| Zyratil |
I recently came across this thread:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2mym5&page=1?Craft-is-not-Broken
And I starting thinking about it for a bit, and I came up with something. Anyone willing to help out with ideas to elaborate on it, I'd appreciate.
I can see a somewhat reasonable solution to this as far as the issue between magical crafting and the mundane. I've seen someone suggesting that part of the crafting time for mundane crafting is due to collecting materials (as far as going out to catch fish to make glue to make a bow). Why not take this further and remove the cost for the crafting altogether, and make it only cost time. This can also explain why expensive things take longer to craft, as it takes more time to gather the materials through either paying them or paying them off by working or gathering them from difficult places, or however else you want to explain it. Eve could be paperwork of tracking down rare ingredients. And of course this can be reduced by buying the materials, even to the point it may only take a few days to craft. I would recommend something to the extent of paying 80% of the base cost (not a market price but the figure shown in the books of an estimate of the actual value) to reduce the crafting time to one day as a minimum. So paying 40% would come out to paying an amount equivalent to crafting half it's value. I suppose something like this would also be altered by the availability of the components, but with the ingenuity of an adventure, or a professional craftsman with roots and connections perhaps not.
This gives both methods of crafting a certain advantage. Mundane is simply more efficient as far as gold value is concerned, and it doesn't allow anything to be crafted from raw materials quickly. As crafting a suit of full plate may be quite possible if all that is required is to fit all the pieces together after buying appropriate piecemeal parts. Magical crafting on the other hand is obviously faster and more powerful but actually requires raw resources.
I know it's still got some of the same holes as there are currently such as making poison out of poison taking a long time, but that could be used as the raw materials for mundane crafting and decrease the time required. Also, I'm not well versed on trap making, so I'm not sure how viable it is for that. Additionally any loopholes could be exploited (for I'm sure my players will try to find them) Of course having crafting something reducing the cost by 20% and making it only a day is intentional, because investing in appropriate skills should have some reward other than for fluff is nice, and if you don't have the ranks in it to make the check you have a chance of losing it all, so it isn't nothing for something there either.
Any thoughts?
P.S. I'm new to the boards, I wasn't sure if I shouldn't necro the original thread or not for this.