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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sulicius" data-source="post: 9679609" data-attributes="member: 6896569">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.</blockquote>

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