Crafting materials and more materials?

[Drakken97]

So read the quotations and I'll present my problem afterwards.

"You must supply raw materials worth at least half the
item’s Price. You always expend at least that amount
of raw materials when you Craft successfully"

"If your attempt to create the item is successful, you expend
the raw materials you supplied. You can pay the remaining
portion of the item’s Price in materials to complete the item
immediately, or you can spend additional downtime days
working on it."

I cannot for the love of role-playing understand that when you roll your check after 4 days and it IS successful (meaning your create the item even though its not technically "completed") and you expend half the items cost in materials, HOW does expending another half of materials (the same amount of materials) complete it immediately and not another 4 days? Sounds like you'd have an awful lot left over.

Example
Say half the items cost in materials is 4 ingots you craft the item over 4 days and with a successful craft check you create the item but to complete it you use 4 more ingots instantly. What? What sense does this make? If the check and days spent determines whether you make the item how does using the SAME AMOUNT of materials complete it instantly?

I'm a logical person and this I cannot make into logical sense. If ANYONE can explain this better than "its a cheap way of saying it either cost you full price to make an item thus making no money on it OR spending many days to create something at half the cost" then PLEASE do.

Just can't seem to wrap my head around this at all.

[Nocte ex Mortis]

Either you had the materials ready at hand and were working on them at the same time, or you’re slowly procuring the rest or having to finish up now that the skeleton/prototyping is done.

[Aducan]

So, I think this is a place where you have to accept that the mechanical text isn't neccessarily going to represent the fiction with as much accuraccy as, well, the mechanics.

The way I've understood it is that, if after 4 days you've successfully made the item, one of two things happen.

1) If you decide to finish the item, we retroactively retcon that you bought the full materials 4 days ago and have therefore had enough materials all along to complete the item, or

2) If you decide to work another 4 days, then you only ever bought half the materials of the item and have been working longer in order to make do with what you have and stretch your resources.

So even thought the text says that you only gather half your materials in the initial 4 day crafting period, I think you can't take that mechanical text as 100% representative of the fiction, unless you can find a way to justify using up the other half of the materials in one day (spending the other half of material cost to finish the item on day 4).

However, now that I think about it, you probably can!

If you wanted to be more faithful to the rules text, you could probably just say that the character uses the other half of the materials as part of the 4th day finalization of the item; just beacuse it took 4 days to use up half of the materials doesn't mean it would take 4 days to use up the other half. Two reasons for this:

1) It's only half the materials in the monetary sense, not pure weight sense. So yes, the first half of materials might be 4 iron ignots, to make a sword, but the other half of materials might be the leather of a rare beast and a strange gem to be used for the handle wrapping and pommel respectively. Applying these componeants wouldn't take as long as forging the ignots, but they would still account for half the item's price. Speaking of time,

2) It takes less time to apply the second half of materials than the first half. So, we might use 4 ignots to make the frame work of the shield, which takes 4 days and involves ardous work, but when we're done with the shield's skeleton, we can either spend 4 more days scavenging the scrap left over from the first 4 day process to finalize the shield, or we can buy 4 more ignots worth of iron sheets to quickly finalize the process. (It's just an example, I'm not a shieldsmith!)

The examples are meh, but I think the principles still make sense and hopefuly that comes across.

But that's just my opinion. Both justifications make sense to me, but that doesn't mean they have to make sense to you, if you disagree. :)

[Otiamros]

Here's how I square the fiction with the mechanics.

Each item has a market value, and a material value. The market value is the cost in the Core Rulebook. The material cost is 50% of that, and includes only the bare minimum materials/labor/rental costs required to make/forge/fortify/brew the item in the slowest way possible (being the cheapest).

The 4day windup time is mostly spent hunting down and securing access to appropriate workshops,tools, and skilled assistants (where necessary). It is mostly NOT a character bent over an oven or a cauldron and babysitting it for 96 hours.

The ACTUAL crafting begins on day 4, and that day is captured by the die roll. This is when you have some idea of how things are going - if the materials you gathered are up to snuff or defective somehow, or the workshop you are working in has a terrible accident the day you are there, etc.

During the course of that day, you decide based on your die roll whether to finish or take your time. If you decide to finish NOW your character has the option to "grease the wheels" as a busy adventurer with cash to blow. So you decide you need this done tomorrow and hire extra help, use the more expensive reagents that work faster, spend extra cash to hire more help so you have more hands, and buy your way past the line for access to the guild's forge or rare catalyst exactly when you need it.

Or you can take your time like the other craftsman: you do all the work yourself, you wait your turn for access to the forge/cauldron, and you use the cheap ingredients that you know how to work with even though they're harder to shape or catalyze- and take more time. Hence, if you go all the way on this option you never have any more net cost of raw materials put into the item - you're still using the same 50% you bought at the beginning.

That second option is just reflected in the "reduce cost" portion of the crafting (day 5+). I imagine Paizo wrote the rules this way because they're easier to parse for playability -- specifically for earn income purposes -- thinking of it as a discount capped at 50% of the market price.

[Super Zero]

Given that the cost is in place of taking time to do it yourself, I figured it representing buying the rest of the parts of the item already completed.

"I forged the magic blade myself, but hired some local craftsmen to sharpen it, make the handle, and assemble it because our party had to get back on the road."
"I was brewing healing potions, but helped it congeal faster by mixing in some potions I was able to buy in town; now I have twice as much."
"I did these intricate carvings myself, but I cannibalized some old ones for the structural components to save time."