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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RealAlHazred" data-source="post: 6749936" data-attributes="member: 25818">Originally posted by Tempest_Stormwind:I'm having to be a bit vague on how formulas work, since they're not described in the rules beyond what I quoted and the rules have to adapt for both Eberron and 5e Standard and everything in between on the item creation front. However, as written, what you say is already what it does. If I find a flametongue (i.e. the DM says flametongues are OK in the game and one shows up in loot), I can dismantle it to learn how to build it, and spend time and money making more (incidentally, replacing the first one I had to dismantle), assuming I have the means to complete the formula (the raw materials, the time, and anything odd - for instance, the flametongue might require lava, which isn't available in my coastal city lab). Are you suggesting, say, that if we find two +1 weapons, I can dismantle the first to learn the formula to make +1 weapons, and suggest that dismantling the second shows some shortcut that lets me create +1 weapons easier? I can't centrally codify that because it makes assumptions on how easy it should be on following a formula, but I did mention something close to that as a suggestion in my "Regarding Item Creation" essay: As for feats, feats are problematic because:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They're optional. I can't do the 3.5 thing of "fixing" or "upgrading" a class feature through a feat because they're not part of the basic game. (That's something subclasses occasionally do.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They're not class-linked. The closest you'll find to a class-specific feat is "must be a spellcaster" (though Svirfneblin Magic in Elemental Evil and the dragonmark feats* have racial prerequisites).</li> </ul>The idea of transferring over simpler creation tools to artificers is one I like - you might notice it's already there on the golemist's Dedicated Wright homunculus, for instance - and I've long been considering it as a capstone or filler ability (say, "Sustainable Salvage: When you salvage an item, it regains its magic on its own after a week." This, in effect, gets over the long creation time needed to "replace" the original salvaged item, particularly as levels increase and downtime days get more precious.) But I haven't fully explored this yet, since I want the artificer to work well in games where there's no permanent item creation at all (as well as in ones where he's basically Iron Man - I'm with you in that I find this fun, but I also have to design for robustness across different campaigns.) One idea I toyed around with was saying that Magecraft tools let you build twice as much per day when creating items (so up to 10gp per day for mundane crafting, 50gp per day for magic item crafting; you still need to have that much on hand. Functionally, this is what Magecraft did in 3.5 - it let apprentice industrial magewrights work on high-quality masterwork material, or churn out normal material much, much faster), but I didn't work that in. Think it'd be worthwhile? (Personally, I would have loved to see similar abilities on dwarves and rock gnomes, but I'm not designing the races.) Finally, for people who want to create new items instead of just copy the ones you find, there are other formulas in the game (including, hypothetically, those for items which don't yet exist). There's just no way to put them in the players' hands except DM fiat, which is where I'm fine leaving this specific ability. (Having a player quest for the five pieces of ancient lore he needs to complete his thesis work and develop a new formula sounds like a fun personal goal, and a player being sent on a mission from House Cannith to acquire the final pieces of a puzzle they've been working on since they unearthed that strange formula in the jungle ruins of Xen'drik last year sounds like another fun one.) It's on par with a fighter questing to find a special magic sword or a cleric's goal of recovering the lost relic of the founder of his church - and is something to be worked out between player and DM, rather than hardcoded into how a class functions. *[sblock]Something else I disliked, for most of the same reasons listed above. Dragonmarks, I always thought, would work better as a background, at least for least marks. You can use the feat mechanism for powerful marks, aberrant marks, or Dragonmark Heirs, but there should be a way to express marks on 1st level characters or in games without feats.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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