3.5 craft skill

[jdizzlean]

I've been doing a lot of reading lately on the craft skill.

there seems to be a large amount of discussion on the various different subcategories of the craft skill, but no published guides on this skill equals this aggregate amount of money/week.

I know that every game world will be different, let's move past that and try to figure out what a good base amount of income might be for someone with 5/10/15 ranks in a given craft subsystem might be able to make. Going by the basest set of ruling in the PHB, you make half your check result in gold in a given week. But if the dc is the same for a gemcutter and a carpenter, and they're both making 10 gold a week, that just seems silly.

there's also skills you can take 10 on, and those you can't.

and then there's masterwork tools, or things like an alchemists lab that give bonuses as well.

for the sake of not throwing to large a net, let's disregard racial/feat bonus's to craft skills and just focus on X DC = Y $$ on average.

[liquidformat]

so I think the best baseline might be Weapons or armor for figuring this out. Lets go with elite array with the 15 in int, masterwork tools, and maxed skills, we are sitting at +8. Next we need to choose what to make, I think a rapier is a good base point since at a DC 15 and price of 20gp. We need to roll a 6 or higher which I have a 70% chance of getting, initial investment is 6.67gp so that would be 70% chance of making 3.33gp a week which would even out to ~4gp/week on average. For armor we would look at hide or studded; studded 40% chance of 4.17gp profit so ~2gp/week and hide would be 80% of making 2.5 gp in a week so ~3gp/week. As a whole something worth ~20gp with 15 dc is going to give you the best profit margin and the 4 gp/week which is well below the spitball of 10gp/week. Remember we can sell at half price so really the 10gp/week seems to suggest if you are a level 1 crafter you aren't selling at half price but full price rapiers.

at level 7 that same character now has a base int score of 16 an item of +5 competence bonus and headband of intellect +2 so +19. So lets look at tanglefoot bag worth 50gp dc25. We have 95% chance of making it in one week with a profit of 8.33gp so ~ 9gp/week. So we are finally hitting that 10gp/week assuming we are selling at half listed price. If we are selling full price we are getting about ~34gp/week.

To be honest the struggle at this point and on are the dc to price we want the highest ratio we can get but most nonmagical items have a dc capped around 25. For example to reliably make an Everburning torch every week we have to be able to roll 44 with some certainty which is a mod above +34 but even then your only making around 20gp/week or 74/week at full price. The numbers really don't pan out since the setup of craft isn't conducive to making money or rewarding high rolls.

[BassoonHero]

let's move past that and try to figure out what a good base amount of income might be for someone with 5/10/15 ranks in a given craft subsystem might be able to make.
Why?

What do you want to accomplish? Is this for PCs or NPCs?

[Segev]

Profession also is the same gold rate per DC per week, regardless of the job. It's heavily abstracted because it's not meant to be the focus of the game.

It mostly works for things that PCs might want to build for themselves, because there is, even with mundane goods, at least a rough correlation of market value in gp to utility to a PC (because gp is just another set of "points" in the game mechanics for buying character upgrades). It's still gamable and breakable if somebody focuses too much on it.

Pathfinder does provide an alternate set of crafting rules (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/alternate-crafting-rules/) that I believe came from the Unchained supplement. They're much more involved, and base things on presumed difficulty of making a given object rather than the gp value of the object. I don't know if they're more useful to you or not.

[jdizzlean]

Why?

What do you want to accomplish? Is this for PCs or NPCs?


For PC's.

as a construct of the DM's mind, an NPC can pretty much have any fictional number attached to it and that's just fine, but a PC either opting or being required to spend X ranks into crafting should be able to use the skill for their gain just like any other. and the expenditure of say 10 ranks isn't a small investment.

if you're making a DC 25 crafting check to make for example forged documents that might show you to be some high ranking member of a states security force, that is arguably a higher actual difficulty and should be rewarded better than making a DC 25 crafting check to make a masterwork basket to carry your tools in. (( these dc's are arbitrarily made up as an example, please don't rip them to shreds...))

so, obviously a Craft - Goldsmithing check should result in a higher income than a Craft - candlemaker for example

the issue is there's not hard set rules out there that state it other then pick an object in the game, determine a cost and xp cost, and go from there. So why have X amount of crafting subsystems if they all make the same amount of gold based off the same DC's. this is further complicated by the goldsmith probably making a single craft check, and the candlemaker making 100 checks in the same week, and both of them earning the same amount afterwards.

in every game i've ever played, during downtime where i'm trying to do crafting to make extra money, or i'm being a rogue and picking pockets to make extra money, (because i have nothing to contribute to the timeline, or i'm working on my crafting to justify some roleplaying choices on my sheet..) the DM's have always just rolled some die and picked an arbitrary amount of gold that i make, probably because there's no resource available to contradict that mechanic, at least not without far more work and arithmetic than is worthwhile.

[Nifft]

so, obviously a Craft - Goldsmithing check should result in a higher income than a Craft - candlemaker for example

Not sure that's true.

Expensive candles might also be luxury items, used by nobles or churches (or demon-worshipers, or candle-casters, or ...). You might need to make more candles to get as much coin as the goldsmith gets for one gold brooch or tiara, but if so then that's what the one check makes.

You'd presumably need a market for whatever it is you produce, but that's a narrative or logistical problem rather than a distinction between subskills.

[BassoonHero]

For PC's.
In that case, I suggest rounding crafting income to zero for convenience. Unless they do silly amounts of optimization, PCs aren't going to make any significant amount of money from Craft, Profession, or Perform.


a PC either opting or being required to spend X ranks into crafting should be able to use the skill for their gain just like any other. and the expenditure of say 10 ranks isn't a small investment.
This is true. Ten ranks are a significant investment and players should get some use out of them. But they won't. This is a real problem with the Craft and Profession skills. I suggest removing the skills altogether and replacing them with flavor text.

[Crake]

This is exactly what the fabricate spell was made for. My party in one of our recent games recently fabricated together a suit of fullplate mithril armor. Cost us 3500gp, we "made" (read: saved) 7000gp in six seconds.