(I forget adamantine's weight in dnd, I like to picture DF's feather light but very sharp weave)
I'd gotten it into my head that it was super heavy for some reason, which is weird because I did play BG2 with the super slick Drow equipment... But according to
Random Page I Just Found™, it's a bit lighter than steel.
So what you're really gonna want, if we're going for pure weight, is gold or platinum. Kill 'em with bling.
On a side note... I've been thinking a little about the XP system. In the limping wreckage of the current campaign I'm in, we're going off of "checkpoint" leveling, where the DM just decides on points in the story where we should level up, and then we do. And I can definitely get behind that way of doing things (our bard hasn't quite found his peace with it though, and therefore asks after every session "Did I level up? Have we leveled up yet?"), but I was wondering about potential alternatives to just making the DM have to come up with the pacing.
Kill XP is great fun for ARPGs, but I feel like it's missing the point for more open platforms like D&D. And for as messed up a system as it was, I can kinda appreciate the early version mechanics of gold = XP. But how do we go about tweaking that so that it doesn't lead to 1) Players squabbling
even more over loot shares, or 2) Resulting in a double progression as they're gaining gold *and* XP at the same time and therefore increasing in power on two different fronts simultaneously.
I was wondering how it would end up working out if you had a sort of "communal account" that everyone in the party donated to, and every character in that party had their XP total equal the amount (of GP) in the account. Withdrawals could be made (which would reduce XP totals but not remove levels) for large purchases the group agreed upon, while every character donated what they had in excess and held on to whatever pocket change they felt they needed to have.
There are a couple interactions here that seem potentially undesirable... One is having players "game" the system by pooling all their cash in at once to hit a new level threshold, then taking the money back out to spend it. This is slightly compensated for by the fact that they'd need to make it all back again anyways to hit the next level after that, but it's still worth mentioning.
The other is having players "mooch" and not donate anything from their personal stash, instead relying on the rest of the party to donate gold for their own XP progression.
Hopefully their greed for progression would make them donate to speed up their own leveling, but I do think it's a concern.
I just like having more "flexible" resources like wealth get used for character progression, because there are a great many ways of making money... But killing something just about always involves killing something.