no rules saying it can't take stuff out of the ground if it wants to, it just means that it doesn't make a tunnel that other creatures can use.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Ah, the trusty Air Bud argument. I dunno, I just figure to effectively extract particular minerals from the ground would take more overt earth shaping powers as opposed to just the ability to move through the ground.
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I'm not sure if I'm in the correct forum, but here goes.
I'm looking to create a master list of Ore/Metals based on typical price paid per pound.
I'm heavily interested in the mining aspect of D&D and would like to know all of the metals, in value, paid per pound.
There have been several posts online about it, but they are contradictory and confusing.
I understand the currency system, but I'm more interested in playing a character that is a miner. Hell, this might not even exist. I see how Brass is a combination of Copper & Zinc. How Bronze is Copper & Tin. Steel = Iron & Coal, etc. I'm interested in the individual costs of all of these components.
Does this even exist? Am I nuts? Any links or leads are appreciated.
There's no official stats on the value of raw ore because that's not a typical player-facing aspect of the game. Honestly, D&D doesn't really support a "mining aspect" on the player side. You can find a per pound rate on a couple metals in the "Trade Goods" part of the Equipment section in the PHB, but broadly speaking D&D doesn't spend much time on the trade value of natural resources. Crafting an item is a matter of spending time and gold based on the item's value behind the black of an interlude between active gameplay, not checking off ingredients on a recipe.
Now, a player character who is a miner, present tense, is not really within the scope of the game. This isn't the kind of open world fantasy like Skyrim or Minecraft where you run around finding resources to build tools and weapons and the like. D&D is built on the premise that the player characters are in some way, shape, or form adventurers and spend the active playtime going on adventures. A character might have been a miner in the past, but in most games you're not going to have the opportunity to start mining a seam during play.
I have never seen such for 5e.
Doesn't mean someone somewhere hasn't done it, but I've never seen it.
There absolutely isn't anything "official", though. Anything would be third party/homebrew.
It's difficult just to find weights per cubic foot of metal (since every metal has a different weight, and alloys are going to vary according to percentage of each).
Some considerations: Official D&D only really has a few metals, and they never really break them down. Brass, Bronze, Copper, SIlver, Electrum, Gold, Platinum, and then different "magical" metals that depend on the game world and the name changes across different editions. THere is no earthly equivalent to Mithril, for example, or Adamant. Different supplements give different weights for the same thing.
Tin, Copper, Arsenic, Iron, Gold, Electrum, Silver, Platinum, Chromium, Aluminum, Zinc, NIckel, Titanium, Tungsten, Antimony, Bismuth -- these are what you'll be looking for in general, as they are the core metals of the general time frame along with the common alloy elements that were put into them. The Carbon, for steel, most often came from the coals they created by burning wood, and then there is also Calcium (usually as a calcite) and Bitumen.
They certainly don't have metals like Sodium, Potassium, Vanadium, Molybdenum, Osmium, Erbium, Fermium, Flerovium, Cesium, Lithium, Francium, Rubidium, Beryllium, Indium, Scandium, Gallium, Hafnium, Thulium, Yttrium, Ytterbium, Californium, Polonium, Dysprosium, Nobelium, Hassium, Lutetium, Lanthanum, Mendelevium, Meitnerium, Niobium, Neptunium, Lawrencium, Promethium, Protactinium, Bohrium, Praseodymium, Ruthenium, Rhenium, Rutherfordium, Samarium, Seaborgium, Technetium, and Terbium, as these aren't metals that would usually be thought of in a fantasy world.
The few I highlighted have been found in quantities in ancient artifacts and old smithy sites. Several of the others are theoretical elements or radioactive and deadly (e.g., polonium).
Only a DM since 1980 (2000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA
Wyrlde.com
Free PDFs
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
What are you looking to do with the information? Maybe people can make suggestions that would get you to about the same end result.
Other than proficiency in miner’s tools, and the already mentioned chart, there’s not a lot to do with mining. Being a miner is something a character might do before they set off on their adventures, but typically not something done afterwards.
This is generally a thing to work out with your DM, as you might get a nice crowd-sourced chart but it won't be worth anything if they decide it's not right for their game.
Typically mining would be a thing you could do during downtime, making rougly the same wages as adventurers doing other jobs. If I were DMing for a miner I might also convert some of the regular loot into exposed ore veins or whatnot that you could mine out during a short rest or something. The point is that this can be integrated into a game without really changing any mechanics.
Now if you want to be making significant amounts of money or craft suits of plate mail on your own, this is where many DMs will say no because it starts to disrupt the game. PCs are first and foremost a member of a group of adventurers. They may have their own personal pursuits but those should largely happen during downtime or between sessions because the other people at the table probably don't want to sit around doing nothing while you get rich on your own.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Not exactly sure how mining during a short rest would work.
Roll a d20. On a natural 20, your character has stumbled across a handful of ore or gem-bearing rocks. Roll on a percentage chart to see what you've found, ranging from a few silvers worth of tin to a gold nugget or high quality uncut precious gem worth 10-15 gold. Must be in a rocky area of appropriate geologic formation.
Basically you're kicking over some rocks and find something slightly valuable below it.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
We have this from mad mage quest
One character can strip 1 pound of mithral in 15 minutes. Each pound of the metal is worth 50 gp
200 gp an hour? Even for D&D, that's an absurdly high rate of return.
Well, um, I would point out that you cannot mine during a short rest, because mining doesn’t qualify as a permitted action…
… but this ain’t my game, lol, and I say if another DM says they can do it, then cool.
Only a DM since 1980 (2000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA
Wyrlde.com
Free PDFs
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I mean, regardless there's the question of how exactly you're getting to your mine and back to the party within an hour. And just scratching at the ground wherever you are for an hour is... unlikely to be a productive endeavor. Yes, D&D isn't real life, but there's still a certain degree of baseline realism to what's possible, and short rest prospecting is rather out there.
Hard-rock mining is the exact opposite of restful.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
In a previous thread on mining, I pointed out that the average daily haul for a full 8 hours of prospecting was about 1/4 troy ounce of gold per day, if they were lucky. I was generous and made a d6 roll for it, because of the fantasy. That works out to about 1 copper a day, at most, based on coin weight versus value.
That's gold. It isn't aluminum (which is the most common metal on earth), and it isn't iron, and it isn't titanium -- all of which are far common than any of the precious ores on earth.
Only a DM since 1980 (2000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA
Wyrlde.com
Free PDFs
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
There isn't really anything in the official rules about mining, and very little about crafting. Just about anything you find will be Third Party homebrew, so it's not surprising that you're finding lots of "contradictory" information. There are many third party attempts at throwing Metal/Ore systems together - most are more focused on the crafting aspect and not really on mining itself, but could still be good ideas for types of metals, gems, etc and what you can craft with them.
The best third party system I'm aware of that is focused on Mining itself is the Angry Golem Games Mining Guide, I haven't actually used it but it looks fun. It's actually more based around setting up a mine, hiring NPC workers that take weeks to find anything, etc, but could probably be converted to PCs mining in shorter time frames if the DM wanted
You are delving into the economics of D&D and that has been horribly broken since its inception some 50 years ago. I have yet to see a supplement that is D&D centric that works. Now, you should look at Harn or ACKS game systems, where the economics is built from the ground up, and is integrated into the game.
This is morphing into two conversations.
To Joecinocca I would like to ask, what metals or other ores do you think are needed to fill out your table? Do you want to include mining (quarrying) marble, granite, milky quartz, limestone, slate? Coal?
I think you might want to include Platinum, Gold, Silver, Copper, Nickle, Iron, Zinc, Tin, Lead, Mithril (which might be tungsten) and Adamantine (which might be something else). I wouldn't include Aluminum because the ore was very expensive to refine and the metal was not needed in preindustrial economies, typical of D&D.
With some license, you could say this list of metals would allow you to make the following list of alloys: Brass, Bronze, Cast Iron, Steel, Electrum, German Silver (Nickle Silver), Gunmetal, Pewter, Rose Gold, Sterling Silver, Palladium, along with the pure metals of Platinum, Gold, Silver, Copper, Nickle, Tin, Lead, and Mithril (and adamantine). Chromium and Magnesium would be needed to make "stainless steel" or "chromium steel".
To the other conversation, maybe we should begin another thread if it is worth discussing further ...
To get pure ore, it has to be processed. The yield (percentage of usable ore per mined raw ore) varies depending on the kind of ore and the method of finding it. You might have to mine 50 pounds of ore to get one ounce of usable ore. But that's not all of it. You have to excavate rock that you know will not yield any ore before you get to the part of the rock that will. Some rock you don't move because it is supporting the rock above you. The rock you leave in place is called Leaverite, as in leave-it-right-there. The rock you have to get out of the way is called Gangue (gang). The rock you want to recover and process is called Ore. The ore is carried out and then processed.
In one of the circumstances mentioned above, a rich deposit on the surface, would be extraordinarily rare. Placer deposits of gold in streams is similar.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Really, if you want mine in a hurry, your best bet is summoning an earth elemental of some kind using Planar Ally or Planar Binding. An elemental should be able to extract the ore without disturbing the surrounding rock. Probably would have to pay it half, though.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Judging by the elemental blocks I could find, I'd say you'd definitely be looking in the neighborhood of a Dao to get something with that kind of ability to manipulate the earth. Basic elemental specifically says it doesn't disturb material it moves through.
That's just movement through. There's no rules saying it can't take stuff out of the ground if it wants to, it just means that it doesn't make a tunnel that other creatures can use.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Ah, the trusty Air Bud argument. I dunno, I just figure to effectively extract particular minerals from the ground would take more overt earth shaping powers as opposed to just the ability to move through the ground.