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

[Arravis]

Thanks for the comments guys...
For those interested in the campaign setting, I made this post:

Endless Desert: Survival in a stone-age wasteland

 

[knifie_sp00nie]

Like others here, I think the answer to your problems is the DC chart on page 42 of the DMG. If you want crafting skills, it's easy to make the skill training feat cover them. Otherwise I'd just use a stat check.

In the larger view though, I think people lack insight on the world they are trying to simulate and are forcing modern conventions of work and skill into an environment that was very different.

Our modern world is very specialized. In order to survive we all have to focus our skills on a narrow profession. To some degree this has always been the case since man started living in communities, but in a medieval world most people would be generalists. The rest might be trained artisans, but day-to-day life still requires a high degree of general skill.

Even with our modern skill specialization we still have a general selection of skills that we take for granted that everyone knows. Literacy and general schooling is a good one to start with. Driving is another (USA centric). If this were d20 modern would you make everyone spend skills in order to drive or just assume everyone over the age of 18 has enough skill to get from point A to B, leaving the trained skill uses to professional drivers?

What I'm trying to say is that cobbling together the tools of basic survival is a general skill in the DnD context and even in the realistic human context. If you know what a spear is, you'll figure out how to make one real quick if your life depends on it. A 14 year old child in a South American tribe has all the knowledge necessary to survive in the rain forest, something only a specialist from the modern US would have.

So when you say you want skill expenditures and rules for crafting, it seems you're asking about the specialists. Those people probably aren't adventurers. On the other hand, basic crafting should be assumed to just be part of everyday survival for the time period the way we assume everyone has the skill to operate a microwave.

 

[Andor]

Wow. This has to be the most useless collection of replies I've ever seen on ENworld. Seriously.

With a couple of exceptions everyone is either so illiterate as to not understand that crafting skills are a central facet of the campaign he's running and therefore not irrelevant, or suffering from a massive cranial-rectal inversion causeing them to chide Arravis for daring to have such a badwrongfun game. What the holy hell? Why would you even post in this thread if you don't have a goddamm thing to contribute aside from an accusation of badwrongfun?

Arravis: Sounds like an awesome campaign man, and I would love to play in it.

If I understand correctly you're looking for 3 things from the skill system.

1) Can character A perform task B?

2) How well can character A perform task B?

3) How long did task B take?

As has been mentioned in a low tech setting like yours most people will be generalists, with specialists being those who work with rare or dangerous materials. So the 3 part skill system you suggest should work fine. As far as setting DCs goes I'd go with whatever the Standard DCs are in 4e with results something like:

Check result of DC-5 = Failure
Check result of DC-(4,1) = Shoddy Workmanship
Check result of DC to DC +5 = Normal Success
Check result of >DC+5 = Superior Workmanship

As far as how long it takes to make something, 4e isn't going to help you. I'd go with a couple on anthropology texts if I were you and use their results as guidelines. So makeing a stone knife or arrowhead might take 20 or 30 minutes while tanning leather takes days (but leaves you with a lot of free time during those days.)

You might use the feat system to allow access to crafting with unusual materials like metal or giant bug bile.

Alternately you can use the ritual system.

I'd call it the crafting system and default it to Rangers and Fighters, letting others pick it up with a feat.

Each item they want to craft is it's own 'ritual' which must be mastered in the same way as a ritual is. No book is needed however, and anyone can teach another a crafting ritual they know if they have access to crafting rituals. Usually masters charge for this training, although barter or exchange of rituals are commonplace.

E.G.

Craft Stone Blade
Level 1
Component Cost 5cp (of nice rock)
Category: Crafting
Market Price: 50 cp
Time: 20 min
Key Skill: Nature
Duration: Permanent

You chip a piece of suitable stone like flint, chert or obsidian into a form with a useable edge. This can be an arrowhead, a knife or an axehead.

But honestly, I don't think 4e has much to offer your game over 3e. Most of your reference document is useless or inapplicable in 4e. :\ Good Luck with your game though it sounds excellent.

 

[FourthBear]

As far as how long it takes to make something, 4e isn't going to help you. I'd go with a couple on anthropology texts if I were you and use their results as guidelines. So makeing a stone knife or arrowhead might take 20 or 30 minutes while tanning leather takes days (but leaves you with a lot of free time during those days.)

I would definitely agree that if your goal is to model something resembling real world crafting (and not interested in rules more focused on narrative outcomes) that what's needed is a good source for reasonable crafting times and materials from an environment closest suited to you campaign world. Once you've got an idea what you think it reasonable, you can decide what game mechanical elements you want to build around it.

I spent a bit of time looking around for an RPG crafting guide or somesuch, but without any immediate luck. It seems to me that this comes up often enough that there should be some kind of guide to this sort of thing for writers of period pieces and perhaps RPGs. Does anyone know of any largely rules-free guides to crafting various items?

I've found the GURPS line to often have very useful and interesting background material, but I don't own GURPS Low Tech. Any chance it could have useful background material?

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/low-tech/

 

[Celebrim]

Arravis: I don't really know how you can put up with this sort of crap. What a bunch of useless replies.

The rest of you...

A) "Characters can do what the DM allows them to do": This is no sort of answer at all. Why don't we just scrap the entire combat system and simply arbitrate combat by having characters do what what the DM allows them to? Why do we need rules at all?

Arravis is saying that crafting is central to his campaign - as one would expect in any game where crafted items aren't freely purchaseable and resources are limited. We don't scrap the combat system because it is central to the campaign. Likewise, we don't scrap the combat system for DM fiat because we want to give players some expectations about how propositions will be resolved. Likewise, we don't scrap the combat system because we want to shift some of the burden of arbitrating the system to the designer thereby decreasing the burden that is on the referee.

B) "Just make it up yourself": This is no sort of answer at all. Why do we purchase a game system? So we don't have to make it up ourselves! Of course we could make up any sort of subsystem, but inventing new game systems is hard. The 3E crafting system was, for all its complexity, already inadequate if crafting was to be in any fashion central to your campaign. That was one of my biggest gripes with the 3E system. Making up a crafting system isn't easy, especially without even any basic system or examples to start with.

C) "Crafting is just badwrongfun anyway": These sorts of replies are not only non-answers, but they ought to get you tossed off the thread by a moderator.

Anyway, back to your question Arravis.

Fourth edition doesn't really provide any answers to your question nor does it provide much help for you. The designers of 4E believed it was very important to focus the game on what they percieved to be D&D's core gameplay. Crafting was not percieved to be part of D&D's core gameplay, and so its not really dealt with at all. I consider this to be very shortsighted, and maybe in the long run so will the designers of 4E. While you are awaiting 'The Complete Crafter's Handbook', I'd check out Andor's reply because I think its a good one.

a) I think I would create a profession/secondary skill template wherein each party member could purchase for free a certain number of crafting skills. Each crafting skill feat would make you trained in that craft.

b) One thing that 3rd edition doesn't handle well is heirarchies of closely related but separate skills, for example: carpenter, joiner, shipwright, plowwright, wood carver, bowyer, all have skill sets that interlap to some extent but not completely. One thing that 4E's skills as feats systems opens up is a nice skill hierarchy like

carpenter -> shipwright
carpenter -> joiner
wood carver -> bowyer
whitesmith -> silversmith/goldsmith
silversmith/goldsmith + stone polisher -> jeweler
blacksmith -> weaponsmith
blacksmith + animal handler -> farrier
carpenter + blacksmith -> plowright

And so forth. In that fashion, all skilled shipwrights are already skilled carpenters, all skilled weaponsmiths can do basic smith work, and so forth.

c) Another thing it opens up is the possibility of defining related skills. For example, if I'm a trained blacksmith (+5 bonus, can do 'trained' things like high skill work), then I could also be considered a 'trained' whitesmith, brownsmith, weaponsmith only without the +5 bonus because I wouldn't be working in my core craft. If I can work with iron, I can probably work with bronze, albiet not with the same degree of proficiency as if I had practiced extensively with bronze.

d) In terms of how long something takes or how much it costs, this can get really complicated. But a simple approach would be to simply start listing out the things you can make with a given skill as 'rituals', listing the time, cost of materials, minimum skill check, and outcome of success and failure. So you might have 'Craft Furniture', 'Forge Weapon', 'Embroider Cloth', 'Engrave Steel' and so forth. That's not as satisfying in some ways as a unified system, but it is simple - albiet tedious.

 

[Thasmodious]

B) "Just make it up yourself": This is no sort of answer at all. Why do we purchase a game system? So we don't have to make it up ourselves! [/quote[

Of course it's a valid answer. You can't just wave your magic wand and make it not so. What isn't valid or helpful is claiming that if a game system doesn't support the eccentricities of your personal playstyle then that game system is broken, the designers failed, and should be drug out in the street and shot for killing D&D. Go ahead and recommend a different system that seems a better fit for a campaign world or idea, no harm in that, but continually accusing a system of failure because it doesn't spell out every possible subsystem is just banal.

What other answer can be given? "Crafting is important to my game and 4e doesn't have a crafting system, what should I do?"

Make it up, change your campaign world, or pick a different system are the only 3 valid answers there are. Suggestions of how to make it up are a good thing. The system is designed so you can make up what you need easily and in a balanced way that fits in with the experience by level mechanic (the DC table, for example). This is a feature not a fault. You don't like that. We all get that. Move on.

Of course we could make up any sort of subsystem, but inventing new game systems is hard.

Maybe for you. I, and most every gaming group I am aware of, have been doing it for decades and 4e was even nice enough to give us that often mentioned framework for balancing new rulesets into the core system.

As already mentioned, 3e is hardly a good source for an accurate crafting system, reflecting the real time requirements of item crafting in such a campaign setting. If that is important to the setting, regardless of what system you use, you are going to have to research that yourself and incorporate it into the system.

Your suggestions were pretty sound, though. I'm just curious, did the irony sprite smack you upside the head so you would notice that in the same post where you say -make it up- isn't a valid answer, you then went on to -make it up-

 

[GnomeWorks]

What isn't valid or helpful is claiming that if a game system doesn't support the eccentricities of your personal playstyle then that game system is broken, the designers failed, and should be drug out in the street and shot for killing D&D.

And if the designers had turned combat over to the realm of DM fiat? I would be willing to bet that a lot of people would complain.

I think you're putting words in our (those of us who are disagreeing with you) mouths: no one is saying that the "game system is broken," "the designers failed," or that they "should be drug out in the street;" at least not in this thread, at any rate. The approach 4e has taken is a valid one, just one that is more limited in scope, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing that out. If you ignore the faults of the system and where it is weak, then you're just being a fanboi.

 

[Andor]

Of course it's a valid answer. You can't just wave your magic wand and make it not so.

"Make it up" is not a valid answer because it is completely and utterly unhelpful in a thread where the OP was asking for advice. It is exactly the same thing as posting "I have no advice to give you." except for being disingenuous and insulting as well as pointless and worthless. So no, it is not a vailid answer.

The difference between "Make it up" and what Celebrin and I posted is that we actually offered advice on how to make it up, including examples and guidelines. This is called advice and useful or not it's a damm sight better than "I have no advice and spit on you for asking the question."

What isn't valid or helpful is claiming that if a game system doesn't support the eccentricities of your personal playstyle then that game system is broken, the designers failed, and should be drug out in the street and shot for killing D&D. Go ahead and recommend a different system that seems a better fit for a campaign world or idea, no harm in that, but continually accusing a system of failure because it doesn't spell out every possible subsystem is just banal.

You do realize nobody made those claims, right? Well, I suppose you just did. Why all the hatred? Calm your nerdrage, that way leads to the darkside.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

For what it's worth, since no one seems interested, lol my Expert class for 4th ed has ideas for 4th ed crafting etc

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/adnd/htm/4th_expert.html

 

[mlund]

Of course it's a valid answer. You can't just wave your magic wand and make it not so. What isn't valid or helpful is claiming that if a game system doesn't support the eccentricities of your personal playstyle then that game system is broken, the designers failed, and should be drug out in the street and shot for killing D&D. Go ahead and recommend a different system that seems a better fit for a campaign world or idea, no harm in that, but continually accusing a system of failure because it doesn't spell out every possible subsystem is just banal.

Ding! Give the man a cookie.

What other answer can be given? "Crafting is important to my game and 4e doesn't have a crafting system, what should I do?"

Make it up, change your campaign world, or pick a different system are the only 3 valid answers there are. Suggestions of how to make it up are a good thing.

I have to agree here.

In light of that, there are only two paths to go down:

A.) Rant about how badevilwrong 4th Edition is for not supporting Crafting. This option strikes me as counter-productive.

B.) Work on House Rules to support a dynamic crafting environment. This option strikes me as tailor-made for the House Rules Section.

4th Edition doesn't support mundane item crafting out of the box. That's not a great thing for your campaign, so you'll have to look elsewhere (inward or outward) for a sub-system you need. In terms of 4th Edition's current emphasis and design goals (heroic fantasy fiction) you've got some disconnect with your choice of technological advancement (Stone / Bronze age) nor your choice of sub-systems (Weapons that commonly break, hand-crafting primative weapons). You're going to have to improvise one way or another.

If your PCs weapons are made out of bone and stone and are breaking then it looks like you're already busy establishing House Rules - which isn't a bad thing at all.

- Marty Lund