Help me make a better crafting system

[martixy]

I've been looking at crafting.

It's not a very good system.

I started off at 3.5 before wandering over to PF. There's certain advancements there, but in the end all the systems result in absurdities in certain cases.

This (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/craft/alternative-craft-rules-3pp) 3rd party source highlights some of the absurdities.
However it has its fair share of problems.
Such as an intricate clock(for which a week of work might be reasonable) and a large vessel(such as a bloody galleon) taking the same time to create. That's just SILLY.

I do like the granularity of the other (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/alternate-crafting-rules) alternative system, but it suffers from the same problems the 3rd party system describes.
I get why it's based on GP value - as a way to preserve the D&D economy, but at the same time it results in the horrible absurdities outlined above.


Which is why I've been thinking on how to fix all of that ridiculousness. By going down to the fundamental level.

The way I see it it's complexity(time) x volume(size).

This results in sort of a combination of both systems + some extensions to accommodate for size.

Starting off with the Unchained system, but instead of being based on GP value, have it be based on time.

For example beginning with a wooden spoon, which you could reasonably carve out in half an hour with a knife and no training whatsoever.
Then double times for each higher complexity, resulting in 4 days for an Extremely Intricate item.

But then you'd have size modifiers.
Say you're a medium creature. If you want to craft a simple item, you'd have no problem doing anything up to tiny(up 2 feet, the width of a grown man) in 1 hour with a DC10 check.
But every category larger increases the time by 1 step.
The time increases start at Small for Extremely Simple and Simple, Tiny for the next 2 complexity tiers, and so on per 2 tiers.
This results in an 8 month construction period for a medium-sized marine vessel(like a galley, which would probably count as colossal based on size) which seems rather reasonable.

Now, obviously a single human can't really make an entire colossal-sized ship by himself, even in 8 months of hard labor(I think). Similarly with a dragon trying to create an intricate pocketwatch.
So maybe a hard-cap on items more than 5 size categories(i.e. you can't create such items) smaller and soft-cap on items more than 3 categories larger(e.g. you need more man-power or double the time steps?).

And on that note I came up with a few additional size categories - Puny(pocket-watch size), Behemoth(Former C+) and Kaiju(have you seen Pacific Rim?). Feel free to add more(I ran out of unique letter adjectives).

That's the prototype, after half an hour of brainstorming. Now I'd welcome some input.

[rockdeworld]

I think this belongs in the homebrew section of the boards, but in any case seems worth talking about.

I think your system is too complicated. Crafting is a skill that's used very rarely because of its extreme limitations (not being able to craft anything useful after level 3-ish, because then everything useful is magic*). I'm not including crafting as part of a spell, because it hardly ever affects the mechanics of the spell. If you don't want to change that limitation, then crafting should be simple enough that learning all the mechanics takes fewer than 3 levels. In other words, grapple-rules complexity and depth is a bad idea.

*Unless you're an archer and want to craft arrows because your DM actually makes you keep track of that. But even then, the only arrows you care about are ones that bypass DR.

Actually, I think I'll make a new topic (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?433027-KISS-crafting-fix&p=19647892#post19647892) for my own suggestions.

[NichG]

For a game, I think its important to always keep in mind 'How do I expect this to come into play?' or 'How do I expect this to be used (by the players, by NPCs, etc)?'. Mucking about in a system just because you can find something unrealistic in there is an endless rabbit-hole, because any rules system will never be completely realistic or completely accurate, and you can always find contrarian examples that end up being very strange in any given system, so if your intent is to hunt down all of those things you'll never really be done. On the other hand, screen-time is a constant. There can be any number of contrarian examples that might exist in the space of things one can think about, but the set of contrarian examples that come up during play is fixed, and informed by what you and the players will want to do.

So I'd focus on that above all - figure out those elements of the crafting system that players will want to engage with because they have a significant and meaningful consequence to them, and then use those to set the reference points. If you find your rules producing numbers that mean that a player would never bother with something, you can assume that a player will never bother with it and just not write down any details about that stuff.

So for instance, with regards to the galleons in your post, the chain of reasoning could go something like:

- (Initial Craft rules): With these rules, there's a contrary example: a ship is something a PC might want to build, but they can personally build it in a very short time.
- Change: I do not want ships to be built that quickly. Therefore, change the rules so that it takes many months to build a ship
- Corollary: If it will take multiple months to craft something, its unlikely (unless other things are changed about the game) that a PC will spare the time or effort to do so. If the rules allow a PC to become so good at crafting that they can bring it back to a short timescale it might come up, but at that time a Galleon is likely to not be a very significant resource compared to other things they can do.
- Therefore, it is no longer something which requires specific rules, and it is sufficient to state: The Craft rules only address personal-scale objects, not large-scale construction projects. If rules are needed for such at some future time, it will be via a distinct system.

That way you don't have to worry about things like 'What if a dragon wants to make a pocket watch?', because even if there is a dragon in your game who makes a pocketwatch, it probably won't be relevant how long it took him to do so.

Now, if you're running a game where the PCs are less adventurers and more kings and leaders of armies, then maybe 'How long does it take to make a Galleon?' is a relevant question, but at that point the PC's personal Craft skill modifier is probably not a good model (and if you tried to do that, using the support of the PC's followers for things like Aid Another, you're going to get really screwy results - like a bag of awakened rats being more useful for building a Galleon than a team of shipwrights, because you can cram more of them into the PC's square).