I've been thinking about crafting in Pathfinder and all of the crafting threads I've read, and what I (and everyone else) actually wants out of crafting. To work that out, I think I should start by collecting a series of examples of how the current crafting system fails. That is, how it works now, what's wrong and vaguely how it should work. (Most of these examples are things other people have mentioned in other threads. I just wanted to get them all in one place for easier analysis.)
Now, before the usual "this isn't Merchants & Moneylenders" arguments, the current system makes the following characters fairly difficult to play and still be fun:
- A dwarf warrior/smith
- A poison using alchemist, rogue or ninja
- Someone that wants to explore away from civilization (other than a high-level caster)
- Someone that wants to put a trap somewhere in their stronghold
Almost all of these characters eventually stop and say "That's going to take how long?" and then give up and do something else. Not exactly fun. (Again, if your argument is just "why play such a character" this thread is not for you. You're not going to convince the rest of us we're wrong for wanting to play such characters.)
Example 1: A copper, silver and gold band (relatively plain, DC 10), worth 1 sp, 10 sp and 100 sp (for simplicity's sake), take someone with Craft (Jewelry) +10 (57 sp per day) 8 minutes, 1.5 hours and 2 days to complete.
I've heard that gold is harder to cast than silver, but that's really a question of skill and care, not time, or at least, not that much time.
Now, material can make a difference in realistic crafting times, and realism isn't exactly the goal here, so any fixes shouldn't necessarily focus on this problem specifically, but will hopefully at least mitigate it somewhat.
Example 2: A commoner with Craft (Painting) +0 and a master with Craft (Painting) +20 are given identical raw materials and the commoner is asked to spend as much time on the painting as the master painter does or vice versa. Under the current rules the commoner and the master end up with identically valued paintings (3x the materials), with the master finishing first and being unable to use the remaining time to do anything meaningful. The master can't even make it a masterwork because that would require more materials.
In this case, it seems like the best solution is probably a separate refinement option. It could potentially replace the existing masterwork rules. Another option would be a DC increase to reduce the material costs. As long as that was balanced against the DC increase for working faster, it shouldn't unbalance anything.
Example 3: A master smith with Craft (Armor) +30 making full plate makes 1560 sp per day. This means it'll take 11 days to complete a normal suit, 13 days to complete a masterwork suit or 106 days to make an adamantine suit.
Again, materials can make a difference in time, plus adamantine isn't real, so we can't use any real-world intuition here, but the size of those two gaps don't seem quite right. The constant price difference for masterwork items may be acceptable for game purposes, but I feel like making it a separate roll at a separate DC is just awkward. The 106 days for the adamantine suit is a bit much, but it's another instance of the same problem as example 1.
Example 4: A master smith with Craft (Armor) +30 spends 11 days in the shop hammering away on a suit of full plate. A level 3 wizard spends an hour to skip the rest and makes it masterwork. Now, the smith can do it in 2 days, for 50 gp whereas the wizard needs 150 gp, but it's still odd. Worse, once the wizard levels up some more, he can invalidate the whole process with fabricate.
I think magic should be capable of stuff like masterwork transformation and fabricate, but there really should be some downside. It would probably be more obvious what that downside should be if the rest of the crafting system worked a little more smoothly. The other (not necessarily exclusive) option is to leave the spells alone, but quite trying to impose "mundane" on high level non-casters. A high level smith could potentially reproduce the effects of masterwork transformation or fabricate through sheer awesome (and possibly a feat or two).
Example 5: A master alchemist with Craft (Alchemy) +30 is only capable of brewing a single dose of poison at once without the Master Alchemist feat. (Of course, if you've gotten your alchemy that high, you should probably take that feat.) Even something like hemlock, with needs almost no processing takes 17 days to prepare (2 with the feat).
The issue here is fairly obvious. Poisons are priced the way they are for game balance, which throws off the assumptions that make the existing craft system (more or less) work. The Master Alchemist feat does help quite a bit, but it's a fairly obvious band-aid over the real problem. Maybe other crafting feats would be help round things out.
Example 6: A smith (+30) spends all month preparing a mithril greatsword (4350 gp), then a wizard comes along with a cart full of reagents and turns it into a +3 flaming greataxe (32000 gp) in another month.
I think the problem here is that the magic item rules are completely separated from the crafting rules. I feel like using Spellcraft like any other craft skill wouldn't be inappropriate (although that would rely on doing something about example 3 first).
So, before I try to actually analyze any of this, does anyone else have any examples of issues not covered by these 6?
Thinking about these examples, I think there's three things I'd like to change. (Of course, that'd be my houserules and not something I'd automatically say everyone should be doing or that the Pathfinder core rules should change or anything like that.)
First, scaling the time with the price or cost of the item is not an entirely unreasonable game balance compromise, but having it scale linearly causes headaches when everything else scales quadratically. I'm not sure if it should scale with the square root of price (roughly linearly with the level of the characters purchasing such items) or even slower than that. I'd really need to set down and pin down how long several items ought to take. There probably ought to be a categorical multiplier as well. Certain items should likely take more or less time than any function of just price would suggest, but it's a bit much to call out individual items.
Second, I think the whole system would be a little easier to tinker with if magic item crafting were unified with crafting in general.
Well, I'll come back and write down my the last change as soon as I remember what it was.
Any system that bases the length of time to create the item off the cost of the item is going to result in unrealistic problems\situations, no matter how you calculate it.
The third party PDF "Making Crafting Work" by Spes Magna suggests that at least one qualifier - complexity - be added to any item that can be crafted.
Since characters are meant primarily to be adventurers, any craft system usable by characters in a 'sensible' duration while adventuring is going to sacrifice some realism.
First, the correct way to create a "realistic" crafting system:
Analyze every item that can be crafted. For each specific item, put some thought into what materials are needed, how much craftsmanship, how complex is the item, and in general, how difficult would it be to create this item compared to all the other items you're analyzing. Then assign each item a list of materials, the cost of those materials, the time necessary to craft it, and the DC needed to succeed. You will almost certainly have to adjust the purchase price for some of the items when you realize the materials cost plus time investment makes some of them impossible to create at profit and other wildly over-profitable.
It would be helpful if you are, in real life, an expert craftsman and/or know other expert craftsmen in all of the crafting fields related to the items you're analyzing - just to make sure your analysis is correct.
Then create a system whereby a craftsman rolls against the appropriate crafting skill using the DC and material cost specific to the item he is crafting. Include rules to substitute materials for a harder DC or rush the project for a harder DC or take longer time (and where appropriate, increased material cost) for the same or slightly higher DC but masterwork quality, etc.
When you're done, you will have rewritten the description and price for every item in the game and created, hopefully, a realistic game mechanic for creating these items.
And then some clever player will come along and exploit something you overlooked anyway.
Obviously, that's a crap-ton of work. Also obviously, this is a very abstract game. The existing silly crafting system is really just a band-aid slapped onto the existing game rules. The authors clearly were not inclined to go through all the trouble I described above so they just created a skill and a formula using that skill and the price of the items - easy, since the items were always going to have a price anyway. Very easy, very abstract, and very impractical in many ways.
The question is, can you find a compromise somewhere in between? Something less abstract, more realistic, but without a crap-ton of work?
Sure. It's a sliding scale with abstract at one end and realistic at the other. You decide where your target lies along that sliding scale. Similarly, the amount of work necessary is roughly the same scale and corresponds roughly to the amount of realism.
So maybe this can start you off:
One simple fix for the adamantine question (or any other special material) is to simply calculate the time as a multiplier on the time of the original item. Just quickly run through the list, there's only like what, a couple dozen special materials, and give each a multiplier to the time - assume the crafter will Take-10 on all his rolls and calculate how long the item will take (11 days for your example armorsmith making full plate) and then apply the multiplier (44 days for adamantine full plate but only 9 days for golden full plate for the same armorsmith using my hypothetical numbers below). Here's a few right off the top of my head:
Adamantine x4
Bone x1
Bronze x0.8
Cold Iron x2
Dragonhide x3
Gold x0.8
Mithral x3
Stone x2
Another limiting factor might be that it can be very hard to get your hands on a pile of adamantine large enough to make what you want to make. Anyone with that much lying around might decide to get into a little price gouging. Throw in a pass/fail mechanism that has real consequences, such as losing thousands of GP worth of adamantium because the smith screwed up his roll and people might think twice about crafting it - anyone who invests enough skill points and cash should probably be rewarded with being able to craft it, but adamantine full plate should not be just the result of investing a skill point and enough time, it should be something that only masters ever do because of the difficulty and cost of procuring the materials and the risk of losing the investment if their skill is not up to the task.
You correctly note that much of the crafting issue with poisons is a game balance problem - nobody wanted PCs crafting a cart-load of lethal, game-breaking poison for pennies on the gold piece, so it ends up taking weeks or months to craft a single dose of any poison anybody wants.
A different way to balance it would be to require expensive ingredients. Instead of assuming the potions cost half of the sale price, it could be 90%. This makes it almost worth it to spend the time to find that one special, creepy merchant in the shadowy end of the bazaar and pay his prices to save you the trouble. Another way to balance it is to just drive up the DCs and throw in some mishap rules. If the basic DC to create a decent poison was in the 30s, and blowing the roll by 5 meant losing your 90% investment and blowing it by 10 could mean killing yourself, then only people serious about their craft would brew this stuff. If someone wanted to invest that many skill points and that much cash, maybe they should be able to create a useful poison in a short time - it's probably not any more game breaking than someone investing feats and cash to craft powerful magical items.
Re Poisons: Treat them how guns are treated in an "emerging firearms" setting, and only allow classes with Poison Use to even have access to them.
I've looked into Making Crafting Work, and I'll offer that as one option to my players, along with just setting a few time multipliers. The idea of adjusting the material costs and changing things to only require the added value to be crafted sounds interesting too.
In the end, I'm not really going for a realistic system. I know that's way too pie in the sky, and I could just go play GURPS if I wanted something closer to that level of realism. (Maybe I should reread about crafting in GURPS for ideas though.) I know any workable solution is still going to be really gamy. The point of discussing realism at this point though is just to get things pointed in the right direction.
My idea from my last post was something like "instead of computing the item's cost in sp as the target, use 150 log_2(price)." Of course, I'd probably roll that into a table to make things easier to use. This would make more expensive items still take longer, but doubling the price would only add a constant amount of time. I'd have to run the numbers on that though.
Example 1 and 3 could be solved by removing the special material component from the item for the purpose of crafting. It does not solve everything in terms of macroeconomics, but it would somewhat correct the crafting time.
Lets take your DC 10 copper, silver and gold bands worth 1 sp, 10 sp and 100 sp (for simplicity's sake).
If we accept the copper band as the "base item" worth 1 sp, we could say that the silver band (basically a regular band made of a "special material") is crafted as a 1 sp item plus 9 sp worth of silver, and that the gold band is a crafted as a 1 sp item plus 99 sp worth of gold. Now it doesn't make much economic sense because the goldsmith isn't making any more profit out of his gold band than out of his copper band, but it brings the workmanship to be the same.
Same goes with the adamentium plate; it could be crafted as a masterwork armour, then adjusted for its special materials with relative ease.
'findel
[edit] basically what DM_Blake said two days ago...
So, besides Making Crafting Work, there's two options so far. Either give a speed multiplier based on categories or change the base material percentage.
Example 1: The speed multipliers can be based on material as one category. If copper was x0.1, silver was x1 and gold was x10, then all three would take the same time. Copper objects are so cheap, I don't think slowing them down is a bad thing.
If we change the base material percentage, as you said, making them all take the same time gives awkward results for the gold ring.
Example 2: Speed multipliers doesn't seem to do much here.
Changing the base material percentage could if it there were a way for the craftsman to lower it further (probably with a DC increase).
Example 3: The adamantine plate takes about 8 times longer than the masterwork plate. I feel like it should take longer, but not that much longer. DM_Blake's suggestion of a x4 seems appropriate. One issue with a straight multiplier is that it'll also multiply the craftsman's profit per day. A x4 is probably not high enough to matter though.
Changing the base material percentage to make the two the same would be awkward here too. The craftman pays 550 gp for masterwork fullplate and 5500 for the adamantine plate. If you made those equal, they'd need to spend 15950 gp on materials and have little economic reason to make adamantine plate.
Example 5: Master Alchemist already applies a straight multiplier to poison making. If I add another multiplier, I'd probably want to change that one for balance reasons.
Here though, it makes sense to raise the base material percentage. If the price is inflated due to illegality, then you'd expect the raw materials to be more expensive for the same reason.
--------------
So overall, it's looking like some combination of the two methods could work best. If there's an option to lower the material percentage further by increasing the DC (without speeding the process up by doing so), I think it'd provide satisfactory results for most of these examples. From the player point of view, all you'd need is a table saying what the base percent and the time multiplier was.
Example 3: The adamantine plate takes about 8 times longer than the masterwork plate. I feel like it should take longer, but not that much longer. DM_Blake's suggestion of a x4 seems appropriate. One issue with a straight multiplier is that it'll also multiply the craftsman's profit per day. A x4 is probably not high enough to matter though.
Don't forget, I also said:
Another limiting factor might be that it can be very hard to get your hands on a pile of adamantine large enough to make what you want to make. Anyone with that much lying around might decide to get into a little price gouging. Throw in a pass/fail mechanism that has real consequences, such as losing thousands of GP worth of adamantium because the smith screwed up his roll and people might think twice about crafting it - anyone who invests enough skill points and cash should probably be rewarded with being able to craft it, but adamantine full plate should not be just the result of investing a skill point and enough time, it should be something that only masters ever do because of the difficulty and cost of procuring the materials and the risk of losing the investment if their skill is not up to the task.
By "Throw in a pass/fail mechanism with real consequence" I meant have a chance the smith screws up. A real chance. With high enough DC that noob smiths can't even realistically hope to achieve it. Only masters would dare risk thousands of GP lost on the chance they'd screw up and ruin their adamantium. Once you get there, you're talking about only the best smiths in the land are even trying, and that's as it should be - adamantium should be rare and precious, and working it should not be automatic for any old smith with a pile of gold or a rich investor.
When you're thinking up some appropriate time modifiers (my x4 for adamantium was just off the cuff), think up what kind of DC would make sense for every material. The harder it is to work with, the higher the DC, and make sure to set them high enough to deter apprentices, journeymen, and wannabe masters from faking their way though on a Take-10.
Yeah, special materials probably should raise the DC.
Really, everyone crafting should be taking 10 unless you're trying to rush the process or something (and under the current rules, the roll doesn't really alter the final time much anyway). In fact, you should probably just make (skill + 10)^2 sp per day if you have enough skill to try in the first place. (That's from raising the DC to equal your take-10 result.)