it wasn't so much only the NPCs could do that as it was a handwave by the referee to not have to go into an NPC/referee dialog and hold up the game. or show all the behind the scenes gathering of components and failures in the process.
the PCs could do it. but it meant the player had to write up the stuff.
after 1999 it has become so the player can do the method/formulary more easily for the game being played with the new rules. the referee can plug the NPCs into the same formulary and it doesn't change much.
Er, I think you might be underselling how difficult item creation was in pre-3E.
I'll give two examples, straight from the books.
From 2e's black cover DMG
A 17th level mage wishes to create a +5 sword.
Requires the "
Contact Other Plane" spell to find out the steps needed.
1st step: Shape a sword blade from his own hands using ore from a SPECIFIC mountain in a SPECIFIC area.
He gets there but to remove the ore, the owners require the mage to pass a test.
He then has to recover from that test, take the ore to be blessed with PURE SPRING WATER from a specific site. (All told, this mage isn't doing this in a week. we're looking at the better part of a fortnight at least if not a month or two)
It takes about a month then to actually construct the blade itself from the ore.
Then he has to dip the blade in fresh black pudding acid, have the blade be blessed in a church and then a paladin must lay hands on it. (Now finding the church is no problem but the acid and the paladin are adventures in themselves as the acid is not something that remains fresh for long and paladins are REALLY rare pre-3E)
Now all of this takes about another fortnight at least hunting down all the people/places involved.
THEN the mage has to spend days casting
"Enchant an Item" on the sword, 5 castings of the
"Enchanted Weapon" (one for each plus) and then since by the time you get through the Enchanted Weapon spell, he has to recast the Enchant an Item spell a couple more times.
Finally, he has to cast
PERMANENCY (and risk losing a pt of con) and after all of that, the DM rolls to see if the player was successful. Even with all his steps, the chance for this sword is 65% so the DM has to roll under(rolling anything above 95% being a cursed sword)
Needless to say, the player isn't going to be creating many +5 swords at all.
How about a couple more examples?
An 8th level cleric creating a scroll of Neutralize poison. Shouldn't be too hard right since this is a spell the cleric knows already....and the slightly more useful Wand of Fire (which became the Staff of fire in 3e).
PO:S&M
Requires the ink to include the rare nightshade plant harvested during the dark of the moon. Takes the cleric about a week to locate and accomplish this at the right time.
Then she must steep the quill used to write the scroll in the venom of an adder (a couple of days here) and then actually takes ANOTHER week to actually create the scroll.
Even with all this effort, the cleric still has a 5% chance of creating a cursed scroll.
Now, a 14th level mage wants to create a wand of Fire.
Uses Contact other plane to shorten the reseach time (he has a laboratory already set-up) and thus only requires 2 weeks (without the contact other plane spell or any other "commune" type spell, reseach takes 1d6+1 weeks)
Result?
To create a wand of fire, the mage requires
1 Wand forged by a master smith of the Azer race
2 Using brass smelted in the Efreeti City of Brass
3 That must then be tempered by the breath of an ADULT RED DRAGON
4 Ten enscribed while still malleable with an exotic red ruby and finally
5 Polished with a mixture that contains the ash of a 1000 year old tree destroyed by fire.....
Needless to say, we're talking several months to set up here (36 weeks as per the book)....but wait, we're not done yet.
He then must spend several days casting "Enchant an Item" then several more days casting the spells Pyrotechnics, Burning Hands, Fireball and Wand of Fire
Then the DM checks to see if the player was actually successful. Would you believe that the book only gives the player a 77% chance and that's only because of the DM bonus of 10% because the DM thinks he was creatve with the processes and 5% since the character was a specialist.
Oh yeah, player pre3E were really lining up and begging their DM to create magic items....
