Crafting magic items, WBL, and reasonable downtime.

[seebs]

Basic observation:

The utility of item creation feats decreases significantly at higher levels. Downtime availability tends to be roughly static. WBL appears to be roughly tracking a multiple of N^3; it's certainly accelerating faster than an N^2 curve.

So, let's say you have a week of downtime every level. At 5th level, you've gained roughly 4,500gp worth of wealth. Your week of downtime lets you convert 3,500 of that into 7,000gp worth of stuff, so you actually get 8,000gp worth of benefit, so you gain 77% more wealth than you otherwise would. Pretty good!

At 16th level, you've gained 75,000gp worth of stuff. Your week of downtime allows you to convert 3,500 of that into 7,000gp worth of stuff, giving you 78,500gp total. That's 4.6% more wealth than you would otherwise have gotten, which is starting to feel trivial. But hey, if you've specialized, you can take the +5 craft DC to double your production, so you can convert 7,000 of it into 14,000gp worth of stuff, giving you 9.3% more wealth than expected. This is... not as impressive.

At 20th level, your wealth increases by 195,000gp. Even with doubled crafting speed, the increase of 7,000gp you get from your week of downtime is about a 3.5% increase. It's basically trivial.

It seems to me that there's a serious design flaw here -- crafting is either too good at low levels, too weak at high levels, or both.

I'm not entirely sure how to fix this. It seems like the basic idea ought to be to scale in a way that roughly approximates the scaling of other powers with levels. Consider the rewards for a Perform check:

DC10: 1d10cp
DC15: 1d10sp
DC20: 3d10sp
DC25: 1d6gp
DC30: 3d6gp

Averaging them out, that's:

DC10: 5.5cp
DC15: 5.5sp
DC20: 16.5sp
DC25: 3.5gp
DC30: 10.5gp

Converting to fixed units (cp):

DC10: 5.5
DC15: 55
DC20: 165
DC25: 350
DC30: 1050

Which is to say, past the initial DC10 base, 5 points roughly triples output. That's probably Too Good, because exponential growth is faster than character WBL growth.

Under the RAW, a 12th level wizard who has a base spellcraft of +21 (12 ranks, +6 int modifier including items, +3 class skill bonus) can produce 2,000gp per day reliably for any item up through caster level 21, because you can take 10 on crafting, giving you a 31. An item which requires CL 21 (which none do) would then be a base DC of 26, +5 gets you to 31. So basically anything in the game is an automatic success at double crafting speed, which makes it sort of boring -- but also sort of useless, because it would take forever to craft the kinds of things a 12th level character would usually have. The 12th level iconic character wizard, for instance, has magic items worth as much as 33k gp (rod of thunder and lightning; CL 9).

Perhaps a good starting point would be setting daily production base at 100gp per character level, 200gp with a +5DC modifier, 300gp at +10DC, and so on. With that, the 12th level wizard's production rate on a rod of thunder and lightning, assuming both crafting feats and the prerequisites, would be:

DC14 (base): 1200gp/day
DC19 (+5): 2400gp/day
DC24 (+10): 3600gp/day
DC29 (+15): 4800gp/day
DC34 (+20): 6000gp/day -- introduces risk of failure, unless you have buffs

Advantages:
* Higher-level crafters can actually earn more money. The amount they can earn goes up a little faster than their level, because they can probably find a larger pool of things that they can make easily enough that they can afford higher DCs.
* Spells like Crafter's Fortune, things like valet familiars, and so on, all become more useful. (I would likely cap cooperative crafting as adding 100gp/day/level of additional crafting, rather than doubling, though).

Disadvantages:
* Low-level characters get noticably less benefit from crafting feats, which may or may not be intentional.

Things I'm not sure about either way:
* You can craft things noticably faster if they're easier for you, and that's a lot more noticable than it is under the current system.

Thoughts?

[Diego Rossi]

"So, let's say you have a week of downtime every level. "
What is the basis for this assumption?
I had campaign with a long hiatus between each adventure (1 year at level 14 playing Pathfinder, up to several years in older 2nd ed. campaigns) and campaigns where you had something happening every few days. It is all about the structure of the campaign, not about the feats or the WBL.

[Driver 325 yards]

They have come up with new rules on crafting and WBL. I have seen it in these forums. Don't know exactly where.

That said, crafting can now only increase your WBL by 25%. I think there are feat and abilities that can increase that to 50%.

[Xaratherus]

The referenced "125%" comes from the recently-released Ultimate Campaign. It's a suggested way to control the WBL boost that crafting can give.

[seebs]

Diego Rossi wrote:

"So, let's say you have a week of downtime every level. "

What is the basis for this assumption?
I had campaign with a long hiatus between each adventure (1 year at level 14 playing Pathfinder, up to several years in older 2nd ed. campaigns) and campaigns where you had something happening every few days. It is all about the structure of the campaign, not about the feats or the WBL.

Unless the number is "under 4 hours" or "well over 1 year", the same thing applies -- there are levels at which you can do an amount of crafting which has a noticable effect on your effective wealth, and levels at which you can't.

Driver 325 yards wrote:

That said, crafting can now only increase your WBL by 25%. I think there are feat and abilities that can increase that to 50%.

That's a guideline, not an absolute rule. And the point I'm getting at is, at 20th level, you would need several years of crafting to get that 25%. And that seems to have problems similar to original 3E Toughness -- it makes something progressively worse as you level.

[Mapleswitch]

The whole point of a cohort is to take item creation feats and sit in town all day making your stuff!

[Mapleswitch]

So, at higher levels there is this ultra cheesy thing you can do called create your own greater demiplane and set its time so it goes really, really fast. 1 round in the real world is a year in the cheesy demiplane.

"Time: By default, time passes at the normal rate in your demiplane. By selecting this feature, you may make your plane have the erratic time, flowing time (half or double normal time), or timeless trait (see Time, GameMastery Guide 185)." - requires 2 castings, suggested permanency afterwards.

Your DM will roll his or her eyes when you pull this one out.

[seebs]

Huh. Interesting, but I suspect my GM wouldn't let me do that one. :)

[Zog of Deadwood]

Here's how I am integrating the Ultimate Campaign crafting/WBL guideline:

In my game, crafting feats allow the crafting of items at 100% default cost (not 50%), but for each crafting feat possessed the crafter has a store of personal mana that can be expended to decrease crafting costs by a monetary value of up to 25% of the crafter's WBL (to a maximum 50% discount on any given item of the appropriate type). This personal store of mana is nonrenewable, aside from increasing as level increases.

This means that crafters have no limit on how much they can craft--but do have a limit on what they can craft cheaply. This also deals with the crafter NPC problem fairly well.