D&D (2024) D&D Beyond Article on Crafting

[Yaarel]

What would you use to make candles?

You really don’t need much in the way of tools, but you do need to be able to collect the Ingredients - beeswax or tallow, and a suitable fibre for the wick. 5e has its strange division of skills and tool proficiency. And “collecting natural ingredients” is lumped into herbalist tool proficiency.

Among skills to make candles? Honestly, a Religion check would work for many sacred traditions.

Also a Nature check.

Even an Animal Handling check, in the sense of livestock whence tallow, and in the sense of beekeeping whence wax.

 

[TiQuinn]

There is a fundamental conflict in what people think crafting should be. There is simulationist - full plate requires a well equipped workshop, assistants, months of work and a full time professional master craftsman with at least 10 years experience. Or there is the gamist approach, as seen in 3rd edition and many video games. Full plate can be created by an adventurer in the field with a work bench, four iron ingots, and an at most one days work.

I don’t really see a way to thread the needle between the two.

I want to throw the metal ingots in a pot cooking on a fire while whistling a jaunty tune and out pops plate armor. Maybe throw in some red dragon scales and get fire-resistant plate armor!

 

[Yaarel]

Retorts, burners, glass tubing? Not useful for making candles. Nor is knowing about material transmutation. All you are doing with a candle is arranging an existing material into a more useful shape.

Alchemy definitely knows about candles − and especially how to refine many different kinds of raw materials.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Crafting is done between adventures and at that point who cares how long it takes.

Plus, by the time they can just buy what they need with all of the excess gold clogging their backpacks/wagons/keep/etc.

Only time crafting has ever been needed was for making scrolls, potions, enchanting, and magic items which again is usually in “off time”.

At least in my experience since 2E.

 

[Yaarel]

Same reason they don’t add a separate Geography skill. To try and keep the length of the list manageable. But you don’t need specialist tools to make a small number of candles. Chandlers focus more on mass production.

Survival, navigation, is the "Geography" skill, and is awkwardly Wisdom.

I would prefer to see Intelligence (Survival) for calculating sea travel by maps and constellations, and so on.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Alchemy definitely knows about candles − and especially how to refine many different kinds of raw materials.

Everyone knows about candles. I can make candles, they are easy.

Soap is another matter. That benefits from a bit of alchemical knowledge. Still needs herbalism for the scent though.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Herbalist kit is use to create rosemary or lavender scented soy candles, duh!

 

[KYRON45]

Herbalist kit is use to create rosemary or lavender scented soy candles, duh!

I do enjoy a nice scented candle.

 

[Stoutstien]

Traditional crafting just doesn't work in the 5e design. It breaks down everything into either adventuring (making progress) or downtime (not making progress) with a extremely fast recovery and advancement rate. Nor is there really any guidelines for crafting specific objects for overcoming a particular challenge.

Seeing how you don't get better at crafting by crafting and it more effective to just gather gold until you have 'enough' a tool prof is basically just a slightly different skill that costs encumbrance..if you even track that.

 

[mamba]

The survival-craft genre is currently very popular in computer games, and even some board games. I could see commercial reasons for taking a more gamist approach to crafting

so you see commercial reasons for going with the opposite of what is popular, am I understanding this correctly?

I meant more that the gamist side is so simplistic that it does not amount to a system, and anyone can just make some widely unrealistic recipe for an item up on the fly