[RPG] How much material silver is required to silver a greataxe, if the time and expertise is being provided as a favour

craftingdnd-5especial-materialsweapons

Suppose I own a greataxe, and a blacksmith owes me a favour. The Smith knows how to craft silvered weapons, and has agreed to do the work as a favour if I provide the raw silver.

The rules on silvered weapons state:

You can silver a single weapon or ten pieces of ammunition for 100 gp. This cost represents not only the price of the silver, but the time and expertise needed to add silver to the weapon without making it less effective.

So clearly the material silver is not worth 100 gp.

How much raw silver do I need to provide to the Smith as material?

My instinct is that the smith will primarily be working the silver into the cutting blades, so a few dozen silver coins would be sufficient. Thus a couple of gp worth of silver?

Is there any further RAW guidance about this? Are there standard interpretations/conventions to cover this?

Best Answer

The standard rule for crafting items is a 50/50 split between materials and labor

Both the PHB and Xanathar's Guide to Everything present rules for crafting items as a downtime activity. While the rules differ in some respects, they are consistent on the most relevant bit: the cost of crafting an item is split evenly between the cost of materials and the cost of labor. From the PHB section on Crafting (as well as the corresponding section in the Basic Rules (emphasis added):

You can craft nonmagical objects, including adventuring equipment and works of art. [...] You might also need access to special materials or locations necessary to create it. [...]

For every day of downtime you spend crafting, you can craft one or more items with a total market value not exceeding 5 gp, and you must expend raw materials worth half the total market value.

And the crafting rules in XGtE agree:

A character who has the time, the money, and the needed tools can use downtime to craft armor, weapons, clothing, or other kinds of nonmagical gear. [...] In addition to the appropriate tools for the item to be crafted, a character needs raw materials worth half of the item’s selling cost.

Regardless of which crafting rules you use, you need half an item's value in raw materials in order to craft that item.

What about silvering an existing item?

Strictly speaking, silvering an item is not the same as crafting a new item, so the above rules do not apply directly to this case. However, I am not aware of any rules specifically for silvering weapons that would answer this question, which means the DM is empowered to make a ruling. In my opinion, a DM looking for guidance in making such a ruling would be entirely justified in using the above rules as a precedent to say that silvering a greataxe requires 50 gp worth of silver (and perhaps other materials) and 50 gp worth of labor.

How much silver is that anyway?

50 gp worth of silver would be 500 silver pieces. By the rules, 50 coins of any type weigh 1 pound, so this would represent 10 pounds of silver. At 10.49 g/cm³, that makes about 430 cubic centimeters of silver, or just under half the volume of a 1-liter bottle. (I've elided the tedious unit conversions. You're welcome.)

However, the actual amount of silver might be less than this, since it's possible that other materials are also required for the silvering process, and the costs of these materials would also be part of the total material cost of 50 gp.

As to whether this is anywhere in the ballpark of the quantity of silver that would be required to silver a greataxe in real life, I have no idea.

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