I want to make sure i am understanding it right.....
I want to craft a normal suit of Half-Plate
600gp = 6000sp
Lets say i have a total of +14 to the check because i am awesome, rolling a 20 every week (because i am awesome) nets me 612sp of progress so that's roughly 10 weeks
I could increase the DC by 10, and if i still rolled a 20 every week, that would get me 952, so 7 weeks.
So, if you wanted to make yourself a suit of armor you would need to be willing to take quite the break
And then, calculate how much time would a Mithral full plate need to be craft, and cry...
lol ill take that as a "sadly, that IS the way it works....."
@Cakeking : yes, that's right !
It's way better to recruit a wizard to craft your adamantine armor : he could do that in a few minutes, where the best blacksmith in the world (+40 in craft, with the magic anvil that allow them to craft 24 hours a day) will take several months to do the same.
Yes.
Whoawhoawhoa....a wizard could craft it....how? I must know this method
I think he means the fabricate spell.
Ah, ill look into that
@Wraithstrike : that's what I had in mind :)
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Fabricate can't create masterwork items (they get to make a normal crafting check, the spell doesn't let them make the masterwork check). Since all special materials are masterwork, a wizard can't do anything for making adamantine.
Can make a suit of full plate mail in a few seconds, and that's bad enough, before making it masterwork for 100 gp.
==Aelryinth
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| 2 people marked this as FAQ candidate. |
Fabricate can't create masterwork items (they get to make a normal crafting check, the spell doesn't let them make the masterwork check). Since all special materials are masterwork, a wizard can't do anything for making adamantine.
Can make a suit of full plate mail in a few seconds, and that's bad enough, before making it masterwork for 100 gp.
==Aelryinth
Why couldn't you make masterwork items with Fabricate? "You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship" pretty much means you can make masterwork items, as long as you can hit the craft DC. A smart wizard would have Crafter's Fortune running ahead of time, and DC 20 isn't hard to hit even untrained. The "masterwork component" is treated as a separate item only to calculate cost and time; it isn't like it is a completely distinct object that you stick onto a sword or armor.
Aelryinth I am going to need a rules quote.
how would you rule paying a wizard to do it? would you just pay for the spell and provide materials, or would you just pay to have an item created? or both?
how would you rule paying a wizard to do it? would you just pay for the spell and provide materials, or would you just pay to have an item created? or both?
I would pay to have him cast the spell, and for the materials needed for the item.
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FABRICATE
School transmutation; Level sorcerer/wizard 5
Casting Time see text
Components V, S, M (the original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created)
Range close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target up to 10 cu. ft./level; see text
Duration instantaneous
Saving Throw none; Spell Resistance no
You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.
You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet of material to be affected by the spell.
-So to me if you have enough Adamantine material. you can make Adamantine full plate.
Look at the crafting rules.
It takes a specific DC 20 check to make an item masterwork. That's not a crafting check, that's a masterwork check. The rules for making an item Masterwork are broken out and treated as a completely seperate component then the crafting check. It's right there in the Craft rules.
nowhere in Fabricate is there a provision to 'make a normal masterwork check'. Saying you can is a house rule that grants the spell more power then it has. Be satisfied that you can create 1500 gp of full plate armor in seconds if you want to destroy an economy.
All items made of adamantine are masterwork items by default. Go look at that.
Cost: Adamantine is so costly that weapons and armor made from it are always of masterwork quality; the masterwork cost is included in the prices given.
--From d20pfsrd.
Ergo, you can't fabricate adamantine armor, because it's not just a standard crafting check.
Fabricate allows you to make normal items instantly. It does not allow you to make masterwork items instantly. I personally rule that ALL items with special materials are generally masterwork, to stop the Fabrication abuse nonsense.
==Aelryinth
Create Masterwork Items: You can make a masterwork item: a weapon, suit of armor, shield, or tool that conveys a bonus on its use through its exceptional craftsmanship. To create a masterwork item, you create the masterwork component as if it were a separate item in addition to the standard item. The masterwork component has its own price (300 gp for a weapon or 150 gp for a suit of armor or a shield, see Equipment for the price of other masterwork tools) and a Craft DC of 20. Once both the standard component and the masterwork component are completed, the masterwork item is finished. The cost you pay for the masterwork component is one-third of the given amount, just as it is for the cost in raw materials.
It is two separate crafting checks. One to craft the item. Another to craft the masterwork item.
By the rules once both checks are done the item is completed. It makes sense, since the masterwork component is created separately anyway.
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Use Masterwork Transformation (2nd level spell in Ultimate Magic) to take care of the Masterwork portion of it.
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This problem was kinda noted much earlier.
If your group allows 3rd Party, here is an option that tries its hand at fixing the problem. It's pretty good, it's only problem being with the craft skill most supported, which is Alchemy. Atleast that's my opinion.
Look at the crafting rules.
Ok, lets do that:
In some cases, the fabricate spell can be used to achieve the results of a Craft check with no actual check involved. You must still make an appropriate Craft check when using the spell to make articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
...
Create Masterwork Items: You can make a masterwork item: a weapon, suit of armor, shield, or tool that conveys a bonus on its use through its exceptional craftsmanship. To create a masterwork item, you create the masterwork component as if it were a separate item in addition to the standard item. The masterwork component has its own price (300 gp for a weapon or 150 gp for a suit of armor or a shield, see Equipment for the price of other masterwork tools) and a Craft DC of 20. Once both the standard component and the masterwork component are completed, the masterwork item is finished. The cost you pay for the masterwork component is one-third of the given amount, just as it is for the cost in raw materials.
So, you can use fabricate to make a generic suit of armor, no craft check required. If you want to use fabricate to make an article requiring high degree of craftsmanship (masterwork) you have to roll the craft check as part of the fabricate casting.
By the rules once both checks are done the item is completed. It makes sense, since the masterwork component is created separately anyway.
I agree with you : crafting checks are all the same. The check for masterwork quality is a normal crafting check, not a special one. So, you can create an adamantine full plate with fabricate.
I've seen characters hit HUGE levels in craft. +14 is achievable at surprisingly low levels.
Me too, but even when optimizing like hell (even a +40 in craft), you still need months to craft a single adamantine full plate.
Mundane Crafting? Terribly slow, crafting time needs to be reduced and I hope Ultimate Campaign revises those rules.
However, Fabricate is clearly meant to do masterwork stuff.
You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
The "high degree of craftsmanship" line has to be referencing Masterwork items, I mean what other high craftsmanship items are there? And as Tarantula and others have said, this allows for those kind of items with the appropriate check. For Adamantine & so on, you'd have to make that DC20 check.
Should you fail, you've messed up the same as a mundane Craftsman might over the months and months of work. Then you'll have to melt down components and start over, though for a Transmuter that's much easier.
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The rules of crafting are not awful. They're fairly reasonable, in fact. Making a suit of full plate isn't something you can just spit out in a couple of days, even if you are really good at it.
They're simply extremely inconvenient for adventurers.
Suppose your master smith is level 1.
He's got 1 rank, +3 class skill. He's optimized for being a smith, so he took skill focus (craft armoring) for another +3. Maybe he has an int of +1. Let's say he's a dwarf, he's got another +2. Naturally he's got the best tools available, another +2. Your smith is sitting at a +12 bonus.
Now, do you think the smith is doing everything by himself? He's not. He's got a team of apprentices, paid worker, servants, maybe even slaves behind him. He's got his best man on the helmet, some laborers on the gloves and boots, and he's overseeing the construction of the chest piece himself.
Suppose he's got 20 people on his team, and they all use aid-another on the smith's weekly check. They all have some minor skill and are using the best tools available, but lets go ahead and say 2 of them fail to beat DC10 to aid. They'll be fired next week, but still. Your smith gets +36 to his check from his helpers.
So the level 1 smith is sitting at +48 to his roll, he rolls a 10 giving him a 58. The DC is 29 because of course, he's working quickly. So he's got 1682 silver worth of progress in a week, it'll take him about 9 weeks to get done. A bit under another week creates the masterwork component. 10 weeks for masterwork full plate. That's not that bad for your average smith.
Just because it's not feasible for your character to make adamantine plate before the campaign ends, doesn't mean the crafting rules are silly. Did most knights make their own armor? Of course not, they had somebody else do it for them.
If you want to be different, well that's very special for your character, but guess what? it's HARD.
Adamantine full plate for regular mundane crafting... you can only make a few of these in your entire career if you're a human.
Thankfully doesn't Ultimate Campaign have revised crafting rules in it?Does it? Well that's good news.
It does not. It helps explain the process to clear up misconceptions, give insight into how materials are acquired and so on but the mechanics themselves are not changed.
That's not that bad for your average smith.
That's very bad for 20 smiths that are led by a smith that could be the best smith there was in 13th century in Europe.
The fact that this smith is of average skill in Golarion is granted, but compared to real life, he is incredible.
And in real life, a masterwork full plate could be created in less than 2 months, by ANY smith (not only master craftsmen), and smiths didn't have 20 apprentices. Maybe they could craft more than one in that time.
A guy who is 20th level, with +50 in craft and the best magic anvil in the world (that allows for crafting 24 hours a day), with 10 apprentices who are each the same level, could craft a full plate armor in adamantine in several months. It's huge.
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You misunderstand Avh.
this guy *is* your average smith. He's nothing special, he's level 1 and a dwarf, thats about all. Now if your argument is that "This guy (average dwarf smith) can create masterwork armor using mundane rules in about the same time it took a smith to create the same armor in the 13th century, but it's golarion so he should be able to do it faster!" Then I don't really understand. I mean, he CAN do it faster, but then he's no longer using mundane means. If he's going to be using the stuff that makes Golarion special, like magic, then yeah he can do it a LOT faster. But the OP said the mundane way, so that's the mundane way.
You say less than 2 months so for the historical account (i'd love to see your source, by the way!), so say 8 weeks? Well my guy does it in 10. It's not exact, but it's close.
Smiths didn't have 20 apprentices per se, but they may well have had 20 people working on the same set of armor. I mentioned they might have apprentices, but also servants, slaves, skilled or unskilled laborers, not just smiths and apprentices. You can have any old guy doing chain armor (if it has a chain component) while your more skilled people work on the trickier bits. You don't have to build the armor only one piece at a time. Plate armor is comprised of a LOT of pieces, then you put them all together. If each guy works on one piece, you could certainly have 20 people on the same suit of armor.
this guy *is* your average smith. He's nothing special, he's level 1 and a dwarf, thats about all
The fact that he is a dwarf make him way above average smith (he is similar to a lvl 3 character smith, which is one of the best smith there was in our world.
I mean, he CAN do it faster, but then he's no longer using mundane means.
The only way to do it faster is by using Fabricate. Even when using enchanted anvil, and by being 20th level with optimized craft (armor), he will still do it in months.
i'd love to see your source, by the way!
I googled it.
Smiths didn't have 20 apprentices per se, but they may well have had 20 people working on the same set of armor.
Real life smiths might have half a dozen apprentices/slaves/workers, and more is pushing it.
In Pathfinder, whatever, it is still ridiculous (and did I precised that you can't craft anything else while crafting an armor ?)
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According to ageofarmour.com, they're master armorer working fifty hours a week takes five months to make a suit of armor. That's using modern tools to do the gross cutting but the good old fashioned stuff for the finer work. It's a really interesting page, go learn something new today. Thanks for the topic!
Andy
It's not like you have a factory turning out sheet steel and stamping presses to puch out components. Every thing is done by hand.
I don't think a level 1 crafter is a fair comparison to human crafters in the middle ages. Maybe a level 10 NPC Expert class would be more accurate. Going with that, a Human 10 NPC Expert Armorer is looking at this for crafting plate:
Human Smith
Level 10 Expert
Craft (Armor) Class Skill +3
Rank +10
Int 17 +3
MW Tools +2
1:Skill Focus +6
3:Prodigy(Craft Armor) +4
5:Master Craftsman +2
7:Leadership(Score: 10)
Heart of Fields +5
Total: +33
Difficulty of the plate is 19, +10 to work faster so 29. Taking 10 we get a result of 43 (plus whatever his 1 cohort and 5 followers can assist). Leadership was taken to represent his shop workers.
43*29 = 1247 and cost of MW plate is 16,500sp. This gives us 13 weeks and change to create. If we can assume each assistant also takes 10 on the assist we get +2 from each, 1 corhort and 5 followers. Total of +12, brining us to 55 on the check. 55*29=1595 and that drops us down to 10 weeks and change.
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The fact that he is a dwarf make him way above average smith (he is similar to a lvl 3 character smith, which is one of the best smith there was in our world.
Not so at all. because if he were a human, he'd have an extra feat. Which he'd probably spend on the Prodigy feat which would give him a +2 bonus to craft (smithing) checks, meaning he's exactly on par with the dwarf. If he placed his stat bonus for being a human into INT, than he's actually at +13 to the dwarf's +12!.
The only way to do it faster is by using Fabricate. Even when using enchanted anvil, and by being 20th level with optimized craft (armor), he will still do it in months.
Not at all the only way to speed up the process. How about:
Crafter's Fortune
Assisting Gloves
headband of vast intelligence
to name just a few. Additionally in pathfinder there's no limit to how many people can help you. Maybe you say half a dozen for credulity's sake if we were trying to do a real-world scenario, but in pathfinder, you could have 20. Or 100. Or 200. Or 500 people all using aid another on your smith check. You could have an entire city dedicated to churning out suits of adamantine full plate. And why not? When you're talking about bonuses of +2000 or better, you'll get them done right quick.
i'd love to see your source, by the way!
I googled it.
Well I google'd it too, and for full plate I saw anywhere from a few months to a year to "we don't know for sure how long it would have taken them because none of our records that we've found on the subject ever gave any specific numbers." So unless you give me something more definitive, I still question your time frame.
Looking at AP's and other modules, NPC mooks tend not to be optimized...so I would not expect NPC non-adventurers to be either.
It is a slow process, and I consider that a good thing.
The rules of crafting are not awful. They're fairly reasonable, in fact. Making a suit of full plate isn't something you can just spit out in a couple of days, even if you are really good at it.
They're simply extremely inconvenient for adventurers.
Suppose your master smith is level 1.
He's got 1 rank, +3 class skill. He's optimized for being a smith, so he took skill focus (craft armoring) for another +3. Maybe he has an int of +1. Let's say he's a dwarf, he's got another +2. Naturally he's got the best tools available, another +2. Your smith is sitting at a +12 bonus.
Now, do you think the smith is doing everything by himself? He's not. He's got a team of apprentices, paid worker, servants, maybe even slaves behind him. He's got his best man on the helmet, some laborers on the gloves and boots, and he's overseeing the construction of the chest piece himself.
Suppose he's got 20 people on his team, and they all use aid-another on the smith's weekly check. They all have some minor skill and are using the best tools available, but lets go ahead and say 2 of them fail to beat DC10 to aid. They'll be fired next week, but still. Your smith gets +36 to his check from his helpers.
So the level 1 smith is sitting at +48 to his roll, he rolls a 10 giving him a 58. The DC is 29 because of course, he's working quickly. So he's got 1682 silver worth of progress in a week, it'll take him about 9 weeks to get done. A bit under another week creates the masterwork component. 10 weeks for masterwork full plate. That's not that bad for your average smith.
Just because it's not feasible for your character to make adamantine plate before the campaign ends, doesn't mean the crafting rules are silly. Did most knights make their own armor? Of course not, they had somebody else do it for them.
If you want to be different, well that's very special for your character, but guess what? it's HARD.
Ironically, this is exactly how I got a quartet of masterwork items to a 3rd level party in a few game weeks.
The heroes saved a town of dwarves from what turned out to be the dwarves own ignorance (long story involving a korred, some mites, and a keg of beer). Anyway, to thank the party for their honor as well as their discretion, the warsmiths of the town pledged their best smiths to work on the items for them. The 20-dwarf team split into teams of five (one chief making the checks with the four under the master working up individual components) to make all four items all at once. Even with all of that it was still going to take a month (4 weeks).
The party decided not to wait in town for a month, so they left and went on a few other adventures. They had been 1st level when the items were promised to them; they were 3rd level when they received them.
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Since the question has been answered, I'll go a little off-rules and suggest a band-aid that works decently. This:
The accellerated crafting rule can be applied more than once. Each time you apply it, double the amount of sp worth of items produced per week.
A half-plate is DC18, so if you have get to +18 (assistants? masterwork tools?) and can take 10, you can produce 28*28*2=1568 sp per week.
Once you're a real master with +28, you can produce 38*38*2*2=5776 sp per week.
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Fabricate allows you to make 'a' crafting check, NOT multiple crafting checks. No masterwork. Since masterwork is considered a seperate item, and Fabricate only allows you to work on one item at a time, you are out of luck. Only by the broadest stretch of trying to extend the meaning of the rules can you allow Fabricate to make masterwork items.
And since adamantine armor must be made masterwork, you can't make a normal suit and masterwork it afterwords with a spell. You can do it for normal armor, of course.
'high degree of craftsmanship' does not refer to a masterwork roll. It refers to the fact that some armor is DC 12 to make and some is DC 19. Crafting some poisons is mid-20's. That's what 'requires high craftsmanship' for multiple items means. The masterwork rules are broken out on their own and don't refer back to standard crafting, and vice versa.
==Aelryinth
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A masterwork weapon is a finely crafted version of a normal weapon. Wielding it provides a +1 enhancement bonus on attack rolls.
You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
I dunno...it certainly looks to me like they are referring to same thing.
Says right in the masterwork weapon section:
You can't add the masterwork quality to a weapon after it is created; it must be crafted as a masterwork weapon (see the Craft skill).
The Craft skill calls this out specifically:
In some cases, the fabricate spell can be used to achieve the results of a Craft check with no actual check involved. You must still make an appropriate Craft check when using the spell to make articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
Now I get what you are saying that you'd have to choose which thing you use fabricate on...the item or the masterwork component...but why is masterwork different than "high degree of craftsmanship".
Dictionary definition of masterwork: "an outstanding work, achievement, or performance". Sounds like something that is "high degree of craftsmanship" to me.
I think there's some merit to what Aelryinth's saying. Their claim, from what I understood it, is that crafting a masterwork item is basically crafting two items - the regular item and the masterwork part. Fabricate only allows you to craft one item, so wouldn't be able to create the masterwork part. The fact that it refers to a single craft check reinforces this.
So either:
1 - Crafting masterwork items should be a single item and can be fabricated; fabricates reference to single item/check are inaccurate, though that's understandable as masterwork items are the exception.
2a - Crafting masterwork items is crafting two parts separately, and fabricate only allows crafting a single item; thus you cannot craft masterwork items with fabricate.
2b - As 2a, but casting fabricate twice will allow you to craft a masterwork item.
I'm not sure what the correct interpretation is, neither from a RAW or RAI standpoint, but I think it's worth hitting the FAQ on as it is unclear and affects the usefulness of the spell drastically.
Fabricate allows you to make 'a' crafting check, NOT multiple crafting checks. No masterwork. Since masterwork is considered a seperate item, and Fabricate only allows you to work on one item at a time, you are out of luck. Only by the broadest stretch of trying to extend the meaning of the rules can you allow Fabricate to make masterwork items.
And since adamantine armor must be made masterwork, you can't make a normal suit and masterwork it afterwords with a spell. You can do it for normal armor, of course.
'high degree of craftsmanship' does not refer to a masterwork roll. It refers to the fact that some armor is DC 12 to make and some is DC 19. Crafting some poisons is mid-20's. That's what 'requires high craftsmanship' for multiple items means. The masterwork rules are broken out on their own and don't refer back to standard crafting, and vice versa.
==Aelryinth
The rules do appear to be a bit ambiguous here. This may be a good FAQ candidate.
I have to say, even if you accept the times for normal quality weapons and armor as ballpark realistic, there are other items characters (PC or NPC) might want to make. The worst examples I can remember are poisons and traps. I know there are various workarounds and extra feats that can help, but even then, making such items is still a pain.
Basically, any time the assumptions underlying the craft rules fail, so do the resulting times.
Fabricate tells us: "The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication."
This implies that qualities other than normal are possible, even mandatory. In fact, it seems to be just there to force a caster to create masterwork items when using materials that can only be used to craft masterwork items (adamantine, mithral).
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Here is something I just thought of because yes, what Aelryinth is saying does make sense. The general order for crafting masterwork armor is:
1)Make craft checks to create the armor itself, until cost in SP is met in total crafting checks.
2)Make craft check to masterwork the new item, against price of 150gp for armor. If successful, item is masterwork.
We all agree that fabricate can be used for the first check. (Still requiring a craft (armor) check of 19 to end up with full-plate armor and not something vaguely armor shaped.)
Then, you have to hand work the armor itself, and finish the masterwork craft check in real time. I.E. make another craft check DC 20 and continue until your total equals the 1,500sp that masterwork costs.
This makes sense to me, you can use fabricate to do the bulk work of shaping the armor into a full-plate shape, but to get the bonuses of masterworked armor takes hand-crafting and finishing the piece. Also, the craft rules don't say you can't do this with a fabricated item that was just created, merely that you have to add masterwork to an item during creation after the initial craft check.