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as you get higher level and progress further, oppurtunities to craft diminish. at least allow newly joining high level characters to benefit from these same windows they would have had if they were PCs the whole time. by denying them access to these windows, or even saying they spontaneously fall from the sky and magically join the party as if in DQ9, you are removing the benefits of the crafting feats.
if a party of 4 10th level PCs had a totaled year to craft over the course of 10 levels, at least give the new 10th level guy the 4 months of crafting time you gave the previous PCs before the current adventure and let them go together.
On what page does it state "Items crafted with feats only count for their crafted value for a characters wealth"?
If it doesn't say that, this isn't RAW, it's rules as you are interpreting them.
I'll show you that if you show me where it says the WBL chart is a representation of total item value rather than gold.
Per RAW, you get a certain amount of gold to start. You can use this gold to purchase items and you pocket the rest since it is unspent. Crafting says you can craft an item at 1/2 or 1/3 the base cost of the item. End of story.
As you adventure you encounter more treasure and gold. The crafter can use this gold to create an item that is worth twice or three times the amount he has, depending on if the item in question is mundane or magical. It's how the crafting abilities work.
Page 400, second paragraph, first sentence:
Table 12-4 lists the amount of treasure each PC is expected to have at a specific level.
Let say you have X gold, which is equal to your WBL. You take half of that to make one item. Now you have an item who's value equals your WBL, plus 1/2 of X in remaining gold. Your total wealth is now WBL x 1.5. If you make two items, you are at WBL x 2. If the campaign contains 3 other characters who are all close to WBL, one character being double cannot be considered to be "roughly equal" (page 399, final paragraph).
You must consider the total value of all treasure possessed by the character.
What I would do is just have the new PC start with appropriate wealth.he is more than welcome to ask if he could have made custom items, or even noncustom ones, but I'm going to calculate his wealth (the real value or Market Price) of the gear.
If he ends up with 67k instead of 65k, that's fine with me. I want him to be close. My players craft all the time. They haven't asked for crafting pregame because they all started to 1st level and have progressed to 20th.
The majority of the crafting I see is through scrolls and wands with a few wondrous items. The wizard starts play with scrolls and like to have some written with metamagic feats so he doesn't have to always prepare the spell. He also has Staff-like Wand so he likes to make these cheap and then pump his own power into them. The wondrous items were all defensive. The druid, before he left the game, had made cloaks of displacement (I allow some things to replace the spell, like the hide of a displacer beast). They fought hard for 3 hides. They used the leathered hide of an owlbear to make their first belt of str/con +2.
They could have just done things all abstract the way the book says but they also like style.a common phrase at my table: "go for style points!" These are a lot like the points on "Who's Line is it Anyway?" They have no value but they are collected anyway.
I would also like to mention that my group tends to divy the treasure based on needs and then value. The barbarian2/rogue 4 had a masterwork urgrosh for a long time. He never complained. He did his job until he couldn't. The party then worked on getting the item some magic. This meant that the wizard needed to sell one of his 4 rings. My players adjust things on their own. I don't have to do much.
If they saw one character always shining while the others lived in darkness, they will make proper adjustments. I provide a certain amount of treasure. It is up to them to keep it as close to fair as possible. I look at combined wealth and then individual when. I come up with the wealth budget for the adventure. They always figure out how to keep it fair.
I see a lot of arguments that 'If I started from level 1, I'd have 2x WBL, so there!'.
You did start from level 1, and you adventured all the way up to level 8. Then, unfortunately, you did a stint in prison because you got captured by the evil Gottals and their minions. You were tortured day and night. You eventually escaped, and made your way back to your homeland, but in the intervening two levels, you've only managed to win back enough wealth to have 64,000gp worth of equipment, and you'd not have had that much if you hadn't been a crafter and been able to craft a lot of it.
Boom, there, done. Our crafter has exactly what he wants to start playing a level 10, and there's ample reason why he doesn't have 2x WBL, or even 1.25x WBL, and it's just as valid as saying 'I crafted for a year straight two years ago'. It even explains why he's a crafter and not wealthy. On top of that, if the main plot is to destabilize the Gottals empire, it gives the character a wonderful backstory to explain why he hates the furry little B******S!
Heck, he might even pick of some of his old equipment during the course of the game. :)
And yet if you played these characters out from level 1 and gave everyone equal opportunity the crafters could still do the same thing in their adventures. Is it fair? Not entirely. Will the mechanics allow this? Yes entirely.
Where do you see in the book that the GM is supposed allow, encourage or advocate inequality of wealth between characters in a party? In fact, I'm seeing statements that they should be roughly equal.
I can think of story appropriate scenarios where the GM adds to the wealth of the players who have fallen behind (gifts from NPCs, items clearly designed for certain characters) and a lack of additional loot for the crafters to craft more.
Page 399,
The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game assumes that all PC's of equivalent level have roughly equal amounts of treasure and magic items.
I don't see any exception for crafting items, either in the Placing Treasure or in the feats themselves. To me, I consider +/-10% to be "roughly equal". I do not consider +/-100% to be roughly equal.
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but the crafting feats aren't giving you +100% ever. there are so many items not accounted for with that first feat. and considering that there is an invisible cap on the coinage you will find adventuring, and factoring both that not every item is wondrous and that consumables are not in infinitely self replinishing supply, your gold isn't +100% for one feat. people should stop handwaving the pocket change, all that pocket change expended does eventually add up. the invisibile cap is based on how long that PC adventures.
And unless your PC came up with that backstory it's not up to the GM to say where a character came from.
And as the GM, it's my job to ensure that the rules are followed and everyone has fun, not just the guy who took the CWI feat. The rules say, roughly equal. If one guy is 50% over or 50% under, it's my job to adjust that. On character creation, it's my job to ensure that everyone is roughly equal, not everyone equal but the CWI guy twice as equal.
You can ignore the rules and houserule it however you want of course, and if you're players are happy with one guy always having 2x as much treasure and the CR's of creatures being reduced because he's raised the EPL by 1 through crafting, then that's fine.
I think you need to actually talk to your players. Before I left St. Louis, this actually came up and the players all agreed that crafting to get higher WBL was bogus and unfair. They still took crafting feats, because they couldn't always find a place to buy/sell/trade their wares. So it was all great to them. Their stance was, it would be very unfair for one person to have 2 times what everyone else had for a feat or two.
EDIT: Forgot to make my other point, got so wrapped up in the above. The character can have whatever back story he wants. If he wants me to make one up for him, I will (btw, I usually get told OMG I love that backstory), if he doesn't, he can make up whatever back story he wants, as long as it fits the world and his WBL is valid (per the guidelines).
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Guidelines are rules.
What's not a rule? Things marked as 'Optional Rules' and 'Fluff'. Guidelines are simply rules with some wiggle room. However, you're not trying to wiggle them, you're trying to tie them up into a gordian knot.
The DM approves of everyone's backstory, he doesn't write it. He approves of the items you choose, he doesn't pick them. Your hyperbole is immature and unneeded.
I've actually written some backstories before. But usually when it's either a weird situation or someone asked me to.
One example was someone had a character die in the middle of a dungeon dive, and there was no way to bring in a new character for at least one possibly two gaming sessions. He wanted to play a paladin, and I said I could get him in, but I'd need to jack with his back ground story to do so. He said he was fine with that, and I wrote a 2 page back story about him and his Paladin trainer, who had gone after an evil witch who was summoning negative energy elementals into the world using rituals. They ended up fighting something too powerful for them, and the trainer gave him two potions and told him to run to an old temple they'd found earlier in the ruins and drink one of them while she held off the negative energy demon and the shaman and his minions.
Fast forward 500 years, and the current party comes across an old temple with a web covered statue of a catfolk paladin and his tiger mount in an old temple...
I'd say anything that brings up this many messages, this fast, and with this many opposing viewpoints is pretty much what the FAQ system was meant for. If it was 1 person arguing against 90, or 5 against 80, then no, we wouldn't need an FAQ.
Since it's 50 vs 50... I'd say we need an FAQ from the Devs.
There's aggression here?
No, no aggression here, nothing to see, move along now...
:)
somebody needs to lock this thread and ban the topic. all this aggression coming from both sides is not healthy, can we just agree to disagree and not bring this up? not everything needs a faq.There's no aggression. It's fun having an argument for 8 pages in several threads where the only argument on one side has been basing a decision on a guideline designed to help a GM with basing encounters while giving ample rules, mechanics, and examples that can show deviation to attempt proving the other.
EDIT: it's usually how debates go. Someone finds something they feel is the crux and the other tries to find ways to prove it isn't.
Except that some people want guideline to mean nothing. If you have an essay due for class and the teacher says that for an A you should have about 2000 words and you turn in 500 and then whine that 2000 was only a guideline so your going to the dean good luck.
Claiming double the benefit of your money based off one feat is as bad as complaining about the numbers of arrows a fighter can shoot a round or how OP sneak attack is.
And we're back to the WBL is a rule again.
What is your point with this statement?
I'm going to go to this again...
Lich (from the Bestiary) Would you adjust the CR of that entry with the following adjustments to the entry:
Removed all magic items
Double the number/value of magic items
Quadrupled the number/value of magic items
My point with this is that magic items can modify the outcome/difficulty/duration of an encounter. If you give a CR1/3 goblin a ring of wishes and the capacity to use it, it probably isn't CR1/3 any more.
If we acknowledge that magic items can modify the power level of an encounter, we must therefore acknowledge that magic items can modify the power level of a party.
Since magic items can modify the power level of a party, we should have a rough benchmark to help GM's know if their party is near the RAW power level of the rules. That benchmark is information for the GM to help him plan encounters and tool his campaign for his and his players preferences. Can you find me something in the rulebook that serves as a better benchmark than WBL?
Part of my frustration lies in that crafting time is a balancing factor~ for item creation.
In one of our campaigns, we are constantly, -constantly- on the move. Item Creation would be an adequate idea at best.
In another one of our campaigns, there are literally months of free time. A single character with an item creation feat can create magic items not only for himself, but for the whole party, with no fear of choke-points for time.
So my problem is that it is not currently possible to hold a yardstick to Item Creation feats and say "it will make you X more powerful." As an analogy, it's like trying to judge the balance of a feat that gives you a +3 bonus to attack, damage, and saving throws against a single Humanoid subtype, when one adventure path features them once by book and another adventure path features them as the primary villains.
Wealth by Level in 3.5e was the average amount of treasure you could have rolled on the random treasure table in getting to your level. I am not sure if Pathfinder used the same concept. Meaning WBL could be drastically greater or lower for the party as a whole depending on luck and the types of encounters faced even in a normal treasure game. Add to that the play style of the group compounded with the play styles of each player and the entire WBL concept becomes meaningless if you played from level 1 to 10. Literally character A could have nearly zero for his share of WBL (especially if he frequently sells items to buy expendables and then heavily uses those expendables during play). While Character B could have three or more times the normal WBL (especially if he is part of a group that uses a simple lottery for magic item division and he gets lucky a lot). It isn't the GMs job to force one character to be equal to another... This is the job of the PCs. It is entirely on their own shoulders how they divide loot and how they spend it. Any attempt to force individual characters onto this unrealistic benchmark during play amounts to the sort of bad GMing that often gets GMs tossed from play groups.
WBL is a meaningless value not based in reality but based in an assumed average without any extra gain or loss. A GM should never rely on it. The best tool a GM has for gauging the treasure level of his group is his OWN brain! If fights seem a bit easy then maybe you should reduce the amount of dropped treasure till it evens out to where it should be. It isn't a hard concept.
As for starting a new character with crafting abilities... I have no easy answer. My best solution is to use the NPC WBL tables to force new PCs to divide their money between categories. That should at least limit the effects of crafting pregame. But I will admit that isn't play tested. As long as the GM is up front about equally applying it then it is perfectly fine to disallow crafting pregame altogether. As unrealistic as this seems it IS FAIR. Otherwise why wouldn't everyone buy a Craft(trade good) skill (no feat required) and start with triple the usual starting wealth? It is necessary to have an even start point even if the finish line isn't going to be even.
Wealth by Level in 3.5e was the average amount of treasure you could have rolled on the random treasure table in getting to your level. I am not sure if Pathfinder used the same concept.
It does not. In the Equipment section the amount listed in the table presented are for level 1 characters. For levels above 1 you are referenced to the WBL table that has set values of gp for a given level. So, 2 characters of the same level have the same amount of gp to play with. The issue comes to play with crafting only requiring 1/2 of an item's base cost to create. That fundamentally allows a doubling of what a party could have, market value wise. If the item gets sold off they are back to where they are so I see no issue here. Similarly a mundane item can be created for 1/3 its base cost. This can gain a marginal profit as you can then turn around and sell that item for half of it's market value. However, only magical items have really high values so the profit gain is not the same if it were a magical item.
This debate, and my reason for creating the thread, is that it seems people limit what crafting can do by means of the WBL table rather than limiting crafting in-game, which, I think, should be the prescribed method. As I said earlier, it makes no sense why I can't swing a hammer on my anvil because some counter I can't see has reached it's limit. Per the mechanics of the game, as long as I have the gp to purchase the requisite crafting materials and the time to invest I should be able to craft what I want.
It is my argument that since a GM is ultimately responsible for what is found in the game world he is the one to limit both time and available resources. People have used hyperbole on here (Which, good job calling Khrysaor immature even when someone mentioned turning 4gp into a million and nothing was said. That was real "grown up" of you, let me tell ya.) to make it look as if the crafting character can run rampant with no end in how powerful they can become and refuse to accept responsibility as GM for the world they created. Essentially, if you don't want your characters to be decked out in full adamantine at level 5 then I suggest you limit the resources of your characters. I see nothing wrong with this. Yet, the debate continues even though in the very first paragraphs of the CRB it states a player in responsible for his character and the GM is responsible for the world the characters play in. :)
Otherwise why wouldn't everyone buy a Craft(trade good) skill (no feat required) and start with triple the usual starting wealth?
No such a craft skill exists. You can't "craft" wood. You go chop down a tree. The available craft skills are such: alchemy, armor, baskets, books, bows, calligraphy, carpentry, cloth, clothing, glass, jewelry, leather, locks, paintings, pottery, sculptures, ships, shoes, stonemasonry, traps, and weapons. Nothing in there even hints at being able to make a raw material out of nothing and all you did was use more hyperbole. Your starting wealth is your starting wealth regardless. It's the same gp amount. However, with the crafter being able to create at half price and the PCs being able to sell at half price they do come out equal. I wonder if that's what GMs are angry about: the fact crafting makes it harder for you to steal from your players since they can net even and characters without crafting are essentially getting gypped for half at each selling transaction.
Okay.
To play with ideas here, what if crafting were divided into two feats?
Craft Magic Item
Pre-req: None
Choose a magic item type (such as wondrous, or weapons and armor). You possess the ability and knowledge needed to craft these items. The ability to craft these items relies on possessing the correct amount of magical essence.
Magical essence may be produced in two manners: by breaking down existing items, or by channeling and storing certain amount of divine or arcane energies into certain containers. The cost of these storage containers is equal to the cost of the MI being created.
You may apply this essence to other items to create a variety of effects. In effect, whenever treasure is rolled you may choose to "swap out" any amount of the treasure roll at no cost. That is, if the treasure roll value is 2,000, you may effectively trade it for an equal amount of treasure of your choosing (so long as you know how to create that type of item). You are assumed to use a variety of methods to create enough essence to be able to accomplish this task.
Each time you take this feat, you may choose to exchange for a different type of item or items (such as wondrous, or weapons and armor).
Use of this ability requires 8 hours of work to craft the essence, and an additional 8 hours to apply it to each new item to be created. At the DM's discretion, smaller items may be created more quickly.
Beneficial Patron
Pre-req: None
You possess greater resources than the average adventurer, perhaps via a patron or other benefit, and may calculate your WBL at +1 to your actual total character levels. At the end of each story arc, you receive whatever amount of additional treasure needed to set you at this goal.
The language needs cleaned up quite a bit, and I'm still not sure I'm serious or not, here. I think this is more along the lines of adding a different dimension to a discussion that seems to be going in circles.
(Which, good job calling Khrysaor immature even when someone mentioned turning 4gp into a million and nothing was said. That was real "grown up" of you, let me tell ya.)
No, it's a logical progression of relativism.
Your argument is that WBL is a starting amount used for new characters to spend in any manner (such as crafting supplies). But this ignores a GM (and players who agree to it) who has maintained a continuous balance between character wealth that is implied in the book (roughly equal).
You argue that a character who obtains a Holy Avenger for 60,000 has it count for only 60,000 of his WBL, even though it has a value of 120,000. My point is that since now we have firmly established that the price of a Holy Avenger can change, if a character obtains for for 0gp or 1gp, should it only count for that value of his WBL as well?
WBL is a benchmark to be measured at all times for the GM to continue planning his game. I'm not saying it should be used as a punishment, but rather a measuring tool to determine the power level within a game and to plan future progression. Your arguments have also ignored the fact that GM's and players can be reasonable people and talk about these things and use this as a tool to maintain balance within their games.
Show me a more objective tool in the book for a GM and player to measure the balance of power (of the totality of their magic items) between two characters than WBL.
No such a craft skill exists.
That is not a complete list of Craft skills... Hmmm, looking at the rules... Gems and Jewelry used to be trade goods in 3.5e. I guess PF changed that?
Regardless, take linen then from pathfinder's trade goods table. Pregame you have as much time as you need. Someone with Craft (cloth) could take the say 1000gp for one example of start money off the WBL table (level 2) and buy the materials required to craft Linen cloth, craft it, and start with 3000gp in Linen cloth. Then before start they could trade that linen for magic items at full value. That is triple. I guess if you have limitless time you could also start with limitless money if you simply rinse and repeat with the above method. As you might be able to see this is only useful if you have vast amounts of free time. Since a starting character has over a decade of free time it is only fair to restrict how that time can be used. It is also wise to eliminate "fast time" plane shifting. Unless you don't mind your PCs having vast wealth even beyond the tables.