Revising Crafting

[Astalanya]

Hopefully this already hasn't been covered in an obvious post I missed. If there are previous discussions, please point me to them!

I've been looking for an alternate method to the D&D Craft system. Frankly, in a campaign where you can't just jump two weeks to say "That sword's done!", the system is ugly, inefficient and far from elegant. Players in our group like having crafting skills but investing 14 weeks to make a masterwork set of armor really doesn't appeal.

We've reviewed options in Unearthed Arcana and whatnot, and they really aren't to our taste. Our ideal system wouldn't require crafting "points" and speeds up the process of crafting. We aren't sure how to go about it, because there doesn't seem to be terribly much rhyme or reason to the existing one.

Have you reworked this in your campaigns? How?

 

[Corsair]

our group just increased crafting speed by a factor of three.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

So ... uh ... House Rules?

 

[Astalanya]

I'd been hoping to hear someone's house rules.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Then you might want to post this in the House Rule forum.

 

[Li Shenron]

I've been looking for an alternate method to the D&D Craft system. Frankly, in a campaign where you can't just jump two weeks to say "That sword's done!", the system is ugly, inefficient and far from elegant.

I agree that it's more complicated that necessary, and this is always a negative IMHO. But overall I think the time required are generally quite realistic.

We haven't modified the way crafting works, but we didn't really need because in our group games crafting is quite rare (crafting non-magic items basically never happens), but on the other hand we often play campaigns with lots of downtime between adventures, a bit like in LotR, so that characters aren't constantly rushing from a dungeon to the next.

I have UA but I'm not fond either of the craft points, it's too artificial for my taste. But I see that the reason behind it is to allow "retroactive crafting", so that when you need something crafted, you assume that your PC has started long ago. It's somewhat metagaming, but beside this or just cutting craft time (which isn't much realistic either), I have no other ideas.