D&D (2024) 2024 Players Handbook reveal: "New Crafting Rules"

[Weiley31]

Sure it can fix armor, but can it fix the Bard's marriage?

It's okay, the Bard is Poly anyway.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

The video came with a nice image of the Gold Dragon Mini

 

[Xeviat]

I miss when crafting had a little mini game. Roll your tool check, multiply by something, and you make that much GP progress toward completing. Can check multiplied by DC work? DC 10 for a standard healing potion would be 1 day of work.

 

[Stormonu]

There's this kind of weird blind spot in the game that occurs with any timescale longer than about 24 hours. Because of the pacing of a lot of the official adventures, the game in practice doesn't actually want to pay attention to this timescale very much, but with other modes of gameplay that aren't so narratively focused, this becomes one of the key pacing metrics.

I don't quite know how they might parse this issue in 2024, though it seems like something they're thinking more about (this crafting system, bastions, whatever they do to the downtime mechanics...).

I'm at this weird spot myself where I want a reason to slow the pace down, a reason to use days of downtime, a reason to do a timeskip of a few months, but there's not much of a mechanical need for that, and there's not much of a narrative desire for that. I'd love to live in a world where what you do with three weeks of downtime is relevant. Yeah, making a longsword probably isn't, but then I'm curious about what is.

It's got me curious about how bastions might work, that's for sure.

Funny you mention this. My brother is running Tyranny of Dragons. The party just went through a MONTH of downtime on the trip between Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep. The group about tried to go nuts crafting, casting spells and such but he did a good job of pacing it to allow them to intermix some encounters, crafting and RP (most of it handled between sessions). I'd like to see more of this sort of thing encouraged, dropping the doom clock and allowing the PCs slow down the hectic pace to do things that ground them in a world where it feels like time is actually passing, rather than it being a week between level 1 and 20. Stuff where 2 weeks training to gain a level isn't mind-boggling too long nor is 6 weeks to learn a language or skill through downtime - or to craft an item or work on a bastion project.

My semi-recent Saltmarsh game had several occasions where up to a week would pass between events allowing for crafting and such, but it was still a bit fast paced - and even my brother's between-session downtime needed a fair bit of hands on adjudication more than I'd personally have time for these days.

 

[Baron Opal II]

There's this kind of weird blind spot in the game that occurs with any timescale longer than about 24 hours. Because of the pacing of a lot of the official adventures, the game in practice doesn't actually want to pay attention to this timescale very much, but with other modes of gameplay that aren't so narratively focused, this becomes one of the key pacing metrics.

Indeed.

One thing my players have gotten used to is one adventure per season, and finding a place to winter over. This gives them time to do their downtime activities and use their discoveries in the next adventure. Once they get to a certain power level they can adventure during the rainy / cold season because traversing roads are less of a need or complication.