crafting in a hour.

[death390]

so i was wondering if there are any rules for crafting an hour at a time. now i know there is 1 day = DC * roll in copper pieces but there is no hour long crafting rules.

if there are no rules for crafting in a hour then why not make them.

looking at crafting magic items it says that a days crafting is 8 hours.

going from a week to a day is 1/7 the time buy 1/10th the progress. so if a standard day is 1/8th of a day why not also do 1/10th the cost.

that would mean in a hour you can do 1/10 of a copper piece. now obviously not much can be done with that but at the same time it opens up aloot of micro crafting. a single basic arrow costs 5 copper. meaning that you would have to hit 50= 10 * result to make a single arrow in a hour. need to hit 10 to make a torch in a hour. hit 100 to make a bedroll. ect.

[thecrimsondawn]

so i was wondering if there are any rules for crafting an hour at a time. now i know there is 1 day = DC * roll in copper pieces but there is no hour long crafting rules.

if there are no rules for crafting in a hour then why not make them.

looking at crafting magic items it says that a days crafting is 8 hours.

going from a week to a day is 1/7 the time buy 1/10th the progress. so if a standard day is 1/8th of a day why not also do 1/10th the cost.

that would mean in a hour you can do 1/10 of a copper piece. now obviously not much can be done with that but at the same time it opens up aloot of micro crafting. a single basic arrow costs 5 copper. meaning that you would have to hit 50= 10 * result to make a single arrow in a hour. need to hit 10 to make a torch in a hour. hit 100 to make a bedroll. ect.

I cant speak for mundane item crafting, but magic item crafting has rules limiting you to no more then 1 item being worked on at a time, with only a few noted exceptions. My Dwarf Wizard was crafting somewhere between 5 to 10k gp worth of an item per day but could only make 1 per day. Sad really, but it makes sense.

[Jowgen]

To my knowledge, there is exactly one thing that supports your argument: Forge of Sustenance, Races of Stone p. 167. This thing lets you do mundane crafting 24 hours a day... and as a result tripples your craft check result. Whether that is enough to reliably support your hourly-crafting via extrapolation...

[Zaq]

I both do and don’t agree with the premise. The perspective that I always attempt (I won’t pretend that I always succeed, but I always attempt) to keep in mind when messing with the rules is “how does this make the game better/more fun?”

On one hand, it does kind of make sense for most Craft checks (not all, of course) that you should be able to make some smaller amount of measurable progress in a period of time smaller than eight full hours. If we give a small amount of weight to realism, the Craft check in question should either be one that doesn’t require a lot of setting up or one in which the character in question has had the setup in place already, but we’re edging into hairsplitting territory there.

On the other hand, that seems really annoying to try to track. Like, really annoying. Mundane Craft checks (no Fabricate or similar magic drastically speeding things up) take forever when you’re measuring them by the day or the week. If we’re breaking down the progress into sub-day levels, that is way the hell more detail than I want to keep track of without a computer doing the work for me.

Doing some fudgetastic back-of-the-envelope numbers that will be wrong but that I hope will be useful: assume you’re Crafting a 500 gp item with a Craft DC of 20. Assume that you have a +10 mod and take 10 to always hit DC 20. (The mod might be low, but I want to keep the math doable in my head.) One week of work gives you 400 sp = 40 gp of progress, so you need 12-13 weeks to complete the project. That assumes basically full-time crafting and not adventuring, so we need a time skip of 13ish weeks or we need to keep track of 13ish individual weeks of downtime between adventures. (E.g., you go adventuring for a week, then you craft for two weeks and write down 2 weeks of progress, then you go adventuring for another week, and then you craft for another week and write down a total of 3 weeks of progress, and so on.)

One day of work gives you rather a bit less (you make 1/10th the progress in 1/7th the time, assuming a 7-day week), but just pretending that we did the calculation to keep you even, you’re still looking at around 90 days of crafting (at a 1/7 rate, or closer to 125 if you’re crafting in cp rather than in 1/7 sp). Presumably, the reason that you’re tracking by the day is because you want to be mostly adventuring with a day here and a day there (but less than a week at once) to craft. We might also accept a non-sleeping adventurer (warforged, outsider, necropolitan, etc.) who crafts while the party sleeps. But the point is that we’re probably PLAYING for most of these days and not skipping past them. So you’re going to have to keep a running tally of your progress on this item for at least three months of game time. Now, if you regularly get four or five days to craft between days of adventuring, you’ll still only have to mark down your progress fifteen-twenty times before you’re done, but that still seems like a lot to me, and that’s also being generous with the crafting time. Mind you, we’re still using the base rules and not your proposed houserule.

Now lets’s add your proposal to the mix. Let’s lowball the number and say that we need 90 character-days of crafting to complete it, and let’s assume that we make 1/8 the progress per hour (rather than 1/10, which will make the math easier but the crafting harder). So we need 720 character-hours of crafting. If we’re using this rule, we probably will be making more checks by the hour than by the day or the week, because if we could regularly devote days or weeks to crafting, we’d primarily be crafting that way, right? Right. Yes, we can mix checks by the hour and by the day and by the week, but since the hourly checks are so small, we need to have enough of them to have them not literally be treated as a rounding error compared to the bigger checks. Anyway, 720 character-hours, and we need to keep track of that in chunks no larger than probably four or five at a time (and, to be honest, often as small as one at a time—it’d be relatively common for a nonmagical adventurer to need to spend an hour every day waiting for a magical comrade to prep their spells, which is one of the primary times I see this coming up.) You’re going to either fill an entire sheet of paper with that or wear out an entire eraser on it. That is a lot of detail to keep track of, most of it happening during “on-camera” adventuring days. And the reward is a 500 gp item, only you made some progress in the field instead of waiting until after the dungeon.

Now, the specifics will vary. Crafting a cheaper item will take less time, of course, but it’s not like 500 gp is some crazy upper limit of what PCs want to craft (honestly, much cheaper than 500 gp and I’d wonder why you’re crafting instead of purchasing). And yes, having a higher Craft mod will let you voluntarily increase the DC to craft faster. Even so, I feel the example is illustrative. If you would genuinely have fun breaking down progress into 720 character-hours and then tracking how many hours your character has been able to spend, then by all means, please have fun. Personally, I think that this would slow the game way the hell down, and I don’t think that the fact that your character will potentially finish an item slightly faster in game time is usually worth the extra expenditure of real time to track it. (Now, a GM just handwaving some background crafting during adventuring without turning Dungeons & Dragons into Scorecards & Spreadsheets is another matter, and I’m behind that, but that wasn’t what was proposed.) I reject that this would make sense for NPCs, either, because who has time to track how many hours of progress a bloody NPC has made on crafting an item instead of just saying “the blacksmith has X, Y, and Z available to sell you right now, and if you want to commission custom armor from her, it’ll take N weeks”?

To me, this seems like the cost-benefit ratio doesn’t check out. I personally would not find that this makes the game more fun, and therefore I personally don’t think that it makes sense to implement this rule. The problem isn’t that it doesn’t make sense for CHARACTERS to make progress in smaller increments—the problem is that it doesn’t make sense for PLAYERS to have to keep track of said smaller increments.

[death390]

ah i see what you are saying. the idea that by-the-hour craft checks wont make much difference.

i guess the main thing to deal with a by-the-hour craft check would be to make minor items that could be helpfull (assumeing that you have the appropriate craft tools). this would be a way for characters who do sleep but till need to take a small watch thus not having a full 8 hours to dedicate to crafting.

for example a human ranger sleeps for 8 hours and is on watch for 2 (so that each caster can get their 8 hours and a 2 hour watch). now this is after a few encounters. so assuming that using standard manyshot/ rapid shot to hit more targets with his bow he is now running out of arrows. (i hate that ammunition breaks every time it hits an enemy) so knowing that he needs more arrows or becomes near useless in upcoming fights.

knowing this he needs more arrows he starts making craft checks for these two hours. at levels 6 and a 12 int. he has 10 modifier. so DC 15 for a martial weapon (since i don't know exactly what its normal DC is) and he takes 10 for his two checks.

15*20 *2= 600. so with my 1/10 of a copper piece. since it is the worse version (lets face it most dms go with worse versions). so 60 copper made in 2 hours. each arrow is 5 copper (1g/20 arrows). that means that in his 2 hour watch he is able to make 12 arrows to replace most of his lost stash. this means he can rapid fire 3 more times. (2 atks & rapid). (i used take 10 just to speed up the process and honestly why not? at best could get another 6 if rolles 20's, (better i my opinion to guarantee the 12.)

then again this is not limited to ammunition. several adventuring gear items to be made during this point would be usefull. making new torches as you used some up, turning some of that survival generated food into rations, making a 10 foot ladder to scale a wall in the morning, making more sacks to carry loot before you attempt to leave the dungeon, ect.

[rel]

If you want to have characters craft on the fly while adventuring and you are happy to make a house rule to facilitate this I suggest going further.

Remove all of the existing crafting rules and put in something easier to use and more generally usefull.