Crafting and equipment in my game

[Talakeal]

So I recently had a player tell me that my game system (both rules and setting) made no sense when it came to equipment costs and crafting rules. I tried explaining it to him, and he told me that it was a "fallacy" and that it was self-contradictory and made no sense, but he was unable to really articulate why*.

I would like to hear some other opinions on the matter, and see if I can isolate and resolve the "fallacy" in the system.

Here is a brief summary of how equipment works:

There are no magical "enhancement" bonuses. Instead masterwork quality on items provides a +1-5 enhancement bonus to accuracy, damage, armor class, and, in the case of tools, skill use.

The cost of masterwork gear scales by a factor of ten. So a +1 masterwork sword costs as much as ten standard swords, a +2 masterwork sword as much as ten +1 swords, and so on.

The quality of an item primarily comes from the quality of the materials used to build it.

It requires a higher level of skill to work with higher quality materials and only very skilled craftsmen can work in the higher end materials.

Typically larger items cost more than smaller items, so daggers cost less than long swords and great swords cost more, a large shield costs more than a buckler, and plate mail costs more than chainmail.

Larger weapons cost and weigh more than lighter weapons. Heavier weapons do more damage but have reduced speed and accuracy. The math works out so that the larger weapon is superior against the majority of combats.

Crafting an item takes a significant time investment and the materials cost is equal to roughly half the market price of the finished product.

A fabricate spell removes the time component, but still requires the materials and a skill check on the part of the caster.

The world is in a dark age. The previous golden era of civilization had certain technologies shared with it directly by the gods, who have since departed from the world. The people of this civilization DID NOT evolve on their own technologically, instead they were simply giving advanced technology by the gods and told how to maintain and in some cases replicate it without understanding the underlying principles or transitional technologies.

The continent on which this civilization was based was completely destroyed. Any survivors (either people or gear) were in the form of explorers or outposts in foreign lands.

In the current age only a few people can work with the advanced materials technology required to construct +3 or better equipment. These are rare master craftsmen and artificers.

The world is primarily between the start of the renaissance and the start of the industrial revolution in technology, however metallurgy, astronomy, and pharmacology are more advanced than modern Earth. These technologies were introduced to man by the gods in the golden age and only the very best alchemists and artificers understand the advanced principles.




*His point boiled down to, iirc, that the materials cost and the market price should scale seperately as a master smith would charge less for his time in proportion to materials when building larger equipment, and that a dark age setting makes no sense because if even a single person understands lost technology they will inevitably teach it to the masses whether motivated by greed or altruism. Also that his wizard should be able to use fabricate to make high end gear with only a basic level of skill because fabrication magic should be just "wishing the materials together" rather than actually rearranging the matter on a molecular level.

[erikun]

I would wonder about the scaling component. I mean, if a basic dagger costs 2gp, then what material could they possibly be using that would cost 200,000gp?

A master smith would not charge less for their time if it is more valuable. How much they charge (and can charge) depends on how common it is. If the smith is the only person in the world that can make +5 weapons, then they can change any amount they want and will likely be charging enough that the richest people will just be able to afford it. Real Life Example: Compare how much you pay over-the-phone computer tech support (likely free) with paying a certified computer programmer to work for you (likely hundreds of dollars an hour).

Why would a smith teach others, especially large numbers of others, his craft? As mentioned above, a single smith with no competition can charge basically whatever they want. If smiths are selling +5 daggers for 200,000gp each, and one potential competing smith would cut their profit in half, then the smith would logically be asking for 100,000gp per dagger made per year, for several years, as payment for their teaching services. How many non-adventurers have several million gold lying around?

In the case of the Fabrication spell, this is just a question of how the spell works. You're the GM and the system designer, and so your description is obviously correct. What the player is describing sounds more like the affects of a Wish spell anyways.

[Talakeal]

I would wonder about the scaling component. I mean, if a basic dagger costs 2gp, then what material could they possibly be using that would cost 200,000gp?


+1 would be something like tempered or damascus steel.
+2 would be something comparable to high end modern stuff like titanium or advanced polymers
+3 would be a fantastic material like adamant, mithril, or orichalcum
+4 items are basically grown in a single molecule from psychoreactive crystals, the seeds of which are rarer than any gemstone in the real word
+5 is really wierd and nearly unique stuff. The teeth of a tarrasque, the scales of an elder dragon, a lump of ore personally blessed by hephaestus, the heart of a mountain, the core of a fallen star, etc.

[Averis Vol]

Your system sounds ridiculously awesome in all honesty. I agree with Erikun, tell your player that such a low level spell does not perform the same effect as you would get from a master craftsman.

Tell him that the spell doesn't work because it requires a certain understanding of the process and the metals to make fabricate properly work, so if he wants to fabricate +4 gear, he just has to learn the metallurgic process required.

As for the teaching to others bit; Were it that I knew a monumental secret like that I might make a stash of gear, probably enough to outfit a few guards, and then only teach people the process in exchange for a great favor (Bringing him the stone heart of a titan so he can extract ore, the plunging that ore into the deepest volcano on earth to heat it up and carrying it into the atmosphere to cool, etc, etc.) to show your dedication to the craft before even letting him handle your tools.

[Arkhosia]

+1 would be something like tempered or damascus steel.
+2 would be something comparable to high end modern stuff like titanium or advanced polymers
+3 would be a fantastic material like adamant, mithril, or orichalcum
+4 items are basically grown in a single molecule from psychoreactive crystals, the seeds of which are rarer than any gemstone in the real word
+5 is really wierd and nearly unique stuff. The teeth of a tarrasque, the scales of an elder dragon, a lump of ore personally blessed by hephaestus, the heart of a mountain, the core of a fallen star, etc.

Now I want to see a super rich dude have a personal army that wears Tarrasque skin as armor...

[TuggyNE]

*His point boiled down to, iirc, […] that a dark age setting makes no sense because if even a single person understands lost technology they will inevitably teach it to the masses whether motivated by greed or altruism.

This betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of communication, especially that of the pre-Internet age; one of the major factors of dark age-type effects is precisely the difficulty in communicating your ideas to anyone who cares about them. This can be caused by geographic, cultural, religious, or political segregation, or possibly others I'm not thinking of. Since most technologies are not directly effective at breaking down such barriers, since those that do generally require considerable investment over the course of some time, and since any given scholar, no matter how learned, is unlikely to know all the secrets of the past, it is entirely non-trivial to achieve this sort of nigh-instant recovery. And that's neglecting the fact that throughout most of history, most experts of almost any sort were highly protective of their secrets: the concept of trade secrets is older than the concept of a corporation, after all!

So no, very few would be willing to do this even if they could, and no one would be independently capable of the whole thing.

[mikalife1]

Now I want to see a super rich dude have a personal army that wears Tarrasque skin as armor...
here you go
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?261519-D-amp-Dish-The-city-built-around-the-tarrasque

[Mnemnosyne]

He's right that the materials cost and market price should scale separately, by reasonable logic. D&D's 'material costs are 1/2 the market price' is a simplification for balance purposes, but if you're trying to make a realistic system, then materials will have their own individual market price, and the finished product will have a separate market price. Depends on how much effort you feel like putting into it. Do you want to figure out the demand for the materials separately, then figure out the demand for the services of the master smiths separately, or just have a figure easily determined? The former is more accurate, while the latter is more playable.

Now, on the education front, there's a few possibilities. You say the world is somewhere between the renaissance and the industrial revolution, which suggests to me that knowledge sharing should be ramping up. Are there printing presses or other easy methods to copy books, such as infinite-use items of amanuesis or a similar spell? If so, then yeah, this knowledge should definitely be spreading significantly. Do universities and institutions of learning exist in the world? Again, if so, then the knowledge should be spreading - you can probably have an easier life teaching than smithing, after all. And considering the rarity of the materials, such master smiths would rarely actually be called upon to craft those items - they would otherwise be working with the same materials as more common smiths, so why not get out of that business and get into the business of teaching others?

On the other hand, if there's no printing presses or ways to disseminate information, and if there are no universities or institutions of learning, and if travel is slow and/or difficult between cities and nations, then yeah, the information's not going to spread purely from lack of the ability to spread it efficiently. Indeed, it's likely the knowledge will die out entirely eventually.

[Talakeal]

He's right that the materials cost and market price should scale separately, by reasonable logic. D&D's 'material costs are 1/2 the market price' is a simplification for balance purposes, but if you're trying to make a realistic system, then materials will have their own individual market price, and the finished product will have a separate market price. Depends on how much effort you feel like putting into it. Do you want to figure out the demand for the materials separately, then figure out the demand for the services of the master smiths separately, or just have a figure easily determined? The former is more accurate, while the latter is more playable.
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Any suggestion on how one would go about doing this? The player wants just a flat "masterwork component" cost like D&D and says that is the only realistic way.

So a normal dagger would cost 5 gold, a normal sword 10 gold. A plus one dagger would cost 105 gold, a plus one sword 110 gold. A plus two dagger 1005 gold, a plus to sword 1010 gold, and so on.

This seems even less realistic to me, as I know in real life if I buy two items of comparable quality but drastically different size the latter will cost significantly more than the former.

Obviously the prices wouldn't scale precisely, but I imagine a realistic system would be impossible, even if I was an expert at ecoomics and manufacturing practices and was willing to devote 50 pages of the rules to calculating material costs.

I am fine with an abstraction, but the player insisted the current model was "absurd" and "a fallacy" and that it was such an abstraction it couldn't be taken seriously.



Now, on the education front, there's a few possibilities. You say the world is somewhere between the renaissance and the industrial revolution, which suggests to me that knowledge sharing should be ramping up. Are there printing presses or other easy methods to copy books, such as infinite-use items of amanuensis or a similar spell? If so, then yeah, this knowledge should definitely be spreading significantly. Do universities and institutions of learning exist in the world? Again, if so, then the knowledge should be spreading - you can probably have an easier life teaching than smiting, after all. And considering the rarity of the materials, such master smiths would rarely actually be called upon to craft those items - they would otherwise be working with the same materials as more common smiths, so why not get out of that business and get into the business of teaching others?


Printing presses and universities exist, but are very rare and only accessible to the very rich. Any infinite use magic items would be EXTREMELY valuable artifacts.

There are only a handful of people in the entire world who can work with the high end technologies, and they don't understand the principles behind them. And besides, most of them are dedicated craftsmen and don't know the first thing about teaching.

I don't see entire university classes working towards something that requires a supra genius level intellect, a lifetime of study, materials that cost more than most towns produce in a year, and access to one of the few remaining facilities in the world capable of producing such items.

If, for example, three nuclear submarines and a small team of navy technicians were transported back to the Roman Empire, do you really think they would have working nuclear reactors, radios, sonar systems, computers, and diesel engines in every town in Europe within a few decades?

[Krazzman]

I have to say this: Talakeal is right in how the information isn't available yet. This is an Adventure hook.

Seriously he could feature a whole campaign of smiths and archaeologists and stuff trying to uncover the secrets of this craft and then capitalize it through teaching, building a facility to further the INGAME world to play Campaigns from what happens after it no longer is that "dark and mostly forgotten" knowledge.

You can tell your player that if he want's fabricate to use it he has to learn how to do it. Fabricate just TRIES to make the stuff you want but is bound by your "imagination" as in you have to know what the spell should do so you can freely manipulate the magic streams to let it do it.

Wish COULD work but it probably takes greater wish to have a 100% chance of working. (YOu can replace wish with miracle).

Congratulate your player that he has found the Plothook you hid in plain sight.

[Mnemnosyne]

Any suggestion on how one would go about doing this? The player wants just a flat "masterwork component" cost like D&D and says that is the only realistic way.

So a normal dagger would cost 5 gold, a normal sword 10 gold. A plus one dagger would cost 105 gold, a plus one sword 110 gold. A plus two dagger 1005 gold, a plus to sword 1010 gold, and so on.

This seems even less realistic to me, as I know in real life if I buy two items of comparable quality but drastically different size the latter will cost significantly more than the former.

Obviously the prices wouldn't scale precisely, but I imagine a realistic system would be impossible, even if I was an expert at ecoomics and manufacturing practices and was willing to devote 50 pages of the rules to calculating material costs.

I am fine with an abstraction, but the player insisted the current model was "absurd" and "a fallacy" and that it was such an abstraction it couldn't be taken seriously.The trick with calculating 'realistic' material costs is that there's no simple way to make rules for it, so you're correct there. You basically have to know the demographics and demand in every area that is in any way trading with the location you're conducting the transaction in. On occasion, with custom materials, I will eyeball the costs as a DM in my campaign settings.

The easiest question is this: where's the bottleneck? Are there more craftsmen than materials, or are there more materials than craftsmen? If the craftsmen are more common than the materials, then the materials are the expensive part and the craftsmen compete to be the ones to forge them. This should result in a lower static cost for the work, based purely on the amount of time it takes to complete, with a higher, much more volatile cost on the materials.

If the materials are more common than the craftsmen, on the other hand, the price for the materials should be stable, and the lower half of the equasion.

In either case, something as rare as I think you're saying this stuff is probably shouldn't have a default market price. Purchasing or crafting any of these items should probably be an individual negotiation each time, with the only guideline being 'how much did similar items sell for in the past' but also considering whether there's anyone else willing to pay for the items right now. When you have something fantastically rare, be it materials, skill, or finished product, you don't set a price and sell it to the first guy to meet that price. Think of it more like a real-life real estate deal, rather than going to the store to buy milk. The buyer makes an offer, the seller makes a counter-offer, and the negotiation continues until their prices meet, but there's a lot of room for a competing buyer to come in with a higher offer. Or perhaps it's conducted like an auction.

Printing presses and universities exist, but are very rare and only accessible to the very rich. Any infinite use magic items would be EXTREMELY valuable artifacts.

There are only a handful of people in the entire world who can work with the high end technologies, and they don't understand the principles behind them. And besides, most of them are dedicated craftsmen and don't know the first thing about teaching.

I don't see entire university classes working towards something that requires a supra genius level intellect, a lifetime of study, materials that cost more than most towns produce in a year, and access to one of the few remaining facilities in the world capable of producing such items.

If, for example, three nuclear submarines and a small team of navy technicians were transported back to the Roman Empire, do you really think they would have working nuclear reactors, radios, sonar systems, computers, and diesel engines in every town in Europe within a few decades?I think your example is a bit flawed in both time period and the necessary materials and tools. If such a scenario occurred, those three submarines would soon irreparably break no matter how many skilled technicians you sent along with them, and it would be flat out impossible to ever make any new ones at all, since it requires a massive number and scale of facilities to even begin to manufacture a nuclear sub, along with precision tools that couldn't be duplicated unless there existed facilities to make those, and so on and so forth. This isn't quite the scenario in your campaign, since it is still possible to create these things, it's just rare.

Actually, giving it further thought, the rarity of the materials actually calls into question whether this would be profitable enough to dedicate that lifetime of study to learn to do. For anyone. If the materials aren't common enough to keep the people that know how to forge them consistently employed, then nobody is going to put in 'a lifetime of study' in order to learn how to make things that nobody can make because there's not enough materials to make them. After giving it enough thought, I think the knowledge would be almost certain to die out, unless a new cache of materials was found, sizable enough that a not-insignificant number of people can make a thriving business out of crafting those materials. So it kind of all boils down to 'just how rare is this stuff anyway?' If it's very rare, then yeah, only a few people would know how to craft it, and within a couple hundred years, the knowledge will probably be gone forever.

[erikun]

Any suggestion on how one would go about doing this? The player wants just a flat "masterwork component" cost like D&D and says that is the only realistic way.

So a normal dagger would cost 5 gold, a normal sword 10 gold. A plus one dagger would cost 105 gold, a plus one sword 110 gold. A plus two dagger 1005 gold, a plus to sword 1010 gold, and so on.

This seems even less realistic to me, as I know in real life if I buy two items of comparable quality but drastically different size the latter will cost significantly more than the former.

Obviously the prices wouldn't scale precisely, but I imagine a realistic system would be impossible, even if I was an expert at ecoomics and manufacturing practices and was willing to devote 50 pages of the rules to calculating material costs.

I am fine with an abstraction, but the player insisted the current model was "absurd" and "a fallacy" and that it was such an abstraction it couldn't be taken seriously.
This is not Wal-Mart; your master smith is not going to provide a discount to shoppers in order to obtain business from other providers. They don't have to; there are likely no other providers in the area.

You can price the cost of material separately from the cost of the final product, but in general the two will not correlate. If a smith can get steel or mithral for half price (compared to other smiths) then they will continue to sell forged products for their normal amount and take the extra profit.

Two tables might be useful if the PCs show up with a rare component to be forged. It would make sense that if they showed up with a tarrasque tooth and wanted a smith to turn it into a sword, then the smith would not charge them the (typical) cost of materials. However, the smith would still charge them the remaining cost of the weapon, for time and expertise.

[Hjolnai]

If you intend PCs to take unique materials to smiths to make something with, consider that it's likely that no one really knows how to work them (otherwise they would not be unique). In this case several smiths might be ambitious enough to try, and the PCs might have to try and work out who has the combination of genius and luck to make something truly extraordinary - but there's still a chance of failure with a material so different from the norm.

[Jay R]

*His point boiled down to, iirc, that the materials cost and the market price should scale seperately as a master smith would charge less for his time in proportion to materials when building larger equipment, and that a dark age setting makes no sense because if even a single person understands lost technology they will inevitably teach it to the masses whether motivated by greed or altruism. Also that his wizard should be able to use fabricate to make high end gear with only a basic level of skill because fabrication magic should be just "wishing the materials together" rather than actually rearranging the matter on a molecular level.

The price of an item is based on both supply and demand, not just on supply. If there is somebody who will pay 200,000 for a +5 greatsword, then that's its price. If your player wants a sword so rare most nobles don't have one, he needs to pay more money than most nobles can pay.

Secondly, it is NOT TRUE that technology always spreads out in a medieval setting. Guilds existed for the express purpose of hiding the secrets of the craft. Take his own logic and consider its effects - if the technology spreads out, then lots of people will make these weapons, and they will be neither rare nor expensive. The smith wants them to remain expensive, and the rich nobleman who just outfitted his elite guard with superior weapons wants them to remain rare.

On fabrication: "wishing" the materials together requires a Wish. Fabricate puts materials together, but that's not how to make a superior blade. The Wootz process, for instance, requires multiple folding to work (Damascus blades). And the crucial aspect is that the smiths didn't know why it worked; they just knew that it did work. So I don't believe even a smith has made such blades could use Fabricate - he doesn't understand what it takes to make such a blade, separate from months of folding and re-folding.

Finally, in a world in which dragons can fly, people can cast fireballs with their minds, the dead can walk, and people who can cast magic can't wear armor, rules of modern physics simply don't apply. All arguments about re-arranging matter on a molecular level, or even the idea that a skill can always be taught, simply don't apply.

[Sebastrd]

Any suggestion on how one would go about doing this? The player wants just a flat "masterwork component" cost like D&D and says that is the only realistic way.

So a normal dagger would cost 5 gold, a normal sword 10 gold. A plus one dagger would cost 105 gold, a plus one sword 110 gold. A plus two dagger 1005 gold, a plus to sword 1010 gold, and so on.

This seems even less realistic to me, as I know in real life if I buy two items of comparable quality but drastically different size the latter will cost significantly more than the former.

In this case, your player is right. The cost of the material is the same no matter who is using it. If the steel required to make a dagger costs 5gp, it should be 5gp no matter the quality of the blade. A +1 dagger costs more because of the quality.

Basically, you should have two prices: the price of materials and the price of quality. So a steel dagger is always 5gp + quality price, an orichalcum dagger is always 5000gp + quality, etc.

[Talakeal]

In this case, your player is right. The cost of the material is the same no matter who is using it. If the steel required to make a dagger costs 5gp, it should be 5gp no matter the quality of the blade. A +1 dagger costs more because of the quality.

Basically, you should have two prices: the price of materials and the price of quality. So a steel dagger is always 5gp + quality price, an orichalcum dagger is always 5000gp + quality, etc.

I think you are misunderstanding. The high quality item and the good material item are the same thing. There is no additional quality modifier, rather the orichalcum dagger would simply require a master smith (whose time is more valuable) to forge as a novice smith would have no idea how to work with such a rare and difficulty metal, and the result would be a barely sharpened lump of truegold which is less effective than a steel dagger.



On fabrication: "wishing" the materials together requires a Wish. Fabricate puts materials together, but that's not how to make a superior blade. The Wootz process, for instance, requires multiple folding to work (Damascus blades). And the crucial aspect is that the smiths didn't know why it worked; they just knew that it did work. So I don't believe even a smith has made such blades could use Fabricate - he doesn't understand what it takes to make such a blade, separate from months of folding and re-folding.


"Wishing" may have been the wrong word. The player wants magic to be something like Mage: The Ascension, where willpower and belief simply change reality, and if the wizard puts enough belief into a sword the sword will simply make itself.
Rather, in my world magic is an incredibly complex process that involves altering reality at the quantum level, and mages need an intimate understanding of whatever they are create using magic.



Actually, giving it further thought, the rarity of the materials actually calls into question whether this would be profitable enough to dedicate that lifetime of study to learn to do. For anyone. If the materials aren't common enough to keep the people that know how to forge them consistently employed, then nobody is going to put in 'a lifetime of study' in order to learn how to make things that nobody can make because there's not enough materials to make them. After giving it enough thought, I think the knowledge would be almost certain to die out, unless a new cache of materials was found, sizable enough that a not-insignificant number of people can make a thriving business out of crafting those materials. So it kind of all boils down to 'just how rare is this stuff anyway?' If it's very rare, then yeah, only a few people would know how to craft it, and within a couple hundred years, the knowledge will probably be gone forever.

Well, the knowledge builds off of mundane crafting technologies. Someone who has spent a lifetime building steel weapons will pick up the secret of working adamant relatively quickly, assuming the have the intelligence to grasp the principles and the discipline to try.

Also, the knowledge may well be lost, and has been lost in the past. The thing is, products of the advanced technology, and in a few cases the tools to make it, still exist in the world, and a high level artificer who puts the time into studying can sometimes reverse engineer the process.

The point of centention between me and the player was whether or not it would become common knowledge again in the future.

[MtlGuy]

The world you created bears a striking resemblance to the world of 'Battletech' (Mechwarrior). The people there have a similar relationship with tehcnology. Although not bestowed by departed gods, years of total war have greately dimished the technological capacity of the Inner Sphere. Some people know how to operate advanced technological devices, but do not really know what they are doing when doing it. The 'repair prayer' is no joke.

The dissemination of advanced skills in dark age setting is slowed to a crawl, a culture of obscurantism is likely in effect. If they were rapidly sharing education and information, then that would be a rennaissance. The few who possess advanced skills aren't going to create competitors for themselves, they're going to charge what the market can bear, and in their case it's likely 'my way or the highway' rates.

Whatever pricing formula you want to use is your business, just consider that manufacturing consists of parts and labour, which may be obtained separately, and that pricing should reflect that as well as the relative advantage of the item created. If it's truly a dark age setting, then maybe the manufacturing of exceptional weapons should be prohibitted entirely. The few smiths who exist are likely exclusively working for lords or people of authority. It could be a quest reward to have such a quality weapon crafted for PCs, and the PCs will have to quest to get the high quality materials required.