So here's a topic about the Craft skill. I'm tossing it up here on homebrew and houserules, as it seems more appropriate (because people may disagree, others may prefer craft as it is now, and so on and so forth; it seems like a houserule issue, or a suggestion issue, more than anything else.)
To anyone who already agrees it's broken, you can skip the spoiler section. To anyone who doesn't, read the spoiler section and see if I can't convince you. To neutral parties who want to give it a read, go ahead and pop it open. After the long, lengthy and probably unnecessary proposition on how crafting is broken, there's a few potential solutions.
Fair warning: Massive wall'o text.
Let's say he's commissioned to make a mithral, masterwork chain shirt.
Under current crafting rules, that means...
Masterwork component;
Costs 300, takes 3000 progress, and a DC of 20.
Costs 1150, takes 11500 progress, and a DC of 14.
To simplify things, let's say he's taking 10 on every roll, so that's a 28 per roll.
Time to complete Masterwork Component:
28x20; 560.
560 goes into 3k about 5 times (it actually only gets to 2800, but we'll cut him some slack.)
That's 5 weeks. That's a month and a week for the masterwork component.
Time to complete the chain shirt.
14x28; 392.
392 goes into 11,500 about 29 times, and we'll again round down for our ambitious smith.
29 weeks of work.
That's seven months and a week.
Along with the masterwork component, that makes eight and a half months - the better part of a year - for a mithral chainshirt, at a +18 modifier.
Furthermore, you're wasting eight to nine months time (I don't know how much time per day crafting requires, as no number is given) doing nothing but crafting. Given the prices above, you're saving
300 ; flat ; saving nothing
1150; rounding to 1200 for ease; costs 400, saving 800.
So either some adventurer has paid this man a great, great deal to make a shirt, he's gone bankrupt working on this single piece of armor and neglecting all other work, or he's a) loaded and b) retired, and this is just a hobby for him.
Even if an adventurer pays him - we'll say the smith is kind, for sake of this argument - and pays the price of the material; he cuts about half the price off the gear. 700 instead of 1500.
This is handy, but at around level 5, it also seems kind of worthless; because after eight months of adventure, the chances the adventurer found a piece of gear that far outclasses the chain shirt he commissioned is massive. If we want to say the smith is an adventurer, it means he's spending the better part of a year working out a cheap piece of gear that he would have spent far better adventuring.
To briefly push on this, heavy armor's problem is even worse. A suit of full plate, for instance - which is neither mithral nor masterwork - still takes 25 weeks (just over six months) to make.
From a DM perspective, nothing is wrong with this. After all, for NPC smiths - ones which will probably be experts with skill focus and every positive modifier you can think of - you can fairly easily fiat away the time so that suit of full plate takes a week, and the smith is able to do other work in the meantime so the party doesn't need to sit around in a city for four years waiting for a blacksmith to finish all their commissioned gear. Maybe a sidequest gets accomplished, or they progress the mainquest, what-have-you; it works.
Now, let's take a PC smith. Same level as the expert above - 5. He has generously recieved an int of 12 (chances are he's either a fighter or paladin), and Craft (Weapons) is a class ability. He's got masterwork tools. It's not likely he's spent a feat on skill focus.
5 ranks + 3 class bonus + int 1 + 2 tools; +11, total. One of his companions recently lost his weapon in a fight, so our friendly PC smith is building a masterwork greatsword from scratch.
Total cost of components: 300(masterwork) + 17(roughly 1/3 of 50); 317.
Total time to complete:
Masterwork requires a total of 3000 'craft points' and has a DC of 20.
One week of presumably dedicated work -- we're taking 10 for these rolls, because the chances of our blacksmith failing to beat the DC of 20 with his +11 modifier is actually fairly high once we see how many rolls are required -- generates 11x20 'craft points' or 220.
It takes roughly 14 weeks - three and a half months, which means 14 rolls (which is why our PC smith didn't roll - every failed roll is another week!)
Greatsword requires a total of 500 craft points, and has a DC of 15.
One week of, again, presumably dedicated work and taking 10, generates 11x15, or 165, craft points. It takes about three weeks.
Our total is 17 weeks - or four months and one week, and that assumes that the smith is dedicated all along the way (given they are adventuring, I doubt he will be). Furthermore, even if he -is- dedicated, the chances of the friend-in-need stumbling upon a weapon equal to or greater than the one he had before, and certainly equal to or greater than our smith's work, is beyond incredibly high. Even if he does not, he will no doubt get the currency - a mere 350 gold - to purchase one of his own once he grows tired of using a spare longsword.
In short, smithing for PCs is borderline useless. You can make arrows, javelins and cheap blades easily enough (with that +11 mod they often take a week - or less!), but things like bows see the same problem as before (a composite longbow with a +3 strength rating requires 4000 progress, and will take something like 17 weeks for a bowyer with a +11 modifier). Raising the int from 12 to 14 or even 18 does not help very much, as it only speeds production maybe another fourth faster (remember, the craft system is reliant on Craft Roll x DC; an Int 12 versus an Int 18 character only gains, for the example greatsword... 45 additional progress a week (it will still take the same amount of time) for the blade, and 60 for the masterwork component, which ends up saving 3-4 weeks time, but it still takes a total of 13 weeks - three months - which is, again, very impractical.
Even an alchemist - and I do mean one with the craft skill, not the class - with a +13 modifier - will end up dedicating five weeks of time, a little over a month, to making a simple flask of acid.
I think it can be said - rather easily - that the Crafting system is broken. I feel like this might've already been common knowledge, but hey, I like making sure of things.
What's a solution?
One that springs to mind is to allow, for every crafted item, the crafter to get a certain number of 'free' weeks, equal to whatever their relevant Craft modifier is. Let's take, for instance, the original example of a level 5 expert working on a mastercraft mithral chain shirt;
+18 modifier means 18 'free' weeks, off of a project taking 34 weeks. The project takes 16 weeks, or four months. This seems a touch more reasonable, though perhaps still a little bit absurd. In fact, it is still absurd. Let's compare this to weapons, however;
The greatsword example from above now takes 6 weeks, rather than 16. A full month and a half, which, given the ordinary pace of adventuring, continues with the same problem it has originally, but that is an issue that will be touched on - separately - later.
The bowyer suffers similar consequences; it takes 6 weeks.
The alchemist seems like the lucky one out - they will build their flask of acid in 0 weeks time, which now brings about an entirely opposite issue as before; they can seemingly generate infinite acid as long as they have the material. This is as large a problem as our original issue, "this is taking forever." The problem now also exists for many non-masterwork weapons.
Next solution; divide the smithing time. In the craft section, there's a portion which reads 'progress by the day', wherein you divide your progress amount by 7 and perform your checks by the day rather than by the week.
I would argue one way to fix crafting would be to make this the standard. Instead of working in 'weeks', a craftsman would work in 'days'; essentially, every instance of 'week' in the crafting rules so far would become 'day'.
The original chainshirt example takes 34 days, a little over a single month.
The full plate we mentioned takes 24 days, a little less than a month.
The masterwork greatsword takes 17 days - a little over half a month, as does the composite bow with a +3 rating.
The acid takes 5 days.
Even this seems a little bit on the crazy side. No longer in comparison to what might or might not be "real" -- Google, after all, tells me a dozen different things -- but in what becomes practical. Things still take a while, but do they take too long? To be honest, I haven't actually PCed very often - in fact, I've been one campaign which has gone out for a while and is currently ongoing (the reason why I'm observing Crafting so much), but I've DMed another game for nearly a year now, and it seems as if the PCs are always moving around and never have much time to stop and breathe. It might just be that particular group (something entirely possible), but even putting aside half a month to smith a sword seems utterly mad.
We finally return to the issue of "this long still seems a long time for an adventurer", which we can address a few ways.
Option 1: Multiple Projects. Any craftsman can work on X projects, where X is their Int modifier. This seems to leave low-int characters the odd-man out, so another idea is to replace X with "with how many ranks they have in Craft" (which seems to make sense; experience and all.)
Option 2:
... embarrassingly enough, I only thought of one. Well, folks, let's open the issue to the public! I'm interested in hearing from others on the issue.