Moon Folk's page

I don't think taking 20 is possible accept in the case where you are making a job lot of one type of thing and then removing the failures. Big budgets for materials and process but a lot is made.

This is a good point. I overlooked the fact that taking 20 means trying and failing a lot. Definitely something I will consider. I will probably do what you suggested and just remove that option. I think I was so excited to make poisons I didn't really see all the rule sin front of me.

Hm... I'm intrigued by this method. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, because it seems like one could conceivably get a ring of Sustenance and set up 20 items every day, given enough alchemist's labs (and, probably, a home base of operations). On the other hand, it would definitely free up the adventuring Alchemist's time so that he could set up 1 or 2 items in the morning before going out to slay monsters and whatnot.

Oh, and if the poison-making rules bug you, there were some alternate poison making rules in Complete Adventurer. They basically just said to do everything the same, but just use the gold piece value rather than the silver piece value. That alone speeds the process up by a factor of ten. Also, if you had a ready supply of what the poison came from (ie, you were extracting venom from a live viper and then adding preservatives) then the materials cost was only 1/6 of the base price instead of 1/3.

Thanks for the criticism! I personally wouldn't have a problem (money-wise at least) because, as kroarty said:

THERE IS NOT ALWAYS A BUYER

I like a character with gall. If they have the gall to do that in my game it's ok. They have a lot of poison/smokesticks so be it. There is always a way to make them useless ;D

And also, thanks for the reference to those poison rules; they sound great.

If you still don't want to do it I suggest trying to hunt down a giant wasp and take it's venom. It adds interesting loot to random encounters with wild animals, as well as finding random fungi in ancient dungeons. Best of all, it opened up the dangerous new profession and business for a small town in the outskirts of the kingdom, Giant Wasp Ranching.

Man, that is a really great idea. I love the idea of having a wasp farmer hidden in the woods somewhere, selling his poison on the black market of some city. As well as a torturer harvesting tears of death from his victims! Nice!

Unification: Crafting takes no significant time whatsoever. You have the skill/feat, you pay half the cost, you get the item. I don't care if it's a tindertwig or a staff of power. Its all a matter of money. And if you can't sell it for more than it cost to make it (this would require regular craft items to be brought in line with magic items with regards to cost), it's balanced, come hell or high water.

This is exactly what we've been doing; if you have the feats and the money, you've got the item. I just wanted to bring the alchemizing into the roleplaying element of the game without sacrificing stomping time. The good thing about your method is that it really takes the headache out; I simply want to make crafting fun flavor-wise.

I was immediately aware of how stupid it is to make poisons when I read the new Alchemist and got interested in working the rules for MAKING poison (as a GM and player we always could acquire or just say we made it if it seemed within reason). Anyway, I understand the craft rules are totally broken, but I think the problem is lumping them all together, so I came up with these rules that my players and I will be using for Craft (alchemy). I'm wondering what kinks there might be, what people think about balance and also correct wording (clarity with the rules and whatnot). Hopefully we can get this fixed. To tell you the truth though, I love doing this kind of thing, so I will probably end up doing it for all the craft skills individually. I understand it is a bit rulish, and that one major difference in Pathfinder is that there is less fluff rules and more awesome; I totally agree with their take on these seemingly less important aspects of the game. Anyway, enough blabber, on to the rules:

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Crafting an alchemical item takes 1 hour for each 10 gold in its base price (Alchemical items take a minimum of 1 hour to create).

DC: The craft DC for items varies depending on complexity: Acid DC 15; Alchemist’s Fire, Smokestick, Tindertwig DC 20; Antitoxin, Sunrod, Tanglefoot Bag, Thunderstone DC 25. The craft DC for a poison is equal to the poison’s save DC.

Raw materials equal to ¼ the base price must be spent on raw materials to craft any alchemical item.

CHECK: One Craft (alchemy) check is made at the onset of creation that represents preparing alchemical substances for 1 hour by measuring, diluting, adding necessary ingredients etc… Alchemical items must then be “aged” for the remainder of the craft time (again, 1 hour per 10 gold in the item’s base price) in order to be fully functional. If you fail this alchemy check by 4 or less, the hour spent preparing the item is wasted but the check can be retried the next hour. If the check is failed by 5 or more, the item’s raw materials are wasted and ¼ of the original base price must be spent on more raw materials.

There is an additional check required for especially complicated alchemical items. Any item that has a base price greater than 450 gold requires a follow-up check for every 48 hours left aging. This is check is made to represent an hour spent measuring, diluting, concentrating or adding additional ingredients. If you fail this check by 4 or less, you have merely wasted an hour, and another successful check is required. If you fail this check by 5 or more, you reset the aging time.

TAKING 10 or 20: You may take 10 on this check by taking 2 hours to attend an item. You may instead take 20 by devoting an entire day’s work to the item’s creation. This does not decrease the time for “aging.”

SPECIAL: You may add 10 to the DC of the item to decrease the time for “aging” the item by ½. You can still apply the rules for taking 10 on this check but not taking 20.

Because items require time to be made, but not necessarily attendance, you can allow any number of items to age simultaneously, granted you spend an hour attending each one, and you have access to multiple alchemist's labs. Given a full day's work, access to many alchemist's labs and with no modifiers to the DC, you could probably successfully craft 8 to 12 different items each day. This might be significantly less of course, if you are trying to make particularly complex poisons or strange elixirs, do to the extra time spent every other day attending them.

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Well there you have it. Hope to see some responses soon!

P.S. This means that one dose of Tears of Death takes about a month, whereas you can make a sunrod every hour, or a smokestick every hour if you increase the DC by 10. Seems fair?

I would say your division of the power is fair, but maybe allow him to take Leadership and use it differently, that is, perhaps a certain number of wolves (however many there are) have twice the bonuses you listed, for instance, with four wolves, maybe 2 wolves would have 1/2 his druid class levels, or all of them, its up to you. If he had 10 wolves, perhaps instead of 1/10 his druid level each, they counted as having 1/5. That way, it works on a sliding scale, quality or quantity, but not so heavily skewed. So a 1st level druid with 10 wolves, 1/10th each, they dont get better until 6th level, (but its ten wolves). That way, if he only wanted 2 wolves, they would each advance using 1/2 his level, until level 6, where they are both counted as having his full level. It doesn't seem too (maybe I'm wrong, I don't know) much more powerful than normal leadership. Maybe you can get the druid to compromise something, say, uses of wild shape?

You can use the Leadership thing in conjuction with wild empathy and Handle Animal so that he can rear a whole pack, multiple wolves, birds, bats, you name it, whatever. Assuming there is some background to the game and he didn't JUST become a lvl 1 druid, than we can assume he can train any number of animals. This is not unbalanced because these animals have no advancement, and become easier to procure. I mean, if an uber Necro can have a bazzillion undead things flying around, why not allow a druid to have fun. This might not be as POWERFUL later on, but its do-able, and very neat, because it opens up a lot of roleplaying potential. Also, you can vouche for the fact that he already has a wolf as animal companion, maybe his animal companion is an alph in a pack, so the other wolves don't necessarily understand the druid ALWAYS (then you can use wild empathy to sway them) but will do whatever the pack leader dictates (who does what you dictate).

I definitely think this should happen though, seems like it would be more fun to not worry about power levels and let some one have fun (unless, of course, that guy wants a twinked-up wolf druid, in which case, he chose the wrong type of druid to be).