RPG Evolution: Craft Everything

There's been a trend for a while now in video games and anime: crafting what you kill. D&D is finally catching up.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

Dungeons & Dragons has always supported the concept of collecting stuff, with detailed inventory lists and encumbrance rules. Despite this, the actual act of crafting has often be relegated to side characters, with a myraid of classes in Dragon Magazine dedicated to fleshing out hirelings and henchment for that purpose. In short, D&D implied that heroes don't craft. This has gradually changed with each edition and has propagated into D&D-inspired video games and anime.

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The Virtual Forge​

The world of video games has long embraced the satisfying loop of gathering resources and crafting items. For two popular examples, look no further than Minecraft and Monster Hunter.

In Minecraft, players begin with nothing and must literally punch trees to gather wood, eventually progressing to building elaborate structures, powerful tools, and intricate machines through intuitive and interconnected crafting recipes. The game emphasizes exploration and resource management as fundamental to the crafting experience.

On the other end of the spectrum, Monster Hunter offers a deeply intricate crafting system centered around the creatures players hunt. From the scales and bones of monsters, players can forge a staggering array of weapons and armor, each with unique properties and appearances tied to the monsters they originated from. This system not only rewards skilled hunting but also provides a compelling incentive to engage with the game's monsters, turning fallen foes into powerful gear that aids future hunts. Of particular note are the Palicoes, cat-like companions who run the canteen and prepare amazing meals for hunters.

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The Culinary Artisan​

The anime and manga series Delicious in Dungeon offers a pragmatic take on crafting, primarily through the lens of cuisine. Faced with dwindling resources in a deep dungeon, the adventuring party, led by Laios, learns to identify and cook the various monsters they encounter. This act of transforming dangerous creatures into nourishing meals, similar to Minecraft and Monster Hunter, emphasizes the practical application of monster knowledge in a dangerous environment. They utilize everything from basilisk meat to slime to create surprisingly edible dishes.

This concept of utilizing the environment and its creatures extends beyond mere sustenance and aligns with the logistics aspect of D&D. While the crafting system in D&D 5th Edition (2014) had limited mechanical depth, D&D 2024 formalized crafting with the Utilize Action. As detailed on D&D Beyond, the new crafting rules allow players to engage in various crafting activities, from creating weapons and armor to brewing potions and enchanting items, with clear guidelines on required resources, time, and proficiency checks. Relevant to Delicious in Dungeon, a character proficient in Cook's Utensils can now craft rations, detect spoiled or poisoned food, and improve a food's flavor -- all skills the culinary dwarf expert Senshi demonstrates repeatedly throughout the series.

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From the meticulous assembly of components in video games to the inventive cooking of monsters in anime and the detailed creation of magic items in tabletop RPGs, crafting has a lot of appeal. It offers players a sense of ownership over their gear, rewards exploration and resourcefulness, and allows for storytelling opportunities -- after all, knowing how to craft a monster's corpse means knowing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities too. And if Delicious in Dungeon is any indication, it's an economical to "live off the land" while keeping adventurers both sated and healthy.

 

[MoonSong]

The thing about crafting in many of these examples, is that it also requires gathering. Gathering materials is very satisfying in computer games. You see a tally go up and up, and you know that you can change all of those into valuable resources that improve your power in combat or whatever else you are trying to do.

I think this has to do with some prehistoric part of our brain that learned to recognize valuable harvest and bring it home. It’s survival and sometimes pleasure to find delicious, nutricious meals. Even now in our modern society, it isn’t uncommon for people to enjoy the “hunt” for bargains, or just the right thing they want as a tool or decoration.

In video games, gathering and crafting is often a solo experience. Everything you find, you can make into something you can use yourself. Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to find a ton of herbs for making potions that you can use in the very next fight. Herbs stand out by pressing a key, collecting is also pressing a key. The herb will then wait patiently in your bags until you are in the mood to make something, and the crafting is instant. World of Warcraft, another game I have played a lot of, did add some time it takes to collect materials and craft items. Making items would increase your skill, allowing you to spend money to learn more powerful recipes. Not only that, WoW has an entire economy where you can sell what you make at a profit, and buy what you cannot craft yourself. This makes the game a fascinating economic and social system.

All of the above requires thousands of hours of work put into these systems for making sure these materials can be found, collected and turned into something else. Then the game is balanced around the improvements the crafted items make to your characters. In some cases, it might make the game almost trivial, like all but BG3’s Hardcore mode.

Now adding these to TTRPG’s is a lot of work. Designers would have to go through all the steps of writing out recipes and rewards, places to find them and advice to DM’s on how to incorporate this into a game. Then they have to balance the game around it, which IMO they don’t do in D&D for any magic item. Having PC’s who stock up on healing potions and other power increasing items can break the normal encounter math. The more control players have over what they find and make, the more they can optimise and overcome challenges.

You can do all this. It would take work. You’d have to have designers make the system and then work them into your campaign in a satisfying way. How hard will it be to find these materials? How much time does it take? Can they fail? Can herbs wither? How simulationist do we want to get?

With the right group, the right system support and the right player group, this could be a blast.

I personally think it is too hard. D&D is something we do at the table for a couple of hours every week or couple weeks. When we get together, we have princes to save, queens to slay and dungeons to delve. A LOT has to be kept track of already. Gold, health, hit dice, spell slots, feature uses and for some also rations and torches. We don’t have much that automatically keeps track of it for us, nor is there a wonderful UI that highlights what we can make with the materials we have. All of it has to be done by hand, done by our mental capacity.

I don’t want to spend the precious time we have together at the table doing things that are not heroic, move the story forward or dramatic. Crafting is a very satisfying, but uncooperative action. It focuses on mechanics, inventory management and time use. The less my players count things in their inventory, the better. I know there are others who disagree.

There are many solutions to my issues with crafting, but all of them require more time and investment. I have limited time and limited mental capacity. I prefer to spend my time on descriptions of awesome scenes, fleshing out NPC’s, developing plots in response to player desires and PC actions.

I have too many things me and my players keep track of already. I prefer to give them a potion seller every once in a while.

The Bastion system gives us an option to allow players to craft items, but with WotC doing such a terrible job at balancing magic items, a DM will have to oversee every step. Anyone remember the post of a 2024 campaign where all players had 10 rings of resistance? I see that as a failure.

Think about the time and effort more crafting in your game requires, and if that is what you and your players all (not just half the players) enjoy at the table. If it is worth it, and you rather spend time looking at crafting rules and inventory, go for it.

I rather flesh out a dungeon.

I like crafting. I love Minecraft and like crafting sidequests in other videogames. But for pen and paper tabletop, I'm not so sure I want it in. Unlike computers, we need to do the overhead by hand -or need computer assist-. Humans are just not good at bookkeeping, that's why we invented books and calculators. And any good crafting system requires some way of record keeping, otherwise we end up with pretty simplistic crafting systems and even these end up requiring bookkeeping anyway. We also suck at generating randomness and at staying true to procedure.

Really, crafting makes for very cozy games, but it is a mostly solo thing. Carving space for solo quests is already hard enough when they are significant for character development. Now doing it so that one player can enjoy five minutes of picking mushrooms feels harder to justify. And well, without it, it becomes an afterthought and missing a lot of the point. Not everybody plays in a platonic sandbox, mostly because there are other players too.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We have to admit that anime and video games are currently a very strong influence on the younger generations, and the TTRPG industry cannot oppose this but rather know how to adapt to changing preferences.

I would rather with a crafting system if I want a magic throwing axe with the returning trait, or to create a consctruct monster ally to be my bodyguard. And what if want to create a "hollow" construct like an animated armour to be used like a magitek powered-armor/exosuit?

"Ars Magica" has got "grogs". D&D could have got "grogs", something like survivor classes from Ravenloft 5e and sidekicks classes for characters who are crafting in the bastions and whose stories are cozier, like discover a spy or the herbolist wants to marry blacksmith's daughter.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

I love crafting in DnD! I think it's inevitable that official crafting rules will always lag behind, with every DM implementing their own house rules for crafting (including no crafting available). Crafting is so tied to loot distribution which is always 100% controlled by the DM, that any official crafting rules are merely guidelines much like a table of how many magic items the party should get per level.

Some posts above make great points about how gathering materials differs in a TTRPG versus a computer game. I feel the best way to address this is by tying crafting materials primarily to harvesting monsters that you kill in combat. This limits the total amount of crafting materials available, gates their power to CR levels the party can kill, and explains why adventurers can somehow make better items than store owners (who have more experience but not necessarily the rare items freshly harvested).

I have also played around with random foraging tables that players can roll on as a passive activity during overland travel or in their spare time during long rests. But I always keep the majority of crafting materials being sourced by killing monsters, and generally see 3rd party content usually being set up with this similar philosophy.