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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 8476383" data-attributes="member: 42856">As an additional thought, at what point is it better to say "To hell with consumer's society, I'll craft my own Celestial Aegis!"?According to the crafting rules, you need the base material. That's a masterwork full plate and sacred texts. Let's assume that you can write the sacred text yourself for no cost going by your Sunday School memories at the Onatar temple and focus on the armour.1. Acquiring base materials. For a masterwork item, it's twice the price of the item. So, well... If masterwork full plate is available for purchase, it's never interesting to try to craft one, since you'll be able to readily buy the materials for the price of the final item. Buying off-the-shelf saves you time and risk of failure.2. Supposing you're in a place where masterwork armour isn't available and you need to craft one, it will set you back 3,000 gp of base material. You need to work on it for 20 weeks (five times the regular 4 weeks for a heavy armour). You need to pass a DC 25 check with your smith tool's proficiency that you can't fail by 5 or more under penalty of losing the materials. So, assuming a 20 in your crafting stat (because you want to craft a very rare item and need to be 10th level for that (p. 365 T&T), so it's reasonable to assume you started with at least 16 in your main stat and spent two ASIs), with a +4 proficiency bonus... You're rolling at +9. Half your attempts will result in loss of materials, a quarter will let you restart and a quarter will let you succeed. Basically, just making the masterwork item will cost you as much as the base price of the enchanted item...3. Once you have a masterwork armour, you must enchant it into a celestial aegis. It will take 24 weeks and you'll need to checks: an initial check under INT (failure by 5 or more gives you an expertise dice and wastes half the materials, failure by less than five let's you continue but adds 2 to the final check DC  [I guess there is a typo and it's by 5 or less, because if not, there is two concurrent "by five or more" results]) and a final check under STR, which makes the item on a success and consumes half or all the materials depending on the margin of failure.Assuming you have an infinite supply of masterwork armour (because they can be bought off the shelf) and assuming  a +5 check in one of the stat and a +9 check in the second one (there is no indication that several characters can collaborate on the work), that's pretty complicated. The odd of passing the first one are 10% without penalty, 20% with a +2 DC penalty and 70% failure. The odd of succeeding at the final checks are 30% if one succeeded on the first check, 20% if they barely failed. On 100 attempts to craft the item, 70 would fail at the initial check, costing half the 3,000 gp materials, 20 will continue with a penalty (of whom 4 will be  succeeding, 14 failing and consuming the materials, 2 failing and consuming half the materials) and 10 will pass the first check with flying colors, (3 resulting in the item being crafted after the second one, 2 resulting in losing half the materials and 5 resulting in failure). That's an average cost of 168,000 gp of materials and 720 weeks to make 7 items if my maths are correct. In the ideal case they are plentiful, an average making cost of 24,000 gp for a 17,500 gp base price item makes crafting something you'd be doing only when able to stack the odd in your favor.Edit: didn't take into account the expertise die, though. Drat!</blockquote>

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