Crafting During Downtime

[Ravingdork]

If I can Craft in 1 day, rather than 4 days, and have 12 days of downtime, can I try again on day 2 after having failed the check?

Or do I waste 8 whole days, even though the result is known after day 1?

[Doug Hahn]

Crafting rules for PFS

Guide special rules wrote:

⠀• Crafting tasks can be continued across as many Downtime days/units as necessary to complete the item.
⠀• Only one crafting project may be started during a Downtime Unit.

I think you should be able to make 3 checks if you're going Slow from a module as they would be distributed in 3 sets of 4 days.* (Not sure how else you could arrive at 12 days of downtime on one chronicle; scenarios are typically 8, or 4 if slow).

*I find crafting too much of a convoluted pain in PFS and therefore haven't done it myself so YMMV, maybe someone else knows more.

[NielsenE]

I'm going to assume you're using the Envoy's Alliance boon to setup the crafting in 1 day, rather than 4.

So if you fail that check, you are locked out of starting another in the remaining 7 days, you'd use those to do regular earn income, or retrain, or some other non-crafting project. Then you could retry the crafting project in the 4 days remaining that are the second downtime unit in your listed example.

[Ravingdork]

NielsenE wrote:

I'm going to assume you're using the Envoy's Alliance boon to setup the crafting in 1 day, rather than 4.

So if you fail that check, you are locked out of starting another in the remaining 7 days, you'd use those to do regular earn income, or retrain, or some other non-crafting project. Then you could retry the crafting project in the 4 days remaining that are the second downtime unit in your listed example.

Alright. I think I grasp the mechanical rule now, but how does that make any logical sense?

I don't lose materials, I've got days left, etc. Conceptually, what exactly is preventing me from contuing the very next day?

Edit: And yes, I have the aforementioned boon (Crafter's Workshop) which reduces Craft to 1 base day rather than 4, plus a Field Commission, which gives me 4 additional downtime days rather than bonus starter items.

[NielsenE]

It might be something that's due for a revisit, but I think its fairly low in priority behind many of the other demands on the OP decision makers.

It arose back when downtime was still a GM responsibility, not a player responsibility, and trying to keep the number of rolls the GM had to monitor/record to an acceptable level. I think I recall some other corner cases that were more about crit fishing and possible abandoning non-crit projects, or something, but I don't remember the full context.

[Pirate Rob]

When Crafter's Workshop was 0 days is was problematically mathematically, especially with something like Junk Tinker giving you a free day of crafting productivity every time you started a project.

The limit of 1/downtime block limits any sort of shenanigans with stopping and starting projects and crit fishing.

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Example I have Junk Tinker and Crafter's workshop and want a bunch of consumables.

Just keep crafting and ending projects, only actually spending additional crafting days on a critical success.

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Like I said, was even worse when crafter's workshop lowered to 0 days instead of 1. There might be some other related issues out there, I'm not sure, but this means we don't have to worry about them.

Of course with crafting getting at least a bit of a rewrite in the Remaster we'll have a whole different set of math to worry about by next year.

[Pirate Rob]

You're also not stuck wasting those days. Do something else with them, earn income, retrain a feat etc.

[Super Zero]

Ravingdork wrote:

NielsenE wrote:

I'm going to assume you're using the Envoy's Alliance boon to setup the crafting in 1 day, rather than 4.

So if you fail that check, you are locked out of starting another in the remaining 7 days, you'd use those to do regular earn income, or retrain, or some other non-crafting project. Then you could retry the crafting project in the 4 days remaining that are the second downtime unit in your listed example.

Alright. I think I grasp the mechanical rule now, but how does that make any logical sense?

I don't lose materials, I've got days left, etc. Conceptually, what exactly is preventing me from contuing the very next day?

Edit: And yes, I have the aforementioned boon (Crafter's Workshop) which reduces Craft to 1 base day rather than 4, plus a Field Commission, which gives me 4 additional downtime days rather than bonus starter items.

"Okay, turns out I really didn't know how to approach this. I need to think about this and make a new plan before I try again."

A check represents a new attempt. If you're just going to go exactly the same thing again, wouldn't the result be the same?

[Richard Lowe]

Ravingdork wrote:

Alright. I think I grasp the mechanical rule now, but how does that make any logical sense?

The same way that dragons can somehow fly despite breaking all the laws of physics (or 6 limbed land vertebrates can even exist!), the same way fireballs have no shockwave, how teleport doesn't send you into space, etc etc. Suspension of disbelief.

Maybe your character gets super upset and frustrated and starts day drinking, it's your character, you get to decide why not if you absolutely must narratively work that into your story.

Mechanically, it's game balance, to stop crafters from just deciding not to craft and repeatedly rolling to get a crit result before actually starting.