Whoa there! The thread I think you are referring to was about creating characters at higher levels, (And I suppose initial character creation.)
The idea was that a character could start with 200% of his wealth by level, by crafting the items himself. The Big Debate was about whether you view the numbers on the chart as being what you start out with on Day 1 of the adventure (if everything was bought at full price), or what you can spend in the months leading up to Day 1.
I think the majority of people felt that crafters should be able to use between 10%-50% of their gold to craft stuff (thus getting it for half price). Although some (i.e. Me) felt that everything should be bought at full price, others thought that everything can be crafted at half price.
Note: This is ALL about initial character creation, NOT about crafting in an ongoing campaign. In an ongoing campaign, I think people who take crafting feats are supposed to craft, use, and use up, more magic items then non-crafters.
Basically put with "wealth by level" no matter how you acquire that wealth the total amount you should generally be around is your wealth at that level.
IF the PC's go out and make a bunch of magical items and end up over wealth for their level go ahead and take a few items out with sundering, theft, magic items being used up, and just replace them slower until you're back at the balancing point.
For example lets say I make two +3 weapons, a +3 armor, a +3 shield at around level 10. That's 36,000 for the weapons, 18,000 for the armor and shield... and lets get a bit crazy and make a staff of healing too (it's a cleric). Now I'm over my wealth for the level. However if you have us fight a lot of say, constructs and things without much wealth by the time I'm level 11 I'll be closer to being back on track for my wealth by level since you didn't give a lot of stuff out during that time.
It's a balancing act, and requires the DM to keep an eye on what's out there, but no more so than when he hands everything out too. In this case the players can simply get what they think they need.
Overall for each item creation feat I generally allow a bit more wealth than normal, since they burned up a feat for it (that they could have taken something more immediately useful instead of), but I don't let them ever double their wealth.
Ok item creation feats allow you to craft at half price... however you are unlikely to end up with more wealth than anyone else due to the idea of wealth by level. Most likely you'll simply end up with exactly what you want instead of what ever "drops" from the monsters.
It's a balancing act, and requires the DM to keep an eye on what's out there, but no more so than when he hands everything out too. In this case the players can simply get what they think they need.
This is a very important thing to understand. If the GM is keeping a proper eye on things, the treasure you find will be more or less depending on what you've already got. If I'm doing it right, you won't even notice during gameplay; but that's the only way WBL can be maintained.
There's a reasonable argument for an item creation feat allowing you to go maybe 15% over-budget, since some of your treasure is in coins, gems and other full-exchange items. (That puts you roughly halfway to the next level's allotment; and yeah, it'll be taken out of your future loot.) And as I mentioned in the other thread, I'll let you blow your entire wealth on item creation rather than enforcing an even distribution of item types on the "mostly, you found them" principle.
Edit: To clarify, the benefit of item creation feats is that they allow you to trade the stuff you find for the stuff you want, with zero loss. Let's say you've found a +2 flaming longsword, and you want a +1 holy longsword. They've got the same value, but you can't just trade one for the other. Most characters will be stuck with the flaming sword until they can save up some extra cash. If you've got Craft Magic Arms and Armor, no such limitation exists: you can convert between equal values rather than having to sell at half price and buy at full.
That you can even find a buyer for that magic sword in the first place, by the way, should be considered miraculous. In fact, I suggested a brokerage model in another thread: want to sell some gear? Contact a broker, put it in escrow, and go on an adventure (slightly under-geared). They'll find a buyer for you while you're out, and you'll get your money when you come back. Or, y'know, use what you find because sometimes something is better than nothing. :)
For 'Starting Gear', irrespective of level, I'd rule that everything was full price.
This preserves initial balance, and saves disputes.
Otherwise we would need to make similar rules for mundane skills as well and then it becomes a PITA. Everyone would take a rank in Armourer and Weaponsmith at level 1 and just start annoying the GM :p
Where the whole show should come into play is during the campaign proper, and frankly I don't mind the mechanics - even if I think they are a bit on the 'easy' side. Crafting Magic Weapons should be a dead-set time consuming chore, and not something lightly entered into (imo).
Yeah item creation is generally one of those "advanced" issues that every DM and group as a whole has to figure out for themselves.
But for the barbarian -- I generally allow creators to take 10, and the amount of actual time taken varies based on what's being made and how soon I want it in the campaign... sometimes I even let them get started and throw a juicy adventure hook at them in the middle simply to get them to drop the item for the time being (generally they'll not "lose" their progress).
How much "over wealth" I let them go partly depends on how many feats they are sinking into it. For a wizard that simply grabs craft wondrous item he's not going to get much from it. A barbarian with master craftsman and craft weapons and armor and skill focus will probably go a bit further over than the wizard will (for the simple fact it took him 3 feats to get near the same point and a skill that isn't directly useful during adventures, unlike spellcraft).
Again it's a balancing act, and something the DM will need to watch carefully. Also just because they have the money to make doesn't mean they have the place to make it immediately. Generally I do my best to allow them to get what they want... it might simply be delayed a little or not in a method they expected.
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For during a game, I allow those with item creation feats to have a *bit* more wealth, but I agree with tej that it is a feat for the purposes of having the item you want much more than it is about increasing wealth.
For character creation I allow people to have the items that they can craft at the craft price... if they do the checks to make it in front of me. Failure means loss of wealth as normal. For magic items I do the check for them (in case they end up with a cursed item and don't know it yet).
The reason I allow this is that it lets the person get some benefit for using up their feats from early levels on item creation without making it a sure thing. Also, going along with the idea that the purpose of item creation feats is to make sure you get the item you want, then if you didn't do something they be purpose-less to characters started at higher levels since all characters get to pick whatever they want.
It all comes down to a judgement call. If the person is creating "item of unbalancing doom" using this ruling I generally say "err... no" to prevent them from getting out of hand, but usually the items they make are only a slight and temporary boost.
In one case I used this rule with another DM to make one my characters possible to play. He was a Kobold who had invested a lot in disguise to appear like a different race so that he could avoid being killed on sight by most others, so he spent some of his initial money on crafting a vest of disguise, which he couldn't afford unless he did the crafting.
At character creation it can be more problematic. At this point in time the GM has lost most of his control over both the time to craft and wealth to craft with. Because of this crafting at creation needs to be governed quite a bit closer.
One way to limit this is to simply state how much time they have for item creation and how much of a percentage they can go over wealth by level with creation...
For example you might say they have 2 weeks and 10% per feat spent on item creation.
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Item creation feats not only double loot; they also penalize one player in the group with stunted XP growth. It's not a big deal; if that player ever falls behind by a level he gets the "mega XP growth", but the point is it doesn't adversely affect the group much. Meanwhile you have to start raising CRs; both because you allowed the party to get whatever they want and they effectively doubled their treasure.
Personally I like the way its done in Shackled City; the city gives you a loot list that you can acquire based on the reputation of your group, it has some of the staples on it, but not all; and the items available certainly aren't on the level of the ones you have found. And I just ban out all Item Creation Feats (or anything that resembles a feat which increases loot, like the talent that does such). It makes interesting treasure piles and keeps the party reasonably in control.
XP is no longer subtracted for making magic items.
XP is no longer subtracted for making magic items.
Aw, c'mon Wraith, next you'll be telling us that grapple works differently, character creation has changed, feats aren't the same, or that Pathfinder isn't 3.5 with a different cover. Stop joking around.
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XP is no longer subtracted for making magic items.
Ah; just starting my first PF home game; and PFS also used no item creation rules for obvious reasons. In LGR characters with them were insanely powerful; the XP loss was an advantage, not a disadvantage, there (the characters ended up lower level with more loot; so would "wipe" the low-tier modules).
XP is no longer subtracted for making magic items.Aw, c'mon Wraith, next you'll be telling us that grapple works differently, character creation has changed, feats aren't the same, or that Pathfinder isn't 3.5 with a different cover. Stop joking around.
But, but, it did change. I'm not joshing ya. It really did.
Item creation feats are always going to be problematic. As someone mentioned above, they work well when used to convert +1 Sword of Stuff I Don't Want into +1 Sword of Stuff I Do.
As long as the wealth system is tied to the power system, anything that deals with item creation is going to be troublesome.
Edited: Because grammar matters.
That's true, but even with the "extra" wealth that the group gains from the spellcaster being able to craft magic items, said spellcaster will be losing out on metamagic feats or feats that could make his spells harder to save against or that allow his touch attacks to hit better or penetrate spell resistance, so over the course of the campaign, is having an extra +1 weapon quality in the party going to make up for a couple of spells that didn't go off when they might have because the caster could boost his own combat effectiveness?
I wouldn't allow a starting character to double their wealth by item creation feats either, even though I do subscribe to the interpretation that allows item creation feats to let you craft things at half level. I'd allow a starting character to craft gear after the point they took the item creation feat, so they have to spend the wealth up until the level the feat is taken at full price, like it would happen as if they were leveling that character up in a full game.
I'm a little wary of holding to the idea that characters should be created as if they were leveled up from scratch (though I can't think of another area where it matters) but I think it's reasonable in this context. I don't mind magic item creation in game because the wealth gets shared, but with starting characters the other players will generally start by buying things at full price and the player with item creation feats ends up over-geared relative to the group, unless they coordinate character creation (which generally doesn't happen for my games). In game the long crafting times also serve as a check on how much wealth you can increase by crafting, which also doesn't exist when creating a high level character from scratch.
Edit: To clarify, the benefit of item creation feats is that they allow you to trade the stuff you find for the stuff you want, with zero loss. Let's say you've found a +2 flaming longsword, and you want a +1 holy longsword. They've got the same value, but you can't just trade one for the other. Most characters will be stuck with the flaming sword until they can save up some extra cash. If you've got Craft Magic Arms and Armor, no such limitation exists: you can convert between equal values rather than having to sell at half price and buy at full.
I don't see how this matters. You're assumed to have a certain amount of wealth at every level, the DM controls the loot drops to match the wealth by level guidelines. If stuff sells for half, you drop twice the wealth by level guidelines in loot (ceteris paribus, assuming you're only dropping items and not coins/tradegoods). If stuff sells for full, you drop the exact amount listed. It washes out to the same place.
As for the original topic, I do think item creation feats let you double your wealth, effectively. Whether this is a good thing is a different question, but I see no reason why it would let you craft things at half-cost if this weren't the case. There are no restrictions on sale of items in the game I'm aware of; there's no reason to think you can't sell all the loot you get in the game until you hit the wealth by level guidelines and then get to crafting with all that gold. If the wealth by level guidelines were supposed to remain intact with creation feats, items would simply cost full price to build.
Incidentally I've always found the loot system for D&D to be a pain in the ass. The problem with it is that when you drop 10k worth of items, that same item pile could be worth 10k if the players use all of it, or it could be worth 5k if they sell all of it. To keep within the wealth by level guidelines, you have to keep track of how much money you hand the players in the form of items plus how much money you've handed them from item sales. What a book-keeping headache. I've long house-ruled it that items sell for full price. That way it doesn't matter to me whether they use what I drop or not and I can get away with only tracking what loot I've dropped.
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My group takes care of the "how much wealth should we have?" problem by not caring about it until it gets crazy enough that we go "... wait a second!"
This actually happened recently where we were having plenty of fun and at the end of a session realized we were at level 3 wealth as level 7 characters.
In my opinion, by allowing the story to dictate how much stuff you get, you tend to have a more natural feel to the world. Every once in a while you get lucky and find a treasure stash, and sometimes you get unlucky and get robbed in the night.
I think any DM that feels obligated to rebalance wealth more than once every couple of levels is working to hard to follow an arbitrary guideline. Sure, the guideline is there to keep balance, but so are you.
Going back to the creation feats at character creation shpeel: The entire problem is that when created well above the level that the character receives their item creation feats, they seem to gain nothing out of that feat for several levels of their career. Whether talking about optimization or not, that just seems weird.
Since you have to take different feats for different kinds of items, I just say "let's roll your craft check" for anything that they can make. If he fail, tough luck on applying that wealth. Succeed? Good for them.
If someone gets too much stuff, just let them help balance the party out after the game has started, then guide the wealth from there.
Oh, I would definitely put restrictions on those discounts for items that are class/race/skill/alignment restricted. Or increase the DC of the check. Stack all those discounts and suddenly that 36,000 item only costs 5,556g6s (assuming you multiply the discounts rather than add them).
In regards to the limitations, I'm pretty sure I remember a Paizo post that said the discounts only apply to the market price, not the crafting cost.
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Edit: To clarify, the benefit of item creation feats is that they allow you to trade the stuff you find for the stuff you want, with zero loss. Let's say you've found a +2 flaming longsword, and you want a +1 holy longsword. They've got the same value, but you can't just trade one for the other. Most characters will be stuck with the flaming sword until they can save up some extra cash. If you've got Craft Magic Arms and Armor, no such limitation exists: you can convert between equal values rather than having to sell at half price and buy at full.
This is also exactly what I like to avoid; in general, I want wealth found out looted to be better than you could afford just by buying it. So if I place a +2 Flaming weapon, I don't want them to just think "Oh, I'd rather have a +1 Holy weapon. Bam, here we go". This leads to those "optimal builds" that tend to break the game :).
A lot of my goal is to actually make a game WORK to level 20. Part of it is to limit spells (they actually did a pretty good job of hitting most "worrysome" spells; and I asked the players to just be careful to not try to find "world breaking combos" if they were playing a full caster at the high levels). So that's a lot of the reason I am glad Shattered City offers up the tiered magic item list, and why I am preventing magic item creation feats.
If a character at Xth level has 10.000 gold to spend on items, it represent the total worth of those items. Whether he buys 1 item of 10k or crafts one for half price and states he has 5k left, it doesn't matter. For game rule purposes, the item is worth 10k.
Starting money counts for buy-value of items, not craft value. A simple rule imho. Afterwards you can go wild with your creation feats of course.
Sure you can say that it means the player didn't get use out of the feat for all those levels and that he thus made a sacrifice for it. But the same can be said for a player who took the toughness feat, which works best for earlier levels since it doesn't really scale well. That player missed the period he benefited best from that feat. It's a choice you make. You can also NOT choose an item creation feat and wait till you level up in actual play before taking it.
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I find this thread quite interesting.
I have been in and run games where item creation is a fairly regular event. I have never once had it be an issue that players become substantially more powerful because they create their own items at less price.
It seems to me the wealth per level rules are designed for the GM to have a ballpark of general wealth to award. Not what maximum wealth level the PCs are able to obtain through play.
To limit a character who has several item creation feats makes no sense what-so-ever. He has sacrificed part of his character development in order to create these items.
It would be like limiting a Fighter from using feats that improve his To Hit chances, because it raises his score above his BAB that is listed in the book.
Simply put, the character with item creation feats has already paid the extra penalties required in order to create items at less cost. To add further penalties is just cruel.
But this thread does raise interesting questions... maybe I SHOULD start limiting Fighters in what feats they can actually use... mmmm...
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It doesn't just help him. One person takes Craft Wonderous, suddenly the entire party gets stat items at half off. Suddenly those +6s are available way before the GM wanted. Treasure from the dungeon immediately gets transformed into GP for optimization.
You can say correctly the DM can adjust the money found, but then what? People are still min-max twinking, and you're having to assume that all Item Creation feats are available (poor fighter begging a cleric/wiz to take craft arms).
It's not worth it; it leads to treasure hoarded being uninteresting and the game devolving into a min-max twinkfest. I've played old 3.0 this way; that is what happened there, and nothing has changed where I feel it would be different.
It seems to me the wealth per level rules are designed for the GM to have a ballpark of general wealth to award. Not what maximum wealth level the PCs are able to obtain through play.
But that's exactly wrong. The wealth-by-level rules are part of the CR system; if the players' gear is too good or too poor, the difficulty of an "appropriate challenge" changes.
If you don't use CR at all, WBL can just be tossed out the window. Nothing wrong with that if it's how your table runs. But if you want to take advantage of that tool, you have to stay within its parameters.
It doesn't just help him. One person takes Craft Wonderous, suddenly the entire party gets stat items at half off. Suddenly those +6s are available way before the GM wanted. Treasure from the dungeon immediately gets transformed into GP for optimization.
Only if you have a few months downtime between every adventure. Most campaigns are relentless in time-pressure. At least the ones I play in.
Since we're adventuring most of the time you can spend like 2-4 effective hours tops. Providing +6 items for the party takes many months, while a session generally lasts a few in-game days.
Someone who takes a creation feat isn't sacrificing anything. He purposely chooses for this feat. One item in the higher levels will save tens of thousands of golds. That alone could be worth a feat!
It seems to me the wealth per level rules are designed for the GM to have a ballpark of general wealth to award. Not what maximum wealth level the PCs are able to obtain through play.But that's exactly wrong. The wealth-by-level rules are part of the CR system; if the players' gear is too good or too poor, the difficulty of an "appropriate challenge" changes.
If you don't use CR at all, WBL can just be tossed out the window. Nothing wrong with that if it's how your table runs. But if you want to take advantage of that tool, you have to stay within its parameters.
No, I think it's pretty much right. It's not meant to be an exact accounting, just a schedule to help the DM keep on track with the expected challenge ratings and treasure allotments throughout the campaign.
So either there is an urgent rush; in which case IC is useless and the argument is moot; or PCs have some crafting feats, in which case the +6s are there. Basically I save 1000 GP per 8 hours you give me; a bargain at half the price.
Not true. It does not have to be one extreme or the other. The PC's can save money, and get the magic items they want, especially in non-magic mart campaigns. I am not saying they will get all the items they want, but it opens things up. The PC's may be working out of a hamlet, with no chance to buy a +3 weapon. Now they can make one.
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For example lets say I make two +3 weapons, a +3 armor, a +3 shield at around level 10. That's 36,000 for the weapons, 18,000 for the armor and shield... and lets get a bit crazy and make a staff of healing too (it's a cleric).
A question , Abraham. How does a level 10 cleric have Craft Staff(an 11th level feat)?
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But that's exactly wrong. The wealth-by-level rules are part of the CR system; if the players' gear is too good or too poor, the difficulty of an "appropriate challenge" changes.
If you don't use CR at all, WBL can just be tossed out the window. Nothing wrong with that if it's how your table runs. But if you want to take advantage of that tool, you have to stay within its parameters.
With respect, I don't think that's possible. In most of the parties I've seen --PFS being the notable exception-- neither the DM nor the players can know ahead of time whether they'll be keeping the loot, selling it for half-price, or how they'll be distributing it.
I've seen PCs pool the treasure to get one big item that'll help the party. So, one character --the cleric carrying the staff of life, or the paladin with the holy avenger sword-- suddenly has a disproportionate amount of treasure.
(When you look at those two situations, do you think the cleric has gained all that much power, relative to her allies?)
It's been my experience that parties nearing the end of a long Journey Into The Unknown are carrying around a lot of coins, gems, and loot they aren't using, waiting to get back into town to buy something useful. If we factor character wealth into CR, then when they sell the stuff they don't want, and exchange gold for equipment, their CR should go down, since they're selling stuff for half-price.
A thought:
When starting at a later point, players may spend WBL cash on a (small) list of basic equipment.
Also, players may spend cash on one of several random tables, to represent odd-ball items they've collected over their travels.
Finally, with an item feat, the player may choose much more freely among starting equipment (but still based on market price).
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William, I've only run one campaign in which characters started above first level. I asked the players to describe, in simple narrative, what their 4th-Level characters had done, previous to the campaign beginning. Then I found a couple of modules that more-or-less matched their description, and provided the party with a list of the loot they'd obtained so far in their careers, which they parcelled out among them.
It was probably less work than generating those random tables.
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It seems to me the wealth per level rules are designed for the GM to have a ballpark of general wealth to award. Not what maximum wealth level the PCs are able to obtain through play.But that's exactly wrong. The wealth-by-level rules are part of the CR system; if the players' gear is too good or too poor, the difficulty of an "appropriate challenge" changes.
If you don't use CR at all, WBL can just be tossed out the window. Nothing wrong with that if it's how your table runs. But if you want to take advantage of that tool, you have to stay within its parameters.
I'm going to have to STRONGLY disagree that a character with item creation feats that has more wealth puts it outside the appropriate CR. That character GAVE UP A FEAT to get this, that means that they are less powerful than other characters if they don't have more/better items, which in turn means they have more than the standard wealth level.
Are you going to tell the wizard in my party who has 5 item creation feats that all but two of his feats are useless because he can't have more wealth worth of stuff than the arbitrary guideline in the book says he can? Considering what everyone else can accomplish with their feats at the same level, I'd say he's entitled to a little extra wealth.
I'm going to have to STRONGLY disagree that a character with item creation feats that has more wealth puts it outside the appropriate CR. That character GAVE UP A FEAT to get this, that means that they are less powerful than other characters if they don't have more/better items, which in turn means they have more than the standard wealth level.
Are you going to tell the wizard in my party who has 5 item creation feats that all but two of his feats are useless because he can't have more wealth worth of stuff than the arbitrary guideline in the book says he can? Considering what everyone else can accomplish with their feats at the same level, I'd say he's entitled to a little extra wealth.
All the combat feats are useless too... until play starts. Why shouldn't the same be true of the item creation feats?