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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 3256437" data-attributes="member: 3051">A long time ago, my group threw out the PHB Craft system and replaced it with something that, ironically, would work well in a low-magic world as a replacement for the masterwork rules.  (Ironic because our world is actually higher magic than the core rules...)  It goes like this (key points in bold).Every material has a cost (in gp/lb, with iron or crude steel as 1), a DC modifier (+0 for iron, ~+20 for the really powerful stuff), a Hardness (from 5 to 25), and a list of extra benefits.  By default, the item's HP is proportional to its hardness, and the maximum enchantment it can hold is equal to its DC modifier.  We converted 44 materials to this system, heavily skewed towards the metal side of things, since we didn't have many players who wanted organic stuff outside of the usual Dragonscale.  (We added a bunch of crystal materials that worked well for the treehuggers, and with the weight-reducing metals like mithral the light-armor folks were happy to give up the leather, so all that was left were the woods for bows.)There's no separate "masterwork" component to craft.  If you want a Fine Steel longsword (the equivalent of masterwork), it's DC +3 (meaning 18 instead of 15), and costs 10 gp/lb for materials.  That's all you need to know, if you want to craft one, with one exception: the core rules' Craft equations just won't work if you want to figure out how long it takes to make something.  We totally reworked that system too.(Our system: take the base item's gp cost from the PHB.  Multiply by (DC-10, minimum 1, including the DC modifier for materials).  Each day, make a Craft check; the result is the number of gp progress made towards this total.)If you want to buy a Fine Steel weapon, you COULD just take the PHB cost of the sword and multiply by 10 (the ratio of material costs, since there's no mithral-like weight reduction to contend with).  The x10 cost already includes the fact that the material is harder to work with (and so you'd probably need assistants and/or masterwork tools) and is harder to find, although an NPC crafter might charge even more just because he knows you really want those bonuses.In our system, there's a steady progression of materials to work with.  For the sword example, you could use Fine Steel (DC +3), Silver or Cold Iron (+4), Cinnabryl (+5), Silver-Iron (+6), Arandur (+6), Mithral (+7), Adamantium (+9), Starmetal (+10), Gartine (+11), Ferroplasm (Karach) (+13), Dajaava (Baatorian Green Steel) (+15), Tanar'ri Bloodsteel (+15), Darksteel (+16), True Mithral (+18), Adamantine (+19), and Orichalcum (+20, at 600 gp/lb!).  And that list was only the metals; if you want to include all the various crystals (Dlarun, Substare, Laen, various elemental crystals), hardened plant products (Ironwood, Cranor), or bone materials that can be used in the place of metals, well, it's most of our list.  Most of these are drawn from various AD&D references, and each has a bunch of benefits, although a few have been substantially altered from their AD&D counterparts.All of the bonuses from armor/weapons are Material bonues, and stack with magical bonuses, so the "+1 to attack rolls" benefit of masterwork applies even if you enchant your Fine Steel sword.  Since both weapons AND armor get material bonuses, the effect tends to cancel out unless you're a class that doesn't use weapons and/or armor (monks, casters).This also means that you have to carefully consider the costs.  A +1 Orichalcum weapon would probably cost more and be harder to make than a +3 Fine Steel one, while being weaker in combat.  But, the Orichalcum weapon could be enchanted far higher and has a lot of other benefits, so in the long term you'd gravitate to the rare, high-end materials.(In a non-magical setting, this one doesn't really matter.)---------------------Now, to your original point: you could easily do something similar.  Sure, you could just make a series of weapon crafting grades: "Primitive" (DC -4), "Crude" (DC -2), "Plain" (DC +0), "Fine" (DC +2), "Masterwork" (DC +4), "Grandmaster" (DC +6), etc., with escalating bonuses, costs, and DCs for each step.  But having the various grades correspond to different exotic materials (with varying bonuses for each) is really a lot more interesting to the players, IMO.  And it's actually not been nearly as much of a bookkeeping headache as I thought it was going to be.</blockquote>

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