So Ive got this character (A fighter) who's rounding level 5 and grew up as the son of a smith with his dad making everything and mom running the family business. He left to go adventuring, pretty much because he formed a crush on a girl who is our groups sorceress. Even though he likes this new life he's still devoting skill points toward craft weapons and armor since its part of his character.
Anyway, the other night we got a haul from helping to restore a dwarven family's lost hold so naturally I started thinking about ideas to spend that money on and I figured Adamantine full plate would be a great purchase, especially since I intend to take Master craftsman later
However I got really blown away by the implications of the time it would take to make that armor. He has a total check of +12 (5 ranks +2 int mod +3 class skill +2 for artisan tools). Not a big deal I can reach the DC 20 on a roll of 8 or more.
This is where these implications scare me. Normally Spiked Adamantine full plate would cost 16550. Converted to silver pieces this would be 165,500. So the materials to make the armor equals 5461 gold pieces and 5 silver pieces. Thats no problem
Now if Im taking 10 on each check to represent a weeks worth of work, giving me a total of 22 on each check, Im adding 440 silver pieces each week to the finished product. Here's the part that blew me away, getting 440 silver pieces each week would mean it would take me just over 376 weeks to finish this suit of armor. That totals out to over 7 years!
I certainly cant ask the group to wait around for 7 years for me to make some awesome armor. Am I doing this right? Im hoping there's a rule Im not familiar with where special materials equal magic item creation costs or something
You are doing it by RAW. Your calcs appear accurate. It's just a flaw of the crafting system. I ran Mithril Breastplate at one point and it was not possible to get it done in less than 6 months, from what I recall. That was on a Gnome (+2 craft) with Skill Focus (+6) and Master Craftsman (+2) with Artisan Tools (+2), 20 skill ranks, class skill (+3) and a +2 Int Mod. That's a +35 right there, assuming you didn't have a Skill Enhancement magic item.
If you can bump your skill some, you could increase the DC to speed things up.
Craft: "You may voluntarily add +10 to the indicated DC to craft an item. This allows you to create the item more quickly (since you'll be multiplying this higher DC by your Craft check result to determine progress). You must decide whether to increase the DC before you make each weekly or daily check."
You could pay a trained hireling to help you for 3 silver per day, or maybe find a way to get a very patient apprentice, aid other for a +2. (+4 if it's a helpful halfling!)
If you can bump your skill some, you could increase the DC to speed things up.
Craft: "You may voluntarily add +10 to the indicated DC to craft an item. This allows you to create the item more quickly (since you'll be multiplying this higher DC by your Craft check result to determine progress). You must decide whether to increase the DC before you make each weekly or daily check."
You could pay a trained hireling to help you for 3 silver per day, or maybe find a way to get a very patient apprentice, aid other for a +2. (+4 if it's a helpful halfling!)
While a good suggestion the problem becomes needing to reach a 14 result on the die roll each week or loose materials. 12 with the hireling
Assuming I could make the 14 check each week I would be adding 780 silver pieces each week. That equals out to just over 212 weeks or 4 years. Still far to long
Put some skills into use magic device and UMD something with fabricate on it. Complicated things still take a craft check but finish in 1 round instead of forever.
Hey, it takes a dedicated and/or expert craftsman to work adamantine into something like that. I don't consider it a flaw in the crafting system.
Besides, like Tarantula said, if you know someone with fabricate or have a device with sufficient castings of it, Boccob's your uncle.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Wow. A novel solution, but this just goes to show how broke the crafting system is.
Ineffective =/= broken. In my opinion, this just shows that crafting is not meant to be done by PCs. Making something out of adamantine is a big deal- and it should take a long time. Maybe not years, but then again, it wouldn't be crafted by Joe Schmoe in his garage- it would be crafted by the nation's foremost craftsman with a team of helpers and masterwork equipment. (Even then it would take a long time, but once again, it's a big deal!) The fact that it can be accomplished with magic much much faster isn't a flaw- that's just how things are. Commoners aren't going to have access to magic, and in fact, most people will go their entire lives never meeting a person of high enough level to cast Fabricate.
It seems to me like it's working as intended.
Crafting in PF is broken beyond reason. I think a reasonable solution is to do what TOZ and Kirth have done with their house rules. Basically, there is a fixed time to craft items based on their complexity.
I think Master work armour takes a week. You make a check, spend the resources and you are done. Get back to adventuring :)
If someone calls this unfair, you can point out that an investment of 1 skill point each level for a fighter is probably just as much as an investment for the wizard's craft feat.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Just to note, there's is also the interpretation that exotic materials add only to cost, not to crafting time. This would fix the example of the gold & diamond ring vs the copper & quartz ring (the 2gp gold ring with a 98gp gem takes 1000 times longer than the 2cp copper ring with an 8cp quartz gem). So, you'd take the time for the base object (copper ring & gem, or one day) and then up the cost for the more expensive components.
Under this interpretation, it takes about the same time to make an adamantine full plate or mithral full plate as it does MW steel, but not years.
1650 = 16,500 sp
Skill +12 (assume take 10) = 440sp / week
37.5 weeks (a little over 9 months)
A much more reasonable result.
You could cut that to 4.5 months if you paid someone to work an 8 hour shift on it after you worked yours. Or to 3 months if you paid two other smiths to work 8 hour shifts (3 shifts per day).
*shrug*
As long as he's got the money and time. Considering how long you'll be traveling along a river, if you book passage on a boat with a forge, you should be good to go.
Just make sure he pays for the materials.
You could by raw materials (admantine or mithral) and start working on it. Nothing says you have to build the suit as one solid object. Buy enough to build the greaves and poltrons, or just the chest plate (for that matter, you could buy enough to build a breast plate and then extend that out later into full plate).
Yeah, that's probably a good thing. He can worry about the armor after he makes sure it's not an easy open sardine can for a big nasty carnivore.
|
I think I can speed it up for you, but only a bit. Please correct me if my calculations are off. I'll use the numbers you presented earlier for the rest, but I thought the formula for Craft (armor) was this:
DC = 10 + AC bonus, so 10 + 9 = 19.
This works in your favor, actually, if you can include a couple of other things.
Using the Crafter's Fortune spell, you can gain a +5 to one craft check. Hopefully you have a party wizard who is willing to cast one 1st level spell on you once per week for free. Assuming a 5 day work week, you need this spell cast at 5th level once per week, since the duration is 1 day/level or until discharged. I'm assuming the spell needs to be active on you for the entire time you craft. So that would be 10gp per day, 50gp per week. Perhaps you can purchase the spell for the party wizard in exchange for having it cast on you while in town. Different groups have different dynamics on how out of adventuring things work, so you'll have to work with your group on this.
As someone has already mentioned, you can then hire a helper to assist, gaining a further +2. This would bring your skill check up to a +19. Then, as another poster already mentioned, you can voluntarily increase the DC by +10 to increase the speed of crafting. Since the DC would then be 29, you can still take 10 with a +19 and not have to worry about failure.
Therefore you have 29 x 29 = 841 sp per week. That works out to 196 weeks of work, or 3 years, 10 months. Better, but not my much. I would think that in that time you would gain a level or two and add more skill ranks to your Craft skill, bringing the time down proportionately.
If the GM allows magic item crafting by a fellow PC, you can ask to have magical Craft tools made, or your tools enchanted. The fomula in the CRB is (bonus squared x 100). Spending 2500gp then would give you a +5 competence bonus. I don't think the bonus stacks with that from masterwork tools, so you'll net +3, bringing your bonus up to +22. This brings the total craft time down to 177 weeks, shaving 5 months off the time. Again, good, but not great.
If the GM allows higher bonuses on the enchnted tools, then say you spent the rest of the money that you would have saved on the armor by crafting it yourself to have your tools enchanted to a +10 bonus (costing 10000gp). This brings your skill check up to +29 with the spell and assistant. Taking 10 on your check results in 1131sp of work per week, requiring 145 weeks or about 2 years, 10 months of work.
Unless you're playing Kingmaker and have loads of free time to craft, this is still unacceptable. However, I remember stories of the ancient sword crafters in Japan spending years crafting certain katanas, so it's not completely without precedent. Still, you'd really have to want that armor.
If you were level 20 with maximum ranks in craft using the +10 tools, an assistant, a friendly mage to cast Crafter's Fortune when you need it and some spare cash to buy a +4 Int headband, then your skill bonus would be +37. Taking 10 on a DC 29 check yields 1363 sp of work per week. This works out to 121 weeks, or about 2 years, 4 months. Also, in the end, with the assistant and the magical tools it would actually cost more than just buying the armor from someone else.
I suppose you had better get started.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Let me draw a different comparison. It takes me 7 years to finish non-magical adamantine full plate as I am right now. If I were level 20 and had a +35 (if not higher check) and assuming I was taking 10 for each roll I would be getting 900 silver pieces each week. This totals out to 183 weeks or just over 3 and a half years to complete
However an adamantine golem (a creature thats far more expensive at 350,000 gold pieces) would only take 350 days (just under a year) to create.
One is a simple non-magical suit of armor the other is a complex "living" suit of armor. However just because theres no magic involved it takes over three times as long to craft that simple suit of armor then it does the super complex golem.
I see a problem with that, purely because it puts crafting exceptional pieces of equipment from non-mage characters out of reach. Im just going to go out on a limb here and say I think the crafting system needs to be carefully looked at and reworked into a new errata or as an alternative maybe Advanced crafting could be a new book that tackles these kinds of inconsistancies?
I think I can speed it up for you, but only a bit. Please correct me if my calculations are off. I'll use the numbers you presented earlier for the rest, but I thought the formula for Craft (armor) was this:
DC = 10 + AC bonus, so 10 + 9 = 19.
This works in your favor, actually, if you can include a couple of other things.
Using the Crafter's Fortune spell, you can gain a +5 to one craft check. Hopefully you have a party wizard who is willing to cast one 1st level spell on you once per week for free. Assuming a 5 day work week, you need this spell cast at 5th level once per week, since the duration is 1 day/level or until discharged. I'm assuming the spell needs to be active on you for the entire time you craft. So that would be 10gp per day, 50gp per week. Perhaps you can purchase the spell for the party wizard in exchange for having it cast on you while in town. Different groups have different dynamics on how out of adventuring things work, so you'll have to work with your group on this.
As someone has already mentioned, you can then hire a helper to assist, gaining a further +2. This would bring your skill check up to a +19. Then, as another poster already mentioned, you can voluntarily increase the DC by +10 to increase the speed of crafting. Since the DC would then be 29, you can still take 10 with a +19 and not have to worry about failure.
Therefore you have 29 x 29 = 841 sp per week. That works out to 196 weeks of work, or 3 years, 10 months. Better, but not my much. I would think that in that time you would gain a level or two and add more skill ranks to your Craft skill, bringing the time down proportionately.
If the GM allows magic item crafting by a fellow PC, you can ask to have magical Craft tools made, or your tools enchanted. The fomula in the CRB is (bonus squared x 100). Spending 2500gp then would give you a +5 competence bonus. I don't think the bonus stacks with that from masterwork tools, so you'll net +3, bringing your bonus up to +22. This brings the...
All adamantine items are masterwork quality so its automatically gets raised to a DC of 20.
I did consider crafters fortune though our sorceress and oracle lack the spell. This also brings more costs if I have someone cast that on me every week (not to mention were still talking several years with its use).
The magic artisan tools I did consider though. I Was planning to give them that +5 bump eventually but again were still talking years for a total crafting time
You could, if you want, look up a book on Paizo called 'Making Crafting Work'. It's a third-party product that works pretty well, and completely replaces the crafting rules with rules that base time on size, complexity, and a few other criteria.
|
|
Ah, I see it now. Sorry for that, it's late and I've had only about 4 hours sleep for several days in a row...
Anyhow, as I said the bonuses can reduce the time needed significantly, but likely not enough. Since you have spontaneous casters they probably don't want to use a precious spell slot for Crafter's Fortune unless it goes well with their own character concept.
The best way to get it done RAW is, unfortunately, using a Fabricae spell. Perhaps you can buy a one-shot item that casts Fabricate. It would appear to fall under the "single use, use activated" spell effect enchantment, costing 2250gp retail. That's not bad at all, a savings of about 8650gp.
|
|
In my games, I have always let the smiths in the party hire some apprentices and journeyman smiths and parcel out the armor making. They get more SP value in production out of the assistants than they cost, and instead I just ask them to make a few harder rolls to merge the components of the plate (or other armor together). For instance, a roll to fit the arm plates, fit the chest piece, fit the legs, and maybe one final overall roll if its been too easy. This gives players the satisfaction of forging their own armor, gives them a chance to fail and get delayed a little, and doesnt require grey hairs to complete. It is one of several ways you can get around the NPC-like timeframe for crafting. This way they get to go adventuring, and fit pieces together while they are in between adventures.