Craft question

[Elodan]

Our group rescued a damsel in distress who was the daughter of the local blacksmith. As a reward he offered to make a suit of full plate for my character.

The interpretation of the craft rules we came up with was that it would take the blacksmith roughly 50 weeks at the quickest to make this suit.

Value in sp = 15,000
DC = 18

So if we're reading the formula right, the progress per week would be the craft role times the DC to see the progress in silver pieces. Let's assume he gets a 20 on his check.

20 x 18 = 360

He accomplishes 360 silver pieces worth of work. If he continues his perfect 20 streak it would take 42 weeks to complete.
Are we interpreting the rule correctly? Has anyone house-ruled the craft times for large-ticket items like this?

(My DM has already said it will only take 3 weeks to complete the armor but I'm curious)

Thanks.

Tom

 

[Spatula]

You're interpreting the rules correctly. Note that most blacksmiths would have an apprentice or two, each able to add a +2 to the skill check through the aid another action. Just one assistant shaves 5 weeks off of the completion time.

A particularly skilled blacksmith can also increase the Craft DC by 10, which would further reduce the time needed.

Finishing a suit of full plate from scratch in 3 weeks is basically impossible unless your total Craft bonus (inluding help from assistants) is around +60.

 

[Conaill]

Yes, the craft rules are almost useless for adventuring PCs. The designers as much as admitted that the Craft skill is only there for "flavor".

If you want to make Craft useful and interesting, I would suggest you increase the progress at least by a factor of 7 or 10, i.e. count progress in sp/day, or gp/week, rather than sp/week. That's nowhere near being unbalanced (actually, it's still very weak compared to 1000 gp/day magic item crafting), and your PCs might now start considering doing some crafting for themselves. Your suit of armor that would take 50 weeks to complete "by the book" would still take 5 or 7 weeks, so it's far from easy. But at least you could have, say, an alchemist that finished a single dose of alchemist's fire in under a day (while his sorceror colleague can fire off a whole slew of Fireballs in the same timespan!)

 

[Old Gumphrey]

If you have 3 people working on a single suit of masterwork full plate and they all have +18 (!) to their craft checks and one assistant aiding each of them for +2 (also using the voluntary +10 DC craft rule), they could finish the suit in exactly 5.55555555553 weeks, and the masterwork component would take less than a week (so approximately 6 weeks and 3 days; this is all provided the DM wouldn't rule that there can only be one actual check per week). This would require at the bare minimum 3 dwarf experts of 14 intelligence and 6th level with maximum craft (armorsmith) ranks, skill focus [craft (armorsmith)], and a homemade feat that grants +2 to all craft and profession checks (not a bad NPC feat, actually) along with 3 assistants of at least 10 int, all of whom are working 8 hours a day, 7 days a week (or about 5 days a week with 12 hour shifts).

I know armor took a long time to make, but that is friggin' extreme, isn't it? We are talking about 3 dwarven master craftsmen and their assistants working non stop, and it takes them all over a month and a half to complete a suit of full plate? That's crazy.

This is why I use the Craft Points system from UA, so people can actually finish items in amounts of time that make sense. If you don't have access to that book I would take Conaill's suggestion and increase the production of craft skills by seven or tenfold.

 

[Elodan]

It just didn't seem to make sense to us that it would take a good portion of a year to make one suit of plate. I think the daily checks make sense. It seems much more reasonable that it would take 6 weeks to get the armor made.

 

[Caliban]

A small point: blacksmiths generally don't know how to create armor. Blacksmiths make items made out of iron, not steel.

For steel you need a weaponsmith or armorsmith.

In the real world, making sword could take anywhere from a day or two to a year, depending on the condition of the materials you started with and the quality you wanted. Higher quality adds a huge amount of time.

Armor has the same issue: you can turn out low quality stuff in a few days (longer for full plate), but average or higher quality armor took weeks to months, and the best armor took up to a year.

 

[Antoine]

Our group rescued a damsel in distress who was the daughter of the local blacksmith. As a reward he offered to make a suit of full plate for my character.

The interpretation of the craft rules we came up with was that it would take the blacksmith roughly 50 weeks at the quickest to make this suit.

Actually, it's likely to be a little quicker.

An artisan (armorsmith) willing to take up this task had better be sure of his skill, since crafting implies the risk of ruining costly materials.
That means a Craft [Armorsmithing] bonus of +17 or more, so as to progress even on a weekly roll of 1.

You're facing probably facing a 7th level human expert with Skill Focus, Int 14 and masterwork equipment.

If the guy is equiped and a master in his craft, you can imagine he's got assistants enough to work faster (meaning five 1st level or more experts with the same 14 Int and Skill Focus).

Then he can face a weekly DC 28 (18 +10 for speed) Craft check without any chance of failure and produce a steady average of :
(10.5+17+10)*28 = 1050 sp/week.

The armor will be ready in exactly 100 days.

It might seem long, but the guy in this example is working from raw materials, on an exceptionnal basis.
A mastersmith with regular customers is more likely to have a lot of metal plates prepared for the making of full plate armors : meaning all generic work is done, he just needs to adujst the armor for the individual who ordered it.

I'd use a simple half/half rule : 50 days for converting raw material to plates suiting an armor. 50 days for fitting, sizing and proofing with the customer.

So you can probably get a Full plate in 5 decadays/7 weeks in any major city; a little quicker if you're asking dwarves.

Again, from raw material, it would take longer to make a masterwork full plate. But a mastersmith probably buys or gathers masterwork material during spare time to keep the business flowing.

And then, some experts may have magical tools or forges in a fantasy world to work better and faster (a 10th level Dwarf Expert with 16 Int, Skill focus and +5 magical tools has a +24 Craft bonus : with assistants, his weekly progress would average 1691 sp, thats about 40 % time gain).

Of course, you can allow more than five skilled assistants working on the same process at the same time…

 

[Caliban]

Actually, it's likely to be a little quicker.

An artisan (armorsmith) willing to take up this task had better be sure of his skill, since crafting implies the risk of ruining costly materials.
That means a Craft [Armorsmithing] bonus of +17 or more, so as to progress even on a weekly roll of 1.

You can take 10 on craft rolls.

 

[Antoine]

You can take 10 on craft rolls.

Can you ? I see an adverse result if you miss by 5 or more.
But the rule may apply only for taking 20 ? Must check.

Then again, can you assume that a artisan working on 500 gp of raw material is under no pressure when a mishandling can cost him 250 gp ?

 

[hong]

Can you ? I see an adverse result if you miss by 5 or more.

You're thinking of take 20, not take 10.