D&D 4E Crafting... can anyone make anything in 4E?

[Arravis]

Mlund:
In the campaign we’re in, crafting is not a “plot device”. I’m not arguing that crafting should be critical in your campaign, simply stating that in mine, and perhaps others, it is. In our game it is a central skill… wood and stone items break frequently, and new ones must be crafted while the group travels. Flint spears and daggers are easy to make, their low cost requiring little time.

Fourthbear:
Well, since it’s a late stone-age based campaign, long swords don’t actually exist… but I was actually referring to actual craft time, not the craft time presented in the 3.5 PHB. As has been stated many times, it’s a poor system.

Saeviomagy:
With the rare exception, the only loot available is that which the players invent and create for themselves out of the raw materials available. Be they monsters, plants, stones, shells, etc. Its up to them to come up with what they want to make out of the available resources. They spend a lot of time looking at monster pictures and reading the physical description to figure out what all can be made from it.

 

[Thasmodious]

Maybe its just me... but it seems that the rules only seem to care about combat and combat is probably the rarest thing in our campaign. I understand having all those things falling under the DM's power, but I want my players to feel like they are in charge of their own characters and destinies, not me. Social interactions with NPCs and environmental survival situations are the most common kind of encounters I have in my campaign, and even though it wasn't perfect, 3.5 did an ok job with them. In 4.0, it seems that I'm left out to dry...

Good lord, sit down with your 3e books, grab Unearthed Arcana while you are at it, and design a quick crafting system that fits the numbers of 4e. It will take you 10 minutes. Print it off and announce to your players: "these are the crafting rules" Problem solved.

And yes, you should have to.

 

[VannATLC]

And a crafting character doesn't mean its unplayable. As mentioned earlier, in my campaign, it is quite critical. Of course, setting it at a late stone-age / early bronze-age level helps.

If the party is attacked by a monster, such as a giant centipede, the monster doesn't have loot... the monster is the loot.
The hard shell of the creature can be used to make armor, shields, or any number of items. The pincers could be made into weapons from daggers to spears, etc, or perhaps tools. The meat inside is cooked and eaten, poisons are extracted, and it might hold strange properties like its bile acting as a dye, or other unique traits.
Weird I know, but my group loves it .

Its fine, I like the idea, in fact, and I'm doing similiar things with rituals, to adjust the flow of gold in the economy.

However;

What sort of time frame are you using? If you are using the 3.5 timetables, anything you make up off RL times is going to be MASSIVELY longer, in most cases. Using a carapace is going to be roughly similiar to making leather, etc. Processes which take substantial amounts of time; They also don't generally need modelling off a check.

 

[small pumpkin man]

Maybe its just me... but it seems that the rules only seem to care about combat and combat is probably the rarest thing in our campaign. I understand having all those things falling under the DM's power, but I want my players to feel like they are in charge of their own characters and destinies, not me. Social interactions with NPCs and environmental survival situations are the most common kind of encounters I have in my campaign, and even though it wasn't perfect, 3.5 did an ok job with them. In 4.0, it seems that I'm left out to dry...

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, the rules do not only care about combat, they only care about adventuring, Social interaction and enviromental hazards are part of adventuring which is why they are in the books. Making a sword isn't, which is why it isn't.

 

[GnomeWorks]

And yes, you should have to.

Mmm, arrogance. Tasty.

The game can't be all things to all people, sure. But the game can allow for a wider variety of things-to-do than it seems to support now.

4e is very much combat-centric, and it would be foolish to claim anything but that. There is nothing wrong with being upset by this, either.

There was a time when, talking about gaming, that I thought that D&D could do everything. d20 was a rather versatile system, in that regard. With 4e, that is not so much the case... and the playerbase will most likely suffer for it. I imagine that there is something along the lines of a "significant minority" that started with 3e and 3.5, and liked the versatility of it, and do not enjoy where 4e headed; some will be satisfied with where the game has gone, and others will look elsewhere.

To bring this post more to relevancy for this thread, crafting is an example of how d20 was more versatile than 4e - it had it, for starters. Claim that you can house-rule it in all you like, that isn't the point: the point is that it's not in the core system. While 3.5's crafting may have sucked, it at least gave you a starting point from which to work, if you felt that it needed improvement; you were not adding entirely new rules, but instead were building off of the framework already provided. That's an important distinction.

If the OP sticks with 4e, there are plenty of good recommendations in this thread. Skill challenges - modified so that they actually function - may be the best bet, and perhaps would provide enough of a focus on the crafting to make it feel like an integral part of the campaign. I would argue that skill challenges may make it feel even more integral, what with the skill challenges being more engaging and such; you don't get that feeling from a single skill check, or even from a set of skill checks made in a row.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Saeviomagy:
With the rare exception, the only loot available is that which the players invent and create for themselves out of the raw materials available. Be they monsters, plants, stones, shells, etc. Its up to them to come up with what they want to make out of the available resources. They spend a lot of time looking at monster pictures and reading the physical description to figure out what all can be made from it.

Sounds fantastic and a lot of fun.

You have to ask yourself a few questions:
how are skill checks supposed to help my system do what I want it to?
There's no real need to have any dice rolling at all with the system you've described so far - the players pick some bits to make stuff out of, you give some rough numbers for how long it takes, and voila - done. On the other hand, you might want to have different characters have different capabilities - one is an expert with poisons, one an expert on leather, another on chitin. That still doesn't necessarily mean you need dice rolls - you can just have someone pick his desired craft, and it simply means that's what he can craft. Alternately if dice rolls are important then you can assign DCs for attribute checks (or checks using particular existing skills, most likely nature). If you want both, it's relatively easy to use the existing skill system and simply add more skills to it, but pay close attention to my second point.

should I require the PCs to give up their character resources to craft things?
If you use the existing skill system, then you have to be conscious of the fact that a character gives up something in order to be able to craft. He's losing a bonus to hit, damage, another skill etc, and you have to make sure the new skill gives enough benefits to counter that loss. In 3e, I doubt that anyone could deny that a single character who took ALL of his skills as craft skills and all of his feats in skill focus: craft skill would be hurting himself pretty badly.

 

[Kichwas]

Before you can craft anything you have to go right click on the herbs and loot cloth from your foes, then go to... oh wait... wrong game.

Sometimes its hard to remember this isn't WoW.

Well, I guess there's one thing MMOs have that 4E doesn't - crafting and non combat skills. How strange is that? Come to think of it, just about every skill based RPG I've seen in the last 3 decades has had non combat skills, including 1E AD&D (which had professions).

 

[hong]

Before you can craft anything you have to go right click on the herbs and loot cloth from your foes, then go to... oh wait... wrong game.

Sometimes its hard to remember this isn't WoW.

Well, I guess there's one thing MMOs have that 4E doesn't - crafting and non combat skills. How strange is that? Come to think of it, just about every skill based RPG I've seen in the last 3 decades has had non combat skills, including 1E AD&D (which had professions).

No doubt it's coming in the PHB2.

 

[Thasmodious]

Mmm, arrogance. Tasty.

The game can't be all things to all people, sure. But the game can allow for a wider variety of things-to-do than it seems to support now.

But why should it? What benefit did it bring to us in the end? There was plenty of playstyles and subsystems that 3e didn't have either. You can't include everything. So what to include and what not to include? If you include one subsystem but leave out another then people who liked that subsystem/playstyle are upset. Instead, the game provides a solid base to conflict resolution, the core of the RPG, and leaves DMs and players free to do what they always did anyway - tweak the game to suit their needs. The books include plenty of advice on how to tweak it, giving DC tables by level so the math matches up, for example. With those tables, devising a working craft system is cake. As is devising about anything you need to do.

4e focuses no more on combat than any other edition of D&D did. 3e was a bit bloated, but the corebooks certainly focused on conflict resolution. So did 1e - I have that PHB beside me, if you would like to post the table of contents. Why? Because that is the central element of the game. People seem to be in agreement that crafting in 3e was crap, so why port it into 4e? 3rd party publishers will cover the niche markets for gamers that don't want to or aren't creative enough to tweak their own games to suit their own wants. But why bloat the rules with a bunch of unnecessary subsystems that don't even get used in most games and many groups just houserule to suit their needs anyway?

With the way many gamers try to abuse every little loophole they can find, the more subsystems you use the more potential problems you create. Not too many groups will design their own system and then seek to abuse it or complain that it isn't realistic enough, or doesn't model medieval armorsmithing well enough, or a hundred other things.

And when the designers state from the beginning that this is, indeed, their design intent. That they credit the average gamer with common sense, a sense of fair play, and enough creative muscle to tweak the game to their own groups playstyle and preferences, complaining that this is some kind of design flaw or limiting the versatility of the game is just baseless nerd rage.

And for the record. 3e wasn't nearly as versatile as you want to claim it was. There isn't a group I am aware of that didn't have a collection of houserules to cover things the way they wanted. Even if the rules included this or that subsystem, many groups houseruled those subsystems to make them work better, or more logical, or more realistic, or more powerful, or whatever based on their own perception. My own group used a notebooks worth of houserules, a completely different and uncomplicated (but mathematically sound) XP system that didn't require tables and a calculator for every enoucnter, much less irritating identification rules (to our view, of course), modified craft systems, treasure systems, level/training, prestige class requirements, and many other things.

I'm already working on houseruling a couple things in 4e, but don't plan to finalize anything until we have more experience with the system. Point is, it is not a design flaw for the game to account for the creativity and individuality of gamers. It's a feature. The skeletal framework is there for you to easily build just about anything you want to add into the system, including crafting. Complaining that they didn't do it for you is where the arrogance lies - in thinking that the game designers failed if they didn't account for your personal preferences.

 

[Obryn]

Arravis - It sounds like a really neat campaign you've got going! Seriously, very interesting stuff, from how you've described it!

Yes, I agree that some kind of crafting skill would be perfectly appropriate for your game. I think 4e has the framework to do this pretty well, and I love your workaround with the other skills.

Admittedly, 4e's a much more focused game than 3e was. 3e tried to do everything - and this was both a boon and a curse. On the one hand, it was overly complex, and arguably didn't do a lot of genres well without extensive house-ruling. On the other hand, it was a better DM toolbox.

I don't think 4e's focus seems incompatible with your goals, and I think you could come up with some really great stuff for it. I'd love to see what you come up with.

-O