Is crafting really pointless in PFS?

[Darrion]

At every game I have mentioned my characters background and blacksmithing, with an eventual plan for magic item crafting, other players and even GMs have chimed in that crafting is a waste of time.

Please note that none of them were disrespectful about my character or my choice, they simply pointed out it was something they stopped wasting their own time on. This makes crafting feel like a 'noob trap'.

Taking crafting (specialty crafting, magical crafting, inventor etc) just to be thematic is hurting your party by not taking medicine feats, combat support feats (Bon Mot) or other directly and mechanically useful feats. To me it seems that characters that invest in crafting are not pulling as much weight as non-crafting characters in society games.

Appropriate level items can always be purchased by characters in society play so scarcity is never an issue.

Items can't be traded so I can't even make something interesting for another player.

I have three questions really.

1. Am I wrong and crafting is actually worth it over buying items?
2. Are characters with crafting feats at a mechanical disadvantage?
3. Can this be fixed without making crafting an auto-take?

Bonus question: Can trading crafted items ever be both useful and balanced for society play?

Please note I am new to both society play and 2e so I may have misread, or completely missed something, that is really obvious. If this is a tired topic I apologise as I did search but no previous discussions seemed to really articulate or answer my questions.

[cavernshark]

Crafting isn't useless, but it is bound in power to the point that the mechanical hoops it takes to get an edge out of it often isn't worth what you put in outside of a few corner cases.

Crafting in PF2 is most effective when 1) you don't have access to items via a settlement level or rarity and 2) you have downtime to really take advantage of creating items. These are usually campaign dependent and -- as you noted -- the global campaign really doesn't support those conditions well. We operate out of Absalom and on-level levels are always available. Uncommon and Rare items are more often controlled by chronicle access or AcP boons. And downtime for players is fixed. Everyone gets 8 days per scenario or 24 days per level. Using all that time for Earn Income nets X money (a small % over your overall net worth), and Crafting in that same time only gets some small % above that.

I think that crafting is balanced for Society play in general, but being balanced may not be fulfilling for the Crafting power fantasy. In general, I think for it to be more fulfilling, we'd need more ways for crafters to be able to use their crafting to access things. More boons for access to rare materials might help in this way, or even some crafting specific boons that allow someone to make an uncommon or rare item (but not just buy it outright).

[NielsenE]

When trying to optimize crafting on PFS2 characters in particular, the important thing to keep in mind is what items do you want, but are willing trade time for money. This is almost never your primary weapons/armor/runes -- you typically want those immediately upon having access/level requirements. Its often an entire level of downtime time to craft one of those for the full discount, and you won't want to be -1 behind for that time.

So the character fantasy of crafting all your own gear is a bad fit,

But if you craft all your skill items, or consumables, or things like the rings of energy resistance can work.

[Squark]

1) Investing in crafting means you get a bit more out of your downtime days than other characters, but it's not a huge increase in wealth, and I think Bards actually do even better using performance, at least if they pick up the Horizon Hunters Storied Talent Boon. It feels balanced if not exciting to me. I do know a few locals who swear by it for making consumables, though.

2) As far as being a burden on the party... Skill feats are not a significant source of power*. Plenty of characters will not use any of their skill feats over the course of a session. That's especially true in PFS where you likely have no idea what the party comp will be each week, since many "power" skill feats depend on synergy. Besides, having extra gold for consumables is helpful for the party.

4) Item trading is such a bookkeeping nightmare that I can't ever see it being allowed in society play.

*Medicine and Intimidation are outliers, but have diminishing returns if multiple party members have invested in them.

[Tomppa]

There was a thread not that long ago that had ideas about crafters being able to trade or sell items to other characters, if you want to take a look at the discussion. It's not really feasible, as it'll be a wealth transfer one way or another, not to mention that it would be either extremely easy to abuse or a horrible burden on bookkeeping.

Most importantly:
If you ever feel that crafting was a poor choice, remember that you can always retrain the feats and skill increases you chose, with 7 days of downtime per feat/skill increase.

Second: A lot of players/characters skil earn income rolls, because the reward is basically pocket change. Crafting has a tiny advantage over earn income: your earnings are calculated based on your level, not your level -2, and the DC is based on the level of the item you're making. You'll get best results if you figure out [a consumable] that your build constantly uses anyway, and you can keep crafting it day after day. That allows you to make the crafting check versus a low DC while earning more than your earn income peers per day of downtime.

To really benefit from crafting, requires spending considerable IRL time on optimising your downtime. For many, it's just not worth the hassle. For those who really dedicate the time to figure out the options, you can get results such as: Rolling DC 15 as a level 4 character with +14 on the skill, critting on 11+, and (effectively) making 1gp per day spent (8gp for the downtime of a scenario). At level 4, you can get 64gp from the scenario, so 8gp extra is 12,5% increase in your earnings. A regular earn income check (DC 16, but your skill and bonuses probably aren't maxed) from the same time is 2,4gp (or 4gp if you crit), so you're earning more than triple (or double) extra compared to them.

One issue is that the best items to craft are: Expensive, lower than your level items that you don't need right now, but those aren't super common in the end (which is why I recommend consumables instead)

[Ferious Thune]

Crafting vs Earn Income is probably not a significant increase, but Crafting the skill is incredibly useful in Society, because it comes up a LOT in skill challenges. More so than Medicine, I would guess. If you are an INT character, and not WIS or CHA, and you don’t have a lot of skill feats to put towards making Battle Medicine and all of the out of combat healing stuff work (Assurance, Continual Recovery, etc), there’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking Crafting. The crafting feats there’s maybe an argument against, but it’s not build breaking if you take them.

[Sir Belmont the Valiant, II]

The crafting skill is _not_ useless in PFS. I have been in many PFS adventures where you want to craft to accomplish one or more of your goals.

PF2 is a party co-operation game, crafting is something you want one or two party members to have. Just like diplomacy or society.

[cavernshark]

I don't think the OP is arguing or even suggesting anything about the in scenario use of the Crafting skill. The post seemed entirely focused on the use of the Crafting skill to use the Craft (Downtime) action in Society.

[Ascalaphus]

Darrion wrote:

1. Am I wrong and crafting is actually worth it over buying items?

If you wanted an item anyway, and have the downtime to spare, it's a bit cheaper.

PFS has to do downtime a bit differently than a home campaign because you run into questions like "so how much time passes between adventures anyway?" when people aren't always playing with the same other people and such. So it's been standardized to 8 days for a normal scenario.

Everyone gets that downtime, you can use it to craft items or to use Earn Income. Roughly speaking, if you already wanted an item, then crafting it is a bit more efficient than doing Earn Income. But it's not a huge amount.

The thing is, none of the things you can do with downtime are really important. Earn Income also isn't that significant. And it's not supposed to be. The important part of the game is what happens in uptime, not what happens in downtime.

The money you earn from adventures is a lot, a LOT more than what you earn in downtime.

Darrion wrote:

2. Are characters with crafting feats at a mechanical disadvantage?

Not significantly. The feats themselves can give you a small discount on getting items you wanted anyway by crafting them. So you might be slightly better geared up than other characters. But in the middle of the adventure, they don't do that much.

However, the Crafting skill itself comes up reasonably often in skill challenges, and doing well at those usually means everyone in the party earns more treasure bundles. So being "the person with Crafting" in the party can be more valuable than "yet another person with Intimidate".

Also, Crafting is needed if you want repair shields.

Darrion wrote:

3. Can this be fixed without making crafting an auto-take?

The way things currently are isn't a huge problem. It's not totally ideal, sure, but not that terrible. And PFS also wants to stay close to standard game rules, to make it easy for new people to join in. So it's not likely that PFS is going to change rules for this.

[Gisher]

Ascalaphus wrote:

...

Also, Crafting is needed if you want repair shields.
...

And for a few niche things like "healing" a poppet familiar.

[Squark]

Regarding crafting feats, if you're specifically asking, "Is taking Alchemical/Magical Crafting+Specialty Crafting (Your choice of consumable)+Impeccable Crafting" a drain on your party, no. That's perfectly fine. Going beyond that (Taking both alchemical and magical crafting as well as seasoned) is excessive, but weird skill feat selection will still not be the difference between sucess and failure.

[Darrion]

I was hoping to repair people's shields, craft items for other players and do some skill checks but it really hasn't come up, which is a mix of luck with groups and the... modules? I have played in.

I think part of my disappointment is that my own character was never really meant to be the primary benefactor of blacksmithing items as they're a metal/fire kineticist and I don't really need many items.

With metal carapace I don't even need to repair my own shields so... odd spot for a metal kineticist blacksmith. Seems like a fairly straightforward character theme but its falling a bit flat.

Everything I do require will be at level and its more efficient for me to buy those items than spend a full level in downtime to craft anything.

This character concept might be best left to a full AP/campaign.

[Tomppa]

Ye, for Society play, you really need to plan your character being self-sufficient, so the odds of someone using a shield but not being able to repair it is really low - after all, what would they do if they went into a scenario where nobody in the party knew how to repair shields?

You also can't craft items for other players, unless you consistently play with the same person every time, and you craft items just so you can lend them out to that person during sessions, since wealth transfer isn't allowed.

Crafting skill checks definitely do come up, though.

[Squark]

Darrion wrote:

I was hoping to repair people's shields, craft items for other players and do some skill checks but it really hasn't come up, which is a mix of luck with groups and the... modules? I have played in.

I think part of my disappointment is that my own character was never really meant to be the primary benefactor of blacksmithing items as they're a metal/fire kineticist and I don't really need many items.

With metal carapace I don't even need to repair my own shields so... odd spot for a metal kineticist blacksmith. Seems like a fairly straightforward character theme but its falling a bit flat.

Everything I do require will be at level and its more efficient for me to buy those items than spend a full level in downtime to craft anything.

This character concept might be best left to a full AP/campaign.

Yeah, that is a concept you want to tailor a party around, and that's just not practical in the vast majority of PFS games.

[Ferious Thune]

It’s also less necessary. In an AP, where you might not always have access to somewhere to buy a magic item, having a crafter in the party is great, and you can do all the things described. In PFS, anybody can buy anything, given that it’s legal in the campaign, and they have access.

As mentioned, you can’t give items to other characters permanently, but also, crafting anything of significance is going to take more than 8 days downtime (except maybe elixirs and the like). You can’t really plan to complete an item for someone else 3 or 4 games from now, if you don’t know if you’ll ever be at a table with that character again.

[Outl]

1. You will gain very little by crafting your own magic items. The days you spend crafting an item could just as easily be spent earning income (with crafting). There are some small gains to be had, for instance with crafting an item you can continue a project over several downtime periods without rolling again, so you remove the risk of rolling a nat 1 for the next few adventures. But this is on average a rather small gain, and it's offset by the day or two you spend setting up each crafting project, plus the cost of formulas. In the end the gain is usually so small (maybe 1% richer) that you'd probably be better off retraining Magical Crafting for something more useful.

There is one exception: if you take Specialty Crafting and Impeccable Crafting (and probably Crafter's Workshop boon as well). Now you almost always get the equivalent of critical successes on your downtime rolls, as long as you keep crafting items of your specialty. So you're making considerably more money during downtime than everyone else (but not twice as much). It will take some planning to always have a useful item to craft, which will mean spending hours and hours poring over books (or AoN) and planning your character's future, and you might even find yourself doing a bunch of mathematical calculations, but it can be done. Also it's complicated so your GMs probably won't be able to help you with it at the end of each session, you'll have to figure it all out yourself. With three skill feats invested and extensive planning, you might end up 3% wealthier overall than if you'd simply chosen Additional Lore instead of Magical Crafting.

2. There are two mechanical disadvantages. First is the obvious tradeoff that you could have taken three different skill feats instead. Most people won't miss an extra 3% wealth, they would definitely rather have the skill feats.

Second is the crafting delays. You can't start crafting a level X item until you're level X. It usually takes 20 or more downtime days to fully craft an item (sometimes even 50 days, it depends on your level), so you'll actually be level X+1 before you can use that item. Right before you finish an item you've invested 90% of the money into it, but can't actually use it yet. You're definitely missing out on some of the usefulness of every item you make.

3. It's not impossible to improve the crafting rules, but I doubt there's any desire to do so. It's just... easier... if magic item crafting is rarely if ever used. However, I can imagine some crafter-specific boons being added (either in the store or on chronicle sheets) that would bypass the crafting system altogether and just give specific benefits, perhaps in exchange for downtime days. But boons like that would only be created if there was a general recognition that crafters are at a disadvantage and need/deserve a bit of a boost.

4. I think trading anything between characters is enough of a bookkeeping nightmare that it will never be allowed. Technically you can already hand items (including consumables) to your party members during any adventure. But as for permanently trading items between characters... I doubt it. It was allowed in 1e PFS so it's not just a theoretical problem, more experienced players have seen the practical consequences of it.