Level Up (A5E) Crafting Rules and Artisan's Tools

[Stalker0]

and yet idea makes millions every year, the dollarstore alibaba & dhgate are likewise happy to sell you a wide selection of poor quality items vhurnerd out in huge numbers by modern factories .

If material cost & sale price were both 1/10th there would never be no reason to ever risk the downsides. Yes if you were buying one dagger it might make sense to spend the extra for the good one, but if you were buying one thousand daggers for an army where you expect 80% of the troops are going to be barely capable of using it & at least 60 % of them to never use it for anything more critical than peeling an apple you might buy the cheap daggers and put the savings towards quality boots that allow them to marge at good speed. Of course if you want to sell a bunch of poor quality daggers the difficulty is in finding a buyer interested in buying a thousand sharpened sporks

I know we are getting OT here but just to highlight the divide.

So if we look at a cheap metal dinner knife, nothing fancy (but designed for long term use), you can get one for about $.75 on Amazon (literally just looked).

Meanwhile, we can get plastic knifes for about $.02 a knife. One the one hand, plastic knives can normally be used multiple times without issue, but they are designed for 1 use and certainly wouldn't cut all the things a metal knife could, so a reasonable approximation of "poor quality"

so right there we are looking at a 37.5x price difference, a hell of a lot higher than the 2x we have now. Aka it takes a very large difference in price before people would utilize a one use disposal item over a permanent one.


In terms of an army, it does make sense to fit your foot soldiers with low quality goods, they are disposable units after all. But....again the poor quality items are just TOO POOR. What the condition technically means is that after 1 round of melee combat, every single one of your foot soldiers would have no weapon. Yes soldiers die quickly in battle but not that quickly.... and now your foot soldiers have no means of fighting back against the enemy.....aka they will be slaughtered. No battle commander (even a cheap one) would think that's a good idea. At that point you might as well just have every soldier go into the woods and find a sharp stick.


I do appreciate the debate because I think I've come around to my real issue. I thought it was cost at first and sell price, but it at the end of the day its not. The real issue is that poor quality is not in fact "poor", its "garbage quality", "unacceptable bad quality", "insert your expletive here quality". Items of this kind of quality are so terribly unusably bad, there is no reasonable scenario that anyone would ever ever use them, unless they are were just completely swindled.

So the reason answer to me....is just fix what poor quality means. Going on what Faolyn said, probably the easiest means is "when you roll a 1 on an ability check or attack roll with this item, the item breaks", something like that. That is still bad, but its at least workable.

 

[Satirical Bard]

Great discussion. Not sure if it's too late to log this as a bug. see below

 

[Satirical Bard]

Per AG p 324, "a broken weapon deals half damage" - so it's not useless, just less effective. Basically 1/2 price for 1/2 damage. For armour, it's 1/2 price for -1AC ... which of course opens up an exploit of a PC with smith's tools buying broken plate armour for 750gp and then spending a long rest to repair it (DC10 - PB, made with advantage, repeatable once per day until you succeed).

 

[tetrasodium]

I know we are getting OT here but just to highlight the divide.

So if we look at a cheap metal dinner knife, nothing fancy (but designed for long term use), you can get one for about $.75 on Amazon (literally just looked).

Meanwhile, we can get plastic knifes for about $.02 a knife. One the one hand, plastic knives can normally be used multiple times without issue, but they are designed for 1 use and certainly wouldn't cut all the things a metal knife could, so a reasonable approximation of "poor quality"

so right there we are looking at a 37.5x price difference, a hell of a lot higher than the 2x we have now. Aka it takes a very large difference in price before people would utilize a one use disposal item over a permanent one.


In terms of an army, it does make sense to fit your foot soldiers with low quality goods, they are disposable units after all. But....again the poor quality items are just TOO POOR. What the condition technically means is that after 1 round of melee combat, every single one of your foot soldiers would have no weapon. Yes soldiers die quickly in battle but not that quickly.... and now your foot soldiers have no means of fighting back against the enemy.....aka they will be slaughtered. No battle commander (even a cheap one) would think that's a good idea. At that point you might as well just have every soldier go into the woods and find a sharp stick.


I do appreciate the debate because I think I've come around to my real issue. I thought it was cost at first and sell price, but it at the end of the day its not. The real issue is that poor quality is not in fact "poor", its "garbage quality", "unacceptable bad quality", "insert your expletive here quality". Items of this kind of quality are so terribly unusably bad, there is no reasonable scenario that anyone would ever ever use them, unless they are were just completely swindled.

So the reason answer to me....is just fix what poor quality means. Going on what Faolyn said, probably the easiest means is "when you roll a 1 on an ability check or attack roll with this item, the item breaks", something like that. That is still bad, but its at least workable.

Your shopping for those 75 cent knives like a consumer not a bulk consumer not a bulk purchaser. Steak knives, .66$/pop @144, dinner knife .32$/pop @1dozen. $0.21@5000 of these. I could find them even cheaper in gigantic volumes = too.... very similar steak knife for 0.50$@5000+. Another steak knife for 0.28$ in lots of twenty thousand.

These gigantic orders are so cheap because the maker can pretty much load them right up from the assembly line onto truck(s) without needing to store them or anything. They could probably churn out billions of those even cheaper all year round if there was unlimited demand, but instead they run a few thousand of one style then switch things to a different style & repeat before selling the gigantic assortment to resellers.

The "soldiers" in that army still have a knife on round two but that knife deals 1d2 instead of 1d4 but a whole lot more of them are alive because the warlord was able to fit them for boots two daggers & poor quality cloth brigandine all under budget so they could get a few days of training... Maybe the warlord even bought the cheap daggers explicitly to use for training rather than wasting good coin on a bunch of rejects that might die if they stub their toe during training

 

[Stalker0]

Your shopping for those 75 cent knives like a consumer not a bulk consumer not a bulk purchaser. Steak knives, .66$/pop @144, dinner knife .32$/pop @1dozen. $0.21@5000 of these. I could find them even cheaper in gigantic volumes = too.... very similar steak knife for 0.50$@5000+. Another steak knife for 0.28$ in lots of twenty thousand.

Your right I should have pushed harder. For example I found those plastic knives for $.0038 a knife. So that's a x73 from the cheap steak knife you found

Suffice it to say, I think we can very clearly show that there needs to be a major price differential to justify a one use item from a permanent one.

 

[Satirical Bard]

Suffice it to say, I think we can very clearly show that there needs to be a major price differential to justify a one use item from a permanent one.

It's not a one use item though! See my comment #23 above.

Broken in A5E does not mean word the word normally means.

 

[Stalker0]

Per AG p 324, "a broken weapon deals half damage" - so it's not useless, just less effective. Basically 1/2 price for 1/2 damage. For armour, it's 1/2 price for -1AC ... which of course opens up an exploit of a PC with smith's tools buying broken plate armour for 750gp and then spending a long rest to repair it (DC10 - PB, made with advantage, repeatable once per day until you succeed).

So good point, and I took a look as I was curious if there were any real uses of poor quality for weapons/armor that I missed.

Weapons: In pretty much every case, the half damage is just not worth it. Its just better to get a less weapon at normal price. The exceptions I found:

• Javelins: If you are planning to just hurl them and not reuse them, then the half price could make sense here.
• Club: For the ultimate in cheapness, you could equip your army with a poor club at .5 sp a pop. Now you are going to do pathetic damage after the first swing, but its slightly better than unarmed if you literally have nothing else to use.
• Medium Shield: So interestingly a poor quality medium shield is equal to a light shield price, and when broken has the same AC as a light shield. So if you don't care about throwing your shield, you could have a "light shield" that gets a +1 to AC on the first round of combat in a day. That's....at least some use.

While the idea of a PC getting a +1 AC against one attack a day, and then repairing it each night....I wouldn't really consider that an exploit, considering you could just have Splint for 450 gp that's going to give you the same AC for 99.9% of the day.

 

[Stalker0]

Broken in A5E does not mean word the word normally means.

You actually may be right here....the trick is Broken is only defined for Armor/Weapons as far as I've seen. So how do broken smith tools and the like work? Is it just a penalty, or do the tools effectively not work any more?

 

[tetrasodium]

So good point, and I took a look as I was curious if there were any real uses of poor quality for weapons/armor that I missed.

Weapons: In pretty much every case, the half damage is just not worth it. Its just better to get a less weapon at normal price. The exceptions I found:

• Javelins: If you are planning to just hurl them and not reuse them, then the half price could make sense here.
• Club: For the ultimate in cheapness, you could equip your army with a poor club at .5 sp a pop. Now you are going to do pathetic damage after the first swing, but its slightly better than unarmed if you literally have nothing else to use.
• Medium Shield: So interestingly a poor quality medium shield is equal to a light shield price, and when broken has the same AC as a light shield. So if you don't care about throwing your shield, you could have a "light shield" that gets a +1 to AC on the first round of combat in a day. That's....at least some use.

While the idea of a PC getting a +1 AC against one attack a day, and then repairing it each night....I wouldn't really consider that an exploit, considering you could just have Splint for 450 gp that's going to give you the same AC for 99.9% of the day.

Look at the armor on MoH 15, -1 AC in that case. AG324 says half AC. Not sure if error or if it's more of a gm decided range not quite spelled out. Either way it makes for a useful way to drop a glittering adventure to be in need of stuff to repair things in a treasure vault for the gm.

 

[Satirical Bard]

While the idea of a PC getting a +1 AC against one attack a day, and then repairing it each night....I wouldn't really consider that an exploit, considering you could just have Splint for 450 gp that's going to give you the same AC for 99.9% of the day.

Good point - I'd overlooked that it's still poor quality and liable to break again! It's also a bit vague what 'each use' means in the context of armour: each time you're hit? Each time you would have been hit but for the armour (ie. to hit rolls btween 10 and the armour AC)?