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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8102957" data-attributes="member: 12731">The other options aren't trap options since you don't take Acrobatics or Nature or whatever to earn income. The ability to use a skill to earn a bit of coin is entirely secondary to every skill.Except crafting, where it is not unreasonable for a player to expect it is the primary reason to take the skill.If crafting was actually profitable (relative to other choices) it would still mean a character would have to forgo another skill to take it. And if you could still make maybe 90% as much gold even without it, that hardly registers as a "trap".Especially since we're talking pitiful small amounts here. You earn more in a single day of typical adventuring than you earn in months of downtime.I get a distinct vibe where Paizo started off by saying "let's not repeat the mistakes of PF1" and then completely forgot to sanity-check that goal as other rules congealed. Somebody should have said "wait a second. Now that we're nearly done with our game don't you see that making even twice as much money as Earn Income doesn't break the balance one bit!". Shame I seem to be one of the first people to do so...This argument again.Yes, it does do "what it was designed to do".Except it doesn't.I don't believe for a second that there was intent for any of the following things, all of which is what it does do:... Crafting should require stupid long downtime to achieve anything... Crafting should encourage crafters to persuade their friends to stick around in backwater hovels, since that's the only place where you "earn" any money... Crafting should involve lots of niggly calculations, and juggling formulas, feats and what not - basically for zero gainIt is bad design alright.The mere fact you can't break the game's economy using it, is a very low bar to clear.Specifically, item pricing is exponential in this game. You basically can never afford an item above your level. Even if Crafting actually made you some money it would not break the economy in the slightest.Give a character 20% more wealth "than intended" and see what she can break. Or even double the "intended" wealth. Go on, I dare you.You will find that the character can still not purchase anything more powerful than before. And she could already buy loads of low-level stuff. The fact the character can now purchase five minor items instead of just four is hardly game-breaking. The fact she could instead save up and get hold of an item maybe one single level earlier than otherwise is... nothing to worry about in the slightest! I would say just about the only "benefit" of the incredibly cluttered design is that it is so opaque and byzantine that lots of players still genuinely believe you can use the rules to make actual money... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />A design like "you can craft an item or items up to your character level before each [insert time unit here]" would accomplish pretty much exactly the same thing, just in one sentence rather than pages and tables and calculations and DCs and rolls....That's my 2 cents, anyhow.</blockquote>

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