Dang, it takes a long time to build Chaositech!

[John Q. Mayhem]

I've introduced some Chaositech into my game, and my players are happily building and mutating. However, I realized that using the rules, it takes an absolutely insane amount of time to build the stuff. Example: Clarity goggles. They cost 1,500 gp, and are DC 25. I'll assume that the crafter has a +15 bonus on his check, and that he always gets a 10.
The steps to buiding something are converting the price into sp, paying half of that, and making a check representing a weeks work. If you beat the DC, multiply the DC by the check result; that's how much of the item is completed, in sp. The craftsman pays 500 gp. The item in sp is 15,000 sp. The craftsman gets a 25, times 25 is 625 sp completed. At this rate, it'd take 24 weeks to make a 1,500 gp item. Is this just a mistake? Is it supposed to take this long? Is the check result x DC actually the item's completion in gp? Help please!

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

I've never looked at Chaositech itself, but the amazingly long time it takes to craft most things is something that's bugged me for a while. It might be "realistic" to say that it takes most of a year to make something like plate armor or a barrel full of alchemist's fire, but it also typically puts such things outside the reach of the characters.

Very few games allow characters to take a year or two off in the middle of the campaign to do little projects like that (or to wait while someone is paid to do it for them). I'm tempted to house-rule crafting into "progress per day" rather than "progress per week" to see if it encourages players to actually look at crafting as something they'd want to do instead of as a horrible waste of highly-limited skill points. Screw realism: I think it'd be cool if some of these things actually got used for a change.

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and 24 days for a 1500gp item doesn't seem so bad, while 24 weeks is silly
ryan

 

[AuraSeer]

The ungodly long crafting times are a side effect of certain economic assumptions. If an item's fair price is 1500 gp, the rules assume that the time the crafter spent on it is worth 750 gp. (The other 750 is the price of raw materials.) Since the average commoner makes maybe 1cp per hour, and even very skilled craftsmen don't make very much more, it takes an awful lot of man-hours to be worth 750 gp. It's hard to change this in a sensible way and still have the economic system make any sense.

I say screw the economic system and multiply all crafting rates by 10. That makes it actually reasonable for a PC to forge his own masterwork plate armor, without having to be an elf to manage it.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

I'm not sure that the economic system makes any sense to begin with, actually.

...which is why I usually just avert my eyes from it, and encourage other players or GMs in our games to do the same, under penalty of the Stare of Death(tm) or excessive sarcasm. Trying to figure out a way that a commoner can make 1cp per hour while adventurers and their ilk are pulling down DMG-approved treasure hauls and matching up to the wealth-by-level chart just isn't all that much fun.


Anyway, how has multiplying by 10 worked out for your game? I'm looking for some way of tweaking crafting that doesn't make me do a lot of extra work and actually lets characters with good-to-excellent skills finish expensive projects within one to two months at the very most (and smaller projects in no more than a few days).

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i suppose i should just sit down and crunch the numbers myself, but i haven't bothered to