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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alex319" data-source="post: 4703243" data-attributes="member: 45678">Well, you know "masterwork" has a different meaning in 4e than it did before, particularly in reference to armor...But anyway, I'm thinking of a couple major tweaks to the system.1. I'm probably going to refactor the entire "production" part of it. Rather than having a "production multiplier," I'm going to specify each production process by a set of inputs and outputs, which can include labor (e.g. 1 IU of iron + 1 unit of labor = 2 IUs of swords) and the production roll determines how many units of labor you produce. This is a lot more intuitive, and also is much easier to generalize to other scenarios, like multiple types of raw materials for the same production process (e.g. you need both wood and horses to make a horse-cart) , substituting one raw material for another, etc. (Going with the village idea, you could even have one of the outputs be "production points" that go towards making new village improvements or buildings. On the other hand, that all depends on if players want a little Civilization IV mixed in with their RPG playing.)2. Another important thing I'm going to try to address is the progression of money-making ability. In the system above you essentially have twice as much profit potential for every 5 points by which your skill increases. Even if you suppose your skill increases by 1 per level (still a little optimistic) then you get x2 money making ability every 5 levels, which is not nearly enough to keep up with the "x5 per 5 levels" progression of magic item/treasure values.  Simply steepening the skill-to-money curve would not help, because skill levels vary so much (much more than say, attack bonuses) that a player who min-maxed their skill would be so far ahead of a player who didn't that the latter might as well not even  bother participating. (Even a +3 skill focus and +2 racial bonus is already +5, which would mean a fivefold increase in effectiveness.) It would also open the system up to abuse by a player pumping their skill to high levels to make large quantities of money so they can outfit their party with much more powerful items than they are supposed to have. (Although it's no longer possible to pump skills to absurdly high levels like it was in 3.5e, there are still some skill boosting items etc.) Probably what I'm going to do is keep the x2/+5 progression but also add in a "quality bonus" that is based on levels and increases by a factor of x2 or so every 5 levels. Thus players still benefit from increased skill, just not too much.</blockquote>

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