
Kevin Andrew Murphy Contributor |

Sometimes adventurers don't have easy access to a general store to buy a new healers kit and this is even more problematic with disguise kits since even if one has access to a large city, unless there's a theatrical supply store, going around looking for a person in a shady back alley ready to sell you a bag of eyeshadow, nose putty, and assorted costume pieces for 50 GP?
Anyway, I was thinking that in the wilderness, the same as Survival can be used to forage for food in the form of wild mushrooms, edible berries, and easily caught animals (which cost money in town) it should also be something that can be used to find medicinal herbs, cobwebs and so forth to replenish a healer's kit.
I was thinking the easiest way to do this is to pick a DC for finding a charge for a healers kit. Healers kits retail for 50 GP. A good meal is 5 sp. A banquet is 10 GP. I was thinking the sort of hunter's meal you'd get from foraging would be pretty pricy if you got it in town, so 5 GP, which is half the cost of a banquet, and more important the exact same price as one charge of a healers kit.
Does this seem about right? Make it a survival check to scrounge around in the wilderness to find the appropriate wild herbs and such, cobwebs to make bandages (what people really used before the modern era), and so forth to replenish a healers kit or even make extras for later. DC 10 check to get one dose for a healers kit, with an additional dose for every 2 successes beyond that, and this can be mixed and matched with the usual "foraging" roll. You're still foraging, only you're looking for medicinal plants rather than edible ones.
For the Disguise kit, what's needed is more make-up, bits of costume jewelry, fabric scraps and so on--stuff you can generally only get in the city, but nothing terribly valuable in and of itself. There's no specific skill for "scrounging" or "urban survival" but I think that this would be a reasonable use of Appraise--after all, you're going around the city looking for cast-offs and scraps, dropped costume jewelry and similar stuff that's mostly valueless. Modeling that on the sort of rolls needed to replenish a healers kit with survival, one could then replenish a disguise kit the same way, scrounging around for enough bits and bobs to account for a "use" of a disguise kit.
Does this seem about right? Too difficult or too cheap?

anthony Valente |

My opinion: DC 10 is generally the target for "common knowledge" stuff. Looking for healer's kit charges in the wilderness sounds more specialist to me, so maybe DC 15 looks more appropriate. I'd also consider the other skills before settling on Survival. That's a good one, but I think Heal and Knowledge (nature) are good candidates as well. The amount of time a check takes might be important to note as well. I could see it being a DC 10 check if the PC spends the better part of a day looking for kit charges, and the PC finds an additional charge for every 5 points he beats the DC by. Bump it up to DC 15 or even 20 if the amount of time taken searching is much shorter?
I like the idea.

anthony Valente |

Hmm. What about Knowledge Nature or Profession Herbalist as both possibilities? The first is Int based and the second is Wis based so they help different sorts of characters but both would be equally applicable.
I'm having this same debate with a new taunting mechanic: which skill to tie it to? I don't see anything wrong with tying this to two skills. There's certainly precedent for it. Those two look like really good ones so they get my vote. I prefer them over Survival; I think they fit better and Survival already has a lot going for it.
Other than that I'd list the amount of time needed to make the check. And actually a base DC of 10 looks good in retrospect; especially if the DC varied depending upon environment. For example, it could be DC 10 in a forest, but if searching in a dessert, the DC would likely be higher.

Ambrus |

In my new Kingmaker campaign, I proposed to a druid player to put some ranks in Profession (herbalist) and to use her downtime to collect medicinal plants in the wild. The game mechanics are already in place; she simply makes a weekly profession skill check and the amount in gold she "earns" represents the value of the supplies she's succeeded in collecting to restock her herbalist kit. Once she reaches 50 gp "earned" for instance, her kit is fully stocked and she begins accumulating a surplus of supplies which she can keep for later use or trade to NPCs for spare cash or supplies.

Kevin Andrew Murphy Contributor |

Hmm, that does seem like a good mechanic, and the same could be done with Disguise Kits and replenishing them via Profession Ragpicker, which is the old fashioned term for dumpster diving and scrounging in the pre-dumpster era.
I realize Disguise Kits are also supposed to have cosmetics in them, but corkblack and chalk are pretty easy to come by and so far as I'm concerned, the biggest part of the disguise is the costuming--getting the makeup perfect doesn't do much to make you look like a fairy princess, for example, unless you've somehow acquired a passable ballgown and tiara.

Kevin Andrew Murphy Contributor |

I agree to DCs varying by area, but limiting it to 50% either forces the character to go hunting for a general store, or else asking what portion of the handwavium that goes into a healers kit is not covered by Profession Herbalist and what other profession or craft is required to gather or make it.
If the answer is "bandages" and for some reason leaves and cobwebs don't work (despite the fact that they did before current day medicine), then about all that's need is some cloth unless you demand that the player also use Craft Weaving to make new bandages.
Of course, the other appropriate answer is that before the current era of sterility and concerns/awareness about blood-borne pathogens people would just use Profession Laundress to wash the old bandages so they could be used again.
However, I'm not going to require Profession Laundress for anything apart from knowledge of how to remove bloodstains and bleach the bandages so they look white and pretty again. Having the character just say "I wash the bandages" should be good enough, assuming they have a stream and bushes to dry them on.

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I agree to DCs varying by area, but limiting it to 50% either forces the character to go hunting for a general store, or else asking what portion of the handwavium that goes into a healers kit is not covered by Profession Herbalist and what other profession or craft is required to gather or make it.
That's intentional. Healer's kits and especially disguise kits are complex sophisticated creations which take skill and a reasonably civilsied infrastructure to complete. It's also a reason for characters to plan ahead and make sure they'll have what they need.

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I agree, micro-managing to that degree is a little excessive. Being a professional herbalist, I figure the character is able to re-use or improvise whatever is needed with those things they gather as a part of their weekly skill check; no need to make it more complicated than that.
It really doesn't get more simpler than... pay gold cost for new kit.

Kevin Andrew Murphy Contributor |

So you're saying that healers kits are only sold in town at the apothecary and disguise kits are only available from thieves guilds or towns large enough to support a theater district.
I'll buy this, but only insofar as there are people actually making these kits by the regular crafting rules and the apothecary's shop is not just a spawn point for healers kits which magically appear every day when adventurers want to buy them.
Someone with Profession Apothecary or Craft Alchemy should be able to make one with the right ingredients which should be available in an apothecary shop, and everything in an apothecary shop has to come from somewhere. Again, it's not a spawn point for exotic ingredients.
Likewise, I'll grant that someone in town with Profession Wardrobe Mistress must put together the disguise kits after shopping for all the relevant bits and pieces and then selling the eight pound chest of make-up, masks, and costume accessories, but that said, someone in a town with the relevant skill should be able to do the shopping themselves. It's a little odd to say that only NPCs with Profession Wardrobe Mistress can make disguise kits but PCs with the same skill and access to the right shops or a good bazaar couldn't do the same thing.

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So you're saying that healers kits are only sold in town at the apothecary and disguise kits are only available from thieves guilds or towns large enough to support a theater district.
I'll buy this, but only insofar as there are people actually making these kits by the regular crafting rules and the apothecary's shop is not just a spawn point for healers kits which magically appear every day when adventurers want to buy them.
Someone with Profession Apothecary or Craft Alchemy should be able to make one with the right ingredients which should be available in an apothecary shop, and everything in an apothecary shop has to come from somewhere. Again, it's not a spawn point for exotic ingredients.
Likewise, I'll grant that someone in town with Profession Wardrobe Mistress must put together the disguise kits after shopping for all the relevant bits and pieces and then selling the eight pound chest of make-up, masks, and costume accessories, but that said, someone in a town with the relevant skill should be able to do the shopping themselves. It's a little odd to say that only NPCs with Profession Wardrobe Mistress can make disguise kits but PCs with the same skill and access to the right shops or a good bazaar couldn't do the same thing.
It's part of the difference between Profession and Craft skills. NPCs with Profession: Costume Design may very well buy parts and supplies from a variety of crafters, herbalists, alchemists, shoemakers, clothiers, woodworkers, to get all the myriad parts for a working disguise kit. Considering the expense that goes into making one, they're generally only g9oing to sell complete kits.
Then again disguise kits are a highly specialised item. Few actors need to go to the lengths of actually fully disguising themselves. It may very well be that the 50 gold spent represents all the shopping the PCs need to do to put one together.

Kevin Andrew Murphy Contributor |

Well, since I'm assuming that the apothecaries and costume designers are operating at a profit, if there are such things as premade disguise kits for sale, the individual contents would cost less separately than they do as a collection unless we're going up to the level of having these being mass produced by apothecaries guilds and costumers guilds who can do things in the economy of scale.
I could see that, but only so long as you set up some sort of costumed festival with a wealthy enough populace to buy scads of the kits, enough to support the work of an actual guildhall.
If, OTOH, they're just nicely put together actor's trunks and prop boxes which there isn't much call for, it's probably possible to make them up oneself.
It's a judgement call you need to make depending on what you want for your world. If I'm going to tell players "You must pay 50 gp and that's always the price" I'm going to put in some explanation that, for example, these are Jeddan carnival kits, from Jedda's festival of masks (as detailed in the Prodigal Sons fiction portion of the Kingmaker adventure path), and they're produced by the Jeddan carnival krewes, with certain items required by law and a certain quality levels to get the guild king's seal of approval and moreover a fixed price as also set by law.
Depends on what you want to do.