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Last session, the party paladin had the misfortune to draw from the critical fumble, resulting in a bent magical sword (-4 to hit, ouch). This has lead to a couple of questions regarding repair:
According to the Craft skill description, "The cost of repairing an item is one-fifth of the item’s price." So I assume that the I am making a Craft check to repair one-fifth of the item's value to determine how long it takes.
But according to the Broken condition, repairing requires a "DC 20 Craft check and 1 hour of work per point of damage to be repaired." with "Most craftsmen charge one-tenth the item's total cost to repair such damage".
So, which one to use? I suppose one could rule that the rules under the Broken are only used for items with the Broken condition, but the difference between something that's broke and something that has the actual named condition seems somewhat arbitrary.
Also, "If the item is magical, it can only be repaired with a mending or make whole spell cast by a character with a caster level equal to or higher than the item's." Is magic really the only way to repair a magic item? Sure, one's a cantrip, but it seems like an awful risk if there's no caster high enough level to fix your primary weapon (as would be the case for the Paladin).
Lastly, Any thoughts on how to handle this "bent" condition from the Critical Fumble Deck? It's not actually damage, and the weapon doesn't have the Broken condition, technically...
look I'n the magic section. basically the mundane repair rules don't help with magic items. you can make whole the item or have s done repair it. I think it basically cost half as much as it would to make it.
The deck was out before PFRPG was official and 3.5 didn't have a "broken" condition. It either was an item with hit points, or it was destroyed. As such, you're going to be ad libbing a bit... I personally would probably treat any card inflicted "damage" as requiring 50% of the total hit points of an item to be repaired at which point the fumbled "broken" condition would go away. Basically it was "Broken" and at 0 hitpoints, but not destroyed.
Making it too easy to get rid of goes against the whole point of the card deck/fumbles. Making it actually inflict significant damage (IE giving it the broken condition and actually removing significan hit points from the item) could be bad if something accidentally inflicts damage (Rolling a 1 on a save and the item gets targeted, acid fog or some other AoE that does damage to items for example) and destroys the magic item. A mending spell cast by a 12th level caster costs all of 30 gold and should do the job in just about all cases (12 hp restored per casting).