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

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Leatherworker needs something useful to craft, such as boots, or a surgical support.

Padding! Reduce any falling damage by 1d6!
Comfortable soles! Reroll one Athletics to move around in the following day!
Pants! Save the barbarian's dignity even when he won't!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Pants! Save the barbarian's dignity even when he won't!

Breaks after a day!

Although that could be useful. Craft a coin pouch and sell it to a rich npc. Then track them down the next day and wait for all their gold to fall on the floor.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Imagine if it scaled. You hit lv10, and you could craft TWO TORCHES.

 

[Stalker0]

For people that hate that the times to craft certain items (like plate) are so long, the rules offer you an easy solution.

while the rules say that normally only 1 assistant is allowed, it very specifically notes the DM is welcome to add more and that each assistant offers the same amount of progression. So if you want a master smith that can crank out plate in a couple of days, just give them a workshop with a ton of staff that they oversee. Same with the players, the fighter comes back to their "bastion" (from the new rules hopefully) and instructs their 20 armorers to make them some plate or something.

And boom you have your fast times with not a single change to the rules. Enjoy!

 

[Chaosmancer]

To be fair Tony Stark owns the factories that make the suit. He tells the computer to make it and the factory goes into action. Tony Stark also makes the suit that Rhodes uses. Its not like either of them set up shop in moments between smacking around the bad guys and hammers out their armor by hand in their free time.

Yep, he never once made the suit from a box of scraps in a cave.

And the third movie totally never showed him improvising a bunch of inventive gadgets to storm a compound from materials found in a small town Home Depot and a kid's garage.

I get the appeal of a grizzled warrior who wants to open a tavern some day after his years of grinding away keeping the world safe have made him broken and tired. I just don't see the appeal of a warlock in his prime wanting to start a scented potpourri sachet Etsy page while serving as a minion of the unseelie court.

I'm not saying the crafters of the world are evil and shouldn't do it. I'm just expressing my inability to see the appeal. I also don't get min maxers, baseball and why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. But as the youngest child in a family of 8 I do get that my opinion counts for little.

My Feylock who had that story was making alcohol, and running a tavern, at the end of the world. The apocalypse had happened, and we were the people rebuilding from the ashes. So, he grabbed a building, and started making food and drinks.

Sure, another character could have done that. We could have had some rando NPC take over that duty... but since it was my PC who was making these things, I became the quartermaster for our settlement. I controlled the food and the drink. As a Feylock I used my powers to improve the farm land and the personal gardens. As the ONLY building that served food and drink, I was also the town purser, who kept track of everyone's wages and what they owed for when we finally got real coin. I was able to use my brewing skills to make large batches of healing potions, becoming the distributor of healing potions for the entire community. And when trouble came, and it stayed at MY inn and ate MY food and drank MY alcohol, I was able to call on Fey Magic to curse them for breaking hospitality.

Yes, it was a very specific type of campaign, but all of that didn't stem from "this is my goal" it stemmed from "I want to play a bartender at the end of the world." So I ended up taking cook's utensils and brewer's tools. And thru the concept of crafting, out of all three of my fellow PC town leaders... only one of them had any chance of being as influential as I was. And she had MULTIPLE divine miracles in front of the entire town to her name (girl's luck was insanity)

Mechanically, crafting doesn't do much for your personal power as a PC. It saves some gold. But as a story element? As a story element, being the person who makes the things people want is deeply compelling.

Enjoy the game the way you play it.

I do. I just wish I didn't need to constantly defend the desire for crafting rules.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Talking about the system more holistically now that I've seen it (though I have not seen the fast crafting table)

It sucks and changes NOTHING. The 10 gp per 8 hour work day was already in Xanathars. Actually, it is even worse, because they say you need to round up on the number of days needed to craft something to a minimum of 1 day. Previously you could at least craft multiple things worth a total of 10 gp in a single day.

And then, if that isn't bad enough, the potion and the scroll, the explicitly magical items, take only a day. So, you can spend 5 days making a flask of alchemist fire, or one day to make a heaing potion of the same cost. The scroll I think is one day up to level 2 spells (not pulling up the chart to check it again, I know cantrip and 1st level were a day) which has a value far higher than the 50 gp of the potion.

We had a chance to improve the system. They refused. Again.

 

[KYRON45]

Yep, he never once made the suit from a box of scraps in a cave.

And the third movie totally never showed him improvising a bunch of inventive gadgets to storm a compound from materials found in a small town Home Depot and a kid's garage.



My Feylock who had that story was making alcohol, and running a tavern, at the end of the world. The apocalypse had happened, and we were the people rebuilding from the ashes. So, he grabbed a building, and started making food and drinks.

Sure, another character could have done that. We could have had some rando NPC take over that duty... but since it was my PC who was making these things, I became the quartermaster for our settlement. I controlled the food and the drink. As a Feylock I used my powers to improve the farm land and the personal gardens. As the ONLY building that served food and drink, I was also the town purser, who kept track of everyone's wages and what they owed for when we finally got real coin. I was able to use my brewing skills to make large batches of healing potions, becoming the distributor of healing potions for the entire community. And when trouble came, and it stayed at MY inn and ate MY food and drank MY alcohol, I was able to call on Fey Magic to curse them for breaking hospitality.

Yes, it was a very specific type of campaign, but all of that didn't stem from "this is my goal" it stemmed from "I want to play a bartender at the end of the world." So I ended up taking cook's utensils and brewer's tools. And thru the concept of crafting, out of all three of my fellow PC town leaders... only one of them had any chance of being as influential as I was. And she had MULTIPLE divine miracles in front of the entire town to her name (girl's luck was insanity)

Mechanically, crafting doesn't do much for your personal power as a PC. It saves some gold. But as a story element? As a story element, being the person who makes the things people want is deeply compelling.



I do. I just wish I didn't need to constantly defend the desire for crafting rules.

I'm nobody. You don't answer to me.
You shouldn't seek validation from strangers.
If crafting is fun for you then by all means no one is telling you you shouldn't do it
Not everyone likes what everyone else likes.
I wish you good fortune in your crafting endeavors.

 

[Parmandur]

@Charlaquin on the question if the Crafter 20% discount, it seems that part of the normal Crafting system is the need to source raw materials, which it seems would apply to that discount. That can be a pretty big dealt o a character who is doing this big time over the long term.

 

[Charlaquin]

@Charlaquin on the question if the Crafter 20% discount, it seems that part of the normal Crafting system is the need to source raw materials, which it seems would apply to that discount. That can be a pretty big dealt o a character who is doing this big time over the long term.

I mean, yeah, that part of the feat is certainly beneficial to someone who wants to do a lot of crafting. And if it only applied to the cost of those raw materials, I’d be fine with it. The problem is that it seemingly applies to any and all purchases, including complete, fully functional gear the crafter did not make themselves.

 

[humble minion]

My Feylock who had that story was making alcohol, and running a tavern, at the end of the world. The apocalypse had happened, and we were the people rebuilding from the ashes. So, he grabbed a building, and started making food and drinks.

Sure, another character could have done that. We could have had some rando NPC take over that duty... but since it was my PC who was making these things, I became the quartermaster for our settlement. I controlled the food and the drink. As a Feylock I used my powers to improve the farm land and the personal gardens. As the ONLY building that served food and drink, I was also the town purser, who kept track of everyone's wages and what they owed for when we finally got real coin. I was able to use my brewing skills to make large batches of healing potions, becoming the distributor of healing potions for the entire community. And when trouble came, and it stayed at MY inn and ate MY food and drank MY alcohol, I was able to call on Fey Magic to curse them for breaking hospitality.

Yes, it was a very specific type of campaign, but all of that didn't stem from "this is my goal" it stemmed from "I want to play a bartender at the end of the world." So I ended up taking cook's utensils and brewer's tools. And thru the concept of crafting, out of all three of my fellow PC town leaders... only one of them had any chance of being as influential as I was. And she had MULTIPLE divine miracles in front of the entire town to her name (girl's luck was insanity)

Mechanically, crafting doesn't do much for your personal power as a PC. It saves some gold. But as a story element? As a story element, being the person who makes the things people want is deeply compelling.

Yeah this, 100%. Crafting is, in my preferences, a story element rather than a part of the routine 'win the next fight' gameplay loop.

I mean, The Crystal Shard, which was the first ever D&D novel i read and was what sucked me into the whole hobby in the first place, has an important scene where Bruenor crafts a magic hammer (and not just any hammer, a Dwarven Thrower, which was a one-step-down-from-artifact level big deal in AD&D!) It's not a powergaming choice for him, it's a story element, a way a gruff and uncommunicative dwarf of few words demonstrates his love for a boy he's come to look on as a son. He makes the hammer with precious materials that he's hoarded for many years for just a project like this, and the text specifically says that he's undertaking a masterwork and will likely never create anything like this again. But he also does it in (if i remember right) a single sustained and draining effort, not 3-10 years of full-time work as the 5e rules would have it take.

I have a habit of building characters around crafting skills, and it's been a bugbear for me how badly they work. I have a gunmage character in my Iron Kingdoms game who is min-maxed to hell for tailoring. Her ancestry is via disgraced nobility, and she's very ambitious to make her place back into the aristocracy, and clothing design and fashion has been her doorway into that. Or there was my illusionist PC for an abortive Dragonlance game, who was an itinerant painter specialising in portraits of the wealthy and powerful, but who I'd planned was going to get unhealthily obsessed with truly capturing the definitive image of some NPC who'd had a major impact on history, maybe Soth or someone. Or there was my Midgard PC, a dwarven drunken master monk who was a fervent worshipper of the Midgard goddess of beer, and who adventured to discover lost ale recipes or brewing artefacts from overthrown dwarven strongholds. Of COURSE she'd be brewing her own beer.

In-game crafting shouldn't (in my opinion) be about churning out hundreds of low-value things. It should be in service of the plot or of characterisation. It should be about how to draft the big important things that are important to the story.