Generally speaking, I've run across several reasons not to allow crafting:
1) Game won't allow much downtime, so the GM doesn't want someone to feel their feats are wasted.
2) GM wants an old-school feel to their game where the PCs get what they get.
2a) GM is afraid of the power level of the PCs/is a controlling GM, so he removes this particular form of agency.
3) GM feels he's been burned in a previous campaign with it and isn't taking chances this time.
4) Got a group of new players, so crafting is being eliminated for now as they learn the game.
5) Finds crafting rules irritating/untenable for some reason and wants to rework them before allowing it.
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In Pathfinder magic item creation feels transactional, the consequence being that there is no sense of wonder, or lore, or danger, or adventure, or mystique, or anything else about magic items that makes them the slightest bit interesting.So, if magic item creation is restricted or banned, there's more wonder in the game? Can't they still buy items? Isn't there still an entire section of the Core book that explains what spells + skills and CL go into making most items, so players know mechanically what creates them? Won't there still be a financial incentive for players to hoard a bunch of items to sell later for better gear?
These are all true. Lots of things regarding items blunt the fantasy of PF1. You can ban item creation and also say "there's no magic marts" such that PCs can't buy, sell or even trade magic items. You stand over your players' shoulders and forbid them from looking at the section of the Core book, AoN, PFSRD and other sources for rules on item creation and the details of each item. All of this would, in theory, force a sense of "wonder" about magic items.
But let's go even a step further: how do you feel about Spellcraft and Knowledge (Arcana)? The fact that Detect Magic is a cantrip? That with a high enough skill check, by RAW a PC can ID a cursed item as well as all the properties of a standard, non-artifact magic item? Does that remove a sense of wonder?
4 PCs, L1, are brutally ambushed by a cross between a python and a velociraptor in the woods. A simple DC 12 Knowledge (Arcana) check ID's the monster as a Tatzlwyrm, a kind of dragon; a higher check tells the PCs to beware it's poison breath weapon and more. Does THAT remove wonder from the game?
My point is only that there are many rules in this system that could, in theory, ruin the "fantasy" of the game. You can either restrict or eliminate all of them, playing with the Swiss cheese of what's left of PF1, not play this system at all, or you could find a way to narrate around these...
I don’t want to ban magic item creation, some players enjoy that aspect of the game, I want to amend the rules to make it more interesting for more people.
My issue is not with character knowledge. It is that magic item creation feels nothing like magic. Magic in literature is dangerous and unpredictable, which makes it interesting. Magic item creation in Pathfinder is safe and predictable, and therefore boring. Magic in Pathfinder works more like well understood technology than our common sense understanding of magic as being different to science and technology.
There is no equivalence to the Tatzylwyrm example you mentioned as there is no Knowledge (arcana) level of skill that by itself solves the issue with confronting this monster. The element of risk that makes the game interesting is always there in encounters with monsters.
Or to consider this from a different perspective. What do players invariably do with magic item creation? They do things like create a cloak of resistance to improve their saving throws. What they are really doing is risk mitigation. Or in other words making the game less risky/more boring. I would prefer that the process of magic item creation was itself risky in some way, that there are consequences when mere mortals use magic to solve their problems. I would prefer that there were hidden dangers with creating and using magic that get more extreme as the magic grows in power.
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Or in other words making the game less risky/more boring. I would prefer that the process of magic item creation was itself risky in some way, that there are consequences when mere mortals use magic to solve their problems. I would prefer that there were hidden dangers with creating and using magic that get more extreme as the magic grows in power.
The kind of thing you're looking for is the way magic works in the Warhammer Fantasy setting. Where even the least of spells runs the risk of the caster exploding into Suddenly Daemons.
As you stated, magic in D&D/Pathfinder is understood, safe, and reliable. People know what it can do and how to use it even if they don't know exactly how it works, much the same way you or I can use a computer or drive a car.
If we’re talking houserules, I change crafting a bit.
1) No crafting feats.
2) The check for magic item creation is not spellcraft but some other skill appropriate to the item. For example, craft jewelry for rings and necklaces.
3) Cost for magic item creation starts at 150% of price. Reducing by a cumulative 5% for every time you’ve made that exact kind of item, to a minimum of 50%. Can’t get this discount from backstory crafting.
There was even the Pharasmin that never got to enchant the daggers but they made special, cobalt-tinted cold-iron daggers, one each for the party members, as a symbol of the group.
I love this particular example.
I don't see a lot of that in my own games, likely because I play with folks that are veterans of several different game systems.
I have however seen a small but sustained burst of passion though from players making their own things. Like, REALLY their own. Inventing a new wondrous item unique to their character, or the one gal that played a ranger and created a set of archery gloves, a special bow and a pair of boots that all worked together.
The main time my group gets excited about a magical item they found is when it's either something with a higher enchantment than they expected based on their level or, more frequently, when it's an item they haven't read about before, which is becoming less and less frequent as the years go on.
Creating their own wondrous items is a reason I could see a lot of GMs banning magic creation feats. One player of mine always tries to push the limit as to what should be allowed but "understands if the answer is no" but also always puts on a bit of a whiny face about it so.... it would get tiring if he were a crafter. (And, on a similar note, if someone else in the group was a crafter he'd frequently try to tell them what to make.)
If we’re talking houserules, I change crafting a bit.
1) No crafting feats.
2) The check for magic item creation is not spellcraft but some other skill appropriate to the item. For example, craft jewelry for rings and necklaces.
3) Cost for magic item creation starts at 150% of price. Reducing by a cumulative 5% for every time you’ve made that exact kind of item, to a minimum of 50%. Can’t get this discount from backstory crafting.wow... that's quite a monetary beating.
In short that means players will buy unless costs also rose to 150%.
That method imposes an overall 10*price penalty to crafting from first until the 20th iteration of that specific item.
It means players mostly craft what they can’t loot or find to buy. It allows loot to often still be interesting without taking away the ability for niche customization.
@Azothath,
You raised an important counterpoint. I wouldn’t make large scale changes to the rules without buy in from the players first. If they really like the crafting rules as is, fine, they stay.
Personally I find the crafting rules boring and lead to design consequences within the game that I think are silly. For example, a Mountain Giant (CR18) has low light vision, see in darkness, and perception of +29. If a group of low level PCs encounter a Mountain Troll it’s virtually guaranteed to be a TPK. Now, let’s be clear, I don’t expect low level characters to be able to defeat high CR monsters, but they should at least be able to hide from them, or bluff them, or outrun them, or survive the encounter in some way that doesn’t rely completely on GM fiat. That for me is a weakness in game design that high level monsters and low level PCs can’t interact when following the rules as written. The reason they can’t is that monsters rarely have genuine weaknesses. And the reason they don’t have genuine weaknesses is that that is part of the design philosophy. Crafting is part of that design philosophy too, it shores up the weaknesses of the PCs so they don’t have genuine weaknesses either.
The design philosophy makes sense, but it leads to a situation where GMs hold back monsters until the PCs are ready to face them. In sandbox style games (my personal favourite) that risks breaking immersion for me.
It’s only a TPK if the creature decides to bother facing what are effectively ants. This is something people forget, most creatures are not just sitting around waiting for other creatures to come close to kill them.Murderhobos are the exception, not the rule. Specially when most high level creatures either want to be left alone or take command of creatures.
Not if you run the creature as described. Mountain Giants like eating humanoids. Are you telling me the anteater is no threat to the ants?
The PCs won’t even spot it coming, it has +21 stealth despite being gargantuan in size, they literally have no chance.
More like, they will eat when they want, not just when the thing shows up. I like eating chicken, I don't go around kill random chickens to eat them. Even if it were a survival situation, I wouldn't just eat without even being hungry.
It’s only a TPK if the creature decides to bother facing what are effectively ants. This is something people forget, most creatures are not just sitting around waiting for other creatures to come close to kill them.Murderhobos are the exception, not the rule. Specially when most high level creatures either want to be left alone or take command of creatures.
Not if you run the creature as described. Mountain Giants like eating humanoids. Are you telling me the anteater is no threat to the ants?
The PCs won’t even spot it coming, it has +21 stealth despite being gargantuan in size, they literally have no chance.
So in your game world humans live in cages constructed by giants until the giants are ready to eat them? I fail to see how your analogy is even remotely applicable to the situation.
Besides, it says in the description what the giant would likely do if it wasn’t hungry, it delights in torturing its prey before feeding. At least if the giant is hungry you can hope for a quick death.
Of course the giant could act against its nature, but that would be GM fiat, which was my original point.
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Casting armor shouldn't affect the "quality" exactly. But it is a problem of fitting. High quality armor was fitted to the individual. Of course, in Pathfinder fitting isn't accounted for at all. Someone 4 feet tall can instantly use the armor of someone 7 feet tall.
Cast iron would be a terrible material for armor though.
Making forms thin enough to be not terribly heavy and filling them successfully is super hard. I'm sure you've seen videos of people trying to cast swords and they're always of terrible quality. Also cast iron has bad impact resistance, which is important for armor. You could get around that to an extent by making it thicker, but that also makes it much heavier.
I don't think anyone ever used armor made from cast iron because it's so ill-suited to such a purpose.
For me it has to do with the fact that the campaigns I run don’t use the 8-hour adventuring day. When the characters are on an adventure, they are active a lot more than that and have little time for other things. The rules in the book are based on that idea and since that is not the case, I adjust what can be done. This might be a house rule, but it is the way I run my campaign. I do not allow crafting during an adventure unless the party is resting or for some reason pausing the adventure. I will also allow it if the party is traveling on a ship or something similar.
As I said I use the ABP rules for my campaign, so the players don’t need to worry about updating the bonus on their equipment, that is taken care of pretty much automatically. A lot of the item's players “need” don’t even exist under these rules. You can’t craft a amulet of natural armor when it does not exist, and the character is already getting a natural armor bonus.
I also give the character downtime between adventures where they can craft as much as they want. If a character really needs a specific item the best time to acquire it is usually between adventures.
One thing that no one has brought up is why a character can make every item in the book without having to do any research. It seems like every character with a crafting feat is automatically aware of every item they can create. Every character who takes craft wondrous items can make every item of the belt, body, chest, eyes, feet, hands, head, headband, neck, shoulder, writs and those that don’t use slot without ever having heard of the item. Some items are going to be obvious, but some are fairly obscure. A cloak of protection is going not going to be hard, but a Dreamwing cape is going to be a bit more obscure. Pathfinder has thousands of magic items so why does every crafting character know about all of them. This is like a programmer in the real world knowing about every piece of software in existence including industry specific programs in an industry they have never worked in.
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One thing that no one has brought up is why a character can make every item in the book without having to do any research. It seems like every character with a crafting feat is automatically aware of every item they can create.
It's not great but a lot of Pathfinder does that sort of thing. I might have a character who has knowledge(arcana), because he is an expert on dragons, but that means he is randomly an expert on all things construct and magical beasts too. And it's pretty ridiculous that many classes know how to use every martial weapon there is. But the game has to pick and choose when to be "realistic" without slowing down the gameplay or effecting "fun" too much
So, The Mandalorian = bad example. Got it. How about Iron Man, the trap and arrow making montage from Conan The Barbarian, forging the rings in Rings of Power, the armor made for Sir William Thatcher in A Knight's Tale, or one of dozens of other fiction or fantasy crafting scenes? I'm not shooting for realism so much as trying to point out that crafting your own or personalizing your gear is a part of many fictional pieces that gamers tend to enjoy.
Also, anecdotally I'd like to point out that while my megadungeon campaign has taken wide swaths of Downtime to craft some major, permanent magic items recently, the vast majority of crafting has either been consumables or cheaper Wondrous Items from 4k GP and below. I'm not going to say that everyone's campaigns run like this but if we're going to restrict or ban all crafting, that has to be spell scrolls, wands and potions as well.
I understand your point, and I can even add to that with another example along similar lines, the scene in Harry Potter where he goes to purchase a wand shows how even shopping at the local magic shop can be made more interesting. Maybe there are some gaming tables who imagine that scene playing out each time their characters visit the local magic store, even though the rules don’t specifically support that idea.
There are so many great examples in movies and literature of how to make magic items interesting and yet Pathfinder has gone the other way and made the rules as written plain vanilla. If players used the item creation rules to customise their characters, then great. My anecdotal experience is that it drives convergence instead, with the same half dozen items appearing on every character sheet. You know the ones I mean: cloak of resistance, ring of protection etc. I think there is a strong case for optional rules that let players further personalise their magic, so that for instance my +1 magic sword is not identical to every other +1 magic sword. They don’t have to be major effects, for instance perhaps my character’s ring of sustenance works mechanically as described but does not suppress my character’s fondness for cheese.
Casting armor shouldn't affect the "quality" exactly. But it is a problem of fitting. High quality armor was fitted to the individual. Of course, in Pathfinder fitting isn't accounted for at all. Someone 4 feet tall can instantly use the armor of someone 7 feet tall.Cast iron would be a terrible material for armor though.
Making forms thin enough to be not terribly heavy and filling them successfully is super hard. I'm sure you've seen videos of people trying to cast swords and they're always of terrible quality. Also cast iron has bad impact resistance, which is important for armor. You could get around that to an extent by making it thicker, but that also makes it much heavier.
I don't think anyone ever used armor made from cast iron because it's so ill-suited to such a purpose.
They didn't cast iron for weapons historically, they cast steel. The people in the videos are showing their ignorance; note that the "drop forged" steel tools that you buy in the hardware store are made using basically the same "casting" techniques that were used for weapons.
For plate armor, by the late Middle Ages armorers would cut sheet steel (formed using waterwheel-powered trip hammers; and simple rolling presses as they refined the techniques) based on a pattern for the armor pieces. The pieces were then shaped over forms and "trimmed to fit" an individual. Creating each piece separately from scratch was hardly ever done because it was so inefficient and time consuming.
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One thing that no one has brought up is why a character can make every item in the book without having to do any research. It seems like every character with a crafting feat is automatically aware of every item they can create.
In my current campaign, I have homebrewed a lot of crafting rules and I am giving a lot of money, downtime, and extra skill points, but most magic items are complex and require getting a blueprint of how they are done or researching the procedure. Extensive (and costly) libraries will help, and the research you do will increase the value of the library and how much it helps in research.
"Straight" items, like rings or protection, cloaks of resistance, weapons and armors with +x enhancements, and other similar single-function items are common blueprints, and anyone with knowledge arcana or spellcraft knows how to make them. Same thing for items that simply contain a spell (potions, scrolls, wands).Stuff with multiple functions or unusual properties is a different matter. Either you buy a blueprint or develop it from scratch.
Magic shops usually have simple items on sale or those that will attract rich customers, while having very few showy pieces for advertising purposes.
That way the players will have the basic necessities (and even stuff that doesn't exist in the rules but I feel would interest wealthy buyers, like a dining set that automatically purifies the food), but unusual magic items will be stuff they find or make themselves.
They could order it from a shop, but it is like asking for a car made from scratch to your specific requirements, extremely costly.
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For any DMs who ban crafting because it makes it too easy to get specific magic items… why not simply remove the DC+5 for missing components rule and enforce CL requirements? Doing this would make limit what magic items the party can get from crafting by requiring someone to have the required spell(s) and restricting some items to late game… in many cases they will be able to afford to buy the item before they have the CL to craft it even…
Crafting was really costly in 3.5. It's not strange that Pathfinder made it easier, but they did it in too many places at the same time.
Besides what Chell mentioned, there was an additional XP cost to the gold cost. When getting rid of the XP cost, some other cost, like more gold, should have been added.
Crafting was really costly in 3.5. It's not strange that Pathfinder made it easier, but they did it in too many places at the same time.
Besides what Chell mentioned, there was an additional XP cost to the gold cost. When getting rid of the XP cost, some other cost, like more gold, should have been added.
I disagree that increased cost would have been the way to go.
Get rid of the ability to increase the craft DC for missing components and instead make them absolutely required and enforce minimum caster level and you go a long way to making crafting so challenging that you'd likely see few characters do it. You're certainly not going to be adventuring and using your high level spell slots to craft in the same day.
Crafting was really costly in 3.5. It's not strange that Pathfinder made it easier, but they did it in too many places at the same time.
Besides what Chell mentioned, there was an additional XP cost to the gold cost. When getting rid of the XP cost, some other cost, like more gold, should have been added.
I disagree that increased cost would have been the way to go.
Get rid of the ability to increase the craft DC for missing components and instead make them absolutely required and enforce minimum caster level and you go a long way to making crafting so challenging that you'd likely see few characters do it. You're certainly not going to be adventuring and using your high level spell slots to craft in the same day.
Exactly… and some items have requirements that might not even be met by anyone in the party… you need a magus to craft gloves of arcane striking… want something crafted that requires a spell only found on the cleric spell list and you don't have a cleric, oracle, or warpriest? Guess the party isn't getting that item made… you want to craft while adventuring… what spells does the item you’re making require? Guess you’ll be preparing those every day until the item is done being crafted or you wont be making progress that day…
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For any DMs who ban crafting because it makes it too easy to get specific magic items… why not simply remove the DC+5 for missing components rule and enforce CL requirements? Doing this would make limit what magic items the party can get from crafting by requiring someone to have the required spell(s) and restricting some items to late game… in many cases they will be able to afford to buy the item before they have the CL to craft it even…
Because a large percentage of the prerequisites is arbitrary, especially if you allow other books besides the CRB. Often later books have spells way more appropriate than what was used for the item.
3.5 crafting was just a way to game your XP totals and be at a lower level against higher level enemies, gaining more XP while adding more power with crafted items instead of random treasure. XP costs were not actually a cost, but a benefit.
So true.
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I've played & GM'd for years in PFS where I'd say the vast majority of the players & GMs were totally for 'pay your money and get the RAW item exactly as is, no changes'. It was interesting but not at all creative.
I've never played PFS, but in my home campaign I decided to implement a house rule Monte Cook once mentioned, where wands don't have charges but instead have a 2% chance of stopping working every time you used them.
(The maths seemed a bit off to me, but I don't have the skills to work out the extent, if any, to which this method penalised the players.)
Anyway, the players all objected on the basis that "we might buy a wand and only get 1 charge out of it, which would be unfair."
And one of the players started recording "virtual" charges to see how many charges each wand actually had. Thereby completely negating the reduced-bookkeeping benefit.
I can only imagine the uproar if I messed with anything more important than wands.
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Don't have time to look it up right now about to leave for work but as I recall (been awhile since I ran a game) my last version of crafting rules wound up looking like . . .
1) No crafting with missing components, if you don't have the required resources you can't make it.
2) You need appropriate crafting stations e.g. a scroll requires a writing impliment, ink and a suit of armour requires a forge.
3) Fabricate can not make magic items only mundane ones, for a permanent magic item you need to weave the spell into the item as its being made. I think I had a high spellcraft check exception for enchanting or modifying existing items in the works but I never finished it to my satisfaction.
4) Caster level in items could not be ignored if you weren't of sufficient level you can't make it any more than you can cast wish at 1st level.
5) Crafting an item requires a craft skill check and crafting a magic item required a craft skill check + a spellcraft check. However you don't need a feat for it. So to make a magic staff you'd need to make craft checks and spellcraft checks somewhere where you have access to sanding and cutting tools.
6) Masterwork items are not a +1 only you had a range of options you could fashion that were similar e.g a sword could be well weighted +1 to attack, sharp +1 to damage, oranate +1 to diplomacy and so on.
7) Failed checks can produce nothing, destroy resources or make a shoddy weapon that gives a -1 penalty depending on how badly you fail.