marr75's page

Clearly, not only should crafters charge their party members for crafting, they should charge them 25%. Any less, and it's the party who is being greedy

Yes! A million times yes! I'm a math minded guy. I find the DPR Olympics posts fascinating. 10 pages of posts on this topic ago I was thinking to myself, "10% is actually too low, it not only unbalances WBL but tips the WBL in the buyers' favor. I bet the actual amount is 25%, but I'll wait to do the math till I get through this marathon."

The arguments that you should do it for free because you "already benefit by making your party better" and "everyone has a role in combat" smack heavily of a newly released edition of a tabletop game that is MUCH more combat based than this one. It's also reductive of everyone's unique roles in a way similar to that game. This same mindset results in people hounding their party wizard not to memorize any fireballs because hastes will have a much more positive impact on the party DPR. It's meta-gaming of the worst kind because it hurts the role-playing at the table and it can really reduce the amount of fun that player is having. What if he didn't want to cast haste and watch his party members tear apart the encounter? What if he would have had more fun frying all of the lower level enemies in the encounter even if they weren't important and because of that decision the encounter was harder and the players barely won? That's completely up to the player and I think everyone will still have fun even if their wizard would rather get to roll the dice to destroy the 7 kobolds than make it easy for the party to defeat the dragon leading them.

As for people who pointed out that other players might play a mercenary character who wanted cash from the loot based on kills, this is an awesome idea if you can get a group to roleplay it right. My current group has one evil character who it is hard to get to agree to the hooks with the rest of the party, what if he was on a totally different compensation scale than the rest of us? It could result in a bunch of fun situations that were suboptimal for combat but fun to play (kill stealing, charging him for heals, etc.) and could make for a fun larger story arch over the other items in the campaign.

The way the OP's group reacted, it seems like they're looking to optimize characters and plow through enemies with a higher CR more easily or more quickly as a group. This is certainly not the only way to play (I've played with characters in my group who couldn't take on challenges 3 CRs lower than their level, we still had fun, as a player, I would absolutely vote to have them in my group again even if my character would not have).

This is a game. It's going to be fun whether the OP's character turns a profit on custom orders for his group or not as long as the OOC issues are handled. Show your friends the WBL math at 25% surcharge discussed in Quantum Steve's post and be polite. If they choose not to partake by buying items full price, that's fine, too.