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What the title says. I'll first introduce the ruleset, then how it came into being. This has not been tested yet, I'd like to have your opinions on it.
The basics of Crafting are not changed. Anyone can use the existing Crafting rules in the core rulebook. All expert Crafters do, however, have the following additional option.
Before you roll your Craft check, decide whether you want to Craft normally (in this case the rules remain the same) or whether you want to do a fast Crafting. If you do a fast Crafting, the 4 initial days spent Crafting are reduced to 3 days if you are expert, 2 days if you are master, and 1 day if you are legendary in the Craft skill. The initial price to Craft remains the same (half the item's price, times the number of items if you make a batch of consumables). If you are successful you can pay for the remaining materials as normal. Or you can decide to continue Crafting, where each additional day spent Crafting reduces the materials needed to complete the item by an amount based on your proficiency rank and your level+1 if you are expert, your level+2 if you are master, and your level+3 if you are legendary in the Craft skill. Add another +1 to your level on a Critical Success as normal.
Any items made with fast Crafting cannot be sold, nor can they be used by anyone except you and your party members. For example, you use a quick handwriting on scrolls that only you and your party members recognize, or the item is missing crucial finishing touches that makes it hard to confirm what it is exactly or to determine the price. If you want to sell an item, you can either Craft normally and then sell it, or use the Earn an Income activity with your Craft skill.
The main problem my players and I encountered was that Crafting does not add much compared to using your Craft skill (or any other skill) to Earn an Income. The only situations where it is better than using the Earn an Income action is when you don't have access to buy an item, not even when you would travel for 1 or several weeks, while you do have a lot of time AND a quiet place where you have all your crafting gear, like a smithy. These situations are just too rare. Furthermore, the benefit of increasing your proficiency in Craft is too small, often you don't decrease the time it takes to craft something. My players did not feel like they were really Master Crafters.
Any change that makes Craft a better activity would raise the question "Then why would you ever use Earn an Income" so our group decided that we would give Craft a benefit but make it so that you can't sell the item, to avoid exploiting this activity. With the rules above, a Master or Legendary Crafter now makes items about 2x-4x as fast as a Trained Crafter, which feels more appropriate, while at the same time it does not really feel as an exploit as they can't sell anything that they craft in this way, nor does it feel unbalanced or unrealistic to make something this much faster.
Finally, we wanted a rule that did not change the core rules too much. No new tables or anything that makes it so that existing feats would need to be changed. I think most Craft-related feats still work with the houserules above.
I like it. I would probably just make a Quick Crafting skill feat (for balancing and stuff) and allow them to sell what they make.
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Isn't the point of increasing crafting primarily the ability to get higher level items out of it, not necessarily to craft things any quicker? Both earning at level+ and using the expert/master/legendary column don't really increase the rate at which you earn by all that much until around level 12-14. It does mean a few days saved in the long run, however.
@Temperans and Omni713: I like those ideas.
@Exocist: You mean the requirements of being master for 9th level items and legendary for 16th level items? If that's indeed the main purpose of increasing your proficiency it sounds a bit boring to me, you'd expect someone to become better at the skill for lower-level items too.
At level 3 you can already see the increased rate of an expert crafter: they could craft a lvl2 spell scroll (costs 12 gp, item level 3) for half price in 8 days instead of 12 days, with the downside that they cannot sell the scroll. With the normal rules, being expert in crafting would not make any difference compared to being trained in crafting in this example, except the higher probability of a success and critical success. Note that for other skills this would be enough of a difference, but the Craft activity has no significant advantages compared to using Earn an Income with the standard rules so I thought it needed something.