raw material values for crafting

[Valrydus]

So one of my players is a Magus with item carting feats. He is our power player: leadership; crafting; kindve a know it all, etc.

He did pose one interesting question however. So I have not been giving a lot of magic items, and those they find are actually gear of those they slay. As a result he is in need of lots of non magical things for crafting. This makes some sense to me, especially since many of the types of items he has been collecting are otherwise perfect spell components or metamagic components.

The items he has include the following: Drake Eyes/tongue/teeth/glands; minerals; hides of various beasts; blood from magical beasts; as well as some plant parts and stuff that would otherwise be used to craft poisons, etc.

He has compiled an algorithm for the purposes of calculating crafting value based on the CR of the creature and the rolls (knowledge; survival; profession ("witched" [for lack of a better term]) that the person makes for collecting. I have not read all that he has compiled, and I know that he will use these in his own game regardless of whether I use them.

What I am wondering is, has anyone out there found some way to give value to things that are not themselves magical (at least not traditionally) for those crafters in their PC groups?

What advice would you have?

[GM Rednal]

Personally, I think this player is making the system overly complicated. Typically, players will sell items for money, and exchange that money for 'crafting supplies', which I'm pretty sure are intentionally left undefined so they don't make things too complex - also, most spell components, even magical ones, have no particular value. They're just, uh, in the pouch. Infinitely. For simplicty's sake, because most players don't want to track units of bat guano. XD

I see two major issues here.

1) If you assign a GP value to the items and allow them to be sold, you are effectively giving the party more wealth - they could also just sell these harvested items for money and split it across the group. This isn't inherently a bad thing - if you WANT that to be a source of income in your game, then hey, go for it. However, be aware that this could give the players far more wealth than you've planned for them to have. You'll have to be consistent about this, and expect them to harvest EVERYTHING.
1b) If the items they're harvesting are otherwise spell components, what's stopping them from endlessly pulling components out of the pouch when they want to craft or get more money? o_O Logic says this could get preeeeeetty weird.

2) If you say that the items are equivalent to "X GP" for the purposes of crafting but don't have real value when sold, then you are only giving extra wealth to only that player, which could be horribly imbalanced. Furthermore, in most cases, Item Crafting is mostly about converting one type of value (10,000 GP from selling a magical sword) into another (10,000 GP in a magical ring that does something different). If they get materials without cost - though, in fairness, invested skill points and feats are a type of cost in their own right - then they could make a LOT of money doing this.

If they want to do more crafting, then honestly, I would talk to the group about it. You could increase the amount of treasure they earn from encounters, with the note that the party should be investing a certain amount of that into crafting for the group as a whole. Use or don't use the algorithm the player came up with, but say that the parts have to be exchanged for a like amount of 'crafting materials' in town or something.

[Valrydus]

Ya you mention some concerns that I had too. I don't want to essentially create a way for one player to have way more access to wealth than the others.

It also is a massive time sink for the party. I mean the party fought 3 sea drakes from the deck of a ship the other week and this player made sure all three were brought aboard afterward (had to use fly and the help of ropes) to be skinned and plucked of all useful parts.

I told him it took hours....which since they had weeks left at sea was NBD, but there were also dozens of others aboard and the captain was less than pleased with the presence of 3 large monstrous creatures aboard.

I have already given the party (through home rules) the ability to disenchant magic items....back down to masterwork quality and store the magical energy in gems.....through use of some formulas. I do think that having these components makes the ability to craft more interesting and adds something to it flavor wise, but coming up with values is difficult.

Do you think the following may assist this?

1) You must use full crafting cost if going into crafting with no external sources.
2) Bringing rare materials or other components reduces the effective cost of crafting by 20%. This way it is substantial, but not a free means of constant resources. To be fair the problem with this approach is that it doesn't help to determine when materials are depleted.

This is more difficult than I expected.

[GM Rednal]

Yeaaaaaaah... you could also reduce the normal treasure they get, and just have the harvested items be the party's source of revenue. In effect, you're replacing coins or gems with monster parts, which also serve as crafting materials. (Basically just saying "you don't have to be in town to exchange money for materials")

At this point, you wouldn't use the table, you'd just say they could harvest X amount of usable material from a given encounter.