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View Full Version : Craft Subskills (And How to Make Them Better)



Vadskye
2013-10-25, 12:24 AM
As part of a comprehensive revision to magic items, I'm redesigning magic item creation. I plan on allowing Craft skills to be used to create appropriate magic items. The key problem is that, in order to specify which Craft skill is appropriate for a given item, I need to a good list of Craft skills. The "core" Craft skills are as follows:

Alchemy
Armorsmithing
Bowmaking
Weaponsmithing


Obviously, this is wildly insufficient for expressing the enormous variety that can be found among the various wondrous items. There are several requirements that must be met. First, the Craft categories should be broad, so that the immense variety of possible items can be adequately represented in a reasonable number of skills. This involves a great deal of suspension of disbelief, but the Craft skill is not the place to spontaneously decide that D&D should be an accurate representation of reality. That's part of why the original Craft system failed horribly.

Second, the Craft categories should be unambiguous, so there is no question what category a given item belongs to. That's part of why I don't like "bowmaking"; without reference to the table, it is ambiguous whether a bow or crossbow can be created with the "weaponsmithing" skill or with the "bowmaking" skill. It is also ambiguous whether a spiked shield should be considered a "weapon" or "armor".

Finally, the Craft categories should have a vague relationship to reality. One of the reasons I dislike the "weaponsmithing" category is that it is absurdly broad; it implies the ability to work with any kind of material, in any shape, provided that it can be used as a weapon. You can craft an intricately woven crossbow, which requires the simultaneous mastery of wood, metal, and thread, but heaven help you if you want to make a spoon - unless that spoon is sharpened with deadly intent. Realism is far down on my priority list, but I still want to avoid things that actively take me out of suspension of disbelief.

My extremely tentative list looks like this:

Alchemy
Ceramics
Leatherworking
Metalsmithing (armor)
Metalsmithing (weapons)
Stonemasonry
Textiles
Woodworking


What important items am I missing? Has anyone else created a good list of Craft subskills?

nonsi
2013-10-25, 03:05 AM
How about Toxicology?

Ashtagon
2013-10-25, 03:36 AM
My extremely tentative list looks like this:

Alchemy
Ceramics
Leatherworking
Metalsmithing (armor)
Metalsmithing (weapons)
Stonemasonry
Textiles
Woodworking


What important items am I missing? Has anyone else created a good list of Craft subskills?

Mine looks like this:


Stone (includes bone-crafting and brick-work)
Wood (includes plastics and fibre-glass at high tech levels)
Metal (both soft/precious and 'hard' metals)
Cloth (includes leather-working)
Glass (includes gem-cutting)
Alchemy (includes poisons and general chemistry; technically, I list this as Knowledge/chemistry, with a note that it can be used to make chemicals)


Three feats (Builder, Armourer, Weaponsmith) each give a +5 bonus on relevant Craft checks for buildings, armour, and weapons, respectively. I'd probably add Ship Builder too, for any design that requires a sealed hull (whether wet navy or space navy).

Note that the specific subskill used depends on the major load-bearing part or most valuable component, as decided by the GM where there is doubt. For example, bows use C/wood, while crossbows use C/metal. Some items (automobiles for example) may require two or more subskills.

I don't make poisons a separate skill from alchemy; it's rather easy to make something toxic from common kitchen supplies. The finer art of limiting the level of toxicity makes just as much sense being part of general alchemy.

And at higher tech levels, the following get added:


Mechanical (clockworks, complex systems, locks, traps; available at standard D&D tech levels)
Engineering (steam/combustion engines)
Gunsmith (gunpowder and conventional firearms, cannon)
Electronics (computers, lasers)
Atomics (nuclear physics, force fields, particle beam weapons)
Weird Science (matter transmission, time travel, dimension hopping)