Chidgey's page

Existing Problems

3.5 has two seperate mechanic for crafting. Non-magical items (including alchemy) use a skill system, where as magical items use a feat only system.

Some craft skills are also much more useful than others, characters with Craft(Stone) are probably trying to qualify for a prestege class or doing it for background reasons and will roll that skill a lot less than someone with craft (alchemy).

Some craft feats are better than others. For example, Wondrous Item gives much more use than Brew Potion despite the fact that they can be taken at the same level.

It may be nice to take this oppotunity to combine these two systems into a single unified craft system and try to fix these problems.

Idea 1: Crafting with Skills.

There is already a concept that some craft skills require a caster level (i.e. alchemy in 3.5), this could be extended to cover some extra skills, maybe it would also be worthwhile removing this restriction from alchemy to make the magical/non-magical split better.

Each magical item would have a DC based on its affects caster level for simple conversion.

To represent the fact that some things cost much more than others each subskill would detail a base amount produced per craft check point. For many existing skills this is 1sp, but the magical skills could have 1gp, 1pp, 10pp, or higher as needed to bring them in line with current creation times.

Non-Magical

Craft (Weapons and Armour) - Making non-magical weapons, armour, bows, and amunition.
Craft (Alchemy) - As is, nomagical one use items.
Craft (Apothecary) - Similiar to alchemy but covering Posions, herbs and some new added medicines.
Craft (Mechanisms) - Mechanical Traps, Locks, and gadgets such as the mechanical footpad.

Magical

Craft (Trinkets) - Magical Scrolls, Potions, and other one use magical trinkets.
Craft (Enchantments) - Applying magical properties to weapons, armour, bows, and ammunition.
Craft (Wands) - spell completion items, either 50 charges or X uses per day. Wands, Staffs, and Rods.
Craft (Magical Item) - Continuous or use activated items, Wonderous items, Rings.

For backwards compatibility someone with one of the old craft feats could simply gain an effective score of the level +3 in the relevent craft skill for the purposes of making the named type of object (in many cases this would be a subset of the skill, i.e. potions ).

Idea 2: Crafting with Feats

Remove the Craft skill and instead have a feat for each type of producable. Change the amount produced to a flat amount per day. Add creation level requirements to items based on their previous craft DC's.

No real way of making this backwardly compatible springs to mind.

Comments or maybe some better ideas?

To totally eliminate front loaded class choice you also need to fix the change previous made for starting hit points.

Instead of having a character's first class HD maximised instead, give all characters a racial Hit Dice (between d4 and d10) that they get at first level (or if they have no levels).

Starting PC's can have their racial HD maximised and roll their class HD (including first level). NPC's can roll or average everything.

Using your values from the alpha; Frail 4, Normal 6, Sturdy 8.
A first level elven wizard would have 4+1d4+con mod, where as a dwarven wizard would have 8+1d4+con mod. I would be inclinded to make that frail 6, normal 8, sturdy 10 to give everyone more survivability than standard 3.5.

With this in place and the skill changes from above you can totally eliminate the importance of class order when building characters and npcs, making the process alot simpler.

Also using this hitpoint system you can make npc such as a peasent without any class levels and easily work out their hitpoints (roll or max racial HD) and skills (a number less than 4+int, say just int) while remaining inside the rules.

Identify

Identifying magical items can be done at will so effectively you will be taking twenty on the rolls. This means that you will automatically (take 20 or roll every 12 seconds until you get a 20) identify items that have a caster level of up to (five + int mod) greater than your own caster level.

So a first level wizard with a 16 int and the appraise skill can id 8th level objects guaranteed in a matter of minutes. You may want to consider not allowing a reroll on appraise checks when using detect magic (identify is fine because its not at will) or having a mechanic like only one reroll per day for each item.

Spell-like abilities

Domains and Wizards have some spell-like abilities of spells you really shouldn't allow. Limited Wish, Wish, Resurrection as written shouldn't be usable daily with absolutely no components or xp costs. If you have them make them cast as spells.

Feats

Although the combat feat mechanic works as a way of implementing 9 sword style content some of the feats you have moved over to this don't work at all.

Some of the feats you converted aren't suitable as combat feats for example Precise Shot needs to be used every round (and folded into the game for free or at least have no prerequisites but that's an aside).

By all means have combat feats have prerequisites of other combat feats but you may want to consider losing the last round you must have done X mechanic.

Rapid Shot and Multishot are different and used in different situations. They would work as combat feats providing they didn't have to follow each other. A lot of the feats you converted aren't something you do to build up to something else.

All combat feats should be some sort of action you can do. As a standard action you can X. None of them should just have flat bonuses (Such as Dodge), such things should be normal feats.

When changing feats don't make them weaker (power attack, combat expertise) and if you are going to radically change them (cleave, greater cleave) just make new feats with a different name instead.

Broken Feats

The Caught Off-Guard feat allows a rogue to carry around a Chair and hit people with it to always get their sneak attack. I can see that someone picking up an item and hitting me may be unexpected but this feat means I'm still surprised on round 15 when the rogue hits me with his chair for the 60th time. Make the feat something like as a Standard action a character can pick up a improvised weapon and make a single attack against an opponent without penalty. The target is flat-footed against this attack. An individual item can only be used this way once per encounter.

Specialist

A Conjurer has the Mage Armour spell therefore his specialist bonus is pointless and never going to be used. Change it to a +1 enhancement bonus to armour class. This bonus increases by +1 for every 5 caster levels you possess, to a maximum of +5 at 20th level.

Racial Abilities

Unnatural Beauty - Seems strange that a race without a charisma bonus would have this effect on people.

Spells

The alignment based cleric spells are received much later than normal. This would effect item creation.