[Homebrew] Crafting Simplification


Homebrew and House Rules


First off, while I appreciate the difficulty in balancing the effects of crafting on planned campaigns and that it can throw off the balance of the wealth per level vs loot received tables.

The Problem (as I see it)
Crafting, as I see it, doesn't work. Characters that take crafting feats are effectively reducing their own power in exchange for half price of certain categories of items, and the freedom to customize them. And on top of that, especially at higher levels, it takes so long to make items that characters have to take months of down time in between encounters to make use of their feat. Seems like a rather unfair way of treating characters that have spent feats to gain the ability to do so.

That being said, I'm not too concerned about how long low level crafting takes. It seems reasonable that low level characters might take days to make something, maybe even a week or two. It seems very unlikely that an epic archmage is going to take several months off to make some item that may be useful. Ideally, I'd like the general "useful item creation" to take 1-7 days regardless of what level the PCs are, with "very powerful items for their level" to take 2-3 weeks to complete, with month+ reserved for things that are pushing the limits of their crafting abilities to the limit and beyond.

My Solution (Part 1, and 2 a, b, and c)
1) Remove the crafting feats. Anything can be crafted by anyone who meets the rest of the requirements (caster level, spells, materials, etc). non-casters that want to make magic items still need to take the master craftsman feat, however.

and one of a, b, or c:
2a) Increase the crafting limit to 2'000 gc per day.

2b) Increase the crafting limit to PC lvl x 500 gc per day.

2c) Remove the cap on value per day entirely.

Caveat:
I fully understand that I will likely have to either decrease the value of the treasure they find, increase the power of their opponents, or otherwise adjust encounters upwards a bit to compensate.

Results:
Hopefully, a bit more interest in crafting amongst my players. Crafting, particularly at the later levels where things get a bit more interesting, will not take ages and ages to finish.

Side-effects:
All classes that receive crafting feats for free will receive a +1 lvl metamagic feat instead (or equivalent)

So, I guess my main question is "Am I missing something? Are there some reason that I am missing as to why a character should have to spend feats to be able to make something? Is allowing characters the option to make their own stuff in reasonable lengths of time going to break the system or something?


Zitchas wrote:

First off, while I appreciate the difficulty in balancing the effects of crafting on planned campaigns and that it can throw off the balance of the wealth per level vs loot received tables.

The Problem (as I see it)
Crafting, as I see it, doesn't work. Characters that take crafting feats are effectively reducing their own power in exchange for half price of certain categories of items, and the freedom to customize them. And on top of that, especially at higher levels, it takes so long to make items that characters have to take months of down time in between encounters to make use of their feat. Seems like a rather unfair way of treating characters that have spent feats to gain the ability to do so.

That being said, I'm not too concerned about how long low level crafting takes. It seems reasonable that low level characters might take days to make something, maybe even a week or two. It seems very unlikely that an epic archmage is going to take several months off to make some item that may be useful. Ideally, I'd like the general "useful item creation" to take 1-7 days regardless of what level the PCs are, with "very powerful items for their level" to take 2-3 weeks to complete, with month+ reserved for things that are pushing the limits of their crafting abilities to the limit and beyond.

My Solution (Part 1, and 2 a, b, and c)
1) Remove the crafting feats. Anything can be crafted by anyone who meets the rest of the requirements (caster level, spells, materials, etc). non-casters that want to make magic items still need to take the master craftsman feat, however.

and one of a, b, or c:
2a) Increase the crafting limit to 2'000 gc per day.

2b) Increase the crafting limit to PC lvl x 500 gc per day.

2c) Remove the cap on value per day entirely.

Caveat:
I fully understand that I will likely have to either decrease the value of the treasure they find, increase the power of their opponents, or otherwise adjust encounters upwards a bit to compensate.

Results:
Hopefully, a bit more...

So I think 2a would be the easiest way to approach it. However, at higher levels things would still take months to create even though they are around the level they should when they create the item.

2b would work, at level 20 they would have 10k a day to work with and that would let them get even the most expensive items done within a few weeks.

2c might work if you just told them how long it would take. It would also give you quite a bit of control over the items that they are working with, because if you think something might throw the balance of in your game, even with the modified creatures, you could make it take longer than normal due to the item being more complicated to make in game. This would give you the most flexibility as a DM, and would let you add more flavor to the items by making some more complex based on environment or however you would want to do it. I might even consider doing this one in my own campaigns.

Something to note however is there are crafting builds, they cripple your build otherwise, but you are damned good at building a specific set of items. A dwarf wizard with a familiar with some feat that allows them to craft with you can get somewhere around 20k done a day I believe. If you don't want your players to have to dedicate a character to that however, using one of the above options would no doubt be the best way to approach it. I do personally like the idea of 2c, especially with the flavor, and control you could implement into player crafting.


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That's a good point. I know I've played dedicated crafting builds myself a time or two, and they are fun to play.

On the flip side, as a player I've always enjoyed the fact that pathfinder (and 3.x in general) provides the rules so I don't have to ask the DM how long stuff takes, because I can work it out and then bring it to the DM for approval. So in retrospect I'd like to stay away from the "DM arbitrarily assigns a time frame" method.

For the first situation, it makes me think that crafting feats should be left in the game, but should receive a different benefit. For instance, say, having the feat grants a +5 bonus to the relevant check for crafting the item (goes up to +10 when you have 10 or more ranks in the relevant skill). That would allow specialists more flexibility when crafting to hit higher DCs to accelerate crafting or bypass requirements, etc, while still allowing anyone the option of doing so.

One idea that occurs to me to retain the dependability of the 3.x ruleset while reducing timelines is basing it off the recommended wealth table. Thus regardless of

Find out what percentage of the character's recommended wealth for their level is. Apply that percentage to two months, with a limit that they can't make items worth more than half their recommended wealth.

Which gives times along the following:

50% = 1 month
25% = 2 weeks
12% = 1 week
6% = 3 days
2% = 1 day

This would be the base timeline that assumes 8h a day of dedicated crafting. Crafting checks would be done as normal, with each minor failure increasing the time by 1 day, and successful accelerate crafting reducing it by a day. (or by half a day if it would normally take 1 day).

So items that even their character would consider to be cheap and disposable would be the matter of an afternoon of crafting, while major projects that their character would likely consider to be their greatest creation so far would take up to a month to complete.

Of course, while that looks good in theory, now I need to go check the actual numbers to see how much of an improvement that is over the standard system.


I like 2b. I think it generates reasonable creation times. One could scale it even more, if you want magic item creation to always take several days or more.

For example: Creator's level squared x 25gp per day.

This may seem problematic at low level, but it does keep a little of the mystique and power of items in players heads. They must make some effort. As levels rise, it quickly eclipses the standard rules, and allows much more timely creation.

One could also adjust gp per day rates for consumables, so they don't take an excruciating amount of time.

Another idea is to use the item creation feats to speed up creation tine.


Zitchas wrote:

That's a good point. I know I've played dedicated crafting builds myself a time or two, and they are fun to play.

On the flip side, as a player I've always enjoyed the fact that pathfinder (and 3.x in general) provides the rules so I don't have to ask the DM how long stuff takes, because I can work it out and then bring it to the DM for approval. So in retrospect I'd like to stay away from the "DM arbitrarily assigns a time frame" method.

For the first situation, it makes me think that crafting feats should be left in the game, but should receive a different benefit. For instance, say, having the feat grants a +5 bonus to the relevant check for crafting the item (goes up to +10 when you have 10 or more ranks in the relevant skill). That would allow specialists more flexibility when crafting to hit higher DCs to accelerate crafting or bypass requirements, etc, while still allowing anyone the option of doing so.

One idea that occurs to me to retain the dependability of the 3.x ruleset while reducing timelines is basing it off the recommended wealth table. Thus regardless of

Find out what percentage of the character's recommended wealth for their level is. Apply that percentage to two months, with a limit that they can't make items worth more than half their recommended wealth.

Which gives times along the following:

50% = 1 month
25% = 2 weeks
12% = 1 week
6% = 3 days
2% = 1 day

This would be the base timeline that assumes 8h a day of dedicated crafting. Crafting checks would be done as normal, with each minor failure increasing the time by 1 day, and successful accelerate crafting reducing it by a day. (or by half a day if it would normally take 1 day).

So items that even their character would consider to be cheap and disposable would be the matter of an afternoon of crafting, while major projects that their character would likely consider to be their greatest creation so far would take up to a month to complete.

Of course, while that looks good in theory, now I need to go...

That looks pretty solid of an idea. Just base it off the normal price of the item rather than the crafted price and I think it would be pretty reasonable.I think at lower levels that might be more difficult to run with, at fifth all weapons would take over a week to make. I suppose even if you ran it using the crafted price, at level 15 it would still take then a month for top tier items.

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I houseruled that crafting works like magic item creation rules except it deals with values in silver pieces

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