So I have a player that really wants to get into digging up ores such as copper, iron, adamantine, etc, anytime they go into a cave or other underground area they try to find raw materials to sell. My question is I don't see anywhere in any sourcebooks that state the price of these materials. maybe I'm looking in the wrong place and anyone gives me some help or tips?
In the Trade Goods section of the PHB in chapter 5, the table says a pound of copper is worth 5sp, iron 1sp per pound. No idea about adamantine, but that stuff is rare and valuable- at least worth 500 gp per pound like platinum.
First of all, let this player know that mining minerals is a downtime activity spanning several days if not a week. They can't just do it Willy nilly in the middle of running a cave encounter. Secondly, if they aren't going to hire an npc who knows what they are doing, they had better have proficiency with the right tools. Either Smith's or Mason's I would allow.
I’d be even more restrictive than samuel. They’d need to have miner’s tools, a smith knows what to do with the ore, not how to get it out of the ground. A Mason knows even less, unless it’s a marble quarry. And even with the tools, a viable vein of ore isn’t just running along the side of the tunnel, he’d need to dig for it, possibly for weeks with little to show for the effort. And he’s have to know what raw ore even looks like (though I’d let that be covered in the tool proficiency). And then there’s the encumbrance of trying to carry it back to town to sell. This isn’t a video game, mining is hard work, and not worth the effort for someone who can slay dragons. That said, it can be fun to find some rare, raw metal in a treasure hoard and use it for crafting, if you are allowing crafting.
I’d be even more restrictive than samuel. They’d need to have miner’s tools, a smith knows what to do with the ore, not how to get it out of the ground. A Mason knows even less, unless it’s a marble quarry. And even with the tools, a viable vein of ore isn’t just running along the side of the tunnel, he’d need to dig for it, possibly for weeks with little to show for the effort. And he’s have to know what raw ore even looks like (though I’d let that be covered in the tool proficiency). And then there’s the encumbrance of trying to carry it back to town to sell. This isn’t a video game, mining is hard work, and not worth the effort for someone who can slay dragons. That said, it can be fun to find some rare, raw metal in a treasure hoard and use it for crafting, if you are allowing crafting.
That would be ideal, but since there are no miner's tools in the PHB you can't reasonably expect them to have miner's tools per se, gonna need to be a bit lenient.
I think it is reasonable to allow artisans tools and those proficient with them to create or harvest the raw materials they need to operate in the first place, such as woodcarvers tools letting you log trees.
That is in truth, and while I'm not trying to turn it into Skyrim or similar games. the group I am currently playing with has shown little interest in traveling. the overall tone of the group is more of "home town heroes" and honestly I kinda like this a little since it provides the challenge of having to come up with reasons for the increasingly stronger creature to appear in front of the party.
You could do it like Buffy. Turns out there’s a portal to hell right under the town that keeps attracting bad guys. Eventually some demons, or Nathan fillion.
Keep it simple. If they have Mining Tools proficiency (yes, I know its not in the booik, but it seems like a good one to add) then they can spend Downtime earning a living (as per PHB, Chapter 8: Adventuring, Between Adventures, Downtime Activities, Practicing a Profession).
If they want more than that then they need to pick another game.
I'm not joking about that last part. D&D does not have an economy. It is nowhere close to even being part of a vaguely useful economics simulator.
I would be cautious about making the craft of mining very difficult. Miners are generally considered manual labor near the Unskilled Labor end of the spectrum. A stone mason is a higher grade craft that requires apprenticeship and membership in the guild. Blacksmithing is manual labor, but higher on the skill progression than being a miner. Now the guys at the top of the spectrum, the ones that organize the mines and figure out how to excavate the vein, they have to have skills. They have to know how to do the 3d mapping for the underground tunnels, how to shape the tunnel for the different sorts of rock they are tunneling through, how to shore it up, accounting for gas and flooding, building the rail carts to help get the ore out, and possibly how to smelt the ore when you are done. That's a much different sort of skill.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Its also worth commenting that before the invention of gunpowder, mining is slow, hard work with little payoff.
After all, you don't mine copper- you mine rock containing copper. Getting it out of the ground is just the first step.
Established mines in Europe produced around 1,000lb of copper per miner per year, and this was from established sites with pumps, tracks, carts, rock crushers, stamping batteries, etc. For a brand new cave, it would be months of work for a team to set those things up before any profit might be seen.
So... One person wandering into a cave with a pickaxe?
To be fair dnd is a game where you can do almost anything. Realism is cool and all but to completely deny someone the ability to go mining or make it overly restrictive is kinda lame. I mean sure irl mining is hard and dangerous work but on the other hand, if you're cutting off a dragons head or tearing a golem to shreds, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say you could do the same thing to stone or ores especially if you have the tools I don't see why we wouldn't be able to give the player a little something even if it means home brewing
If you want to do realism, realize this is the procedure:
Find a good mining spot
Mine the ore
Kill the monsters/NPCs who figure out that it is easier to wait till the players do the mining and take the ore rather than do the mining themselves
Take the ore and smelt it down to bars of metal. I would set the DC for this blacksmithing depending on the metal (Iron = DC 10, Copper = DC 15, Silver/Gold = DC 20, Mithral/Adamantine = DC 25, any other super special metal = DC 30). Be shocked at how little metal is made from a ton of ore.
Sell the metals or forge it yourself.
Note, for a modern commercial gold mine, when gold prices are average, they can make money with less than 0.2 ounces of real gold per TON of ore. More common metals can get you pounds of metal for a ton. This is mainly because the easy cheap gold sources are gone, which may not be true in the fantasy world. Do not be afraid to tell them that a ton of rock gives then only 5 gp worth of metal.
Even a pure vein of metal could be as little as 40% metal. And those are the equivalent of hitting the mother-lode.
Personally, I would have them hit a bunch of low grade 5% ore for a while, and then surprise them with a nice mother-lode vein of 40% only if they stick with it (if they quite too soon, let them hear of someone else hitting the mother-lode.
It is also why gold panning was so popular. The river has had thousands of years to slowly eat away the ore and for the gold to collect in certain 'holes' as it falls into the deeper sections of the river (being heavy as gold). You can pan a pound of dirt and get ounces of gold rather than mining a ton to get less than an ounce.
I think it's ok to have mining opportunities be a quest reward but it can't be something done in the middle of a quest because that's too disruptive at least not without some serious magic.
Some options:
Have already mined ore as a quest reward some where. In a chest or mine cart.
Have a note or clear mining geode available with the opportunity to sell the information of hire, use hirelings to extract or use down time. Basically its a reward you give them options. A) money B) ore + costs money c) ore + costs time
Give them a spell like fabricate or something to extract ore. Whether they have to find an item to do it or learn it themselves some how.
To be fair dnd is a game where you can do almost anything. Realism is cool and all but to completely deny someone the ability to go mining or make it overly restrictive is kinda lame. I mean sure irl mining is hard and dangerous work but on the other hand, if you're cutting off a dragons head or tearing a golem to shreds, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say you could do the same thing to stone or ores especially if you have the tools I don't see why we wouldn't be able to give the player a little something even if it means home brewing
It's worth highlighting here that the fantastical creations of popular world builders in TV, Film, Books, and Games all have a common theme. The best of all of these genres establish a baseline of what is and isn't possible. Boundaries and natural rules/limitations are what help to create a conflict that the protagonists can overcome. I've been a player with DMs who seem to misunderstand the point of utilising realism as a tool in creating our game worlds in the same way you appear to have in your comment. Being honest, they're always the most boring games to play in.
In a similar way, the reason why keeping track of basing things in some kind of real world analogy is important is to create the limitations that allow players the challenge to overcome. No challenge, no real sense of accomplishment. In short that's why people use realistic analogies and why they are important to some people's worlds. Players really ought not be surprised when and if they kill someone to find themselves being locked up. They've taken a course of action and the world has responded. Likewise, no it's not possible to sleep for another eight hours just a single hour after the last eight hour sleep you just took. The body can't work that way, so the players need to find a different way around the next challenge they face if they've had an encounter or picked a fight.
Getting back to the topic though...
I would say it depends on how your game world economy works. I won't lie I have found the 'official' pricing of items to be just flat out broken. From both players and DMs I've heard time and time how the D&D economy makes no sense. So, I set a baseline for my game worlds.
For me a single day's common labour (farming, fishing, or anything unskilled) is worth 5sp. From that I extrapolated that a single drink in a tavern might cost 1sp. A day's rations or cooked meals would cost around 2sp. Rent for a common shack or dwelling works to about 1sp. Leaving around another 1sp for either supporting a child or disposable income.
For skilled work (weapon, armour, and other crafting) a day's labour would be around 1gp. So a good bunch of arrows would cost 2gp covering about a day's labour, and materials with around 1gp profit.
In that system then, raw minerals or ores that could be found, are going to represent a single day's work so a merchant buying the ore is going to be paying no more than 5sp....if the player is lucky. If they've put the time in to smelt iron from a couple of chunks of iron ore, then they'd have needed a few day's worth of coal and access to a furnace. The value of a pig iron ingot (created from say 2 chunks of ore) would be around 25sp (2.5gp). A merchant would be buying that ingot for maybe 1.5gp however....they've got to turn a profit after all.
Basically, if you're using the books other DMs have done the legwork and by simply googling the value of iron ore/ingots you'd find lists in loads of places.
If you're running your own world sit and think about how much the average labourer's pay would be per day. Use that as a guideline for pricing in your world. If you decide that one day's labour is worth 1gp then that informs a lot of other things. Prepared rations then for example might be the day's work to prepare them, another day's work to grow/procure the items, and maybe even one more day's worth to account for profit...valuing a day's rations or prepared food then at 3gp. It's a quick and dirty system but can help to create fair(ish) seeming prices from thin air when your players decide they want to go shopping.
So I have a player that really wants to get into digging up ores such as copper, iron, adamantine, etc, anytime they go into a cave or other underground area they try to find raw materials to sell. My question is I don't see anywhere in any sourcebooks that state the price of these materials. maybe I'm looking in the wrong place and anyone gives me some help or tips?
In the Trade Goods section of the PHB in chapter 5, the table says a pound of copper is worth 5sp, iron 1sp per pound. No idea about adamantine, but that stuff is rare and valuable- at least worth 500 gp per pound like platinum.
First of all, let this player know that mining minerals is a downtime activity spanning several days if not a week. They can't just do it Willy nilly in the middle of running a cave encounter. Secondly, if they aren't going to hire an npc who knows what they are doing, they had better have proficiency with the right tools. Either Smith's or Mason's I would allow.
I’d be even more restrictive than samuel. They’d need to have miner’s tools, a smith knows what to do with the ore, not how to get it out of the ground. A Mason knows even less, unless it’s a marble quarry.
And even with the tools, a viable vein of ore isn’t just running along the side of the tunnel, he’d need to dig for it, possibly for weeks with little to show for the effort. And he’s have to know what raw ore even looks like (though I’d let that be covered in the tool proficiency).
And then there’s the encumbrance of trying to carry it back to town to sell.
This isn’t a video game, mining is hard work, and not worth the effort for someone who can slay dragons.
That said, it can be fun to find some rare, raw metal in a treasure hoard and use it for crafting, if you are allowing crafting.
That would be ideal, but since there are no miner's tools in the PHB you can't reasonably expect them to have miner's tools per se, gonna need to be a bit lenient.
I think it is reasonable to allow artisans tools and those proficient with them to create or harvest the raw materials they need to operate in the first place, such as woodcarvers tools letting you log trees.
I take your point, but also, it’s easy enough to homebrew tools.
Really though the issue here, I think, is trying to make D&D into Skyrim or something similar.
That is in truth, and while I'm not trying to turn it into Skyrim or similar games. the group I am currently playing with has shown little interest in traveling. the overall tone of the group is more of "home town heroes" and honestly I kinda like this a little since it provides the challenge of having to come up with reasons for the increasingly stronger creature to appear in front of the party.
You could do it like Buffy. Turns out there’s a portal to hell right under the town that keeps attracting bad guys. Eventually some demons, or Nathan fillion.
Keep it simple. If they have Mining Tools proficiency (yes, I know its not in the booik, but it seems like a good one to add) then they can spend Downtime earning a living (as per PHB, Chapter 8: Adventuring, Between Adventures, Downtime Activities, Practicing a Profession).
If they want more than that then they need to pick another game.
I'm not joking about that last part. D&D does not have an economy. It is nowhere close to even being part of a vaguely useful economics simulator.
Also, have them fight NPCs not monsters.
That is, have the 11th level characters fight a 20th level NPC.
According to Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Page 90:
An Adamantine Bar worth 1,000 gp weighs 10 lbs.
I would be cautious about making the craft of mining very difficult. Miners are generally considered manual labor near the Unskilled Labor end of the spectrum. A stone mason is a higher grade craft that requires apprenticeship and membership in the guild. Blacksmithing is manual labor, but higher on the skill progression than being a miner. Now the guys at the top of the spectrum, the ones that organize the mines and figure out how to excavate the vein, they have to have skills. They have to know how to do the 3d mapping for the underground tunnels, how to shape the tunnel for the different sorts of rock they are tunneling through, how to shore it up, accounting for gas and flooding, building the rail carts to help get the ore out, and possibly how to smelt the ore when you are done. That's a much different sort of skill.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Its also worth commenting that before the invention of gunpowder, mining is slow, hard work with little payoff.
After all, you don't mine copper- you mine rock containing copper. Getting it out of the ground is just the first step.
Established mines in Europe produced around 1,000lb of copper per miner per year, and this was from established sites with pumps, tracks, carts, rock crushers, stamping batteries, etc. For a brand new cave, it would be months of work for a team to set those things up before any profit might be seen.
So... One person wandering into a cave with a pickaxe?
To be fair dnd is a game where you can do almost anything. Realism is cool and all but to completely deny someone the ability to go mining or make it overly restrictive is kinda lame. I mean sure irl mining is hard and dangerous work but on the other hand, if you're cutting off a dragons head or tearing a golem to shreds, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say you could do the same thing to stone or ores especially if you have the tools I don't see why we wouldn't be able to give the player a little something even if it means home brewing
If you want to do realism, realize this is the procedure:
Note, for a modern commercial gold mine, when gold prices are average, they can make money with less than 0.2 ounces of real gold per TON of ore. More common metals can get you pounds of metal for a ton. This is mainly because the easy cheap gold sources are gone, which may not be true in the fantasy world. Do not be afraid to tell them that a ton of rock gives then only 5 gp worth of metal.
Even a pure vein of metal could be as little as 40% metal. And those are the equivalent of hitting the mother-lode.
Personally, I would have them hit a bunch of low grade 5% ore for a while, and then surprise them with a nice mother-lode vein of 40% only if they stick with it (if they quite too soon, let them hear of someone else hitting the mother-lode.
It is also why gold panning was so popular. The river has had thousands of years to slowly eat away the ore and for the gold to collect in certain 'holes' as it falls into the deeper sections of the river (being heavy as gold). You can pan a pound of dirt and get ounces of gold rather than mining a ton to get less than an ounce.
I think it's ok to have mining opportunities be a quest reward but it can't be something done in the middle of a quest because that's too disruptive at least not without some serious magic.
Some options:
It's worth highlighting here that the fantastical creations of popular world builders in TV, Film, Books, and Games all have a common theme. The best of all of these genres establish a baseline of what is and isn't possible. Boundaries and natural rules/limitations are what help to create a conflict that the protagonists can overcome. I've been a player with DMs who seem to misunderstand the point of utilising realism as a tool in creating our game worlds in the same way you appear to have in your comment. Being honest, they're always the most boring games to play in.
In a similar way, the reason why keeping track of basing things in some kind of real world analogy is important is to create the limitations that allow players the challenge to overcome. No challenge, no real sense of accomplishment. In short that's why people use realistic analogies and why they are important to some people's worlds. Players really ought not be surprised when and if they kill someone to find themselves being locked up. They've taken a course of action and the world has responded. Likewise, no it's not possible to sleep for another eight hours just a single hour after the last eight hour sleep you just took. The body can't work that way, so the players need to find a different way around the next challenge they face if they've had an encounter or picked a fight.
Getting back to the topic though...
I would say it depends on how your game world economy works. I won't lie I have found the 'official' pricing of items to be just flat out broken. From both players and DMs I've heard time and time how the D&D economy makes no sense. So, I set a baseline for my game worlds.
For me a single day's common labour (farming, fishing, or anything unskilled) is worth 5sp. From that I extrapolated that a single drink in a tavern might cost 1sp. A day's rations or cooked meals would cost around 2sp. Rent for a common shack or dwelling works to about 1sp. Leaving around another 1sp for either supporting a child or disposable income.
For skilled work (weapon, armour, and other crafting) a day's labour would be around 1gp. So a good bunch of arrows would cost 2gp covering about a day's labour, and materials with around 1gp profit.
In that system then, raw minerals or ores that could be found, are going to represent a single day's work so a merchant buying the ore is going to be paying no more than 5sp....if the player is lucky. If they've put the time in to smelt iron from a couple of chunks of iron ore, then they'd have needed a few day's worth of coal and access to a furnace. The value of a pig iron ingot (created from say 2 chunks of ore) would be around 25sp (2.5gp). A merchant would be buying that ingot for maybe 1.5gp however....they've got to turn a profit after all.
Basically, if you're using the books other DMs have done the legwork and by simply googling the value of iron ore/ingots you'd find lists in loads of places.
If you're running your own world sit and think about how much the average labourer's pay would be per day. Use that as a guideline for pricing in your world. If you decide that one day's labour is worth 1gp then that informs a lot of other things. Prepared rations then for example might be the day's work to prepare them, another day's work to grow/procure the items, and maybe even one more day's worth to account for profit...valuing a day's rations or prepared food then at 3gp. It's a quick and dirty system but can help to create fair(ish) seeming prices from thin air when your players decide they want to go shopping.
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