Silver weapons

[AuraSeer]

The PHB lists a price for a silver dagger. But what if I want a silver longsword, or battleaxe? If I'm about to go into the woods and hunt werewolves, I'm not going to rely on a dagger as my primary weapon.

 

[SpikeyFreak]

It would probably be cheaper to get a +1 weapon.

Besides, silver is so soft that a longsword made of it wouldn't work very well.

--Were-Spikey

 

[Caliban]

I haven't seen anything official, but I use 5x base price for weapons, and 20x base price for ammunition.

This is for a "silvered" weapon that is just as strong as a normal weapon, but has a silver alloy or enamel that allows it to affect lycanthropes.

 

[trentonjoe]

Caliban's numbers seem right to me.

The silver-steel combo is in Magic of Faerun. It is something like +2000 gp for a weapon and does an extra point of damage to lycanthropes and other silver haters.

 

[Cloudgatherer]

Magic of Faerun has rules for magically forged "special" metal items. Examples include silver, gold, platinum as well as a variety of others. The price adjustment in that book is +1000 GP for weapons, +2000 GP for armor.

 

[Umbran]

Guys, there's a difference between a "silver" weapon (a weapon made out of pure silver) and a "silvered" weapon (a weapon the incorporates enough silver to make it damaging to weres and other beasts with low damage reduction).

Yes, pure silver makes a lousy weapon. But be reasonable - they wouldn't include "silver" damage reduction if the only way to get it by core rules would make the weapon unuseable. Silvered weapons either are an alloy, or have a form of silver coating, or somesuch. They're harder and more costly to make than normal, but should still be viable weapons (and should cost significantly less than a +1 magic weapon).

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

When Living Greyhawk permitted silvered weapons to be purchased (for the most part, they don't anymore), the cost was calculated at 8gp x weapon weight.

This made sense for some weapons (like longswords, heavy picks, etc) and the formula worked for silver daggers but it didn't really seem to make sense for weapons like greataxes and glaives where a lot of the weight is the wooden haft which isn't used to deal damage.

Still, it's a reasonable rule and a good starting point.

 

[Roland Delacroix]

Magic of Faerun has rules for completely silver weapons. Solid Silver, Gold, Platinum and I cant remember what else are considered 'Heavy' weapons. They introduce an Exotic weapon prof for them too, you have to practice to handle all that extra weight. 'Heavy' weapons stage the damage up one notch. So if you have the Exotic weapon Prof: Heavy longsword you can use a solid gold longsword that does 1d10 damage because of the weight.

We've always taken Silver weapons to mean a light coating of silver.

BTW Magic of Faerun is an awesome book, theres so much good stuff in there. It's not much of a campaign source book, more like a kick ass magic sourcebook. I highly reccomend it.