Making crafting more interesting

[Heliomance]

Let's face it - magic items, and crafting, in D&D are just boring. They just feel like mass-produced junk. There's nothing special about them - all the options are laid out in the books, aside from artefacts, there's no such thing as a unique magic item. It's just another +1 flaming sword, or just another belt of battle.

The Christmas Tree Effect is real, and has been discussed endlessly elsewhere. That's not what I'm talking about - there are ways around the need for static stat enhancers, with some judicious houseruling. That's been hashed out before. No, my problem is the magical supermarket effect.

What does crafting an item take? Gold and XP. That's it. Nothing unique, at all. Where's there room for the master dwarven smith who can forge a blade out of the concept of victory, who can sharpen it on moonlight? Where's there room for the gnomish artificer who makes a magical ring, with a jewel formed from the tear of the spirit of the ocean? Where's there room for the alchemist who makes a potion from a pinch of sunlight and a baby's first cry? Where, in short, is the magic?

And what can be done about it? Yes, you can go on a quest to get phoenix feathers for a new cloak, but then that means diverting the entire adventure for one item. And it takes a very special kind of crafter to spin starlight into cloth.

I'm not sure if I'm asking a specific question, really. I'm just griping, and hoping to open an interesting discussion. So, discuss!

[NapazTrix]

I had a campaign once, set in the FF8 World, where I was playing a fighter whose main goal was to make his own Garden*. I got some money together and bought a shop, used leadership to get some followers and train them in blacksmithing to work the shop whilst I was out on adventures.

I bought their equipment, books, materials and the like and it was a nice side thing, that also brought in some more money to help fund my Garden.

Every so often the GM would give me quests to go to a neighbouring continent to talk about trade between us, hand over business cards to make some contacts etc.

Then there were the special orders, like Crystal weapons or light weapons with dual modes. This is where my character came into play, I would have to hunt down crystal giants in the Tower of Odin to gather the necessary materials, with Odin being obtainable if I completed the puzzle in the tower.

It was a fun way to go about crafting, besides "You wait 21 days and make a MW Falchion".


*Gardens are military schools where children are taken to train into mercenaries called SEED who work for governments or themselves.

[Saintheart]

On a related point, it's a great pity Legacy Weapons were not handled a bit better. To my mind they do recapture elements of the wonder you seem to be crying out for in the form of the rituals required to fully open a weapon's capabilities. Some of the rituals in the books could just about be adventures in themselves.

On the other hand, consider the spells themselves. Is there anyone who rigidly enforces the rule that you have to get hold of the unusual, even exotic, material components some of these spells require? (Of course, even then, there's always Eschew Materials...sigh...)

[nedz]

In a game I've just started running I intend to go for a Magic is Special approach.

I haven't worked out the formulae as yet, the party is still only 3rd level, but the basic plan is as follows.

This only applies to permanently enchanted items, not consumables.

If you roll a 1 on the crafting roll then you get a cursed item.
If you roll higher than a given number then you lose control of the enchantment and the item becomes sentient.
We then roll up an intelligent item. This will likely increase the xp and gold cost.
If you fail a will save against it's final ego then you are compelled to complete the enchantment even if you end up loosing a level and stealing stuff to fund the process - a kind of addiction/compulsion behaviour.
If you make the will save then you can stop at any point though interacting with the becoming item may force a further will save.
The more powerful the enchantment the more likely this is to happen - though enchanting items in steps may be safer.


Obviously found items will have an increased chance of intelligence, though this is probably unlikely with +1 items.

I haven't worked out the formulae as yet, though I want it to be quadratic. I did start with dividing by 2000gp, because that is the cost a +1 item, but that seemed too high — it would be quadratic though.

In terms of game balance: enchanted weapons could be more annoying — though they are likely to have more powers. Also the actual SLAs could be customised from those in the table in the DMG — just swapped for more appropriate powers of a similar level.

[unseenmage]

In one of my most favorite games I've been a part of my Artificer character was figuring out how to give his Constructs person-like abilities. Intelligence, skills, spellcasting. The things persons do all the time that his Constructs couldn't.

We were using the Constructs are Magic Items rules interpretation and the DM had granted me infinite gp on an experimental basis (basically so long as Rule of Cool was obeyed it would be allowed).
Eventually when I was putting feats in Constructs via the Arms and Equipment Guide pricing for feats in Magic Items it occurred to me to wonder where my character was a) getting all his cross-campaign ideas from (became a major plot point later; long story short even the deity of crafting/creation was surprised) but also where he was getting knowledge of feats he didn't have to magically cram into his Constructs/Magic Items.

So the DM and I agreed on a point of style, that whenever a mental facet was being added to a Construct/Magic Item there had to be someone present to represent that mental facet for the entirety of the process.
I wanted to build a golem with innate Improved Initiative? Fine, I hire someone who knows that feat and they drone on and on throughout the golem's creation process as I build that feat into the Construct.

Eventually we agreed that doing it this way was more flavorful and it became a persistent part of the gameworld, basically retconning so that this was always the way Magic Item/Construct creation worked.
What's better, the personality elements of the NPCs, or PCs even, would sometimes 'infect' the resultant feat/skill/spell/etc granting item so that a Construct who was imbued with a cowardly rogue's Improved Initiative would react physically in a cowardly fashion like that rogue to situations. Or the Construct who was built with a disdainful wizard's spell would look down its nose at enemies when it used the SLA that spell became.

The process did cost my character additional time (the only true cost when gp is infinite) to shop for NPCs who had knowledge I wanted to imbue as well as additional gp to hire those NPCs for the duration of the crafting process (again infinite gp but we tracked it to see which settlements/nations were receiving magically generated gp). This extra process connected the flavorful idea of needing examples of knowledge to be able to imbue knowledge to the crunch of time invested finding those examples and the money required to hire their services. Flavor met rules in a way that satisfied us.
It enriched our game just that little bit so I thought I'd mention it.

[Milo v3]

Pathfinder Unchained has a system specifically designed to fix this called Dynamic Item Creation, replacing just spending time and money with small little challenges that alter your progress with the item and tweak the final item itself.

[Eisfalken]

One thing you can do is require the PCs to not just pay "gold and XP", but rather they have to obtain specific materials.

For the gold side of things, they must obtain specific things like incense, ink, vellum, gems, etc. which are utterly consumed in the process. Attach gp values to the units of things they need, so that they can't just get them anywhere but a certain size of settlement. This naturally explains the congregation of wizards and similar folk who make items to larger cities: to be closer to the markets for their rare goods. In fact, you may require them to visit planar cities like Sigil, the City of Brass, and others to find the non-magical substances on other planes needed to make items. Perhaps spider silk harvested from the Demonweb Pits, or hell-wrought iron.

For the XP side, you have to get tricky. Instead of just having PCs pay out of their own XP pool, make it so certain monsters have "essence" that can be extracted to pay XP costs. The amount of "essence" should be around CR x 100 XP; deduct the XP value x 5 gp from their treasure value. Removing the essence should take a Knowledge check, keyed to the creature type (arcana for dragons, the planes for extraplanar creatures, etc.), DC equal to 10 + CR.

Each type of "essence" should be keyed to the creature's abilities, qualities, and type. For example, a red dragon might yield essence keyed to "fire", "arcane", etc.; a hellhound might be keyed to "fire", "evil", and "lawful". You may even alter the final item's properties if a PC accidentally stacks up too much of a property that they didn't intend. For example, if your PCs harvest tons of devil and demon essence to make a magic sword, you may purposefully alter it to have the unholy property (if "evil" outranks "fire").

This makes it vital for PC spellcasters to keep actual notes on their items, and to be mindful of what they use in their creation process. For example, perhaps for a +1 flaming burst sword they need to use more red dragon and efreeti essence than devil or demon essence. (And, if they are running low, perhaps set off to acquire some the hard way...)

But don't make this a math or scientific matter. Make the ebb and flow of magic somewhat more tricky. For example, perhaps during the feast of a given saint who was martyred by burning at the stake, a wizard can "purify" any evil influence from his project by simply going and making the proper religious observance. Or maybe he can make the sword in a place where a firre eladrin destroyed a powerful agent of evil.

This makes item creation both art and science; the wizard has to learn metaphysical associations and kind of "feel" his or her way through the process. Don't be too harsh on them. If they have the right Knowledge checks, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to figure out the right way to make things.

And, lucky for a DM, it definitely makes them more mobile, seeking out new opportunities to make items.

[Curmudgeon]

I don't see the value in trying to fix this for PCs. Special quests, & c. would essentially be adding complexity on top of boredom, as opposed to actually alleviating the boredom. I'd steer clear of the issue to the extent of making item crafting exclusive to NPCs.

[Troacctid]

I'm with Curmudgeon here. This isn't a good place to introduce a minigame. If crafting isn't a fun part of the game, then handwave past it, either by streamlining the mechanics or just making the items available via NPCs instead.

[Heliomance]

I'm with Curmudgeon here. This isn't a good place to introduce a minigame. If crafting isn't a fun part of the game, then handwave past it, either by streamlining the mechanics or just making the items available via NPCs instead.

That doesn't fix the problem of there being no magic in magic items, though. If anything, it makes it worse, by enforcing the magic supermarket feel.

[Kelb_Panthera]

That doesn't fix the problem of there being no magic in magic items, though. If anything, it makes it worse, by enforcing the magic supermarket feel.

Two things can make that feeling possible but 3.X wasn't built to deal with either of them.

1) Magic items are very rare. So rare that freely flowing market can't build up around their trade. This makes the christmas tree effect's necessity conflict with the reality of the game world pretty harshly.

2.) Magic items can't be made deliberately through the magic item creation feats*. Instead the rules for either bonded magic items from DMG2 or custom legacy weapons or some homebrew that links the items strictly to their owner is used instead.

*exceptions made for wands, scrolls, amd the like.


Using either of these options can make magic items feel more special but it's simply not possible for special to really work when magic items are plentiful enough for their trade to be viable. If they can be traded, they will be traded. That's just how market forces work. Supply meets demand and if both are relatively high then they meet quickly and often. The more quickly and often a commodity is traded, the less special it feels.

To be frank though, I don't really get why this is such an all or nothing thing for people. Why can't most magic items be just normal trade goods while only mcguffins and whatever equipment the players choose (again with bonded items, legacies, ancestral relic, etc) are special.

[Saintheart]

Two things can make that feeling possible but 3.X wasn't built to deal with either of them.

1) Magic items are very rare. So rare that freely flowing market can't build up around their trade. This makes the christmas tree effect's necessity conflict with the reality of the game world pretty harshly.

2.) Magic items can't be made deliberately through the magic item creation feats*. Instead the rules for either bonded magic items from DMG2 or custom legacy weapons or some homebrew that links the items strictly to their owner is used instead.

*exceptions made for wands, scrolls, amd the like.

So let's, by that exception, make the party fighter even less interesting than he already was, while maintaining if not comparatively enhancing the mage's mastery of reality. :(

[Kelb_Panthera]

So let's, by that exception, make the party fighter even less interesting than he already was, while maintaining if not comparatively enhancing the mage's mastery of reality. :(

I acknowledged that 1 was a less than ideal solution. 2 can work just fine for fighters and other melee characters unless the DM is being a d-bag.

Honestly, the magic item market makes plenty of sense to me and I don't have the same hangup that some others do about magic needing to be special beyond the fact that you're warping reality with your brain and some bat poop and carrying a fortune in gear that lets you tell physics to go screw itself.

Like I said, if special is what you want then a free market kills that deader than a disintegrated zombie whose soul was used to craft a scroll of prestidigitation. Of course you have to compensate if you strip out the market, somehow.

[tadkins]

I think a system involving the gathering of rare and valuable materials would be pretty interesting, like what many MMOs have. I posted a similar thread recently regarding craft/profession recipes and I think some concepts might apply here. Perhaps the party might have a PC with a mining background, and a spellcaster that can help them locate a valuable vein of metal. In addition, they can also go after certain powerful creatures for supplementary materials to craft items.

"We've mined up this adamantite, now we need the beating heart of a red dragon to power the forge necessary to smelt it down. Then we can create some truly remarkable adamantite arms."

Of course, as evidenced by this thread and the one I posted, not everyone's going to be into that sort of thing.

[oxybe]

The thing is, a +1 sword really isn't interesting.

Like, say in real life you're walking on the street and find new drill by the side of the curb, in the box an everything. It's better then your old one so upon seeing the owner of the house exiting and ask her what's up, they tell you they're dumping it because reasons and you can take it. We'll say the husband forgot to walk the casserole or something.

Either way, new drill, better then the old drill!

And that's basically how a +1 magic weapon in D&D is. People, for 30 years, have tried to make that "magic" part interesting by giving it a long backstory, like how it's an ancient artifact used by Timothy, the man of many tools to put in screws into a really fussy beam or something. Or by making it rare! I mean, it's got a replaceable AND rechargeable battery that can also fit in Timothy's Buzz Saw of lumber splitting and not an old hand-cranked drill model like you're currently using.

OOOOOOHHHH... MAAAAAAGIC!

But in practice you're just hitting somewhat easier and dealing a marginal amount more damage. And that's it.

You've basically upgraded your tools from dad's old electric drill for the new model. from a functional and working one to a slightly better one.

And when Doc Brown's Plutonium-Powered Screw Insertion Device comes out, it'll be a nice upgrade from the Timothy's, but in the end it's still just a boring screwdriver with more fancy-sounding bells and whistles.

And that's why the +1 magic sword, no matter how much you fluff it or make the players pull out their own teeth to get, will never be interesting. It's a slight technical upgrade to the previous one.

[tadkins]

And that's why the +1 magic sword, no matter how much you fluff it or make the players pull out their own teeth to get, will never be interesting. It's a slight technical upgrade to the previous one.

Does it have to be a +1 magic sword? Maybe it can be a sword that can shoot beams when the wielder is at full HP. The crafted armor might allow the wearer to take on the body of a fire elemental for a brief period. The jeweler's new amulet might bestow the ability to stun dragons.

Lots of ways crafting, and the products, can be made interesting I think.

[Zale]

If the problem is finding crafting to boring and irritating, then making crafting harder and more irritating doesn't seem like a good answer, personally.

I don't want to have to break off from the main quest line just to collect the feathers of sacred cherubs and the golden silk of moon spiders to make my cloak of resistance +3.

Because at the end of the day, it's still just there to make my numbers a bit bigger. That's not going to be exciting, no matter how many fetch quests I have to complete.

For exciting items, I'd love to- going on a quest to collect items to forge my sword of epic ness sounds like a really fun thing.. But it requires the requisite item not just be a +2 flaming sword of mediocrity. As cool as a backstory it may have, that doesn't change how it only makes me a little more accurate and do a bit more damage sometimes.

I've seen people try to "fix" this by making crafting annoying or by making items rarer, but that doesn't fix the underlying issue.

Id personally rather implement one of the many Christmas tree fixes, then reserve cool powers for magic items.

A sword that shoots fireballs is more fun than one that is simply on fire.

A cloak that lets you fly is much more fun than one that just lets you keep pace in the magical arms race.

Those sorts of items are things I would actually go on epic journeys to make or obtain, since they give my character more variety in what they can do.

[Curmudgeon]

That doesn't fix the problem of there being no magic in magic items, though. If anything, it makes it worse, by enforcing the magic supermarket feel.
I don't see that as a necessary consequence. Why should there be a stockpile of existing items (the magic supermarket)? If you want anything more complex than a potion, you find an NPC crafter and commission what you want. Say you want some +5 armor. You find a Dwarf with Craft Magic Arms and Armor, pay ¾ of the price up front, and she tells you to come back in a month. When you do, you find the Dwarf has lost 25 lbs. (none of it from her muscular arms), her beard is matted, and she's being helped out of her chair by her assistants. But the +5 Dwarvencraft armor is exactly as you ordered, so you gladly pay the remaining ¼ of the price and take your magic armor. You don't know what was involved with that item creation, but obviously it took considerable time and was severely draining for the crafter.

[daremetoidareyo]

Chapter 11 of the 2nd edition DM's guide addresses exactly what you want guys. If you want magic items to be special, you have to find materials to make them special. You can find the book at your local library or with illegal google searches if you're a criminal.

In 3.5 there is a magic supermarket, and I do not like that diablo style of play. So I houserule it to this. You can buy magic items that are listed in the books. But if you start adding things (enchantments like flame burst or whatnot) or making custom magic items, you need special materials. You can buy those materials usually (represented in the GP cost associated with crafting), depending on city size and location, but you may also replace those materials with cheaper alternatives. I will tell you the mechanical differences (if any) of using pheonix feathers instead of an alchmists fire rubdown (as is obviously typical) for your flameburst sword ingredients. Anything that requires a miniquest to hunt down gets some sort of lift. I'm sorry, but you aren't going to buy kaorti resin outside of Sigil, or finding the dude who has them and doesn't need them, or befriending the kaorti yourself. If you want to reskin kaorti resin, we need to talk outside of playtime. The answer is usually "yes, but" rather than "no." I tend to plan 1/3 of the campaign arc, and the PCs tend to make the rest of the direction, cuz we all know how much it stinks to want to really make your PC shine and then get stuck in an "We only ever face undead due to the campaign world"


Plus, if you kill a chimera, saving some of those parts, which invariably happens anyway, will have real magic item crafting uses. And it's fun to go on an expedition to specifically hunt certain crazy species because of a need to have an adaptive kukri that splits when you throw it.

[oxybe]

Chapter 11 of the 2nd edition DM's guide addresses exactly what you want guys. If you want magic items to be special, you have to find materials to make them special. You can find the book at your local library or with illegal google searches if you're a criminal.

That doesn't make them special, it makes them tedious. Scarcity alone doesn't render a thing special, or wonderious just hard or a hassle to get. It also doesn't make it more inherently interesting. A porche is considered an object of value because it's supposedly made of significantly better quality parts then the standard car and offers a much better driving experience. I wouldn't know or really care, but i would say the difference between a porche and Kyle's Junkard Fixer-Upper would be rather significant.

Because that's the sort of gap you're talking about, people going significantly out of their way to aquire things or pay exorbiant amounts of cash, but the +1 magic sword has little in terms of practical better use then a mundane or masterwork sword. outside of the "can hit some monsters now" it's not that much better at cutting or hitting things you were capable of cutting or hitting wtih the mundane sword.

melee characters in D&D requires magic items at high level to function. go read up how those demons and devils interact with mundane weapons in 2nd ed. I'll wait.

for those that don't have the books though: they do diddly squat. they cannot technically even hit (IE:connect!) with the demon. you thought 3rd ed's DR40/+3 was rough, the 2nd ed guys laugh at your attempts.

Scarcity doesn't make it interesting nor does it make it particularly special. It was a hassle then and it's a hassle now.

[Troacctid]

To be fair, you are always going to be questing for some reason or another. Crafting materials are as good a MacGuffin as any.

[daremetoidareyo]

That doesn't make them special, it makes them tedious. Scarcity alone doesn't render a thing special, or wonderious just hard or a hassle to get. ...

...Scarcity doesn't make it interesting nor does it make it particularly special. It was a hassle then and it's a hassle now.

You make it sound like the PCs are starved if they don't get exactly their mary sue power fantasy with no verisimilitudinous compromise in this social games collective fantasy-space.

We just disagree. I love mundanes, but making magic less magical and more ...economical is less fun for me. I am totally on board with you about how difficult 2nd edition outsiders were, especially for mundanes, but that made even low level demons scarier and more deadly. Which is why they were demons and not inconveniences. Like I said, we approach the aesthetics of play differently.

I was pitching a solution to what Heliomance was referring to. Just because it's tedious to you doesn't meant that others are obliged to take a highly morphic social game like dnd and play it like it's final fantasy. I feel like the whole game is just a tedious grind, if everything is being purchased on the books. Ubiquitous magic spoils the narrative power of what mundanes can do well.

Such a creative venue as dnd is a lot of fun to explore by making things that your imagination comes up with, and it's intellectually stimulating to have to figure out how to get a pixies nightmare into your wand confusion so that all of your charges are maximized. Hint, it involves night hags. How cool is it to kill the evil priest of baseball and get his vorpal mace of sonic burst +3...You know how much effort he put into that?

Fixing the "magic mart effect" requires taking an ax to the magic inflation and power creep of the game.

But like I said, we approach this differently. You're inconvenienced by the roadblocks to total power, I like a different pace and probably a different power level of play than you do.

[Zale]

You make it sound like the PCs are starved if they don't get exactly their mary sue power fantasy with no verisimilitudinous compromise in this social games collective fantasy-space.

We just disagree. I love mundanes, but making magic less magical and more ...economical is less fun for me. I am totally on board with you about how difficult 2nd edition outsiders were, especially for mundanes, but that made even low level demons scarier and more deadly. Which is why they were demons and not inconveniences. Like I said, we approach the aesthetics of play differently.

I was pitching a solution to what Heliomance was referring to. Just because it's tedious to you doesn't meant that others are obliged to take a highly morphic social game like dnd and play it like it's final fantasy. I feel like the whole game is just a tedious grind, if everything is being purchased on the books. Ubiquitous magic spoils the narrative power of what mundanes can do well.

Such a creative venue as dnd is a lot of fun to explore by making things that your imagination comes up with, and it's intellectually stimulating to have to figure out how to get a pixies nightmare into your wand confusion so that all of your charges are maximized. Hint, it involves night hags. How cool is it to kill the evil priest of baseball and get his vorpal mace of sonic burst +3...You know how much effort he put into that?

Fixing the "magic mart effect" requires taking an ax to the magic inflation and power creep of the game.

But like I said, we approach this differently. You're inconvenienced by the roadblocks to total power, I like a different pace and probably a different power level of play than you do.

Whoa, hey, so I just wanted to say that I feel like you started this discussion with a lot more hostility than what was warranted. Of course, you might have not meant it in a hostile way, but most of the bold statements seem to personally insult the person you were quoting.

I understand what you are getting at, though. You don't like how magic can be made so mundane- it takes away from the epic fantasy of the game if someone can just walk into the shop and pick up a +3 Vorpal Sword of Dooming Epicness. It makes something that should be cool and magical into something rather mundane. I also want magical items that are treated with narrative power, I'd love to do a story like something from a Norse Epic- like how Hervor the shield-maiden braved the spirits of the dead to regain her birthright- the mighty sword Tyrfing.

But at the same time, I want items that are actually worthy of that distinction. A +1 sword just makes it a little easier to hit something. It isn't exciting; making it harder to get isn't going to give it an aura of magic and wonder.

And you can't simply make magical items more rare without altering the underlying assumptions of the game. After a certain point, you need to have some things to continue, or you get squashed. This hurts spellcasters less because they need magical items less.

One of the best solutions to this, in my own opinion, is implementing some form of Christmas Tree solution (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?408942-A-New-Anti-Magic-Mart-Solution). They attempt to solve the "magic-mart" problem by folding most of the things that players need into a staggered series of benefits over the levels.

That way you can eliminate the dull magical items that just make your numbers a bit bigger, and instead use that space for things with narrative clout.

Because, once I gave one of my players a sword that allowed him to produce a Major Image once a day. I can tell you he loved that sword more than anything else I ever gave him, because it provided an option that he'd otherwise not have, and it was a fun power with a lot of creative possibilities.

That's the sort of thing I want a magical item to be- I want to it be like something from a story. Not a +2 Sword of Mediocrity.

[daremetoidareyo]

Whoa, hey, so I just wanted to say that I feel like you started this discussion with a lot more hostility than what was warranted. Of course, you might have not meant it in a hostile way, but most of the bold statements seem to personally insult the person you were quoting.

There was absolutely zero hostility in them thar words. I was just pointing out that we have different approaches to the game and that whatever the group, no one necessarily gets exactly what they want, however they want it. And it's cool if you prefer the game the way that the design compels one to play. But in a thread about how to address the frustration of the magic mart, disassembling a suggestion through the strawman of 2nd edition's inefficiencies is not productive, especially when the follow up content of the post being responded avoided the major pratfalls being mentioned. I was being told that my preferences are wrong, and I laid out some typical reasons why someone would have preferences that differed from mine for reasons of "tediousness". That isn't hostility, it's analysis.

Also, implementing some 2nd edition crafting rules into 3rd edition crafting doesn't have to be a full bore quest for every magic item. I pitched the idea that there are neat item altering substitutions that can be made, either by circumstance or choice, which helps de-abstractify the gold piece cost of item crafting, which itself seems like an arbitrary requirement. Magic item fabrication can be a fun and enjoyable part of the game without feeling like it is a slog at all. I agree that the christmas tree approach you've put forward is probably a good compromise as well.

A +1 sword being necessary to simply hit a bad guy is a type of mundane punishment, totally agree there. Those rote pluses due to "magic" are easy to work around by making the very ingredients that go into weapon/armor fabrication be the cause of their effectiveness, rather than sheer reliance on the presence of casters. If you live in a world that has basilisks, there is no reason why their bones wouldn't act as [outsider] bane boomerangs. No caster necessary, just an expert boomerang...whittler, whose craft check can be the means by which the pluses are added.

[BWR]

As Milo mentioned, Pathfinder has some interesting alternatives to the basic rules.
Dynamic crafting (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items#TOC-Dynamic-Magic-Item-Creation) might be closest to what you are looking for.
While not crafting rules, you also have Scaling (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/scaling-magic-items) or Innate (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/innate-item-bonuses)items for those who wish to dole out fewer items but not have PCs stuck with less powerful stuff when they need more powerful.

I incorporate the feel of 2e crafting in my games. Instead of just throwing money at something players are encouraged to find exotic components and describe what sort of process they are using. Mechanically, nothing much changes but just adding some description makes things far more interesting.

[Grod_The_Giant]

There are, I think, several interrelated issues at play here:

The game's math assumes that certain magic items-- all those little things that give piddly numerical bonuses-- are in play. If it was PVP you could strip items from everyone without issue, but everything in the monster manual assumes a certain amount of extra-class scaling. This leads to a proliferation of transitory, uninteresting items that are forgotten as soon as they're acquired.
Many classes are poorly designed, and don't have native ability to fill their role. Fighters can't close to engage their enemies, Rogues can't hide from magical detection, and so on.
Items don't scale-- not even the interesting ones. Effects which were relevant at low levels aren't necessarily relevant at high levels. Items that give flat +numbers are replaced outright; others-- say a pair of Boots of Striding and Springing-- are sold or forgotten when a superior effect-- Wings of Flying, perhaps-- becomes available. This keeps items from becoming trademarks.

If you can solve the above problems, if you can make magic items interesting (but not otherwise necessary), you sidestep a lot of the crafting issues. You can have sidequests or interesting lore if the party only has a handful of items between them; it's only when you have to have 20 items per character that it starts to be a big deal.

The first two problems aren't difficult to solve-- getting, oh, +1/4 level to AC, save DCs, and all d20 rolls ought to do the former just fine, and the latter... well, it's a serious balance issue, but it's one that's been discussed to death. We know how to deal with that. It's the third problem that's hardest to deal with. Ideally you'd want a Weapons of Legacy type solution, where every character gets a handful of trademark items that progress with them over the course of their career. Say, a pair of boots that grant a bonus to speed and jumping, then a Sudden Leap type effect, then out-and-ought flight, then a full-attack Flyby Attack style of thing. But there's no simple solution there-- you'll need to do a lot of homebrewing/custom item creation.

[Afgncaap5]

Honestly, my problem here is the description "+1" for the common magic sword. That's such a video game way of putting things. You might as well say "This is the sword of Rectromar, capable of dealing forty-percent more damage to fire giants than to other enemies but twenty percent less damage to the lizard folk of Gushuerma! GUSHUERMA, I SAY!"

The obvious solution that NO ONE wants is for the DM to be secret about what a weapon does, even for weapons that players make themselves. If a player knows that their sword is "magic" but don't know how strong that magic is... well, they'll probably be able to guess that it's a +1 item, but they won't know.

What if it wasn't, though? What if I had a player make a mithril Warhammer and enchanted it with magic, and described things like "dew gathered from fairy wings before they wake in the morning" and "morgia root ground into a fine powder"? What if I secretly rolled a 1d10 twenty times, and made a note of each time I rolled a 10, so that I knew that the 7th and 18th times he attacked with that weapon it was actually treated as a +2 item instead? What if I made a note that it ALWAYS acted as a +2 against the family of orcs that murdered the player's family?

Sometimes I'll add weird little things like that to mundane weapons. When two players got the killing blow on a set of hellhounds, I decided to say that their weapons were warmer to the touch, and roll 1d4 to decide that their weapons would deal 1 extra point of fire damage the next 1d4 times they used them.

I would also try to put more roleplaying keys on items, things similar to straight-cash bonuses, like how Shadow armor is just 3750 gp, not +1 or +2. Some of these might feel like curses on items, but... what if a magic sword caused a wielder's nose to grow if she lied, or a magic dagger when held in the hand could spin like a compass toward whatever person nearby was carrying the most silver? Technically things like that should cost more money by the rules, but... do we really need that rule? All the time?