| 1 person marked this as FAQ candidate. |
Ok, I knew the mundane crafting skills are way way way way way broken. I've read about it and all that, but it wasn't till I just made some math about it, till I realised just how much.
Ok, I was considering having my paladin craft her own Mithral Full Plate at some point, because its quite expensive and I thought I might save some money. I almost expected that it would be a silly attempt, but it got even sillier than I had thought.
I was hoping I could maybe do it by level 6.
So 6 (ranks) + 3 (class skill) + 1 (int) + 2 (MW tools) = 12 total.
With a take 10 I get a check result of 22.
Now Full plate base has a DC of 19, the MW part 20. It doesn't say anything about the mithral part, but lets give it the DC 20 as well and have it be part of the MW process.
I'll spare you the math, but it would take me over 4 and a half years! Working every day!
Even at level 10 it would still over 3.5 years.
Then I looked at the Fabricate spell.
It takes the same amount of raw material as the craft check, 10500/3 = 3500 gp.
It's a 5th level wizard spell, aka min 9th level.
It requires a craft check too. So lets see. 9th level wizard: 1 rank + 3 class + 4 int + 2 MW tools = 10. Enough for a DC 20 on a take 10. If he doesn't have 18 int (which he should have) he might need 2 ranks.
Hiring a level 9 spellcaster to cast a level 5 spell costs laughable 450 gp.
Total cost 3950 gp.
Time: probably a day, since he has to prepare the spell.
I mean why would anyone
a) craft something with the craft skill
b) buy the armor at full price
if hiring a wizard to snap a finger is alot easier and faster and only marginally more expensive. (I bet even using Profession or Craft for 4 years you make alot more than those 450 gp to pay him - not to mention what you make for killing 2 level apropriate enemies)
Actually an armorsmith that gets the order to make a Mithral Full Plate would be stupid not to run to the next wizard, have him cast it, and then sell it.
Heck if all else fails, and you don't find a high enough spellcaster buy a scroll of Fabricate for 1125 gp and have the party wizard cast it. Or the rogue with UMD.
Yeah, I know it's totally old news for most of you, I'm just sort of ranting here and needed to get it out.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It may not be a quick as fabricate, but it is much nicer than the rules as written for crafting.
Thanks, I might check it out.
Lowering the DC actually causes it to take even longer! Yes that's right. Making it easier means you spend more time on it.
Instead of 4.62 years it now takes 4.83 (about 2 months longer)
Aid another gives a lousy +2 to your skillcheck. So having 5 people aid you adds a +10 to your check, but at the same time you can increase the DC voluntarily by +10 as well.
Lets see... even then it takes a bit longer than 2 years still. Alot faster, I admit, but still totally out of proportion.
And you somehow have to pay 5 people as well for those 2 years. Assuming you can use untrained hirelings for that, they get 1 sp per day for 2 years, thats about 365 gp. Pay 100 more and you can hire that wizard. If you actually need trained helpers, the price is at least 3 times that.
Ok, I went completely silly now and hired 20 people to aid me for a +40 on my skillcheck. Not even sure that works, but assuming it does.
I can only increase the DC by +10 once, so can't do it again. It still takes me over a year now.
And 730 gp in wages.
Damn, even assuming I can do the +10 DC multiple times... it still takes about 6 months, with 20 people helping.
No, it really doesn't matter how you turn it, mundane crafting as written just doesn't work.
I guess the reason for that is, that armor technically took a long time to make. I don't know about 4 years, but it could take months. Ether way, it is not valid to make a player waste 4 in game years to make that armor without the aid of magic. That is just insane. Why is it even in the game?
IMO, this is not so much an issue with the Craft skill as it is an issue with how special materials are handled. An easy houserule is to treat adamantine, darkwood, and mithral (all special materials that are "considered masterwork") similarly to dragonhide: the added cost doesn't add to the crafting time. The GM can add an ad hoc +2 to the Craft DC for the item to reflect the difficulty in working with the special material and the character still has to pay the full raw material cost.
With this house rule, the 6th level paladin with a Craft (Armor) check of +12 could craft a suit of mithral full plate (DC 21 with the +2 from the special material) in:
22 (taking 10) x 21 = 462 sp per week
1,500 gp / 46.2 = 32.4675 weeks (a bit over 7 months)
Seven months for a suit of mithral full plate armor is not unreasonable for one person working alone without modern machine tools and pre-made sheets of metal.
Adding 5 helpers and increasing the DC by +10 to speed up the process, you can craft the armor in:
32 x 31 = 992 sp per week
1,500 gp / 99.2 = 15.12 weeks (a bit less than 4 months)
IMO, this is not so much an issue with the Craft skill as it is an issue with how special materials are handled. An easy houserule is to treat adamantine, darkwood, and mithral (all special materials that are "considered masterwork") similarly to dragonhide: the added cost doesn't add to the crafting time. The GM can add an ad hoc +2 to the Craft DC for the item to reflect the difficulty in working with the special material and the character still has to pay the full raw material cost.
I probably should have been more clear, but the Craft DC should be the DC for the item +2 for the special material or 20 for being masterwork, whichever is greater.
|
I would agree that you should not add the time it takes to craft the full value of the mithril armor based upon that component's cost. That is, instead, computed at the base price of 300gp (3000 silver) for being a masterwork.
If you have a simply trained apprentice assist you with aid another, you are correct that this only adds another 15 silver of production time on the armor per week. It shaves off only a little over one week of the production time. That can't be right! That sucks!
Well, it sucks because you are a Paladin, not an armor smith. If you decide that you want to be less of a Paladin, and more of an Armor Smith, you take Cooperative Crafting. Then your trained journeymen smith (who ALSO has cooperative crafting) KICKS ASS. At that point, your SP worth of crafting per day DOUBLES. Now you are crafting 912 SP per week.
In the result, a mildly talented professional armor smith with a trained apprentice will take between 4 to 5 months to complete Mithral Full Plate. That sounds about right to me. Add another trained apprentice with cooperative crafting and the time taken plunges yet again.
While a Wizard using fabricate can reduce this time to a mere moment, he has to be able to make the Craft Armor Smith roll first before he can make that material out of mithral. That's not a common skill synergy. It will be an exceptionally rare Wizard who will spend their time to learn the ins and outs of being a master armor smith heaving a hammer at the forge, day in and day out. Those individuals are too busy being, you know, a WIZARD. Having to be a 9th level Wizard AND having the discipline to be a professional armor smith is an exceptionally rare combination of talents.
My current character in my Kingmaker campaign actually took these spells, skills and various crafting feats, too. Most of the people on these message boards will tell you how sub-optimal such a combination of feats are to an Eldritch Knight "build". (They would be right, too. Except those posters weren't building their Wizards in order to be able to outfit an entire army in Masterwork Plate and Weaponry when the time came to do it. Whereas, that's exactly the reason I built my Eldritch Knight in the way that I have.)
So while it is easy to point to the crunch in the rules in terms of how EASY a Wizard can "magic up" that mithral full plate in no time flat, the flavor in the underlying assumptions of Golarion is that such individual Wizards with that sort of discipline are exceptionally rare people.
While the 5th level spell might be relatively cheap -- you are going to have to still pay top dollar for his underlying skill, without which, the fabricate spell is useless in order to work up mithral armor. Accordingly, that's not a 450 GP service -- not by a long shot.
In my opinion, the crafting rules are the absolute worst thing in the game.
In fact, it's the only real thing I just toss out the window and houserule due to it's sheer ridiculousness.
Take into account that a 15th century Italian armorer and his assistants crafted a suit of ceremonial plate not only for a high-ranked noble, but also for his son, including matching barding for their horses in less than a year while STILL working on other armor.
I mean, come on.
A WHOLE DAY to craft a SINGLE ARROW? (Why the heck even bother, I'll just give my broken ones to ANY caster who can use the 0-level free to cast mending cantrip to just keep fixing my original 20)
Could you imagine if this were the case in the real medieval world where there was NO MAGIC to assist our crafters in their toil?
Others have already explained why the time is ok, personally I don't think it's unreasonable considering your going for mithral rather than just plain enchanted armor. Plus I've never seen a game where anyone figured out the time to craft things beyond:
DM: OK so your all back to town and have a few days/weeks/whatever to kill now that the last adventure arc wrapped up. do your shopping/crafting/whatever & let me know if there is anything too out of the ordinary in your minds so we can see about availability & such.
Player: I have craft magic [X] & wanted to make a [enhancement] +Y [X] of [enhancement]. I figured out the cost & can afford it fine is that cool? (or similar for another character in the group)
DM: ok
Player:scribble scribble scribble in the details of the new thing on his sheet.
My biggest gripe with crafting is that the craft magic arms & armor/weapons feats. Basically they are pretty useless to most people who use those things because they don't have the needed spells to make anything. The people who have access to the spells however, are basically burning a feat so someone else can save money because they are crap with weapons and typically hurt by the ASF of the armor. They would be better off burning the feat on craft ring/wonderous item/staff/etc type feats they would actually benefit from.
The craft magic armor/weapons feats should probably be free once you have a certain number of other craft magic [thing] feats. Something like:
-Armor at 1 because of the "simplicity"of infusing the defensive enhancements into the large structure of the armor.
- Weapons at 2 because the varied knowledge of infusing often complex enchantments into items makes the application of enchantments into weapons without risk of having them accidental backfire on the wielder in ways not designed a simple manner.
Give the actual feats an extra 10% price drop or something if it's taken over just some other craft magical [thing] feats.
My biggest gripe with crafting is that the craft magic arms & armor/weapons feats. Basically they are pretty useless to most people who use those things because they don't have the needed spells to make anything.
Check out the Master Craftsman feat in the Core Rulebook. Also, review the magic item creation rules: you can ignore a spell requirement for a +5 on the creation DC.
There's nothing preventing any 7th level non-spellcasting character (Master Craftsman at 5th, Craft Magic Arms and Armor at 7th) from making magic armor or weapons; granted, to be able to make both magic armor and weapons requires taking Master Craftsman twice (once each for Craft (Armor) and Craft (Weapons) skills). In some respects, the Master Craftsman route is better than the standard route, since the Master Craftsman can gain bonuses to the skill check from masterwork artisan tools (and, I believe, helpers without needing the Cooperative Crafting feat; although the time is not reduced without the feat), in addition to racial bonuses (dwarf with the Craftsman alternate racial trait, gnome Obsession, etc.) and the bonus for Master Craftsman itself.
We use a houseruled system, which unfortunately I am not able to tell cause our GM calculates it in his head. He says it is keeping to the book, but he comes to totally different times. Like a few weeks or a month at maximum for an Adamantine Armor.
Maybe fixed values for the most common stuff like armors and weapons would be nice. No calculations and discussions.
Perhaps something like:
2 weeks for light armor
3 weeks for medium armor
1 month for heavy armor
For every point your craft check (taking 10) exceeds the DC you can subtract one day from the whole process. Minimum it takes is 8 hours (1 day). You make only 1 craft check for the whole thing.
And similar tables for weapons, etc...
Also just a small note. Why are we talking about wizards only here (well almost)? A cleric with the artifice domain has access to fabricate as well and wears armor himself.
Makes sense that they would also train their craft skills.