Craft Item Question...

[AuraSeer]

Stone widgets as a general rule should be harder to produce, but under the Craft rules, they're going to take less time to make. Why?

You're looking at it from the wrong direction.

Consider widgets that can be made of either stone or wood. Both are equally simple; the craft DC for each is just 12. Even apprentices can make these things routinely (taking 10 on their checks).

If an apprentice stonemason takes a month to make a widget, but an apprentice woodcarver can crank one out every week, the stone one will be more expensive. The mason will have to charge more for his labor, because he spends more hours working on the thing.

When WOTC puts these widgets on the equipment list, they don't bother worrying about hourly rates or whatever. They just write in the widget entry, "Stone: 40 gp, Wood: 10 gp."'

Now, along comes Joe PC with his ranks in Craft(woodcarving) and Craft(stonework). If he wants to make widgets, he doesn't have data about the crafting time itself. All he has is the Craft DC and the market price, so he has to work backward. That's where that funky calculation shows up.

The system is slightly oversimplified, because it assumes that raw materials will always account for the same percentage of the market price. In the real world that isn't the case, especially when comparing complex objects to simple ones. But it's close enough for most people; this is after all Dungeons & Dragons, not Papers & Paychecks.

 

[AuraSeer]

(Something I left out from my last post)

Here's a different case. If stone widgets are harder to craft than wooden ones, it's reasonable for them to cost more. Only a skilled craftsman can make them, so there will be fewer stone widgets available to be bought.

You end up with two contradictory effects:
1) By the D&D crafting formula, higher DC means more work done per week, which means shorter crafting time.
2) As DC rises, the market price goes up. Higher market price makes the crafting time longer.

Change #1 can be quantified, based strictly on the Craft formula.
But change #2 isn't so simple; it's very gameworld-dependent. It is based on the availability of craftsmen skilled enough to meet the higher DC. It's also affected by the craftsmen's willingness to spend time making widgets. (If they don't make a profit on them, they won't make 'em. That lowers the supply, driving the price up, which encourages more craftsmen to make widgets. Finding the equilibrium point of this process is nontrivial.)

[edit]
So there's really no telling what the "right" result is. Raising the DC might raise the crafting time, or lower it, or have no effect at all. That's the point of all of the above.
[/edit]

Doing the economic calcuations "the right way" would involve a lot more math, and wouldn't add much to the game. There are only so many pages in the PHB, and adding a chapter on Economics 101 wouldn't be useful to most players.

 

[LokiDR]

The system is slightly oversimplified, because it assumes that raw materials will always account for the same percentage of the market price. In the real world that isn't the case, especially when comparing complex objects to simple ones. But it's close enough for most people; this is after all Dungeons & Dragons, not Papers & Paychecks.

I agree with the simplification in general for a fantasy campaign in general or D&D specifically.

Now, what about a d20 varient on D&D, something like Renaissance, where magic is lower and crafting is more important? Crafting is minimized by the D&D rules because adventurers should be out doing exciting things. How do you figure out changes to those rules if you want a different concept?