Making a minion to help with crafting cost reduction

[Jowgen]

Crafting magical doohickies is expensive, and while there's some great feats out there to help make a saving, spending feat slots on those (not to mention the crafting feats in the first place) is rarely a worthwhile investment.

Now luckily, the rules for cooperative crafting (MIC 232) allow a given character to get outside help, wherein said help provides 1 or more of the prerequesites for the item creation, everyone invovled counts as the creator; and the pesky stipulation that whoever has the crafting feat pays the exp can be circumvented with things like (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060526a) the Talisman of Transference.

My thought is to create a minion that has cost reduction abilities and other assorted helpful things that can participate in cooperative crafting to keep the cost down without taking up the MC's character creation resources. This thread is to present ideas on one way of doing that, while also looking for input regarding improvements.

My current best idea so far:

Use Planar Binding (Lesser if 6 HD versions exist) to call a Midgard Dwarf (Native Outsider, Frostburn), murder it, use Animate Dead to make it a Skeleton, and then Use Awaken Undead on it. We'll name it Winslow.

Per Awaken Undead, Winslow regains his Ex racial abilities, in this case its Master Smith (Ex) ability that grants Craft Wondrous Item, Craft Magic arms and Armor, and Forge ring; with the added/main benefit that Winslow counts has meeting all the prerequesties required for crafting with those feats, including spells.

This is already makes Winslow pretty great in terms of helping us with crafting... he's basically doing all the work already, we just supply the Exp and Gold... but wait... there's more.

Winslow also gains Feats (and skills) according to the rules on MM p. 290, but they only specifiy the number of feats based on HD. So really, it's feat selection should be customiseable, which means we should be able to allocate them to cost reducing feats (worst case scenario we chaos shuffle them).

At 8 HD, Winslow gives us 3 feats to play with.

Extraordinary artisan is the main thing, it gives us "reduce the base price by 25%" with any item we craft.

Magical Artisan is the next best option, so we "pay only 75% of the normal cost to create the item".

Whether or not we're allowed to apply Magical Aritsan (which is for one Item Creation feat only) to Extraordinary Artisan isn't that big an issue, since a NO on that one only means we need'd to choose whether to go for Wondrous Items or Magic Arms and Armor.

The third slot is more malleable.

We could pick Legendary Artisan, to knock 25% off our exp costs.

We could pick Magical Artisan again if we weren't permitted to add it onto Extraordinary Artisan, though that seems excessive.

Apprentice (Craftsman) would net us a 10% discount on raw crafting material purchases, though there might be fluff hurdles to let an Awakened Skeleton apprenticed to a master.

I don't believe Blood Artisan (Dragon 318) stacks with Magical Artisan as they both refer to "75% of the normal cost", but maybe it could fly at a given table. Blood Artisan (if the regional requirement isn't a hurdle) could also be an alternative to Magical Artisan if it can't be applied to Extraordinary artisan, giving us both Magic Arms and Armor and Wondrous Items (plus we get to live dangerously by rolling Curses).

Lastly, for the purpose of what we craft with, Fey Cherry wood "cost 10% less gp and XP to enhance magically", while metal items alloyed with Oerthblood (DR351 pg45) cost 25% less exp (and take 25% less time); but these can not be counted on in all cases. Same deal with the Artificer's Dump magical location and Affiliation benefits.

Example (focusing purely on GP):

We want to craft a Glove of Storing, which has a market price of 10000 gp, giving it a base price of 5000 gp and a craft exp cost of 200.

Winslow is the primary creator, while we use our Talisman of Transference to provide exp (and foot the bill for his materials).

Winslow determines what he needs in materials, wherein we don't need to worry about caster levels or having spell prerequesites thanks to Master Smith.

Extraordinary Artisan is applied first, so the base price is reduced by 25% down to 3750.

This "normal" price is then reduced by 25% by either Magical or Blood Artisan, to 2812.5 gp

Lets say Winslow took Apprentice as his 3rd slot, so when he goes to purchase those 2812.5 gp worth of raw materials, he only has to pay 2531.25 gp.

In total we have close to a 50% discount on what it would have costed to craft normally, or put differently, an almost 75% discount on what we would have paid to buy the item outright.

Cost of the above example Winslow

Lets assume we can't cast anything ourselves, but can at least activate scrolls, and also have to chaos shuffle all of Winslow's feats.

- Scroll of Planar Binding: 1650 gp
- Scroll of Animate Dead: 625 gp
- Scroll of Awaken Undead: 3275 gp
- 3 sets of Chaos shuffle scrolls: 4250 x 6 = 25500 gp

Total cost of 31.050 Gold

In exchange, we have a minion who can provide all our wondrous items (and maybe magic magic arms & armor) at at nearly 75% discount compared to buying them, given the time to craft them.

I think that by mid-level, this is a more than a reasonable investment to make.

So...

Any ideas on how to improve upon Winslow, or any rule wise problems with Winslow as presented?

[sleepyphoenixx]

In exchange, we have a minion who can provide all our wondrous items (and maybe magic magic arms & armor) at at nearly 75% discount compared to buying them, given the time to craft them.


FWIW the only official example i know of that uses multiple cost reducers (Unbound Scroll) has them stacking additively, not multiplicatively.

Also you can presumably replace the Chaos Shuffle with Psychic Reformation if your campaign has psionics to save money.
Might have to dominate the dwarf first and do it before turning him undead, but that's not that big a hurdle.

Or you could just use Reformation to give the party caster the necessary crafting feats and switch back after crafting. It costs some XP, but not enough to be a serious setback.

[Jowgen]

FWIW the only official example i know of that uses multiple cost reducers (Unbound Scroll) has them stacking additively, not multiplicatively.

Also you can presumably replace the Chaos Shuffle with Psychic Reformation if your campaign has psionics to save money.
Might have to dominate the dwarf first and do it before turning him undead, but that's not that big a hurdle.

Or you could just use Reformation to give the party caster the necessary crafting feats and switch back after crafting. It costs some XP, but not enough to be a serious setback.

Yeah, the whole question of how crafting cost reducers stack is one of those debates that doesn't seem to have a consensus. For practical, at the table purposes, It's easier to just stack em together for easy math; but for this example I decided to go with the most restrictive rulings on all sides to demonstrate that this is a worthwhile pursuit even with a most stingy DM.

Same thing with reformation really. If its available it makes things easier/cheaper, but I assumed not.

I don't think just reforming for crafting feats is a good option in comparison. Winslow's Master Smith ability allow him to bypass crafting prerequesites, so you never need to worry about getting the prerequesite spells or meeting weird requirements again; plus he's not limited to downtime but can craft in the background during Adventure Time Come on grab your friends, we go to very distant lands

[Kaiwen]

The problem with crafting cost multipliers stacking additively like damage multipliers is that it's not hard at all to get -100%. There's the 3 (Something) Artisan feats from Eberron, which decrease XP, time, and GP by 25%, and then there's Magical Artisan, which reduces XP and GP by 25%, which you can take 3 times for each of the Eberron feats, stacking with itself each time. And then since time is based on GP, that goes to 0 as well.

[Biggus]

The problem with crafting cost multipliers stacking additively like damage multipliers is that it's not hard at all to get -100%. There's the 3 (Something) Artisan feats from Eberron, which decrease XP, time, and GP by 25%, and then there's Magical Artisan, which reduces XP and GP by 25%, which you can take 3 times for each of the Eberron feats, stacking with itself each time. And then since time is based on GP, that goes to 0 as well.

Magical Artisan doesn't say it reduces the cost by 25%, it says it reduces it to 75%. So even if you can take it three times for Extraordinary Artisan etc it can't reduce the cost to zero.

[Jowgen]

I have been mulling over the 3rd feat slot selection for Winslow.

Apprentice (Craftsman), even if allowed, might not be worth it with multiplicate stacking in play, as that reduces it to 5.6% cost reduction.

There are other 10% reducers one might be able to get for a given item (e.g. Fey Cherry), which would get an even further diminished return.

Blood Artisan might be worth it IF "normal" cost is ruled to mean just what the cost would be if the feat hadn't been applied (a reasonabe reading imo), so that it can stack with magical artisan.

That would get our cost reduction down to 42 percent, which one might consider worth the risk of a bad curse.

If the curse turns out to be something that makes the item unuseable/impractical, there are means to mitigate the loss.

First, the item can be sold. Sure, a merchant might be unhappy to find you sold him a badly cursed item, but it's perfectly within the rules, as the item continues to be worth what it's worth. Thanks to cost reduction, we'd actually be making a profit equivalent to however much we spent.

Second, we can break the item and then mend it, which sets the base price at half before other modifiers are applied; so about 21% of normal. We thus have 2 retries before the cost exceeds what it would have cost to just craft normally without cost reducers.

Other options for the 3rd feat would be Sanctify Relic (expanding the range of items we can craft), or Portal Master if we wanted to get into the business of doing those (doesn't stack with Magical Artisan, but does stack with Extraordinary artisan, getting us down to 42%).