Cost to Craft Armor

And it does cost money to craft armor. The cost is:

(a) About half the "retail value" of the armor piece for materials; plus

(b) The cost of maintaining one or two apprentices during the time it takes to make the piece; plus

(c) Additional cost based on how much of the overseer's time and attention the project takes. (The project may take one or two overseers full-time on the project, may take only half one overseer's time on the project, or may take none of the overseer's time—the latter constitute projects that the apprentices can do all by themselves, mostly unsupervised.)

The previous table shows standard costs to manufacture armor.

In usual circumstances, the difference between the Total Cost and the Retail Value is the shop's profit when it sells a piece of armor.

As you can see from the table, hide armor, leather armor, padded armor, medium shields and small shields are little-to-no-profit propositions. However, they keep the apprentices paid and keep work in the shop.

Playing With These Numbers

Now, the costs given above are not the final word on how much it costs to make armor. With your DM's permission, you can skew these numbers around (both up and down) through the following means.

First, you can put extra men on a job. (Important Note: If overseers are drafted to do apprentice-level work, one overseer counts as two apprentices.) You can only put extra men on a job in increments of the original number of men required for the job: In other words, if the job required two apprentices, you don't see an improvement in speed until you assign two more apprentices to the job. At that point, you cut the speed of the job in half.

Example: From the chart, you see it takes one apprentice with no overseer ten weeks to work up a set of chain mail. That's a standard in the armorer's industry; they'll always tell you it takes ten weeks to work up a chain mail hauberk. But in an emergency situation, they could put an extra apprentice on the job (either have two working on it at once, or have one on the "day shift" and one on the "night shift"). With twice the available manpower, it would only take half the time, or five weeks, to create the chain mail.

Second, if the Overseer is a player-character, he doesn't have to pay himself as much. This is usually the case with armorers when they first go into business for themselves: They pay the cost for materials and the cost for their apprentices, and whatever they have left over is their own salary, even if it is much less than the 15 gp/week standard mentioned above. (That number, 15 gp/week, represents a firm lower-middle-class standard of living; an armorer who earns less will be living at a lower-class standard of living.)

With that in mind, we can re-interpret some of the numbers above. Let's say that we have one player-character armorer who wants to work up a set of hide armor.

Hide armor normally takes up half the work-day of one apprentice for eight weeks. It costs 7 gp in materials, and he can sell it on the usual market for 15 gp. If just the chief armorer, who counts as an Overseer if his Armorer ability check is 12 or better, works on this item alone, it will take him only two weeks to make the hide armor (remember, an Overseer counts as two apprentices; therefore, he's putting four times the manpower on the task as it customarily requires, thus cutting the time required to one-fourth, or two weeks). If he can sell it for 15 gp, he's made 8 gp. He's earning a meager 4 gp a week, which is better than a poverty-level wage, but less than middle-class.

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