Should destroyed items count as crafting material?

[kogarou]

I think this is up to GM fiat. I'd like to say yes (at 50% of the item value, as per items that have been disassembled in hopes of obtaining its formula, and no longer simply Repaired), and allow my players to reforge a destroyed beloved item into something new, within reason - metal to metal. Perhaps sometimes they'd even like to upgrade an unbroken item, (though I'd still force it to be disassembled to 50% value first). This could increase the value of crafting as opposed to just buying new items in the store.

Any thoughts or conflicting rules? Maybe when an item is destroyed as opposed to intentionally disassembled, I could apply the -10% raw material value penalty for critically failing a reverse engineer attempt.

[masda_gib]

These sound like good thoughts. Counting item destruction as crit. failed disassembly sounds neat rulewise (and like an euphemism).

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

kogarou wrote:

Perhaps sometimes they'd even like to upgrade an unbroken item, (though I'd still force it to be disassembled to 50% value first).

In the playtest you could upgrade an item w/o having to dissemble it first:

playtest page 190, Improving Quality wrote:

You can use the Craft downtime activity (see page 148) to improve the quality of an item up to your proficiency rank in the Crafting skill. For this purpose, the Price equals the difference in Price between the two qualities. Upgrading an expert-quality chain shirt to master quality, for example, uses a Price of 3,250 sp. This requires you to have master Crafting and to provide 1,625 sp worth of raw materials to start the process.

Nonmagical items might decrease in quality over a long period of neglect or after extended use, but they can be restored in the same way as improving an item.

Did we lose that option? Or are you talking about something else?

[kogarou]

Oh, wow, I forgot about this being in the Playtest! In the final CRB, the entire Item Quality section has been lost. Instead we have the Materials section. I'm still wrapping my head around it and may still be very wrong about things, but here's my current impression:

You must craft a new item to incorporate a particular material. The GM must approve of the combination of item and material. Each material has three grades of purity - low-grade [expert], standard-grade [master], and high-grade [legendary]. The effect is the same regardless of grade; the reason you care about grade is that low-grade precious material in incompatible with runes beyond a corresponding level. You are able to increase the grade of an item later by investing the price delta via Crafting - but you can't directly craft a pre-existing sword into a silver-coated sword.

One super cool thing about this system is that it gives you rules for finding the raw material in varying Bulk and how much it's worth. You get to think about how many items you can cover with the material you've found, and describe the details of your new item.

...so back to my initial post - there's a hodgepodge of rules that could be generously interpreted in a way that e.g. allows a weapon to be reforged, but I don't think it's in RAW. There is a mechanic for transferring runes (at a 10% value fee), so I believe it's reasonable that we should also be able to reclaim some material value of our items, and particularly that of the precious material they may contain. Hope to find some official guidelines in the future. Maybe Paizo was worried about the economy implications, since they've been so careful with it in this system - it could e.g. lock a player into wooden items if they invested in something expensive and wooden. Or it could cause a group to stop caring about finding the same precious material twice. But I still want this to work, somehow.

Edit: If I tell myself "getting something new is more fun!", I suppose I'm fine with RAW. Would still appreciate peoples' thoughts.

[Fuzzy-Wuzzy]

Got it. Thanks for the explanation!

Getting 50% of an item's material for intentional disassembly, with -10% for a destroyed item, sounds like a perfectly good rule. It shouldn't lock anyone into anything---they can always sell the recovered goods from a destroyed item instead of re-Crafting them if they want to switch to another material.

I would still want an actual reforging rule so that the PC who starts with an ancestral but normal weapon can upgrade it in every respect (including special material coating) as they accumulate wealth. Getting something new is fun, but being able to say at high level "this sword has been with me since I started adventuring, and in my family before that!" is cool.

[breithauptclan]

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

I would still want an actual reforging rule so that the PC who starts with an ancestral but normal weapon can upgrade it in every respect (including special material coating) as they accumulate wealth. Getting something new is fun, but being able to say at high level "this sword has been with me since I started adventuring, and in my family before that!" is cool.

To me that feels more like a role-playing thing rather than a game mechanics thing.

Mechanically I could be disassembling the sword and recreating it. But in the role-playing description it could be thought of and stated as a reforging or upgrade of the existing sword.