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For some reason, organized play has always neglected crafters...
The current system even neglects it so bad that its weird and honestly kind of op for crafters.
But there could be so much more interplay and player community and cooperation with one tiny, intsy, tinsy tweek.
Let players sell items they craft to other players.
I actually came to this realization when I went around asking about a crafters guild. I wanted to know if there is a crafters guild (and upon finding out there isn't one... I may make one).
but supposedly its not a thing that you can trade items with others. Some how, it was said the reason was "To make sure all characters are on an even playing field."
but it's actually pretty irrelevant to that.
I replied to them with:
"its not uneven if someone buys a suit of adamentium armor from you at the cost it took you to make it.
the only thing there is they are benefitting from is that you played a module they have not had, and may never have, the opportunity to play in.
hell... a crafter loses downtime they could have spent earning gp when they craft (prep days).
it would actually make sense/balanced/fair/even if they could then turn around and sell a suit to another player at full cost (or perhaps 60 percent when it cost them 50 percent). so they could actually make up for those prep days they didnt earn during"
To extend on that, if I craft something at 50 percent and sell it to a player at 50 percent market value... its basically as if they themselves crafted the item. I do not earn any additional gold, I have exactly as much gold as I had before crafting and selling the item. If they had the craft skill... they could have made the item at 50 percent anyways and therefore they did not spend any more gold than they would have for a player craftes item.
Some people (like myself) LOVE playing a crafter, the spirit of making items is joyful... and it feels even better knowing people are slaying or staying alive using something I made for them. it feels REALLY good actually... like I'm helping and connecting with others and I don't have to be there risking being annoying.
I know I cant be the only one that feels this way (law of probability and all that).
So... WHY cant a player buy a composite bow from me? or arrows... or obsidian gauntlets?
Especially when I really REALLY want to make items for people (especially on their dime).
and I'm sure there are people out there with access to fun materials others would LOVE to pay to have nice gear made out of.
Imagine people engaging over simple transactions, and trading stories about that one adventure where they found fun and unique things. Hell, imagine all the new stories as people here these fun times and try to strike out to make their own stories... inspired by those who blazed the trail before them. Oh how the bards will sing.
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What you suggest might lead to this:
Player 1-3 play repetables up to lvl 4. Then give all their gold to lvl 1 player they have been cooperating with. Resulting player having like 300 gold above their paying grade. Repeat 3 times, and we have player with over 1000 gp at lvl 1. This completely breaks balance.
Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku
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It's highly unlikely or near impossible that Organized Play would allow trading between players. Some reasons:
1. the bookkeeping would be absolutely a nightmare, and would be basically impossible for a GM/VO to verify when auditing a character. How would you verify that the crafter A really spent the downtime to craft the item character B bought?
2. At what price would the crafter sell the item to the other PC? If it's at the cost the crafter spent (pay 50%, craft for the 50% discount), you would be effectively transfering wealth to the buyer, as they are getting a 1000gp item by paying just 500gp.
If it's at the regular cost of the item, then the buyer isn't getting anything out of it - they could have just bought the item regularly for the same price - but the crafter is essentially getting extra gold. Crafting as a downtime activity 'earns' better than earn income because it's always just a discount and you can't turn it into actual gold, but with this method you could. Either method results in someone having more gold at their disposal than they should have. At best, it would give the buyer double the downtime - their own, plus someone else crafting, and at worst, it would give permanent 50% discount to all items for some characters.
2.5. Your argument that "it's as if they crafted it themselves" is not true - the buyer didn't invest skill increases or feats or equipment or downtime into crafting. You could have a dedicated crafter for a single of your own/friends PC, and effectively double their wealth by just having the crafter PC craft and sell everything to them at 50% the cost of what it would regularly cost.
3. Some items are, by their nature, 'limited'. You can only get access through a chronicle sheet to some uncommon/rare items - and those items are a reward for playing that adventure. Thus, only 2 (or 3, with a replay) of your characters can ever get their hands on that piece of equipment. Allowing a crafter to sell it to whoever would break this 'reward' and 'limit', as suddenly the rare limited item is at everyone's disposal.
3.5. Tracking access would be impossible too. "Oh I bought this [unique item] from player A's crafter." "Oh, yeah, I crafted that, I'm player A. yeah I bought my own copy of the item from some crafter at a convention 6 months ago. Yeah I think they said they bought it from someone else. Yeah sorry I have no idea where the original copy came from, I just assume there's an adventure/charity boon/AcP boon somewhere that gives you access to this."
OR you'd have to share copies of chronicle sheets for items when you sell them, which circles back to point 1 - bookkeeping horror.
In short, the system would be just ripe for abuse and cheating, and even with strict oversight it would create uneven playing field where some characters gain way more than others.
tl;dr it's just not necessary. You can buy all the equipment you want, at the regular price, except for the items that you aren't supposed to be able to buy. PC crafters would either mess with the regular price, or the restrictive rarity on some items.
... The only sensible way to implement this would be:
Buyer has to also have access to the item or they can't buy it
Buyer spends gold equal to the printed cost of the item
Crafter receives gold equal to the gold they spent, not for any discount they got through crafting (so typically 50% of the gold)
But at that point, there would be literally no point for these rules, as nobody gains any sort of benefit and the crafter just loses their downtime, effectively, so why bother.
Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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I am very much against giving players permanent advantages for which groups they have played in or people they have played with. It was bad enough in PFS1 when people got carried into the upper tiers and thus significantly increased their income.
There are other arguments against this proposal but honestly, this type of thing is better suited for a campaign of a game like FF14 where crafting gets a lot of attention.
I think the closest you can get in PFS2 to being a crafter who provides items to others is being an alchemist or similar class that has a daily amount of items to share,
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It's highly unlikely or near impossible that Organized Play would allow trading between players. Some reasons:
1. the bookkeeping would be absolutely a nightmare, and would be basically impossible for a GM/VO to verify when auditing a character. How would you verify that the crafter A really spent the downtime to craft the item character B bought?
2. At what price would the crafter sell the item to the other PC? If it's at the cost the crafter spent (pay 50%, craft for the 50% discount), you would be effectively transfering wealth to the buyer, as they are getting a 1000gp item by paying just 500gp.
If it's at the regular cost of the item, then the buyer isn't getting anything out of it - they could have just bought the item regularly for the same price - but the crafter is essentially getting extra gold. Crafting as a downtime activity 'earns' better than earn income because it's always just a discount and you can't turn it into actual gold, but with this method you could. Either method results in someone having more gold at their disposal than they should have. At best, it would give the buyer double the downtime - their own, plus someone else crafting, and at worst, it would give permanent 50% discount to all items for some characters.2.5. Your argument that "it's as if they crafted it themselves" is not true - the buyer didn't invest skill increases or feats or equipment or downtime into crafting. You could have a dedicated crafter for a single of your own/friends PC, and effectively double their wealth by just having the crafter PC craft and sell everything to them at 50% the cost of what it would regularly cost.
3. Some items are, by their nature, 'limited'. You can only get access through a chronicle sheet to some uncommon/rare items - and those items are a reward for playing that adventure. Thus, only 2 (or 3, with a replay) of your characters can ever get their hands on that piece of equipment. Allowing a crafter to sell it to whoever would break this 'reward' and 'limit', as suddenly...
I gave a very detailed reply to this but the mods deleted it for some reason.... I'm not going to put the effort into remaking it (especially since it could be deleted again and I may even get punitive actions against me... for whatever reason...
just want to make sure its understood I did take the time to address this. the only real issue was with the limited but its a small issue.
I don't like that all my replies were deleted... kinda feels like mod bias.
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What you suggest might lead to this:
Player 1-3 play repetables up to lvl 4. Then give all their gold to lvl 1 player they have been cooperating with. Resulting player having like 300 gold above their paying grade. Repeat 3 times, and we have player with over 1000 gp at lvl 1. This completely breaks balance.
I also presented this completely irrelevant talking point was also said on the same discussion in discord and my reply to it from discord:
thats dumb. I never once suggested people can just GIVE others stuff. You are feeding a talking point.
I said trade and sell. someone makes item, others pay value for item.
resulting in same gold amount. your rhetoric immediately fails
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Venture-Captain, North Carolina—Central Region
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I see two main concerns with this option.
1) As others have mentioned, it creates a wealth imbalance.
> If you and the buyer always play at the same tables together, your spent downtime kinda evens out against their extra wealth (even if they paid half, it still counts as 100% for their total wealth value). But if you're always at the same table, you can already emulate this by "lending" the item to them every scenario, and they can "lend" you item(s) of an equivalent value.
> If you're not at the same table, that's when the imbalance shows. They suddenly have gear worth more than the average character, while you at your tables have less cash/gear than average. While some players find Downtime's value to not even be worth counting, the Buyer PC effectively having a free extra half an item is more significant. That's on top of the complexities others have stated about tracking who had the original access to the item in the first place.
2) Given how few Downtime days each PC gets in Society play, I'm not sure this would even be efficient. Let's take two examples:
A) low-grade cold iron longsword. Level 2 item, costs 44gp. So 22gp and 2(or 1) days of setup. Even assuming you got a critical, you'd only make 5sp of progress each extra day, meaning paying nothing more than that 22gp takes you 44 extra days (or 36, since you'd level mid-process). So you're out ALL of your Downtime for just over a level and a half, and the Buyer PC is up 22gp from his expected wealth.
B) Let's go adamantine longsword instead. First you spend the AcP for the boon for adamantine. Lvl 11 item, 1,540gp. You pay 770gp and 2/1 days to start. With Master Crafting and a critical, best case scenario, it takes you 56 extra days to finish that sword without paying a copper more. You've just spent 20 of your own AcP and ALL your Downtime for 2.3333 levels just to give your friend an extra 770gp wealth... At a time when scenarios can grant up to 1,880gp each, and your friend's been waiting around for 7 scenarios
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Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku
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Agree with what Kyrand said, and that's just assuming that everybody is using this system fairly - it would be extremely easy to abuse:
Player 1: 15gp to start. Plays two games, 14gp per game in gold rewards. Has now 43gp. Purchases a +1 sword (35gp), armor (3gp), Adventurer's pack (1,5gp), and a minor elixir of life (3,5gp), has 0,5gp left, plus two scenarios worth of earn income (0,8gp) ) 1,3gp left
Player 2: Decides to trade between his own characters (or if that is explicitly banned, with the characters of his friends who are in on this)
15gp to start. Plays 1 game, has 29gp. Buys a +1 sword from 'a crafter friend', 17,5gp, and an armor at 1,5gp. Maybe they'll buy the adventurer's pack at book price cause it includes lots of items, 1,5gp. They have 8,5gp left, plus earn income from one adventure, 0,4gp, total 8,9gp. They could buy Almost 3 minor elixirs, or almost 6 if they bought them from their 'crafter friends. They'd have 5 consumables - 15gp worth - more than player 1's character, despite having earned 14 gold less from adventures.
Percentually, that's a huge difference in the assumed wealth.
One big issue is that when player 1 sits down at a table and GM goes "Oh, your level 1 character already has a +1 sword? Doable, but just to double check, let's see your chronicle sheets and list of purchases" it's easy to verify that the player's bookkeeping checks out.
For player two? How could the GM possibly verify that the character who sold the sword at 50% actually exists? Or that they didn't sell the sword multiple times to different players? Or that even if the characters do exist, that they are actual characters that actually get played, and not just a friend's agreement to "Ye I'll create a crafter for you and you create a crafter for me and we both get our weapons at half price" agreement?
You keep saying that there's no wealth transfer and that character's wouldn't be 'giving' each other things - But as you can see, there clearly is wealth transfer, and it creates an inequality. Player 1 did not do get transferred wealth, player 2 got 3 other characters' downtimes worth of gold transferred to them. Not directly, but that's the end result.
There's also the argument that "they could have crafted it themself" - no, they could not have. Player 2's character could have started crafting the sword, but it would have cost them 17,5gp to do so. Assuming they rolled success (DC 16, their bonus is between 1 and 6, so at best 50% chance):
After the first 2 days, at level 1, they get 2 sp per day spent as a discount. So after the first game, they've spent 6 days crafting for 1,2gp discount.
As they paid 17,5gp, the remaining balance on the sword is 17,5-1,2=16,3gp - They could not finish the crafting even if they wanted, because they could not afford to pay the remaining balance as they only have 29-17,5=11,5gp left.
Indeed, they could keep crafting the sword during the next downtime too (8x0,2=1,6gp) and another adventure (1,6gp).
That's 3 adventures, so they get a level up, but keep crafting because they really want that 50% discount:
Another adventure (this time at level 2) 8x0,3gp = 2,4gp.
Second adventure at level 2, another 2,4gp.
Third adventure at level 2, 2,4gp.
That's another 3 adventures, another level up. The character is now level 3. Crafting now gives 0,5gp per day.
One more adventure, this time at level 3: 4gp from crafting:
The character has now earned a total discount of 16,4gp, out of 17,5gp. They've spent 17,5gp, total of SEVEN adventure's worth of downtime, and they haven't yet finished the craft. They could spend the difference, 1,1gp to finish it immediately (for a total cost of 18,6gp for the sword) but at this point, they've done their entire level 2 + 2 additional adventures without a +1 sword, compared to the player 1's character who just bought the sword after 2 adventures.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku
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And that's the benefit and drawback of crafting. Earn income from the same duration (3x level 1 scenarios, 3x level 2 scenarios, 1x level 3 scenarios) would have been 4gp in total, ASSUMING that you succeed on all 7 rolls (so probably a bit less). Crafting discount was 16,4gp - 12,4gp more -, and you only needed to succeed on a single roll - but you had to wait 7 scenarios (even though you spent 17,5gp immediately) to get the discount while earn income got it gradually and you got the item later than where it was first possible, meaning you had to play several adventures without it's help.
Trading would completely bypass this balancing benefit/drawback, letting some other (probably never actually getting played character) suffer the drawbacks, while letting your actually played character enjoy the benefits, in advance.