Crafting, Resources, and D&D

[GnomeWorks]

Old-school D&D, to my understanding, has a significant "resource management" aspect to it - resting was more difficult, wandering monsters more common, and "resources" more rare.

In this context, I generally understand resources to mean spells, as that's typically what it means in a d20 context, the system I'm primarily familiar with.

I'm not talking about spells, though.

Item creation has generally been relegated to backgrounds or fluff skills, often with no real use past the first couple levels, if they're even useful then. So what if your 15th-level fighter is a blacksmith - unless he can make magical weapons and armor with that skill, it's worse than useless, as those skill points could have been spent in something useful like tumble or whatever.

I find this unfortunate.

I mean, what's one of the advantages of adventuring? Loads of money. Adventurers don't need day jobs, because adventuring is, effectively, a job. You find lots of money and loot, and you trade in that money for loot you want. Crafting requires spending money to buy "raw materials," and then the end product is something you probably won't use anyway because it sucks, and the return on investment is terrible comparable to adventuring.

But what if crafting were the means of money generation for an adventuring party? Or just resource management in general?

Instead of finding a massive hoard of wealth in a dungeon, say adventurers only find a smattering of coin, and a bunch of stuff that could be turned into useful things. Like raw materials, or poorly-made equipment that could be reprocessed into more useful stuff. Instead of dragons sitting on piles of wealth, maybe they roost in areas with rare mineral veins, which the adventurers can exploit after the dragon is dealt with.

In a lower-power game, with significantly less magic, crafting can become useful, too. If the fighter's weapon gets sundered or his armor gets damaged, having a person in the party who can repair it on the road - or in the dungeon, even - would be infinitely preferable to having to trek back to town, or use whatever random loot you find. Instead of crafting being a fluff skill that is treated as a dumping ground for skill points, it becomes a valued ability, something you want in the party as valued as exploration or interaction skills (which will hopefully be more valued in 5e than in the past).

Sure, this kind of moves away from the Conan-esque "kill things and take their stuff" sort of style. But honestly I find the idea of monsters sitting on huge piles of cash kind of weird anyway - I mean, once in awhile it could make sense, but all the time? Doing away with cash-oriented adventuring also would help with the weird economics you run into in d20 (which was the fuel for my thinking about this sort of thing to begin with), and eliminates the crazy price inflation that happened with high-end items.

Would anybody else like to see crafting be a more integral part of the game?

 

[Dandu]

The option to have it a more integral part of the game seems like a good idea, as it would better cater to different styles of play.

 

[Zustiur]

I'd like to see physical resources as a more integral part of the game. I'm less fired up about crafting.

 

[Ryujin]

One of my favourite 'side quests', from my 3.0 days, was the DM having my expert bowyer Fighter searching for just the right piece of wood, to make his Magnum Opus bow. Every adventure held a greater or lesser part of that quest and I played the character as being as much an artist, as a maker of weapons.

I don't mind the idea of Craft being a major part of the game, but to do so I think that two conditions must first be met; the players must be of like mind and the ability to craft must not impact/influence choices that are needed in order to advance as a character, within a given class. The make my expert bowyer character was a significant drain on a limited skills resource. Character concept tends to be more important to me than power gaming, but being able to maintain basic utility is pretty darned important.

 

[howandwhy99]

Crafting is a big part of the LARP community and there they actually create all kinds of stuff. Clothing, weapons, even buildings for which to play in.

For D&D, crafting is almost exclusively part of the class one plays. Warriors might create arms and armor. Thieves traps, hidden caches, secret doors, and the tools of their trade. Wizards make magic items, of course, as do Clerics, but of a different sort.

Basically, almost all of the crafts and professions are simply NPC classes. They do stuff that most PCs don't because they don't have a lot to do with adventuring (at least adventures quite different from finding a rock for your stone wall).

In terms of constructing a world and any communal groups of creatures living in that world, then resource collection, construction, trade and also service are probably going to be part of that game system. The Player Characters don't have to do these things, but navigating a city? Even a farm village is a complex community interconnected web of interactions that make up its culture. By default PCs are strangers in a strange land and learning how to get what they want or at least what they need can and probably should be part of the game.

What I don't see as a core campaign focus is a group of people deciding to get together to adventure through an imaginary barn raising or reaping of the crops. It's actually pretty boring. Designing architecturally a building? Yeah, that could be cool and PCs might build their own homes or fortresses at some point, but they may just as easily acquire one some other way too.

Resource management is central to almost every available kind of game. What I don't see is all of those potentially different crafting games, as complex as some can be, being central to D&D. I mean, maybe we merge Agricola into D&D because the players spend 90% of the session on such stuff, but I suspect that group would be an outlier.

 

[Zustiur]

To add clarity to my last comment;
Early on in my DnD history, I had the PHB but no DMG or MM. I tried to introduce a friend to the game. We ended up with characters spending their entire time making pots and leather goods to make money so that they could buy better equipment. The game was deeply flawed as you'd expect from an 11 year old. For instance, I didn't think about paying for food and lodging.
Anyway, the point is that I discovered that there is such a thing as 'too much crafting' in a game of DnD.

Adventurers are adventurers. They are not craftsmen. They may have a background in crafts, but they shouldn't (in my opinion) be experts at that trade. At best I'd think of them as apprentices (remembering that an apprenticeship took 7 years in a lot of cases). If it takes 1-12 years to make an adventurer out of a 15 y/o human, and 7 years to make a journeyman (not a master!), I really cannot fathom the idea that adventurers would ever be excellent craftsmen. My understanding is that an armoursmith or weapons smith would take even longer to train than most other crafts...

I'd be happy to see adventurers doing some of their own repairs and maintenance, maybe making a few arrows, but I don't think they should be able to make armour and swords to any great level of quality. Not unless you want to drastically increase the characters' starting age. Something functioning as a dagger in a pinch? Sure. Masterwork platemail? Nope.

On the other hand, I'd love to see more accurate figures for physical resources such as food, water, lodging and so forth. Cost of living. Something which is subtracted from character wealth and is substantial enough to make them want to continue adventuring after they reach level 2.
3.0 DMG p 142 "Variant: Upkeep" is a start, but it doesn't go far enough for my taste.
I guess that would need a working economy first though...

 

[Kinak]

Personally, I'm an absolute sucker for crafting and I'd like to see it integrated into the game as a player.

I've actually done this a couple times in games and, in my experience, all you need to do is expand the 1st/2nd Edition philosophy of "monster parts as treasure."

So instead of mentioning that a displacer beast's hide can be used to make a cloak of displacement and can be sold for 500 gp, explain that and give the mechanics for how it's done (including DCs for the crafting checks). It doesn't have to involve external magic at all, just the appropriate materials and epic crafting. I mean, if you find a sword carved from a dragon's tooth, I don't care if a wizard or cleric whispered over it, that thing had better be at least +1.

If it plays a large enough role to cover in depth I think an extended check or skill challenge system would be a great fit. Having it all come down to one roll makes things pretty intense.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[GnomeWorks]

I'd like to see physical resources as a more integral part of the game. I'm less fired up about crafting.

It would certainly be more interesting to have to deal with the resources gathered from a dungeon than having it simply be "you find X thousand GPs."

I know that some might argue that it adds an unnecessary step, that the resources essentially translate directly to GP and you're just adding an extra five minutes of "wasted time" for the translation. But I think it adds a bit of versimilitude, and also always for the DM to deal with the economics of the setting a bit (in a place with a high owlbear population, owlbear pelts and their respective pieces/parts might not sell for crap, but they might sell better elsewhere).

What I don't see as a core campaign focus is a group of people deciding to get together to adventure through an imaginary barn raising or reaping of the crops.

That's not what I was getting at.

I think more what I was getting at was like the 3e Artificer, but with less magic and more focused on gathering the resources necessary for item creation, rather than just being handed a pool of points. Combine that style of class/concept with a more resource-centric style of loot distribution to the players, and it's really close, I think, to what I'm talking about.

Adventurers are adventurers. They are not craftsmen.

Why?

Your post mentions realistic-ish training times for such professions. Yet high-level D&D almost always has characters that are ridiculously superhuman. A human can be 19 years old and a 20th-level wizard, able to wish anything into existence... but him being a master blacksmith is somehow absurd?

I personally like the idea of a traveling craftsman, someone who - by some means - has surpassed the talent of average craftsmen, and needs to head into the world to find ways to improve their skill beyond what can be taught, or to find the resources to take advantage of their improved skill because no one else can get them (for instance, if it takes a crazy-awesome person to work adamantine, how many people in the world will be able to work it? If no one can work it, why would anyone gather it? - and so the high-level craftsman has to go and get it).

I mean, yes, you can have these people present just as NPCs in the world. But you can also just have a party hire high-level fighters, too. Or utilize the services of high-level clerics. I'm not trying to argue that every party should include a craftsman, or that it should be something worthy of a significant amount of attention in the game. But having it as an option, just like playing a fighter or explorer or faceman, makes sense to me.

 

[Greenfield]

My experience is almost 180 degrees off of yours.

Item crafting is a powerful tool, particularly for consumable magic, such as Scrolls, Potions, Wands and Staffs. The demand is high and constant.

At low levels, that Wand of Cure Light is a life saver, and frees the Clerics from the "Healerbot" role that someone else complained about in another thread.

Craft Wondrous is really "Craft Anything", and we've actually had to pare it down a bit, shifting broaches and amulets into Forge Ring (making that feat "Craft Magical Jewelry".) Consumable wondrous items such as salves, dusts, candles and such were shifted to Brew Potion.

The item crafting Wizard in the party became the wealthiest character in the game, since he could essentially double the value of any cash type loot he received, at the cost of a bit of time and Exp. And the way the Exp per level in 3.* worked, if he slipped back a level from the party, he'd earn more Exp per encounter until he caught up. The "cost" was a self correcting problem.

The DMs had to work to reign in his crafting, just to keep treasure levels under control. Fabricate allowed him to hit a major town with a stockpile of Master worked bows and weapons, a nice item within the economic reach of a lot of NPC types, and highly desirable for any noble seeking to keep his level 1 and 2 soldiers and guards well prepared.

By the book, you pretty much can't make any money crafting magic items. The material cost is half the market price, and you can only sell them for half the market price, leaving you with a profit margin of zero.

Non magical items, however, have a material cost of one third market, yet sell for half. That leaves a common profit margin of one sixth market.

As a DM I try to discourage PCs from becoming merchants, either through transport or via crafting. Magic grants them a huge advantage and their ability to accumulate wealth is staggering.

And in any version of D&D, wealth translates to good gear, and good gear is more than half of what makes most PCs what they are. Too much wealth unbalances the game.

 

[Ferghis]

As a player playing a game, my only use (in the sense that I use it as a resource that I can count on and plan for) for magic items is to tweak my character's abilities for a desired result. In other words, it's a part of character building. I would much rather see those kinds of options woven more directly into character building. In 4th edition I would take a power that slides 1 square and an item that increases slide range and a feat that would drop enemies prone if I slid them 2 squares. If I could do that without needing an item, I'd be happier within a system where magic was special and unique and wherein players requesting certain items would be considered unreasonable.

From an in-character perspective, it never made sense to me that certain skills went up just because we beat up some bosses. In a game where many skills aren't formalized, I'd rather players say "my character spent 5 years as a ranger in the northern forests after spending two years as a jeweler's apprentice." It's the years spent doing something that rate the skills learnt at that profession. I don't understand how a character goes on a two year epic adventure and turns out to be the best blacksmith in the land despite all those talented blacksmiths who have been at their craft for decades (if not centuries).

I will say that I think mid and high-level loot should move away from cash and towards things that fuel rituals or eve "epic" art. "You've found the lost chandelier of Castanamir!"