Craft DC for a House/Building

[Morithias]

Not even in the stronghold builder's book can I find this. If a player happens to be insane enough to have ranks in stonelaying/carpentry and knowledge (architecture) what is the DC to build a house/building?

Note: Yes I know the craft rule suck, you don't need to point this out.

3.5 or Pathfinder are both accepted, if you can get both that's even better.

[KillianHawkeye]

You're going to have to make it up yourself. It's not in any book.

[Pilo]

SRD says this:
Very simple item (wooden spoon) Varies 5
Typical item (iron pot) Varies 10
High-quality item (bell) Varies 15
Complex or superior item (lock) Varies 20

I think a house is a typical item, except if you try to design something special, so DC 10.

[Drelua]

Well, I'd say it's pretty low, considering we're talking about places without any electricity and likely no plumbing. I took a few construction classes in high school, and I can safely say that it's a lot more difficult to build a cabinet than most parts of a house. There are some more difficult bits, but most of it's pretty straightforward. I'd guess DC 12 at most, maybe higher for certain parts. It's easy, it just takes a long time.

[Slipperychicken]

There are some good guidelines in the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook, and base prices for houses at the bottom of this page (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/wilderness.htm#urbanAdventures) One useful one is that it takes 1 week for every 10,000gp in the price, if you have lots of magic available. Without magic, normal craft rules should suffice, each laborer contributing his Craft check in silver pieces each week.

Here's my take on it: You need to make a Knowledge: Architecture and Engineering check to make plans (Take 20 is recommended), but unskilled laborers can do the work, possibly under his supervision. Build times are in Stronghold Builder's Guide.


If it's a hovel/shack, like the cobbled-together dwellings starving people in the 3rd world live in, it would cost next to nothing, and should be Very Simple- DC 5.

The "normal" house that costs 1,000gp in the DMG should be Typical. DC 10

Grand Houses (villas, possibly multiple floors), which are 5,000gp, are High Quality. DC 15

Mansions (100,000gp) are Complex or Superior. DC 20

Castles, Strongholds, and Dungeons are DC 25, maybe even DC 30 if particularly complicated (i.e. if you have a network of pit traps, gravity-chambers, and Ooze-farms to deal with), to draw workable plans for.

[Drelua]

You know, I'm starting to think you'd have to treat different parts of the same structure as different items for the purposes of craft. I mean, it's easy to nail together the frame of a building, but something more precise like making wooden stairs is extremely difficult. There's also the problem that different parts would fall under different skills, like carpentry and stonemasonry. If you had people working on a castle at DC 25, they'd need something like a +18 modifier, 16 before masterwork tools, just to make progress more often than they completely waste materials.

Then again, maybe I'm expecting too much logic from the craft rules...

[Slipperychicken]

If you had people working on a castle at DC 25, they'd need something like a +18 modifier, 16 before masterwork tools, just to make progress more often than they completely waste materials.


It's called Take 10, and it's the reason the Craft skills work at all. Take 10 makes skill-use much more sane, especially from a realist/simulationist perspective. Also, the DCs I posted of were for Knowledge: (Architecture and Engineering) to draw up plans, assuming the actual crafting would be done by unskilled laborers (like random slaves building things like castles, walls, and pyramids).

[TypoNinja]

This has actually come up in a game I'm playing as were in sort of a survivalist mindset, we've been using the craft rules (I've stone working, my buddy has carpentry). The 10,000gp per week modifier assumes you have sufficient labor, and further assumes that getting your hands on it is simply a matter of hiring them, as evidenced by the SHBG listing labor as a simple cost modifier. We obviously don't have that.

We chose the "Complex or Superior" (DC20) class for throwing up a building, but recognized that there is a lot of room for unskilled labour to help speed up construction. Lot of heavy lifting to go around, so one skilled builder could be helped by several people rather easily. Stack bonuses to your craft check for helpers effectively makes you build faster.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Have you seen stormwrack's rules for shipbuilding?

If you're having to make something up, that seems like a good starting point. What's a house but a ship that doesn't float?

[Deophaun]

In reality, it doesn't much matter what the DC is, as to get it done in any reasonable amount of time you're going to want to boost the DC significantly above 20 anyway using the rules for accelerated building in the epic level handbook. Assuming the character can hit a DC 20 by taking 10, with 20 hired unskilled laborers rolling assist checks, you can accelerate the build by adding 10 or 20 to the DC to bring it up to 30, and get 90 gold worth of progress a week (compare to 22 gold if you all just took 10s). With 40 you can get a DC 40, for 160 gold a week, and with 60 you get a DC of 50, for 250.

It's kind of unintuitive, but the more valuable the object you are trying to make, the less the DC matters for the question of whether you can do it or not.