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

[Stalker0]

I did the math once, and figured out that if you got a week of downtime between every adventure, and used that entire week to craft, starting at level 1, you could probably end up making a suit of platemail... by level 7. By which point, most groups have already gotten at least one suit of platemail.

Yeah this is where you have to decide if you want crafting to serve some semblance of realism or work with the game.

The simple truth is, the pace of leveling compared to time spent in a standard dnd game is just ludicrously fast, people gain speed, strength, and competency at a rate that is beyond normal human experience unless the dm very intentionally slows things down (such as months of downtime between adventurers, training requirements, etc etc).

If you want those kinds of players to actually craft things, crafting speed also has to be equally ludicrous. Like making a full set of plate armor in a day. Is that realistic for a single person? Absolutely not....but again if this is going to work in a game where I can be a farmer to start, and I'm hunting dragons for sport in like two months.... than you have to respect that time realism has gone completely out the window.

 

[Kobold Stew]

This is the sort of the Bastion rules can address -- the PC doesn't need to craft things if their bastion can do so), but even still, it comes online too late for most non-magical items.

 

[Stalker0]

Yeah… Todd Kendrick really doesn’t seem to do grasp how interviews are supposed to work. He rarely asks any questions, he just kind of reacts to the person he’s supposed to be interviewing saying the information he should be prompting them for… It’s weird…

Well I mean.... its not an interview at all. All it is the two get on camera, we here our head designer give a number of comments, and Todd nods and adds the occasional comment.

They have never really been "interviews" in the traditional sense.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah this is where you have to decide if you want crafting to serve some semblance of realism or work with the game.

The simple truth is, the pace of leveling compared to time spent in a standard dnd game is just ludicrously fast, people gain speed, strength, and competency at a rate that is beyond normal human experience unless the dm very intentionally slows things down (such as months of downtime between adventurers, training requirements, etc etc).

If you want those kinds of players to actually craft things, crafting speed also has to be equally ludicrous. Like making a full set of plate armor in a day. Is that realistic for a single person? Absolutely not....but again if this is going to work in a game where I can be a farmer to start, and I'm hunting dragons for sport in like two months.... than you have to respect that time realism has gone completely out the window.

Or you can, as you say, slow things down to something resembling reality and insert that necessary downtime.

 

[Staffan]

Mining Tools

I mean in a game about underground dungeons we need some rules on how to dig them.

Step 1: Get a dwarf.
Step 2:

 

[I'm A Banana]

"...and it will also let players stretch their gold further assuming they have enough time between adventures to actually spend on crafting"

man i hope crafting doesn't turn out to be primarily a downtime activity system, being able to craft a basic longsword over a three weeks downtime with smith's tools is not something useful or engaging to do with tools.

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.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No-one who has ever owned or cared for a cat could believe a cat would look that happy whilst being made to wear a hat like that. I know this is fantasy but, sir, there are LIMITS to my credulity!

A fair point, I rescind my statement LOL.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Nice design! What comic is this?

The Comic is Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables: Dungeons & Doodles: Tales From the Tables

That particular art came from the podcast game they are in, run by the Forever DM, they seem to be mid-re-releasing their content? I'm not 100% sure what is going on on the channel at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/@TheForeverDMAdventures/videos

 

[Chaosmancer]

But we don't really want to get to where it's Video Game Crafting systems, where you specifically need 1 X and 2 Y to craft something, and you can't use anything else because the system is very strict about what it's using.

Fair, and I agree. There have just been a few times when I've had crafting minded players (or been a crafting minded player) who got lost in the "what the heck do I do other than say "I buy 50 gold worth of crafting material"?"

 

[MarkB]

Step 1: Get a dwarf.
Step 2:

Take your pick.