Unsorted Material wrote: Why a Revision to the Crafting Rules?
An overhaul to the Craft rules may sound fairly unbalancing, as the current Craft rules were created to prevent characters from making a lot of money and potentially destabilizing their games with an influx of magic items. Unfortunately, like Level Allowance, the heavy nerfing to Crafting resulted in a lot of characters simply becoming unviable, a lot of very dumb things happening all around, and it still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they really want to. If the party is made out of Elves, they can simply set a single skill rank on fire and announce that they're going to spend 100 years farming, making trained Profession (Farmer) checks every week. That'll get them about 6 gp a week for the next 5,200 weeks – for a total of 31,200 gp at first level before they even start adventuring. And as elves, they can honestly just spend 200 years farming or spend some real skill ranks on that to get even more money.
If the DM is willing to simply let players roll dice, have downtime, and purchase magic items of unlimited power, the game is already broken on first principles at first level using the PHB alone. If the DM wants to keep sanity going at all, then something in that equation is going to have to go. Probably everything in that equation should go. As discussed in the Dungeonomicon, there is an inherent limit to what players could reasonably be expected to be able to purchase with pieces of gold, so to a very real extent crafting for money is simply multiplying the amount of low-level equipment you have – it doesn't particularly get you more powerful equipment. And of course there's no reason for players to be able to do all of this 9 to 5 working without having on-camera adventures. An adventure where you are running a silk factory and will make a bunch of money as soon as you can stop the goblin syndicate from extorting all your profits is pretty much the same as the adventure where you run off into a dungeon, fight the goblins, and take the money they stole from the silk merchants home in a sack.
So the nerfs on Crafting just aren't necessary. But what actually needs to change?
* Valuable Raw Materials Aren't Valuable: This is a part of the rules that makes me cry. Since the amount of value you make each day is based on the difficulty of working the material and not on the value of said material, there is no way for a goldsmith to stay in business. Gold is very easy to work and therefore the DC to work it is very low, and therefore a goldsmith makes very little in the way of finished product each week. A five pound gold candle holder is roughly four ounces and fits into the palm of your hand, but it'll take a master goldsmith (+10 Craft Bonus) almost a year to finish one (500 gp value, at DC 5 = 50 weeks).
* The Costs of Materials are WHAT? Remember that five pound gold candle holder? It's worth 500 gp and therefore requires 167 gp worth of materials to make it. But it's worth 250 gp just as a lump of gold. So you can buy things as raw materials and sell them as trade goods and make lots of money. The reverse happens when you make complex or finely worked items. A masterwork sword is made out of pretty much the same materials as a normal sword and is much more expensive because it's better made. But because the higher quality crafting will make it sell for more down the line, the cost of the materials goes up by a 100 gp. Where does that money go? What are you getting for 2 pounds of gold? Sure, maybe you get some better coal or something, but really, that doesn't even begin to cover it.
* Field Fortifications Cannot Happen: Even the simplest of traps (such as a bucket with some acid in it balanced on a partially open door) has a cost that is very high – in the hundreds of gp. That means even the most gifted craftsman is going to take weeks to boobytrap a room or lay down some field fortifications. When longbowmen want to hammer some stakes into the ground to protect themselves from the knight stampede that's going to come when the battle starts, the Craft rules essentially tell them that they can't do it. Which for those of us who have seen Henry V, seems unlikely.
* Risky and Illegal Trades are Pointless: Some products are expensive because producing them is risky (poison, flower arrangements from the Bane Mires). Some products are expensive because their production and sale is in some manner restricted by the authorities (shrunken dwarf heads, disrespectful puppets of the king). In the real world, people produce these things because they can charge inflated prices because of the risk. It's a gamble, where sometimes you make big money and sometimes you get killed by hydras or agents of King Ronard. But with craft times directly dependent upon resale value, these crafts are gambles where sometimes you make the same amount of money you would have making night stands, and sometimes you get killed by your own poison or Clerics of Torm.
Dungeonomicon wrote:Magical Currency
Souls: The souls of powerful creatures are trapped in gems and the trade in them is brisk on the outer planes, especially in the planar metropolis of Finality on Acheron. Once a soul is in a gem, the gem itself is of little or no value, but the soul goes for 100 gp times the square of the CR of the creature whose soul is trapped (see Tome of Fiends for more information on the use of souls).
Concentration: Ideas take form on the outer planes, and really pernicious or stellar ideas can be so powerful that they take a while to form. In the before-time, they can be found as an amber-like substance that is extremely valued on Mechanus, and by extension every single other outer plane as well. Concentration is actually made out of ideas, and while it looks like a solid object it is actually a liquid that flows so slowly that you could watch it for a year and only a Modron could tell you have far the flow had taken it. A pound of concentration goes for 50,000 gp to an interested party, and can be used in magical crafting by those with the patience to learn its secrets (see Book of Gears for more information on the use of Concentration).
Hope: Hope is funny stuff, it has lots of inertia, but those who carry it are not weighed down in the least. It has mass, but not weight. Even the smallest piece of Hope sheds light like a daylight spell (the effective spell level for this effect is 7, and Hope can overcome almost any darkness). Hope is measured in kilograms rather than pounds, and a kilo of Hope goes for 100,000 gp to those who want it, and it can be used in magical crafting (see Tome of Virtue for more information on the use of Hope).
Raw Chaos: The plane of Limbo is filled with possibility and change. Usually this manifests as a continuous creation and destruction that is awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Sometimes, for whatever reason this possibility doesn't become anything, and just stays as Raw Chaos. Raw Chaos can have any dimensions and any amount of mass, but from a practical standpoint you either have it or you don't. If you have Raw Chaos and someone else doesn't you can give it to them, and it is generally considered good form for them to give you magical items or planar currency worth 200,000 gp in exchange. Raw Chaos can be transformed into magical items by those with the correct skills (See Tome of Tiamat for more information on the use of Raw Chaos).
Dungeonomicon wrote: The Maginomicon:
"With great powers come laser eyebeams."
Easter Egg Class Features: Artifact Swords and Powergloves:
Here's a secret: some characters really can't even play the game at high level. But they do anyway, all the time. Sometimes the players never even realize that their character has no intrinsic capability to play the game at the level he's competing at. And that's because of two things: DMs control the Monsters, and DMs control the Treasure. It is our hope that the Monks and Assassins in this document will be able to hold their own without needing to get Power Gloves that act as magic weapons for their natural weapons or anything else really cheesy like that. That being said, we still haven't covered everything:
* Rogues still need a magical object that allows them to use the Hide skill by about level 9.
* Fighters still need their artifact swords at level 10.
* Bards still need some completely arbitrary magic item that summons a monster or something so that they can contribute at all past level 12.
* Mounted characters need a magical beast or dragon to ride around on by level 7.
And so on. As this series continues, we will attempt to solve some of these outstanding issues.
Your Money is No Good Here.
As described in the Economicon, you can't just throw a walrus' weight in gold on the table and get powerful artifacts in return. You can get powerful magical items in exchange for rare planar currency, but you can only do that in a few planar locations. From the standpoint of the DM this is very convenient, because it means that you can hand out all the opal statues you want without worrying that the players are going to pool it all and get some totally hardcore magic items that will undermine everything. At the same time, it means that you can hand out planar currency and know for a fact that it's going to be used for powerful magical items.
It's not Stupid, it's Advanced!
The 15,000 gp limit for purchasing equipment can be pretty limiting, but the game works much better once you realize that it's there. Still, while characters can't go out and buy a +4 sword with pieces of gold (all 647 pounds of it), they can purchase a +1 flaming or ghost touch sword with chunks of non-magic metal. You can also pump those up with greater magic weapon to be something level appropriate. This offends some people, but it really is part of the way the D&D magic item economy is supposed to work. People are supposed to be fighting with weapons that are level appropriate, and people are supposed to be purchasing new weapons for different occasions, and there are not supposed to be stores with racks of powerful swords that would be level appropriate for 12th level characters stacked up in various setups on shelves.
* Bonus Rule: The game actually works better if every character of 6th level or higher simply has greater magic weapon 1/day as a spell-like ability. Caster level is equal to character level. Try it, it's amazing how many problems are solved by this relatively simple change.
