Crafting ideas

[GorTeX]

Many people have noted that with the current crafting rules, it often takes less time to create a High DC item than it does to create a simarly valued item with a lower DC. I know that there is the option to increase the DC by 10 to help with the time, but I've always felt limited by the requirement to only increase the DC by multiples of 10...why couldn't you just increase it by 3??

Why not seperate the DC of the object from the time taken to create it? Instead of 'Check' times DC for the amount made in a week, why not just 'Check squared' (as long as the check is greater than or equal to the DC)?

Another issue that I've had with the craft system is that crafting very expensive things (like Armor or anything with most special metals) takes an prohibitively long time (took me almost 3 years to craft admantine Battle plate...with helpers and a forge that both let me work all day AND added 20 to my craft check!).

I think that the crafting rules wouldn't be horribly changed by this: for items valued at 500gp or more, your caculation (check*DC or Check*check from above) would be in GP/week (instead of SP/week). For items valued at 5000gp or more, your caculation would be in PP/Week.

 

[airwalkrr]

Hi GorTeX,

Since I only know one GorTeX who spells his name like that, I am presuming you are probably the GorTeX I know. (Hi Cory, it's Theo if this is the person I'm thinking of.) The reason you can only add 10 to the Craft DC, imho is probably a balance issue. Taking 10 on crafting is a good way to get things done, as long as you can take 10 to meet the DC. The fact that you can only add 10 to the DC represents the fact that you need to achieve a significant level of skill before you can consistently produce a "rushed" item of the same quality without wasting resources and making mistakes. If you could add whatever number you wanted, you could simply tailor the DC to your liking so that you could always take 10 and meet an optimal crafting time. That said, the crafting rules are so underused it probably wouldn't break the game to let your PCs do that so I don't think it would be a problem.

The problem with a "check squared" rule is that it creates a vast disparity of time required for rolling a 1 versus rolling a 20. Suppose I have a +5 on my check. That is the difference between 36 sp worth of crafting and 676 sp worth of crafting, as opposed to a maximum of 260 sp worth of crafting. It simply reduces the disparity of item crafting. When you are actually making something (in RL), you usually do so within a similar amount of time and squaring everything skews your resultant time a lot. Sometimes it will take me 10 days to make a model car but other times I can finish it in 1 day? That's not the way it works.

As for items taking an inordinate amount of time to craft, even a penultimate master dwarven craftsman (20th level expert) from the DMG2 would have taken a little over a year to make 17,500 gp armor. Battle plate is not simple to make, especially out of adamantine, the hardest metal to forge.

 

[GorTeX]

yes, that's me

I imagine that most people crafting will take 10 if their skill is good enough to make the DC but not high enough to auto make it. Taking 10 not only evens out the time required (no matter how you determine it), but also guarantees there are no losses.

Yea, adamantine armor (especially heavy) should take a bit to make.

Looking at it with actual numbers, the reduction for over 5000gp items is probably a bit much.

Say crafting a suite of full plate (dc18), check (taking 10) is 25.
Normal: 33.3 weeks
check squared: 24 weeks
Normal, but in gp/week: 3.3 weeks
check squared, gp/week: 2.4 weeks

make it out of adamantine (adds a 15000gp, DC20 component)
Normal: 333.33 weeks (that's almost 6 and a half years)
check squared: 265 weeks (still 5 years)
Normal, with gp/week: 33.3 weeks. (over half a year)
check square, with gp/week: 26.4 weeks (almost exaclty half a year)

If you did the reduction for 5000gp items I suggested orriginally, it cuts it down too much (I shoudl have run the numbers 1st)...6.3 weeks normal, and 4.8 with check squared.

I guess I'm one of the few that is actually interested in crafting mudane items (and armor seems to be the only one that takes too long, IMO)