Crafters! [3.X]

[*.*.*.*]

Really quick question here, what should I do about crafters? I don't award XP in my campaigns, just levels. What should I do about crafting XP? Dropping it for free seems ripe for abuse and I don't wanna give XP to one character type. Any ideas/suggestions?

[Roncorps]

Trade rate : 1xp = 5gp

[prufock]

I think the craft point variant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/craftPoints.htm) is basically made for this situation.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Characters who spend enough xp to fall behind in levels will gain more xp per encounter until they catch back up, so xp costs are often negligible.

That said, the standard xp to gp conversion is 5 gp per 1 xp, according to NPC spellcasting costs (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/goodsAndServices.htm#spell).

You would normally pay 1/25 the base price in xp, so it would be five times that much as an extra gp cost, or 20% of the item's base price. If they were to take a feat like Extraordinary Artisan (reduces the gp cost of item creation by 25%), it would not affect the xp-conversion portion, only the normal 50% base price in gp portion.

[Afgncaap5]

I've experimented with dropping the XP requirement from item crafting recently, and it's not been too bad. When a player asked to play artificer in that campaign, I had her XP reserve be a GP reserve, but she had to divide the amount by three and then multiply it by five.

I suppose that could be done to the market costs of items as well... seems that magic items would get a bit expensive in some cases, though.

[Slipperychicken]

Trade rate : 1xp = 5gp

This is what Pathfinder does, and it works beautifully. They essentially removed all XP costs like this.

[Drachasor]

Trade rate : 1xp = 5gp
This is what Pathfinder does, and it works beautifully. They essentially removed all XP costs like this.

That's what they do for spells.

Magic Items just had the XP dropped.

[Devils_Advocate]

Page 110 of the Dungeon Master's Guide says that magic items a NPC spellcaster can make for herself should be counted as 70% as expensive as normal when selecting gear for her. It makes sense for the same discount to be applied to PC's magic items. As such, simply increase the cost of the raw materials used to make an item to 70% of the item's listed price instead of 50%.

Which is of course precisely what everyone else is recommending, but with the math done for you instead of just giving a counter-formula to reverse the standard formula. You can check all of that to make sure that the math adds up, of course, but at the end of the day it's "crafting materials cost 70% of item's listed price".

EDIT: No, wait, that's not always the case, because making e.g. a potion or scroll of a spell with a material or XP component requires you to simply pay the component without discount, in addition to the other costs.

(In fact, this can have the effect of discouraging PCs from actually preparing certain spells, e.g. identify or raise dead, because the material component of the spell isn't much less relatively expensive than a scroll of the spell.)

Gosh, magic item pricing is complicated, isn't it? :/