Lorefinder and Knowledge skills

[The Best Goblin!]

So, I'm running an investigative game using the Pathfinder/Gumshoe mashup, Lorefinder. The setting is western, so there are lots of guns, and one of the players wants to be an inventor that creates new modifications for his gun.

Now, normally I'd do the usual Knowledge (Engineering) to make sure he has the ingenuity to invent something new, and then Craft (Firearms) to actually make it, but in Lorefinder, Engineering works differently. It basically grants you any basic applicable knowledge automatically, and then you can spend points from a pool to get more specific information. This doesn't cover situations when you want a chance of failure, nor does it cover ingenuity, only the ability to access pre-existing knowledge without derailing an investigative game with bad rolls.

I want to accommodate this player, because he has some good ideas, but the Lorefinder rule leaves me letting him invent all he wants with little chance of failure or loss, and that could break the game. I have some ideas about what I could do, but I want to know what you think. Help!

[James Martin]

I own that book and love it! I think, in this situation, he can make all the modifications he wants, but the key is how long will they take. As DM you can say, you can make a very simple, basic modification in a day, but as you're dealing with explosive, potentially lethal changes to a firearm, if you want to do them right, it's going to take a while. And that's just for a basic change. If he wants to do something major, he'll need lots of downtime, the sort of time that you really don't have when you're investigating a mystery.

In other words, no rolls, just investment of time, energy and capital. You should be able to keep his madness to a manageable level that way.

[The Best Goblin!]

That's excellent. I was thinking he'd need to spend Engineering points on more improbable inventions, and I might still keep that idea, but I hadn't thought of design time, because knowledge checks usually don't represent any span of time. That covers most of it.

You're the bestest, James!