Cooperative Crafting accessibility


Rules Questions


When I skimmed the feats in the APG I thought this was a sound solution to the math in craft skills. Which would resolve the oddity that a Masterwork full plate of armor takes longer to craft by a blacksmith than it takes a wizard to enchant it into a +10 suit of armor. All without dipping into unchained. The solution I foresaw was to "just hire 8 apprentice smiths to hasten the completion of a suit of plate from 12 weeks to complete in 1-2 weeks".

I am now revisiting this and I see that "any Item Creation Feat" is a prerequisite.

Cooperative Crafting:
Cooperative Crafting

Prerequisites: 1 rank in any Craft skill, any Item Creation Feat.

Benefit: You can assist another character in crafting mundane and magical items. You must both possess the relevant Craft skill or item creation feat, but either one of you can fulfill any other prerequisites for crafting the item. You provide a +2 circumstance bonus on any Craft or Spellcraft checks related to making an item, and your assistance doubles the gp value of items that can be crafted each day.

I may not be very rules conscientious, but the qualifier of "Item Creation Feat" just rings my mind full of Forge Ring, Scribe Scroll and Craft Wand and other Spellcaster feats. I'm aware the Master Craftsman feat allows Craft Magical Arms and Armor to be taken without a caster level. But that would mean a theoretical hireling would need to be level 9. An unlikely find to say the least. Even if I could find a rare one, that hireling would be be using Cooperative Crafting to provide a bonus and double the results of a less skilled hireling's roll if my PC wasn't in the picture.

The text however explicitly says this benefit is applicable on mundane items, and makes a statement of "You must both possess the relevant Craft skill or item creation feat" when describing the actual crafting it applies to. It would seem strange that only casters reasonably benefit from it. However I can find no set definition for the feat group. Is Skill Focus (Craft) an item creation feat since the skill is used to create items? Is Master Craftsman by itself? To go into unchained: is Signature Skill(Craft)? Is Gunsmithing since you can't craft firearms and accoutrements without it? I guess more to the point: is some feat I'm overlooking, that a laymen could have, considered an "Item Creation Feat"?

I honestly don't think any of those qualify, but I also don't think I can reasonably find level 1-3 Alchemists or Wizards for hire trained in Craft (Armor).

TLDR; Is Cooperative Crafting really a feat that only sensibly allows its benefit of faster mundane crafting to be performed by magical craftsmen?


As a teamwork feat there are ways you can bestow it upon others. The Valet familiar, for example, could assist.

As for Item Creation Feats, this is a specific subcategory of feats that this feat is referring to. Which means, yes, it needs one of those feats you require caster levels (or Master Craftsman) to pick up.

For the record, though, creating a suit of full plate armor is HARD, even with modern day processes. The smith absolutely would want some apprentices to assist him in the process.


I'm actually fairly confident Cooperative Crafting isn't itself a Teamwork feat. Those are well labeled with (Teamwork) in their entries and Cooperative Crafting doesn't require "An ally with this feat...". Valets do get both the master's teamwork feats, and Cooperative Crafting is separate entry. Which is too bad since that might've been a good workaround with any number of Teamwork Feat sharing abilities.

Anyway I definitely do not dispute that crafting a personalized fitted suit of full plate armor requires a lot of man hours. It's just again a pesky thing about math. Which boils down to one of the following:
-An apprentice is adding 4-6GP of work a week with an aid another.
Or
-They have a +10 to the Craft (Armor) skill and can add 40GP or so each week.
However, when you factor the assistant's wage and paying for the materials consumed; the skilled hireling nets about 2GP in value per week over the unskilled one since he costs 20GP more a week. That's more a question of economics than crafting progress, but still a limiting factor in choosing how to progress on crafting.

At any rate, thanks for the confirmation.

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