Craft Skill - mechanically broken

[The Sigil]

My opinion...

I suppose it could rather easily be fixed by use of the following...

Instead of DC times Check Result use

Check Result squared.

Simple and elegant. Perfect? No. But solves some of the problems inherent in the current system.

Haven't fully thought this one through, and am thinking of fudging somehow, but it seems to address the immediate problem.

--The Sigil

 

[Macbrea]

Ah, missed that so, My Elven smith with 6 assistants makes mithril full plate armor in 20 weeks. If he has the 20 assistants then he can make it in a mere 12 weeks. Those times are perfectly respectable for an item they are going to make.



At 10,500 gps for the armor and 20 weeks to make it:

Material cost ..................................................... 3,500 gps
Rent on building and forge 1gp/day ....................... 140 gps
Paying 6 journeyman 2sp per day ............................ 169 gps
.............................................................Total cost:3,808 gps
....................................................... ...Total Profit:6,692 gps


Not too bad for the smith. He is making 334 gps 2 sps a week for his time.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Actually, special materials like adamentine and mithril don't affect creation times. They're all considered masterwork for the creation time effect. It's in the SRD.

Weapons and armor fashioned from adamantine are treated as masterwork items with regard to creation times, but the masterwork quality does not affect the enhancement bonus of weapons or the armor check penalty of armor.

Weapons or armors fashioned from mithral are treated as masterwork items with regard to creation times, but the masterwork quality does not affect the enhancement bonus of weapons or the armor check penalty of armor

The longest thing to make is masterwork full-plate.

As I see it, nothing in either of those statements indicates that the crafting times are reduced.

There's only one mechanic for crafting, DC x skill check, which is then compared to the item's market price. So, yes, it could take 4 years or so to make a masterwork suit of mithral armor.

We ARE talking about mithral here, folks. This isn't exactly a "life's work" for a craftsman, but the creation time should be long to reflect the quality-- and rarity-- of the item.

I went through just this exercise recently, and came up with the same solution: masterwork tools and lots of apprentices.


Wulf

 

[Lord Ben]

It says they're treated as masterwork for purposes of crafting times. I take that to mean that it's just 320 for a longsword since that's what a masterwork would cost.

 

[Conaill]

The Craft rules are NOT mechanically broken.

For the longest time, I thought about it the same as you do: crafting a simple items should not take longer than crafting a more complicated one.

But then I realized... we're really looking at the problem backwards. In other words, in reality it's not that the time to create is determined by difficulty class and price, rather the price is determined by difficulty class and time to craft!

So... Price = difficulty x time.

Now, for simplicity, we just want to have a straightforward table of item market prices, and a couple of straightforward rules to determine how hard certain items are to craft. From this, we can "reverse engineer" how much progress you make on an item per week:

time = price / difficulty.

Yes, if you're crafting two items with the same listed market price but different DC's, the cheaper one will take longer. However, the reason that item has the same price although it's easier to craft is precisely that it takes *longer* to craft than the higher DC one.

Think of an item that takes a lot of busy-work: low DC, but it takes time. For example, putting all those teeth on a saw must take an enormous amount of time, but once you get the hang of it, any apprentice could do it. On the other hand, a good pair of scissors takes careful precision work (higher DC), but a master crafter can probably crank them out much faster that the apprentice can finish saw blades.

Now, we could argue about how bloody *long* it takes to craft anything, but that's a whole different discussion...

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It says they're treated as masterwork for purposes of crafting times. I take that to mean that it's just 320 for a longsword since that's what a masterwork would cost.

Oh.

I took it to mean that crafting the item requires you to craft the base item (the armor, with its own DC and base price) and the masterwork component (with its own DC and base price).

However I did not extrapolate that to mean that a +1000 gp mithril chain shirt had its market value reduced to +150 (for purposes of creation times).

I suppose you could take it either way; personally I like the long creation times for these "difficult to work" metals.


Wulf

 

[tenelo]

Conaill: Interesting take on the subject.

I am afraid that I disagree, you are rationalising the effect of the rules, not proving to me that the effect they have is the correct one. PHB p66, Craft skill description "The item's price and DC determine how long it takes to make the item and the cost of the raw materials"

Take as an example a Breastplate and a suit of Splint Mail, both costing 200gp.

AC bonus for Breastplate +5 Therefore craft DC 15
AC bonus for Splint mail +6 Therefore craft DC 16

Take a smith with total bonus to his craft (armoursmithing) of 15
(10 ranks + 1 Int bonus +2 Skill focus +2 apprentice)
Assume taking 10 on all craft rolls.

Breastplate 2000sp at 25*15 = 375sp per week
Time to create 5 1/3 weeks. Raw materials 66gp 6sp.

Splint mail 2000sp at 25*16 = 400 per week
Time to create 5 weeks. Raw materials 66gp 6sp.

Time=price/difficulty gives us 200/15 for the breastplate = 13.3
Time=price/difficulty gives us 200/16 for the splintmail = 12.5

A Breastplate is a simpler item to make than the Splint mail. The raw material costs are the same. Why should it be the same price if it takes more time to make?

(obviously because the price is the constant everything else is calculated from, that's the problem I have with this system.)

For all the suggestions for patching the system to get workable results, thank you, they seem like sensible suggestions to follow. I would like to address the underlying problem however. Is there a simple elegant system for crafting items that does not suffer from the flaws in the current one?

And please, does anyone have any useful rules regarding masterworking? It seems a little silly to determine that to make a masterwork suit of full plate costs an additional one tenth of its normal price while a masterwork leather armour is 15 times as expensive as its normal price.

Thanks again to everybody for the replies and opinions.

 

[Vaxalon]

Conaill has it. Thank you.

 

[Caliber]

Masterwork Items

The way I see it, Masterwork Items all have a certain amount of extra effort put into them. Edges are smoothed, balances are set, other things I probably don't understand are done. The point is that no matter the item, its roughly the same amount of effort to make that item a 'Master' item.

Dunno if you can believe it but thats how I see it.

 

[Conaill]

A Breastplate is a simpler item to make than the Splint mail. The raw material costs are the same. Why should it be the same price if it takes more time to make?

Because if it took the same time to make, it would have to be cheaper than the splint mail.

Essentially, the DC measures how intrinsically difficult the task is. If your master crafter is just doing busy work (low DC) all day, obviously he won't make as much money for his time as when he has to use all his skills to the fullest. Regardless of how good a job he's doing (his skill check).

Some tasks more time to accomplish than others. And the time needed to accomplish a task need not be directly related to how hard the task is. That's the difference between a master stonecarver and those guys breaking blocks of stone at the chain gang.

Suppose a ton of fine gravel costs about as much as a small, finely crafted stone statue. Who do you think will make more progress in gp/week, the master stonecarver, or the guy on the chain gang? And which do you think will take longer for a single person, bashing solid rock until you get a ton of gravel, or carving a small stone statue (with the same market value of a ton of gravel)?