Use of Fabricate spell to create siege engines

[Angelus789]

The case
My players have reached the point in the adventure where they have roused a rebellion amongst villagers to put siege to the local tyrant. By the help of some 100 villagers they (the PCs) want to build siege engines by combining local labour with the Fabricate spell.

Background references:
Fabricate
Fabricate
TransmutationLevel: Sor/Wiz 5
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: See text
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: Up to 10 cu. ft./level; see text
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No


You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.

You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.

Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet (or 1 cubic foot) of material to be affected by the spell.
Material Component

The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

Craft (siege engines)
* is a separate Craft skill as per the book Heroes of Battle

Craft, in general
Check

You can practice your trade and make a decent living, earning about half your check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work. You know how to use the tools of your trade, how to perform the craft’s daily tasks, how to supervise untrained helpers, and how to handle common problems. (Untrained laborers and assistants earn an average of 1 silver piece per day.)

The basic function of the Craft skill, however, is to allow you to make an item of the appropriate type. The DC depends on the complexity of the item to be created. The DC, your check results, and the price of the item determine how long it takes to make a particular item. The item’s finished price also determines the cost of raw materials.

In some cases, the fabricate spell can be used to achieve the results of a Craft check with no actual check involved. However, you must make an appropriate Craft check when using the spell to make articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.

Siege engines,
Catapult light GP value 550
* ref: Heroes of Battle p 67

The dilemma
The most obvious route the players took was to calculate how many cubic feet a catapult takes, then by pure math, tried to figure out how many catapults their level 14 wizard will be able to pump out each day.

This way of approach just leaves me with a bad taste, so I want to create another way to implement Fabricate into the creating (Craft) of items worth several hundreds (or thousands) of gold pieces.

Some ideas:

• going by the rules states in Craft using Fabricate it is tempting to rule that using Fabricate is like taking -10- on the Craft check
• using Fabricate will cut the price of the item in half
• using Fabricate will add some 100 GP / Caster Level worth of GP value in the crafting

However I'm not sure if any of these solutions are good. What do you guys think?

 

[aarondirebear]

The case
My players have reached the point in the adventure where they have roused a rebellion amongst villagers to put siege to the local tyrant. By the help of some 100 villagers they (the PCs) want to build siege engines by combining local labour with the Fabricate spell.

Background references:
Fabricate
Fabricate
TransmutationLevel: Sor/Wiz 5
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: See text
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: Up to 10 cu. ft./level; see text
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No


You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.

You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.

Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet (or 1 cubic foot) of material to be affected by the spell.
Material Component

The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

Craft (siege engines)
* is a separate Craft skill as per the book Heroes of Battle

Craft, in general
Check

You can practice your trade and make a decent living, earning about half your check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work. You know how to use the tools of your trade, how to perform the craft’s daily tasks, how to supervise untrained helpers, and how to handle common problems. (Untrained laborers and assistants earn an average of 1 silver piece per day.)

The basic function of the Craft skill, however, is to allow you to make an item of the appropriate type. The DC depends on the complexity of the item to be created. The DC, your check results, and the price of the item determine how long it takes to make a particular item. The item’s finished price also determines the cost of raw materials.

In some cases, the fabricate spell can be used to achieve the results of a Craft check with no actual check involved. However, you must make an appropriate Craft check when using the spell to make articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.

Siege engines,
Catapult light GP value 550
* ref: Heroes of Battle p 67

The dilemma
The most obvious route the players took was to calculate how many cubic feet a catapult takes, then by pure math, tried to figure out how many catapults their level 14 wizard will be able to pump out each day.

This way of approach just leaves me with a bad taste, so I want to create another way to implement Fabricate into the creating (Craft) of items worth several hundreds (or thousands) of gold pieces.

Some ideas:

• going by the rules states in Craft using Fabricate it is tempting to rule that using Fabricate is like taking -10- on the Craft check
• using Fabricate will cut the price of the item in half
• using Fabricate will add some 100 GP / Caster Level worth of GP value in the crafting

However I'm not sure if any of these solutions are good. What do you guys think?

Why nerf it? Isn't that a bit extreme? All fabricate lets you do is take the normal materials, which you have to buy anyway, and craft stuff faster than a regular craftsman would have to. Why is that so bad and wrong?

Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is in letting the PC's find a source of revenue outside of adventuring...and in the case of your story, do you really want to deny them the ability to give those poor peasants the help they need?

 

[Angelus789]

Why nerf it? Isn't that a bit extreme? All fabricate lets you do is take the normal materials, which you have to buy anyway, and craft stuff faster than a regular craftsman would have to. Why is that so bad and wrong?

Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is in letting the PC's find a source of revenue outside of adventuring...and in the case of your story, do you really want to deny them the ability to give those poor peasants the help they need?

Hey Aarondirebear, thanks for the reply. Consider my feedback below.

In case of the story - making a ruling on this right now will stick for the rest of the campaign, and further ongoing adventures that we have with players, so yes, it is is pretty important to have fundamental rules set down right here.

Find a source of revenue outside of adventuring - being able to create good worth several hundreds GPs by just one spell is something I consider a "big deal".

Craft stuff faster than a regular craftsman - that's partly fine, but note the "high degree of craftsmanship". Where do you draw the line between mundane craftsmanship and high degree of craftsmanship?

 

[anest1s]

Hey Aarondirebear, thanks for the reply. Consider my feedback below.

In case of the story - making a ruling on this right now will stick for the rest of the campaign, and further ongoing adventures that we have with players, so yes, it is is pretty important to have fundamental rules set down right here.

Find a source of revenue outside of adventuring - being able to create good worth several hundreds GPs by just one spell is something I consider a "big deal".

Craft stuff faster than a regular craftsman - that's partly fine, but note the "high degree of craftsmanship". Where do you draw the line between mundane craftsmanship and high degree of craftsmanship?

I think it is not mundane craftsmanship. Making a wooden doll or some rope doesn't need any knowledge. Making a sword, or a lock however does. The spell allows you to make it faster, it doesn't provide knowledge.

However maybe you want to allow a knowledge check instead of a craft check, since making a catapult doesn't require so much skill - just knowing what you are doing.

On the other hand, maybe you can make catapults without knowing how to, but then they would be less effective....(penalty on attack and damage etc)

 

[Celebrim]

Craft stuff faster than a regular craftsman - that's partly fine, but note the "high degree of craftsmanship". Where do you draw the line between mundane craftsmanship and high degree of craftsmanship?

Well, I would think at seige engines.

In this case 'mundane craftmanship' refers to rough work that could be performed untrained. So, for example, you could use fabricate to turn a pile of logs into a palisade without the need for some sort of woodworking check. If on the other hand, you wanted to turn the pile of logs into a barn, a ship, or rocking chairs then you better be at the least a carpenter.

Your actually problem here isn't with the Fabricate spell entirely, although admittedly that is not actually obvious unless you've run into this sort of problem before. Your actual problem is with the D&D economic system and the craft rules, both of which are inadequate for dealing with any sort of significant PC economic activity. If those rules were more robust, then it would be easier to write exactly what the fabricate spell does.

Congradulations, your campaign has become sophisticated enough that you've unburied what has long been the single most broken aspect of the D&D rules - economics.

Don't nerf the spell too harshly. If you do, your players are likely to get quite upset with you. Instead, hold to the letter of the law and start working to get more complete and functional craft rules. The letter of the law on the fabricate spell is actually pretty harsh on your average PC trying to do what you are describing even without too much adjustments. I think there is only one basic adjustment you have to make to the spell and that is for the degree of detail in the work. The RAW description only considers the amount of material to be crafted. It doesn't consider how much detail goes into the work, which implies that a bale of uncombed cotton can as easily be turned into thread as it can bolts of cloth as it can be into fancy lace dresses. In reality, that's actually about 4 separate fabrication steps, so it makes sense that it takes at least four times as long for dresses as it does for thread. The RAW designers tried to address this problem with the 'minerals' rule, thinking that it mattered mostly what you made the object out of, but that's not really the issue. The issue is whether its as easy for the spell to fabricate rough clay pots as it is to fabricate handpainted porceline artware. I think you really only need a 'level of detail' or 'difficulty of work' rule, and I think that rule is really simple at heart though complex in application.

Each round, the spell can do one weeks worth of work.

The cubic feet rule is merely an upper limit for rough labor - unmortared stone walls, palisades, etc. More detailed work consumes more time because the spellcaster has to spend more time refining the work at each point during the casting.

The first thing you have to do then is figure out how long it normally takes to craft a seige engine. This is where the simple rule gets complicated. Let's suppose that you decide that working from finished materials - cured sinew, hemp rope, logs, lumber, steel bars - that it requires 14 man-weeks of labor to craft a catapolt. Furthermore, you decide that the engineers required to craft catapolts are highly paid professionals that under a gold piece standard economy (most things are priced in gold peices) make 7 g.p. a day. This implies that the cost of labor on catapolt construction from finished materials is 490 g.p. Going on the theory that 2/3rd of the cost of anything is labor, then the cost of the raw materials is 245 g.p. The total cost then is 735 g.p. - not that far off of the SRD value of a heavy catapolt at 800 g.p. So maybe SRD number assumes some profit taking and that charismatic PC's can haggle for reduced rates or maybe siege engineers are paid a bit better than the estimate. In any event, the 14 man-weeks of our guess both pass a sniff test in terms of versimilitude and existing game rules.

So, this tells us that Fabricate, under our slight rules modification, cast by a 14th level Wizard can produce 1 heavy catapolt per spell per day provided that a) they have 245 g.p. worth of finished goods to work with and b) they can pass a difficult crafting check to produce the catapolt. (Presumably they could also make about 1 1/2 light catapolts.)

Why a difficult crafting check? Because we have already asserted that seige engineers are highly paid professionals. Why are they highly paid? Because they do work that not just anyone can do. The real gotcha in that spell is the crafting check. It doesn't specify a DC and the player probably won't have sufficient skill to match NPC labor unless they've been dumping points into craft skills (or craft enhancing magic items) with this end in mind. Personally, I think the DC here is probably about 21. This is a check that skilled 3rd level NPC crafter (expert) can make most of the time - 6 ranks craft, skill focus, +2 bonus from attributes is a +11 bonus. Add in masterwork tools and possibly some skill aptitude feat (+2 bonus to two skills), and the NPC crafter is expecting to go into this with like a +15 bonus on the check.

The PC wizard though is going to be doing well to have anything but his Int and maybe a point or two on craft (seige engine). So here's the big gotcha. If the PC fails the craft check, it doesn't say what happens but its reasonable to assume that you end up producing a finished catapolt that is flawed and doesn't work. You end up in other words with a pile of junk worth less than what you started with.

Now, if you really want to put a stop to this plan, I'd make one further change to the crafting rules. The rules imply that you make a single check per item. But the rules also imply that you must make one check per week of labor. Combine the two concepts. The fourteen weeks of labor require 14 successful crafting checks. Failure means no progress that week and a portion of the raw materials are wasted. Failure by a large degree means you have to start over and all the raw materials used to that point are wasted. The NPC crafter needs that +15 bonus on the check (and he probably also needs the ability to take 10 on the check, and if you can justify that, up the DC of the craft check). Under this new take on the crafting rules, making an object as detailed as a catapolt requires 14 DC 21 skill checks, any one of which can cause you to end up with something that looks like a 3 year old made a catapolt and which works about as well.

One more caveat is that I would immediately change the cost of making skill enhancing magic items to match the cost of combat enhancing magic items. Once you move to an economic game, the assumption that skill enhancing items are worth less than those that enhance combat skill is immediately revealed to be shortsighted.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that a PC wizard can indeed produce alot of catapolts in short order - although probably not as many as the original rules allow by strict application of math. That's ok in my opinion. If the PC's try to turn this into a money making operation, you have several recourses. First, raw materials are not available in unlimited amounts. There is a limit to how much rope, sinew, and lumber is immediately available in a community and if you start using it up and dozens of times faster than its normally consumed, then you are going to cause sky rocketing local inflation. Secondly, if you continue to do this long term you are going to make alot of enemies in the local community. If you use your magic to build catapolts to save the community, then you may be cheered in the short term. But, if you use your magic to start churning out fine furniture, the local joiners guild is going to want to burn you at the stake for being a witch and you will wear out your welcome in the community in a hurry. If you persist, that might quickly turn into hatred by joiners guilds world wide, and they are likely to be able to back up that hatred with the support of whatever diety out there is the patron of skilled craftsmanship.