I've read through most of the threads on the poison question and i know the jasonator was workin on the situation, but i haven't seen a concrete clarification yet? have i missed it somewhere? has it not been settled yet?
Paizo is incredible
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Also has poison been ruled an alchemical item that the alchemist can apply his bonus to?
Master Alchemist
Your mastery of alchemy is nearly supernatural.
Prerequisite: Craft (alchemy) 5 ranks.
Benefit: You receive a +2 bonus on Craft (alchemy)
checks, and you may create mundane alchemical
items much more quickly than normal. When making
poisons, you can create a number of doses equal to your
Intelligence modifier (minimum 1) at one time. These
additional doses do not increase the time required, but
they do increase the raw material cost.
In addition, whenever you make alchemical items or
poisons using Craft (alchemy), use the item’s gp value as its
sp value when determining your progress (do not multiply
the item’s gp cost by 10 to determine its sp cost).
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I imagine you've seen This thread where Jason offers some clarity on the issue. He is pretty focused on Gencon right now and it's unlikely there will be much clarification for a bit. I suggest you refer to that AND Please mark that thread for inclusion in the FAQ since it's more or less the best thread for poisons right now. They have committed to prioritizing 'official' FAQ issues based on those flags.
(Go to the top of the thread and click the "FAQ" link to flag it.)
Thanks for the help! Poisons are seperate from alchemical items, you still use craft alchemy for both. so the Alchemist does not apply his level as a bonus to make a poison?
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I would suggest viewing the prices of poisons to be the price of such items on the black market in lands where possession is a felony. If you're in an area where possession is merely a misdemeanor, divide prices by ten. If you're in an area where poison is unregulated, divide prices by ten again, which is to say, 1% of list prices.
For example, hemlock costs 2500 GP in lands where possession is a felony. In lands where possession is a misdemeanor, it costs only 250 GP. In lands where it's unregulated, it costs only 25 GP because the raw material is a pretty common plant.
Arsenic is a chemical element that used to be used in green paint and is still used in some fireworks. Belladonna is a pretty plant that can be grown in the garden, was historically used as a cosmetic, and can still be bought for flower arrangements from a good florist. And so on.
I would calculate the time to process the raw materials into the sort of lethal concentrate suitable for use in a poison ring as being the time to process them at their true value without the inflation caused by the black market.
Do the same thing with drugs. It is not rocket science to make hashish or opium.
Treat drugs as poison with regards to the Master Alchemist skill and the number of doses that can be made.
If any players want to get rich by getting poisons from unregulated areas and reselling them in highly regulated areas, let them, but realize that the same rules apply to drugs with the same troubles as in the real world: smugglers cartels, street gangs, bribes and protection money to the authorities, money to pay lawyers when you do get caught, and fines and worse if the lawyers aren't able to get you off.
The 2500 GP you pay for hemlock is street price for just enough to fill up your poison ring with to poison someone tonight when you want to leaving you poison if not guilt free when the guardsmen come around with Detect Poison spells after your rival has conveniently keeled over at the royal ball.
That's how I'd do it, and that should bring creation times down to something resembling reality and sanity. Cost to create, however, varies by the legality of the area, since either you're paying black market prices for ingredients or you're paying the authorities for the necessary permits to be able to make these regulated items which miraculously comes to the same price.
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Are the normal creation times for poisons crazy long or is my math off?
4th level wizard makes single dose of hemlock poison.
4 skill ranks +5INT bonus +3class skill=12
average D20=10.5
total 22.5hemlock costs 2500gp and is DC18 so...25,000 in SP
average weekly progress is 22.5 x 18=405
25,000 / 405 = 61.728 weeks
The answer is yes, it does take that much time. Unless your GM is willing to handwave the time on it the only timely way to craft poisons is with the Master Alchemist feat in the APG which lets you craft multiple doses at a time and in 1 tenth the amount of time.
Seems to me that the end price isn't a very good measure of how long it takes to craft because the end price would also be affected by the scarcity of the materials. The price of dragon bile is likely largely in the raw materials rather than a work intensive process.
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I would suggest viewing the prices of poisons to be the price of such items on the black market in lands where possession is a felony. If you're in an area where possession is merely a misdemeanor, divide prices by ten. If you're in an area where poison is unregulated, divide prices by ten again, which is to say, 1% of list prices.
For example, hemlock costs 2500 GP in lands where possession is a felony. In lands where possession is a misdemeanor, it costs only 250 GP. In lands where it's unregulated, it costs only 25 GP because the raw material is a pretty common plant.
Well the alchemist class already drastically reduces the cost of poisoning (by a factor of 10-15 if you craft). Just reducing the time to craft would be enough.
Unfortunately changing the way crafting works for poisons has a trickle down effect on questions about crafting anything else.
As long as your players don't care about crafting anything else, you can come up with some custom rules for poison and be done with it.
I like the idea of some crafting times being based on difficulty rather than value of the item.
The only problem with applying this universally being that some objects, the point of difficulty is that it does have a higher value, but for that I could see a second level mechanic approaching from a different direction (value for those items increasing based on the skill check, rather than influencing the time).
That way you can have the time it takes to make independent of the cost, since the cost can be vastly different based on markets, legalities, and balancing factors vs wealth by level.
The crafting rules are pretty much borked to begin with. Anything that makes them more sensible is a good idea, and I think mark-ups for contraband and highly regulated items are a sensible way to go.
Having social class mark-up is also sensible. I mean, something like this:
Baked Apple sold by farmwife at fair: 1 cp
Baked Apple sold by innwife at nice inn: 1 sp
Baked Apple sold by king's personal confectioner with "By Appointment to the King" prominently displayed in the window: 1 gp
Now, is there much difference between the three? The first will be dumped in the wooden bowl you brought with you and is eaten with your own spoon and belt knife. The second is brought to you on an earthenware plate on which it was baked and it looks nice and comforting. The second is served on a beautiful china plate with a silver fork (neither of which you get to keep) and there are some flecks of cold leaf or gold dust sprinkled over it to make it look more beautiful and costly but not affecting the taste and it's served by a beautiful waitress in lovely starched livery (and no, you don't get to keep her either).
The taste? Pretty much the same. It's a baked apple with sugared walnuts.
The prep time is also pretty much the same. In fact, the farmwife and the innwife may at this moment be working in the king's confectioners personal kitchen if there's some royal feast and he's gotten an order for 500 baked apples and needs the extra help.
That's definitely true.
However, there is one small part that I can see where people get finicky: the Master Chef who can make a Baked Apple that is to die for.
It can be because of using different ingredients, different amounts, or methods of cooking (how it's handled when made).
None of these need to increase the time or the cost, but it would be increased by the DC.
And it could increase the value of the end result.
This is why crafting is so hard, because we use a system that is used to maybe two angles (bonus vs DC), but crafting typically touches on multiple aspects (cost vs skill vs value vs demand vs legality, etc).
It's hard to crunch that all down into one skill check and be done with it, and really needs flat modifiers and values that are kept independent from each other.
Poisons are just one area that this is an issue, but it's the one that players typically find immediate practicality with. It'd take some really indepth changes (like whole tables of cost v value v legality) to really get this to work.
Considering how little it comes up in games, using feats and class abilities as a patch for the areas that people actually care (magic items and poison for instance), seems the best compromise so far.
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Unfortunately changing the way crafting works for poisons has a trickle down effect on questions about crafting anything else.
As long as your players don't care about crafting anything else, you can come up with some custom rules for poison and be done with it.
I think think is why Jason added a feat specific to alchemy rather than a blanket change. Things like crafting weapons it makes sense to make one at a time, crafting a poison or alchemist fire you'd make a batch.
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The crafting rules in d20 as a whole are borked. I wish Pathfinder had bothered to change them, but it is what it is. For my game, I just dispense with the ridiculous "time is related to cost" thing and determine how much is costs for base materials and what the crafting time is separately.
Jeremy Puckett
That's definitely true.
However, there is one small part that I can see where people get finicky: the Master Chef who can make a Baked Apple that is to die for.It can be because of using different ingredients, different amounts, or methods of cooking (how it's handled when made).
None of these need to increase the time or the cost, but it would be increased by the DC.
And it could increase the value of the end result.
Fair enough, but there also comes the question of which of the three is the master chef who makes the Baked Apple that is to die for: the Royal Confectioner, the innwife at the nice little inn in the woods, or the farmwife who's been making her favorite recipe for the past thirty years and sells them at all the market fairs and still only charges 1 cp?
We will assume that each of them has their own separate apple tree, walnut tree, and secret recipe.
Now, which of these is truly The Baked Apple to Die For? We will assume that we have Wicked Queen's Mirror of Mental Prowess, and rather than ask it for the value judgment of "Who is the fairest of them all?" we're asking for the value judgment about the best baked apple. Saves a lot of trouble with gathering restaurant reviewers and county fair judges and interviewing travelers and whatnot, and is moreover diplomatically important because the Faerie Queen is visiting and has requested to be served the finest baked apple in all the land and the fey are like magic mirrors in that they somehow know if something is not quite up to snuff so we're not going to bet on the Royal Confectioner being the ticket without checking with the mirror first.
As for the "value" of the baked apple, it's whatever the market will bear. The Fairie Queen may grant a wish to whoever serves her the best apple, and whoever doesn't gets cursed with the head of a pig, and so at the end of the tasting the Royal Confectioner and the old farmwife both have pig heads and meanwhile the innwife no one was paying attention to has been anointed as the new Martha Stewart and has wished for, well, let's hope something reasonably good.
The amount of GP you can charge for something bears very little relation to reality. Go to any fancy bar and ask for any high end liquor served straight up. How much are you charged per ounce? Then go to a liquor store and buy that exact same bottle--what is the price per ounce? Exactly how much are you paying for a guy in a nice white shirt and vest to pour it into a glass for you and put it down on a paper napkin?
Those questions are getting into details that are far too specific to place in a general rule. At that point, it's up to the GM to place situational modifiers on the situation.
The person who makes the baked apple to die for would necessarily be the one that rolls the highest DC, in my books. If it's about skill in making the thing, then the DC is where you look.
To know the base "value" of the item then, in a general sense, you'd have to compare each one next to each other with all other things being equal.
Afterwhich, the GM can decide how much it actually is sold for based on his campaign (either with a handy chart, with %'s for situational factors, or as simply an ad hoc decision "this is 1cp, but tastes amazing!", etc).
It's good to know the starting point though, so that GMs have a point of reference.
My main point though, in all of this, is that the value of the item (how much people are willing to pay, or willing to selling, etc) should NOT be a factor in how long it takes to make, or even the cost of the materials to make.
If anything, your questions prove that "value" is so far disengaged from cost and time to make that it's silly to consider it the starting point that decides the other factors.