Crafting

[Kest]

Flat-out crafting as per Rick's suggestion or the Bartleby's token system sound best.

[Nalo Jade]

Supply and Demand of goods...

It could break the current economy over time.

Even with a token system the fact is that it will increase the number of magical items in the players circulation. It will become easy to get low level magical gear as it is being created by players...

I am all for "Brew Potion".

Weapon and Armor crafting.

But I would say we start with just those or something similiar before unloading everything.

[Rick7475]

This belongs in the brainstorming or ideas forum. somethin like that.

It's been there with pages and pages of everyone's opinion and no one volunteering to build one.

In fact, the proposals suggested in that forum would require a dedicated software team from Microsloth or Stun Microsubsystems or Intensified Bowel Movement to implement it.

I just want to make a few statics, a couple of craft tables (ie and anvil and a potion table) and work from there. Add a few items for potion creation, and smelting and make potions and magic weapons/armor/shields. Before you could make anything, you would have to have a certain amount of skill ranks which the scripts would check and that would cover the months of 'mundane' stuff. Basically, you probably couldn't start crafting until level 4 or 5, and then for +2 magic crafting, highter skill ranks.

Naturally the crafing scripts and goodies could all be put in an erf and used on other mods.

[Kest]

Even with a token system the fact is that it will increase the number of magical items in the players circulation. It will become easy to get low level magical gear as it is being created by players...

???

Crafting is usually limited to mundane, masterwork, alchemical, or items of a curious nature such as silvered weapons...

[indio]

Rick, something like this could work without being too much fuss:

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... ail&id=225

Was only released a few days ago.

[Rick7475]

Thanks Indio, looks promising, even if we don't use the system the plants and stuff could be brought in.

[JaydeMoon]

In my mind, the biggest issue is time of crafting.

Having skill checks, checks to see if you have the materials, checks to see if you have the feats, and a system that removes the proper amount of materials and (if necessary) XP would be simple.

But the fact of the matter is that it takes time to make stuff.

Even doing a time compression, you should only get to make a single craft check per day (on non-enchanted items). Normally it's weekly. This also assumes dedicated work.

This means that a dedicated 5th level smith with high quality equipment and of slightly above average int (12) taking 10 on skill rolls would need 9 RL days to craft a masterwork longsword.

This is 9 days taking into account some level of time compression. Without time compression it's something like 9 weeks (makes sense I suppose, ask Zelk how long it takes to smith a superb katana or some shat). It takes into account that the major part of each day is spent working on the item in question.

This is also the time spent crafting the item after you have acquired the 1/3 of the final cost of the item in materials. For the masterwork longsword, that's 105 gp worth of high quality steel, or what have you (easier to gather steel, I would imagine, than rare herbs).

Now we need to take into account failures and spectacular failures. You can choose to take ten, which is easiest, because then you know what you can and can't make and it's as simple as that. As you get better, you can make new stuff and can make stuff you already knew how to make faster.

But if you want to go the route where you can roll for each, then you can try to craft some crazy things. It just means you might not make progress on a given day. Failure by 4 or less means no progress, but no penalty. Failure by 5 or more means you've lost 1/2 of the remaining GP cost of the materials. You need to get them again before you can continue working on the item.

SO!

That's all just on crafting a mundane item. We haven't even touched crafting magic items!

Simply put, it would then take a mage 2 full days to take that masterwork longsword and make it into a longsword +1.

So, total cost to make a longsword +1 from scratch?

Smith: 105 gp + 9 days.
Mage: 1000gp + 2 days + 80 xp.

All in all, I think that the checks are simple, don't think it'll mess up the economy overmuch...

But the time component... that will be hard to replicate via scripts.

Now, with a DM... simple. When I did it, I just said that any RL day spent not RPing or campaigning would be a day that counted towards the time component, granted that the player spent some time emoting the work here and there.

Anyhow, I'd be interested in hearing what you think about that, or if you simply believe that a time component is unnecessary.

[indio]

I'm all for crafting, but completely against crafting magic items I don't know where that leaves me, but not terribly popular in crafting circles one suspects. lol

Remove the financial or power aspects of crafting, turn it into a roleplaying pursuit with goals and rewards that fit such aims, and Bob's your uncle.

[JaydeMoon]

Bob the Pedophile?


*Not a real pedophile, image depicts comedian Jon Lajoie, a really funny guy, check out his website http://www.jonlajoie.com.

[Kest]

I'm all for crafting, but completely against crafting magic items I don't know where that leaves me, but not terribly popular in crafting circles one suspects. lol

No, no. You can have a perfectly good crafting system without magical items, leaving those to the dominion of DMs.

[Mulu]

Just one word of wisdom - economy doesn't happen when things are made.

It happens when they disappear.

Without wear and removal of items, you can't have a properly functioning economy.

Traditionally they "disappear" when they are sold to an NPC merchant for a profit. The old crafting idea to prevent an endless stream of wealth was to make all crafted items unsellable to merchants (plot/stolen) but you could of course still sell them to other PC's.

If a PC could craft or brew something that acted as a cure minor wounds, they'd at least be able to sell it, and it wouldn't persist. Crafting expendables actually makes a lot of sense. If you're worried about hoarding, just make them heavy.

BTW, traps are expendables.

[JaydeMoon]

If you're worried about hoarding, just make them heavy.

Alternately, you can laugh really really hard when someone dies and they had a bag full of cure, ability buff poisons, and uber traps and refused to use them.

[yavanion]

Easiest way to "control" the economy is to make all crafted items, unsellable to NPCs, this way crafted items is sold, traded between players, or through DMs that use NPCs to make small events to order crafted items from crafters in game...

[Amar]

Please Direct your attention to the Crafting, Caravan, and Trade forum.

At last notice, standards there were submitted for DMA approval (about a year and a half ago?) and were never responded to.

That is where a more permanent and reliable crafting system currently stands in ALFA.



If someone wants to reforge the Crafting team, I will volunteer to sit on it.

[Zelknolf]

This is 9 days taking into account some level of time compression. Without time compression it's something like 9 weeks (makes sense I suppose, ask Zelk how long it takes to smith a superb katana or some shat). It takes into account that the major part of each day is spent working on the item in question.

In RL? One person never makes a katana. Ever ever. It takes at least five people. Two for the forging, one for the polishing, and one for the saya, and one for the tsuba. But yeah, that group's gonna spend weeks on it (and there's a direct proportion inthe mindset there between time spent and quality of the work; see legends of Masamune and Muramasa for that one.), and even the ridiculously good ones have a pretty high rate of failure when it comes to tempering.

In D&D? A level 5 smith with 12 int is probably going to have 8 ranks, a skill focus, masterwork tools, and an apprentice for a +16 on the check. A mastwork item is DC 20, making taking 10 feasible and allowing for an average of 5.2 gold of crafted item per day. Divide 315 by that (swords are cheaper in PnP), and you get 60.58 days put into the weapon. Add ALFA time compression and it's an OOC week.


Potions are more feasible to script by the PnP rules, imho. Take a feat, spend some gold/xp and a day, poof you got a potion.