Crafting Revision [3.5]

[Bauglir]

So, my problems with the crafting system: it takes too long to make easy things, it doesn't take long enough to make hard things, and superhuman ability doesn't make you go faster enough. Toward the end of fixing that, I propose the following changes, first brought up in an earlier thread:

Proposed Revision:

Item cost is no longer relevant to crafting time. Although it makes sense that you should have to spend longer crafting an item of higher quality, that's only relevant within items; a Spyglass, while difficult and involved to make from raw materials (particularly grinding the lens), probably should not take longer to make than 3 Masterwork Chain Shirts. Instead, we're going to have crafting time be a function of DC; the more intricate and difficult it is to make an item, the longer it takes. We're also going to have to have different time scales for different crafting skills; it's simply not feasible to measure Craft (Cooking) on the same scale as Craft (Armorsmithing).

Here's how it works: each band of 5 DC has different units. To get the base crafting time, start with the amount the DC is above the highest number in the lower band (so, for instance, 6 is one higher than 5, and 1 is 1 higher than 0), and multiply the result by the units. Each unit should be larger than the entire span of the previous scale. So, for metalworking:

DC: Unit (Example)
-19--15: 1 second (Failing To Open the Door to your Forge)
-14--10: 10 seconds (The Pants You're Wearing, On Fire)
-9--5: 1 minute (Warm Bits of Iron)
-4-0: 10 minutes (Chunks of slag)
1-5: Hours (Simple, small objects, such as spoons)
6-10: 6 Hours (Larger simple items, such a low-quality longsword)
11-15: 2 Days (Time-consuming, but not particularly challenging work for somebody trained, such as chainmail)
16-20: 12 Days (Difficult, highly involved work that any well-trained smith can accomplish reliably, such as full plate)
21-25: 72 Days (Extremely challenging work, approaching the limits of mortal skill; the life's work of an ordinary smith, such as a masterwork weapon)
26-30: 1 Year (Legendary work, challenging even for a master smith, perhaps a gift forged for a deity of battle)
31-35: 10 Years (History-making items, such as those further enchanted to become artifacts)
36+: For each increment, multiply previous value by 10. Such items become defining parts of a civilization's history.

Keep the same scale, just shift it up or down some steps depending on the craft in question. Certain materials, such as Adamantine, can shift the scale upward due to the difficulty of working them. Adding +10 to the DC of a given item allows a character to treat the item as though it were one band lower. I'm not sure about the rubric here, but a deity of the forge should be spewing forth masterwork swords when he belches. (He can start with a DC 25 Masterwork Longsword and add +80 to the DC, shifting it downward to a 5 second crafting time, making it take less than a round)

EDIT: Incidentally, a sword-based breath weapon needs to be a special attack on any deity of the forge printed henceforth.

As far as game balance goes, I like to think this improves things a bit. Ideally, it makes it easier to create relatively simple things on an in-game timescale, if your character is a sufficiently badass crafter. For instance, if you can pull off a DC 45 Craft check, you can spit out a masterwork weapon in a little over a week; a couple of days if you can get a bit higher. On the other hand, it makes an economy where awesome things are rare stay plausible, because the number of people capable of making masterwork weapons for a living is very, very small.

There are some downsides, however; if a Star Destroyer is only DC 55, tsuyo's build can churn them out by the thousands in a matter of seconds. Still, all things considered, since a +1900 something craft check is an order of magnitude greater than a god of mechanics, that's not actually all that implausible, since it'd be the equivalent of a city full of crafting deities working together. Still, this probably doesn't help balance that much at the very extreme ends of the scale, but I don't worry about them all that much. There are less roundabout ways to break the game.

[veekie]

Hmm, I think it could help to split the crafting task DC and time between scale/volume and the skill factor involved. GP value derives from skill x scale.

[Bauglir]

Hm, that's a good point. Probably DCs should take more into account than just the quality of the work; I'd want to revise the scale to take size into account as well. Still, if assigning an item's DC takes that into account, does the above system work?

[veekie]

Hmm, it could, very likely do the trick.

Maybe if you set the starting time unit based on your skill ranks, modified by the size of work(which can be reduced by assistants)?

[Bauglir]

Hmm, it could, very likely do the trick.

Maybe if you set the starting time unit based on your skill ranks, modified by the size of work(which can be reduced by assistants)?

Hm...  for whatever reason, it makes more sense to me that the starting time should be based on the particular object, and then have THAT be modified by your ability. What sort of system do you have in mind, though? I'm not sure if I understand completely. I suppose I should mention that if you meant scale to include the number of items you're making, I'd have them all be separate checks (where you just start taking 10 if you're making enough, because it averages out in the end). I suppose it gets a bit wonky having quality be a nonlinear scale while quantity remains linear, but I'm not entirely sure if that's actually unreasonable.

[veekie]

Well, it's like this.

Take an advanced alchemical recipe that requires Craft(alchemy) 10 ranks with a base time unit of hours and a craft roll DC of 25.
For someone with 10 ranks, they count their time units in hours.
Someone with 8 ranks would be working in days.
Someone else with 12 ranks would be working in minutes.
Rolling significantly above the required 25(e.g. hitting 35), gets you double the progress.

Scale is both volume and quantity, you split a large item into multiple units, while items up to...perhaps 2 sizes smaller than the crafter's own size is the smallest possible unit of work.
Different items would have different starting time unit of course and you can split units up to multiple crafters.

[Bauglir]

Ah, ok, so you'd have each item require listing a DC, required ranks, base time unit, and size? I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the level of complexity that introduces, although I admit it's really only slightly more than what I'd propose, which would require a DC and a size. In any case, doing this probably requires introducing object size categories similar to 3.0, only because I want to minimize confusion we'd really want to baseline a "Medium work unit" as a one-handed weapon sized for a medium creature or something. I'm really not sure about that, though; most objects are close enough in size that you can safely abstract away size into the Craft  DC without compromising plausibility, with buildings and vehicles being the exceptions (and probably requiring modified rules, since a crafty player who sees a really long scale for "Craft (Architecture and Engineering)" might calculate that it's faster simply to build all the component parts individually rather than make that check). Maybe have it so that one check covers a 5-foot cube's volume of an object for the purpose of larger objects? Or maybe a 10-ft cube, to make it fit in better with the rules for damaging large objects.

Note that the above post was written stream-of-consciousness style and thus significant wandering exists between the beginning and end.

EDIT: I should clarify that I want to keep the "make 1 check every week" aspect, if the DC requires more than 1 week of work; failure to make the DC results in that week not counting toward finishing, although it might be more appropriate to have checks every day. So that's why a masterwork weapon is going to be the life's work of an ordinary smith, because he just won't have time to dedicate 8 hours a day every day for a week toward making the weapon (because it's going to be a hobby; nobody is going to commission it from a backwater village smith, knowing it will take years at best to finish), and a good chunk of those checks aren't going to result in any progress because an ordinary smith can't consistently make the DC by taking 10.

[veekie]

With size, most of it is basically simply your work unit I think,(i.e. quantity of progress per roll) and indeed most common objects you're working on would be more or less the same size. The idea was just that you could split large construction projects out across multiple less skilled builders rather than using the aid another rules.

The rank requirements are still based off the quality of the work, and quantity could act as a penalty to the time unit(but not actually reduce time needed if you work with units at your own size scale). Basically, small creatures could build small things faster(maybe with a circumstance bonus from their size to fine detail), but large creatures could build large constructions faster.

[Bauglir]

Ah, ok. With regards to progress per roll, I'm thinking of that being constant, so that you make "one week's worth of progress" per roll. Definitely more abstract, but that's a good thing in my mind, since it allows a single mechanic to cover everything from making a sandwich to making a monument. I think that for splitting large constructions across multiple workers (definitely something that can be done), making it so that each check involves, at most, a 5- or 10-foot cube could handle that nicely without introducing complexity to the actual numbers that need to be rolled.

As for rank requirements, I kind of prefer it to be based on total skill modifier; the tools you have available affect what sorts of things you're actually capable of making just as much as how skilled you are, so it seems like they should factor into this whole process.  I'm not sure how to handle large vs small creatures' varying crafting abilities. It seems intuitive that there should be some difference, but splitting large things into separate checks accounts for large structures taking longer (oh, here's an idea, the chunks that crafting large objects is broken into are equal to the crafter's combat space, so the Tarrasque could craft a 30x30x30 foot basket if it felt the need), and crafting fine detail is a matter of the tools you have available; being smaller would just obviate the need for those tools, and I'm unsure how to model that without introducing some additional kludge of a system that requires appending a "Detail Size" thing for each item that says what size you have to be to need no special tools (presumably the penalty is -4 per size category of difference between your actual size and the detail size).

[veekie]

Hmm, well, basing it off total skill mod is trickier to set goalposts, whereas I figure your ranks defined your learned skill and everything else is circumstances.
Making the crafting working size based on your combat space is good though. You could provide a circumstance penalty for working with things signficantly smaller than that?

[Bauglir]

It's true, goalposts are harder to set, but then, I don't like hard level-based goalposts either, especially for things that are (probably) going to have their roots in the character's fluff. I tend to think, "If I'm badass enough to do this as well as a 5th level character when I'm at level 3, why SHOULDN'T I be allowed the same benefits they are?" As long as it still requires sinking resources in to achieve that kind of success (resources which I'd take into account setting basic DCs, such as the assumption that an average smith can get a result of 20 consistently, unlike the Core rules which tend to assume 20 is a really awesome result that normal people really won't accomplish often).

I suppose it might not hurt to include, say, a -4 penalty for every size category an object is below 4 below you, but I don't think Medium creatures should have a problem making Fine objects (people cut gemstones that size all the time, for instance).

[veekie]

Well, that still makes things like magical crafting enhancers determine your level of craftyness, and for things like alchemy, you suddenly know new formulae, which are then gone once you lose the booster. Ranks provide greater consistency and don't bone people who don't go the whole hog with boosting their skill mods, Remember that by 10th level the gap between someone who pumped a skill and someone who didn't is easily 15.

As for sizes, not without tools to help sight, a theoretical thumb sized fairy would find carving the same gemstone/clock part to be about as difficult as assembling furniture, given the knowledge(ranks) of how to cut them.

[Bauglir]

True, magical boosters can get kind of crazy (whose idea was it to let them go to +30 pre-epic?). Thing is, though, I'm still not really a fan of added complexity; adding a minimum Craft rank to every item doubles the amount of information that needs to be accounted for every time an item is printed, and so on. I don't have as much of a problem with the shafting people who don't pump skill mods vs those who do, though; I don't actually have any objection to requiring characters to pimp out their skills in order to achieve superhuman effects with them, and I don't care about having level-based goalposts, because I don't see what making armor has to do with being ultragood at killing dragons.

As for the thumb-sized pixie, it seems reasonable to allow the crafting time to remain the same, even though the mechanics of the task are fundamentally different; the pixie doesn't need to spend as long lining up cuts because it's easy to see where they should go, but can't make each cut as fast because it's a relatively larger cut.

[veekie]

Well, with the craft ranks thing, I figure you could abstract the whole range of 20 into relatively simple grades, allowing for permanent increases like Skill Focus to count as ranks:
Simple, items that can be crafted untrained, if not well or quickly
Apprentice, items that require training in the skill to craft, but are not otherwise difficult 4 ranks using the regular 3.5 skills.
Journeyman, items that require basic level of mastery of the craft to setup shop, the minimum requirement for basic masterworking(though it takes forever), and alchemicals above basic acids. 8 ranks
Master, items that few people even in a fair sized city would be working with, masterworking with exotic materials, items that replicate simple magical effects from sheer craftsmanship, 12 ranks
Grandmaster, one in a generation, or even rarer, they should be outright building lesser magic items, 16 ranks
Legend, their works will live on in legends, you might never see one in a generation, they can build moderate magic items with skill alone, 20 ranks
Divine, godlike works, major magic items can be built, 24 ranks

Like that.