The Craft Skill.

[Chidgey]

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?

[DeadDMWalking]

I do like the idea of a craft skill that explains the production of magical items. I really like the idea of magical dwarves forging spells into their items, but not so much walking around all day casting fireballs. The enchanting of items is a 'subtle' use of magic, not so much in line with the 'flashy' wizard's art.

There are two concerns I have, though.

1) When enchanting a magic item, whether it is a weapon or a ring, there is an assuption that the item already exists, but the wizard is adding magical properties to it (enchanting the blade forged by a master craftsperson). This system seems to fail to address that situation.

2) I forget what I was going to say.

These of course refer to option 1. I don't like option 2, where in order to craft anything you need a feat. I'd rather see it skill based.

One possible solution would be to create one feat (imbue magic) as an item creation feat. This would allow you to enchant any item you create (forge, carve, construct, etc). This would let you avoid paying for a craft (ring) feat, and a craft (wand) feat, etc. As long as you had the skill points to construct the item from scratch, you could do so without the extra feats.

Characters that don't want to learn to construct magical items but do want to enchant items that have already been created would simply take the individual feat as it stands now. There would certainly be an incentive to take this feat, at least for characters that are used to having time to work on item creation. The other feats could work more quickly, since the item creation is already done...

If you have the Imbue Item feat, you can craft any magical item, DC 15 + minimum caster level required. Each day you work on an item you must expend spell slots totalling the required caster level. For example, to craft a magic item with a caster level of 5, the character must have at least 5 1st level spell slots, or 3 1st and 1 2nd.

Just kind of brainstorming with you here.