I'm considering implementing a house rule to ensure that players will always be able to take advantage of magical crafting feats and character build resources even if downtime isn't available for one reason or another. My proposed rule is:
"Once per level, during your daily preparations, you can choose to put the finishing touches on a crafted object that you had been working on during free moments in the past. Perform the Craft downtime action, but ignore the time requirements. You cannot achieve a critical success when crafting in this manner."
The idea being: I've had several scenarios where multiple levels have passed by and there has been zero downtime available, making the players' crafting skills useless for uncomfortably long stretches.
What do you think?
I'd want to playtest the specific implementation before commenting on its balance and gameplay impact, but I very much like the idea behind this. I'm in full agreement that Crafting and its main activity can feel useless in many adventures due to the lack of downtime, and would very much like it if players were able to have their character Craft during daily preparations, even if it would be in more limited amounts.
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My only feedback is that you're mixing the flavor description and the mechanical impact. Consider moving the "Once per Character Level" phrasing to the very end of the house rule for clarity and to also ensure that you decide on what happens if they FAIL their Check because it is ambiguous in that it seems to imply that failing on that Craft check would lock them out of being able to try again and they'd need to level up to give this another shot which doesn't really feel like it lines up with what you're aiming to do.
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This feels a bit similar to wizards getting a guaranteed couple of new spells every level, which also help set up baseline functionality.
I think you could leave out the roll entirely, and just make it an automatic Success. The important guardrail is already in the base rules: you can only make items your own level or lower.
Arguably you could increase the amount of times per level you can do this at Expert/Master/Legendary.
This could be a really smooth little house rule for those "level 1 to 20 in 2 months" rollercoaster campaigns.
Does the player need to have chosen the item ahead of time, or is this a Prescient Planner type thing?
I was planning on it being a Prescient Planner type thing.