| Blue_Sky |
I love the Asura from Guild Wars 2, gnomish engineers from World of Warcraft, and the old Dragonlance tales of Mt. Nevermind. Doing a bit of research, I came to the idea that I'd like to make a gnome golem crafter. However, dwarves have the one favored class bonus with wizards that I need for said character.
So, I have a two questions:
1) Is there a way a race can obtain the favored class bonus of another race?
2) If not, is there any way a gnome can gain the dwarven subtype? Has to be done at 1st level.
Yes, these are serious questions of the utmost importance. lol
| avr |
The increased speed while crafting? Just get a valet familiar, and if you're a wizard the arcane builder arcane discovery, that'll let you burn through your money fast enough.
| Meirril |
I love the Asura from Guild Wars 2, gnomish engineers from World of Warcraft, and the old Dragonlance tales of Mt. Nevermind.
I'm just going to point out that before WoW the dwarves made all of the gadgets in Warcraft. Dwarf musket troops, dwarf gyro-copters, dwarf balloons and dwarf zeppelins.
If you want to make a dwarf tinkerer then you might consider a Forgemaster. While you give up channeling, you get a lot of crafting benefits. While a dwarf wizard could be faster than a forgemaster at making a single kind of item, it would take 10 levels and be limited to a single crafting feat. The Forgemaster would get his benefit on any magic item made from metal.
Let me give a quick example. Lets say you want to create a 20,000gp golem that uses metal parts. Normally that would be 20 days to create at 1,000 gp per day. Any crafter can add 1000 gp per day to their rate of crafting for +5 DC, so 10 days if you double the rate per day.
A Forgemaster halves the time to create the item as long as its made from metal. So you go from 20/10 days to 10/5 days to craft the item.
For your dwarven wizard to make the sale golem in 5 days he'd need a crafting rate of 4,000 gp per day. He can achieve 2k per day without his favored class bonus. And he needs 10 levels worth of the favored class bonus to get the remaining 2k per day.
| Blue_Sky |
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So...ahem...this gnome has a different perspective. If not for gnomes, you wouldn't have catapult trajectory systems that can transport cargo and civilians not only horizontally, but vertically, too! Sure, dwarves can make weapons of war, but Gnomes take everything the dwarves made and improved on it.
Let me point out to you the wonderful specimen that is the Gnome Hooked Hammer, a pick AND a hammer! Or the Gnome Pincher! Dwarf dropped his crowbar? Oh well. A Gnome Pincher can grab it from five feet away!
Therefore, Gnomes are better.
Now, how do we go about min/maxing the crafting heck out of this gnome?
| VRMH |
The best way to affirm Gnome superiority, would be to employ other races as minions I'd think. So maybe an "Aid Another"-Halfling (let's call him Igor) for the craft checks and a "Coven Caster" Changeling to boost your Caster Level (as Construct-construction has a Caster Level requirement).
| Coidzor |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So...ahem...this gnome has a different perspective. If not for gnomes, you wouldn't have catapult trajectory systems that can transport cargo and civilians not only horizontally, but vertically, too! Sure, dwarves can make weapons of war, but Gnomes take everything the dwarves made and improved on it.
Let me point out to you the wonderful specimen that is the Gnome Hooked Hammer, a pick AND a hammer! Or the Gnome Pincher! Dwarf dropped his crowbar? Oh well. A Gnome Pincher can grab it from five feet away!
Therefore, Gnomes are better.
Now, how do we go about min/maxing the crafting heck out of this gnome?
Well, there are two things that aid with crafting.
1. Increasing (effective) wealth through things like acquiring funds or converting money into Magic Capital. So you can craft more expensive things.
2. Increasing crafting speed. So you can craft more things in the same span of time.
Intelligent Constructs offer ways to do both, although without rolling back or disregarding the FAQ forbidding Spell-Like Abiltiies from being used to qualify for crafting feats, they will be limited to using Master Craftsman in order to qualify for Craft Wondrous Item and/or Craft Magic Arms and Armor in order to grab Cooperative Crafting.
1 such assistant should double progress and stacks to become a multiplier equal to 1 + the number of assistants. So a Valet Familiar and an assitant mean 3x crafting speed. Effectively, if you can make the accelerated crafting check, each assistant adds 2000 gp of progress per day. If you can't, then they add 1000 gp of progress per day until the stacking, untyped +2 bonus they give allows you to make the check for accelerated crafting.
1. Soulbound Mannequins
2. the Trompe l'Oeil template
3. Wax Golems
Soulbound Mannequins have 10 HD by default and are intelligent. They have 4 feats by default, allowing them to take Master Craftsman, Cooperative Crafting, and both Craft Wondrous Item and Craft Magic Arms and Armor.
They can be increased to 15 HD during their creation without increasing their size category to Large, which would net them 3 additional feats which could be used to fuel money-making ventures or other functions.
(If you really wanted to, you could also, technically, use HD Modification to add half again the HD after it is constructed, bringing it up to a total of 22 HD maximum, but there would be little reason to do so most likely)
Soulbound Mannequins do have the downside of requiring someone to die in order to make them, but things like Breath of Life or Temporary Resurrection + Breath of Life can avoid or severely reduce the cost of restoring people to life.
They're 8500 gp for the base 10 HD version, 12,500 gp for the 15 HD version.
(You can reduce that 500 gp component to 166.66 gp by using mundane crafting or Fabricate for the mask. This could be further reduced to 86.66 gp by using 8 Goods Capital. The 8000 gp component can become 4000 gp using 80 Magic Capital, the 12,000 gp component can become 6000 gp using 120 Magic Capital.)
Trompe l'Oeil can literally be copies of the Wizard themselves or even go to the heights of the Painter Wizard. They're also pretty cheap at 500 gp per HD, especially if you focus on making Tiny or Small sized assistants. A level 9 Wizard assistant with Craft Wondrous Item, Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Craft Construct, and Cooperative Crafting would cost 4500 gp to make before taking Size into account, and even making it Medium would only bump it up to 6500 gp.
(Magic Capital will effectively make them 5 Magic Capital or 250 gp per HD. Goods Capital will reduce the cost of the painting component, though it would take, at minimum 25 Goods Capital for a Tiny one, 50 for a Small one, and 100 Goods Capital for a Medium one.)
Trompe l'Oeil are also fairly likely to be banned at any given table, or severely curtailed if they are allowed.
Wax Golems are the least reliable method, between uncertainty about whether they can still be controlled and the random chance involved in whether they become sapient, but they do explicitly gain class levels along with the ability to gain more of them.
It costs 7000 gp to make the baseline version, 6500 of which can be halved with 65 Magic Capital and 500 of which may or may not be handled with either Goods Capital or Magic Capital.
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In addition to being able to make constructs that have Cooperative Crafting, you can also just use Downtime to hire level 3 Wizards, Clerics, etc. for a set fee and then, worst case scenario, you can use Retraining to give them Craft Wondrous Item + Cooperative Crafting.
The Gunsmithing feat would be a prime candidate for making money, producing a net profit of 400 gp per day by using 100 gp of raw materials to produce 1000 gp of ammunition or gunpowder and selling it for 500 gp. So that would take them 25 days to produce the money necessary to craft a Portable Hole. An advantage of this feat is that any intelligent creature can take this feat and it isn't dependent on how intelligent they are or how many ranks in Craft they have. A disadvantage is that there's very little that can be done to increase the daily profit directly.
(A character; probably another party member, a cohort, or a Trompe l'Oeil; with the Duskwalker Agent trait could boost that to a daily profit of 460 gp by increasing the sale price to 550 and reducing the cost of the raw materials to 90 gp.)
The Master Alchemist feat would be another option, especially combined with boosting the construct's intelligence and the Signature Skill feat, provided the construct has 5 or 15 ranks in Craft Alchemy.
The Focused Worker and then Focused Overseer feats if the Downtime system is on the table. Being able to purchase Magic Capital for the same cost as earning it effectively halves the cost of making a magic item, or a mundane item when it comes to Goods Capital. It is limited by the size of the settlement how much Capital can be purchased in one day, so it could add several days of preparation time to the time it takes to create expensive magic items.
The Additional Traits feat and using it to grab one of the magic item cost reduction traits (Eldritch Smith, Hedge Magician, or Spark of Creation) could be a way to have the construct craft magic items that are then sold for a profit, especially if paired with using Magic Capital.
As for Constructs to make to make money with, Soulbound Dolls are one of the least expensive intelligent Constructs. There's even suggestions in the original version for them of ways to make them without having to kill people first, IIRC. Their main downside, other than potentially requiring killing someone to make them, is that the main way they can make money is the Gunsmithing feat.
They're 2300 gp, which could be reduced to as little as 1050 gp withe Magic Capital, Goods Capital, and crafting the focus item one's self using mundane crafting or Fabricate. So, even without cost-saving measures, it takes them at most 6 days to recoup the cost of their construction using Gunsmithing.
In comparison, a 1 HD, Small Trompe l'Oeil would cost 1500 gp to make without cost saving measures. This could be reduced down to 423.33 gp with 5 Magic Capital, 16 Goods Capital, and Mundane Crafting/Fabricate. So it would take between 2 and 4 days for such a construct to pay for itself using Gunsmithing.