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really?
if you find a PC starting with extra magic items to be that disruptive. just treat his level as slightly higher than it is when you calculate APL.
in this case, the guy sold a feat for some extra cash. big deal. it's not anything too disruptive. not much more than +1 across the board. and those bonuses are dependant on the item used.
just don't allow more than 50% of your wealth to be spent on one item, including gold. and you solved most of the issue right there.
Depends. In Carrion Crown, my cleric has barely had time to craft anything. We're in book 6, and the pace as you may know is rather frantic. Over the course of the previous five books, he did boost the fighter's sword from +1 to a +4 in bonuses, another weapon from +1 to +2, and one suit of armor from +0 to +1; he's also written one 5th level scroll and one 6th level scroll, and a bunch of level 1 and 2 scrolls. . . . But no more. He hasn't even had the opportunity to enchant his own shield, armor, or weapon.
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it's not anything too disruptive. not much more than +1 across the boardHow do you figure that?
i did a rough mental audit of how item prices scale compared to how wealth by level increases by level. it compared roughly to a +1 bonus across the board with each item. which is a series of small bonuses in different sectors that don't have much of an impact on thier own.
and once your primary bonuses cap out, you are either adding new bonuses elsewhere, investing in consumables and spell components, or buying utilitarian items.
even with the hypothetical +1 across the board with a possible +3 AC.
monsters will still frequently hit you with extreme lethality.
I would suggest, if it is difficulty you want, to not change the rules but instead include specific recipes for each item. Like the PCs have to actually find what it takes to make the item instead of a solid GP value. You can balance this by replacing some of the found loot on the loot table with the recipe items in question. It would take finesse and work but that would solve almost all your problems without having to change the rules.
I totally agree that abandoning the specific spell lists themselves is essential to an underlying rework of the crafting system. Except perhaps in the case of wands and potions, which are honestly fairly clean, Summoner/Dimdoor aside.
For instance, instead of requiring Fireball or Flame Strike, there should just be a "Fire Damage Spell" (FDS) ranking that each casting class advances on, in a table, and the prereq for creating a Necklace of Fireballs should be "FDS5." Moving to a system like that would require some up-front re-engineering and table creation, with an eye on balance, but would wipe out much of the monkey business.
The reason crafting is borked today, is the prereqs were often prohibitive and nonsensical, so Paizo ruled you didn't have to follow the prereqs. The true 'fix' is to reintroduce new prereqs that aren't nonsensical, and then require PCs to meet the prereqs.
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Really all that is needed to "balance" item creation is what is written and a little help from the DM. Simply make it so you are limited on what you can make based on the knowledge you have obtained. In some world where magic items are commonplace and u cant spit without hitting one or two then this would be useless and I think not the subject of the discussion. In most worlds I have played in magic items have been super rare and the dm would hide "treasures" in the dungeons of long gone civilizations that would give a blueprint of how to create boots of striding and springing. To meta the you can make all this as long as it is in a book does not give a relative amount of experience gained. If a wizard bookworm wants to be a crafter and spends all his downtime pouring over every library he finds just to find out how to make a item in game he wants out then I see no issue in the current rules. Player research+item crafting feats+ spell craft boosting feats= walk in the park. I'm no cook but with a recipe, a Youtube video showing how to do it, and a trip to the grocery I can make most anything. I think the balance is just going to come from time...time prepping, time making...
just my two cents
This again? :(
It's easy by design.