My potential Wizard player asked me after I said, "If its banned in Pathfinder Society, it's banned at my table," (as a general guideline of what I expect) if he could craft magical items. The adventure path already has loot from beginning to finish so I would think its not necessary at all. If I allow it, I risk the potential of the wizard breaking the breaking the adventure path by imbalancing the WBL... I think. What do you guys think? Is it good or bad for the adventure? The general feel I get is there is not a lot of downtime for the adventure. I already told the ranger it wouldn't make sense to dual wield sawtooth sabers from a story perspective (which just comes off as cheesing to me).
Crafting is considered part of the normal game (outside of PFS) so it should not have an adverse effect. They still gotta pay for the crafting costs (probably from selling the normal loot@50%) so it should not tip the scales. It would also depend how much downtime you give them to do the actual crafting.
To be honest, most of the loot in APs is pretty stale, so there will definitely be things they will want to buy or craft themselves. For example, if there are small characters (halflings etc.) in your campaign, after the first book, they won't find much that fits.
Lots of if's in this one...
Depending on your parties makeup the loot might be awesome - or meh.
Loot in this AP in general is bursty (at least through level 9-10 from my perspective - there is a serious lack of it to begin with (compensated by freebies the party *should* be able to get from townfolk) followed by decent 'caches'.
If your group misses out on a 'cache' it could leave them underpowered (assuming you don't give them hints to go looking in 'that other room') then again if they find everything it could be over the top I suppose.
Much of the answer though is going to depend on the class makeup of your group - and if you are running 4 people or more. The loot (assuming they find everything again) is tuned around 150% wealth by level for a 4 person party - if you have a 6 person group that will leave them lacking which crafting can make up for, and even then the 'gold' wealth would limit what they can turn around and craft.
The AP itself has some fights that are brutal, yet are a breeze with the right classes (a Paladin with detect evil is handy many times, and a class with channel can make at least one early deadly fight a joke for instance)
If you don't like crafting though I'd just leave it out - not as much due to the imbalance as much, rather that if you don't like crafting and allow it you'll stress over what they are making. Really it's not worth always doubting if you made the right call, because that's no fun. You can always change your mind later if you think they could use a boost - it's hard to take it back after the fact though.
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Some of my players absolutely *love* to craft, and I've never had it mess the campaign up badly.
Item crafting is fun for a lot of players, and the game is designed to allow it without too many problems. There are easier ways to "break an AP" that are worse than having the PCs end up with slightly better gear.
The reason why crafting is banned in PFS isn't because of game balance, but because there's no good way to keep track of it from session to session in PFS.
More importantly, as the GM you have the power to adjust the AP to compensate for any problems that might develop because of crafting. If the players have awesome gear, you can make encounters harder, you can reduce the loot they find to bring things closer to the WBL chart, or you can be really mean and throw a bunch of rust monsters and mage's disjunctions at them.
Yeah I don't see it as a problem because it's easily gated by money.
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Another thing to keep in mind is the pacing of the book. I believe the AP recommends that book 5 occurs approximately one year after book one. There is more than enough time to accomplish books 1-4 and craft items in that period. Ultimately, it is up to you, as GM, to control how much time the characters have to craft.