Do you ever use item creation feats?

[Kershek]

Magical Artisan is from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (FRCS). You pick an item creation feat you already have and your XP and base gold cost for creating an item is 75% of normal.

 

[Victim]

It depends on my character. My selfish and greedy wizard never spent her XP making stuff - but that'll change a bit now since the only point of XP is to spend it. Travanos the cleric, on the other hand, crafted weapons for all his teammates, and he got the wizard to join in. Characters with item making ability and the desire to use it can be tremendous boons to an adventuring party.

 

[zeo_evil]

I have had one character scribe a few scrolls once in a game in all the years 3rd has been. Rarely enough I would say.

Item feats lose out to the Thayans in most FR games anyway. Item shops have grown in number over the years.

 

[Kershek]

If you don't create items, then you are losing potential money. Let's say you find 5 +1 longswords. If you sell them, you will get 11500 / 2 = 5750 gold for them. Then you can only buy a magic item that's worth 5750 gold. However, if you sell them and then have a spellcaster make something, you can get your full value's worth (11500 gold) in created items.

And if you had Magical Artisan, you could actually increase your wealth and make items worth up to 14000 gold.

 

[D-rock]

I have always thought item creation feats were good for creating magic items that were rare or unusual and just couldn't be bought at the friendly local magic store. Or you could custom make items that you need in a short amount of time.

Sometimes I'm amazed by the amount of campains people have where you can buy any magic item you need without doing more than walking to the next moderatly sized city.

 

[Jdvn1]

Only the little things, but that doesn't happen too much either.

 

[Soel]

I will allow my players to craft in incremental time (2 hrs one night, perhaps 5 hrs tomorrow) until the item is complete. The player just has to make allowances for this in game time. I also believe in downtime, and will be using it for many reasons other than just crafting.

I absolutely hate xp costs for creating items and spells. It just seems anathema to me. I decided to have the xp cost add to the next level cost for advancement, cumulative for each item crafted/spell cast that costs xp. Player crafts 3,000 xp worth of stuff and casts 1,000 xp worth of spells, then it will take an additional 4,000 xp past the current next level limit.
This way, the player doesn't lose any xp at all, it just makes the next level a bit further off.

 

[the Jester]

The pcs imc are closer to 'only big things' than to 'only little things....'

 

[Gez]

Lack of downtime would be a problem yes, but winter is a three month downtime in my campaign, with only an event or to to break it up. There is a reason that March is named after the god of War - everything stops until the armies can start moving again.

Until the armies can march again.


Seriously, downtime is always good, IMHO. Your campaign has a plot moving? Yes, but it's not always moving at the same pace, is it? When PCs intrigue to get admittance at the dwarven King's Court, or gather informations from travelling merchants about the neighbouring nation and whether or not it plans war, that isn't instantaneous and solved in a few combat rounds. It can take days, weeks, or even months.

Only in a pure hack'n'slash game are those long social interactions useless.

 

[Staffan]

What is this Magical Artisan feat you speak of? I'm not familiar with it.

It's a feat from Forgotten Realms, that lets you make one type of magic item (as defined by the creation feats) for 75% of the cost in money, XP, and time.

As an aside, Eberron doesn't have it. Instead, Eberron has a series of three feats - Exceptional, Extraordinary, and Legendary Artisan, which each reduce one aspect of the cost (gold, XP or time) for making magic items, but for all items. The artificer (Eberron-specific class that's really good at making magic items) in my group has taken the gold and XP feats, and spends a lot of his downtime making items for sale, essentially converting XP to gold (30 XP gets him 625 gp).