Fixing Fabricate

[Fax Celestis]

Anyone come across an elegant solution to the problems fabricate presents?

I'm wondering if requiring a craft check for crafting anything would help. Fabricate's purpose, then, would be to eliminate the crafting time, not the necessary skills.

[Millennium]

I'm not sure I understand what the problem is. The spell's description already requires you to make an appropriate Craft check for anything Doesn't the spell already require you to make "an appropriate Craft check" for anything that requires "a high degree of craftsmanship". Doesn't that already mean that if something requires a Craft check to make normally, it still requires a Craft check to make with the spell?

[Segev]

What problems are you trying to solve? Fabricate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/fabricate.htm) already requires craft checks for items "requiring a high degree of craftsmanship."

[Fax Celestis]

I mean specifically using it to break the economy, but I guess it's actually okay as-is: the main perpetrator in that problem is stuff like wall of iron providing ridiculously huge amounts of raw materials for free. Fabricate is just leverage.

[tyckspoon]

I mean specifically using it to break the economy, but I guess it's actually okay as-is: the main perpetrator in that problem is stuff like wall of iron providing ridiculously huge amounts of raw materials for free. Fabricate is just leverage.

If Fabricate has a problem, it's that the the Craft check isn't really a barrier to making much of anything, especially for Int-based casters.. Craft is an Int-based skill, you can take 10 on the check, you can use it untrained, it has fairly low DCs (the main barrier to crafting anything valuable isn't the Craft DC - it's how bloody *long* it takes if you aren't shortcutting with Fabricate or voluntarily taking on an Epic-level DC) and if Take 10 + your Int mod doesn't get you there it's not terribly difficult to rig a single skill check.

But yeah, Fabricate is just one more bullet point in the 'lolmundanesyueventry' of D&D 3.5.. and honestly it's the only practical way for significant amounts of things like full plate armor (let alone full plate in exotic materials) to exist, given how long it takes to make them the normal way. And it's mostly used to turn raw materials into things that have more value per unit - as you've correctly noted, the ability to create arbitrary amounts of said raw material is the actual source of that particular economic exploit.

[icefractal]

Craft checks are pretty easy for Wizards, also. They're Int-based and can be used untrained, so for example, a Wizard with Int 26 and the spell Crafter's Fortune gets a 23 just by taking 10, enough to craft most things (including masterwork equipment). Hire a Bard for Inspire Competence, and you're hitting 25, enough for a lot of the fancy stuff.

Edit: Swordsaged.

[Thiyr]

You could also be a cruel and unusual individual and let it work like its written. That whole "material components are consumed" bit, so you need twice as much material to work with than you normally would (half to be consumed as component, half as target), and end up spending twice as much as you normally would.

[Coidzor]

Does sort of raise the question of how long crafting things should take by default in order to then have an idea of how to properly weight circumventing crafting time completely...

[Millennium]

Another interpretation would be that since you're making a Craft check as though you fabricated the item normally, the spell can only do as much work as the Craft check would. That's still nothing to sneeze at, even on the really expensive stuff: you do a week's worth of work in ten minutes, and you can cast it more times to make even more checks. But it keeps you from churning out multiple suits of full plate in a day.