As a longtime player, adamantine doesn't even make up 10% of a mundanes expenses. Theoretically, it could take a total of 0% of your expenses if you can mine and forge the ingots yourself. Adamantine is also much more common than it used to be now too.
A vast majority of your expenses comes down to a few other factors:
Consumables: Wands, potions, scrolls, healing kits. The staples of adventuring~ This has been beaten to death already so I won't add to this
Repairs: Casters don't have to repair gear. With how the gigaschatten engine works, you really only damage your gear when directly engaged with an enemy; something casting-focused casters rarely do, if ever. This is a small expense, but an expense nonetheless that will add up over time.
Gear: The cost of enchanting gear is more strenuous on mundanes than casters. Casters will, at some point, gain access to dwemorcrafting ranks, whereas mundanes typically won't without feat and skill investments. This alone makes gearing up easier for casters.
Because you're on the frontline as a mundane more often than not, you need to figure out how to balance your two (sometimes three) primary stats, saves, and skill bonuses on your custom gear. Casters need to do this too, but the access to DR/AC/miscellaneous buffs helps ease the pain if you can't hit everything right away (in my experience).
I'm might be alone in this opinion, but as someone who mostly solos, and having played both casters and mundanes (and weird hybrids), this isn't terribly unbalanced.
Spells per day: Whenever i'm juggling effort vs reward in my head, I absolutely need to consider the number of spells per day I can cast as a consumable resource. Granted, its a renewable consumable, but a consumable nonetheless. Especially with wizard spell components (prior to them being restorable). If both my caster and my mundane can progress through the same area at a similar pace, the mundane is likely to get far, FAR more milage than my caster, simply as at a certain point, I simply won't have enough spells left to reasonably progress.
Yes, the cost-per-run for my mundanes is higher, but these aren't usually constant expenses, healing items aside. Careful wand/scroll use can spread out the life of buffing consumables for RL months, and as said before, a typical mundane can go farther than a caster simply because the mundane isn't reliant on spells. Hell, I can even exploit saving throws with dirty fighting and traps if simply hitting stuff doesn't work.
Going out and buying wands/scrolls also gives a natural way for me to interact with other players.
MissEvelyn wrote: ↑Sat May 27, 2023 3:47 pm
If we factor in the short amount of time it takes for a mundane to clear a dungeon vs a caster, doesn't that cost even itself out in the end, since mundanes technically make more gold per minute than casters do?
(Shops not included, of course. Casters tend to have the upper hand on those.)
If you're looking at just the end results, maybe? The cost preparing to do said run and replenishing supplies is not the same, however.