how do you run craft heavy games?

[Shinizak]

I kind of want to run a game that's based off a "post apocalyptic D&D earth" with the point being rebuilding society. But that seems like it involves a lot of item crafting. Is there a system that handles that well?

[Vahnavoi]

All good crafting-based games exist on computers. You may want to specify which kind of crafting you want to focus on. Unreal World, Terraria and Minecraft are some obvious games to look at for inspiration, the first more than the others since it is closer in implementation to a tabletop roleplaying game

d20 D&D, at least 3.5, in theory has all the rules you need to run a craft and survival heavy game. In practice, this means focusing on parts of the system (survival skill, craft skill, profession skill, handle animal skill, mundane equipment, food and starvation, passage of time etc.) that have been badly overshadowed by others (combat skills, magic, magic items, combat encounters etc.). Some pointers:

- assume there is no money or coin-based economy; player characters may find significant amount of pre-apocalypse currency but can't actually trade it for anything.

- Profession skill, Perform skill and other such skills that ordinarily earn some value in coins, instead earn that value in raw materials. These raw materials can then be used for Craft skills to make specific items.

- Type of raw materials gained depends on type of profession. Service-type skills, such as Perform, or Profession (Accountant) that do not really produce anything, cannot be used to earn anything outside of well-established settlement; it's assumed the pay for these skills comes from surplus product of other people.

- You may want to make a list of specific Profession and Craft skills above and beyond those in base 3.5 rules. Examples for suitable professions might include woodcutter, miner, farmer, etc.. Various versions of D&D, including OSR retroclones, might have lists of suitable occupations and what they do. You might also want to specify which kind of resource (f.ex. wood, stone, grain, etc.) is produced as raw materials by each type of profession. Example for suitable craft skills might include carpentry, stonemasonry, basketweaving etc.

- Not only is there no magic mart, there are no marts, period. Basically, if you can't figure out the chain of production behind an item, that item is not up for sale. The only exception is stuff scavenged from ruins and pre-apocalypse supply caches. For example, if someone wants a woolen shirt? Well then somebody had to make the yarn and knit it (craft: clothes). For someone to knit it, somebody had to shear a sheep (etc.) and collect the wool (profession: animal husbandry). Which means somebody had to tame a sheep (handle animals). Which means somebody had to hunt and gather to feed these people (survival). You can expect a good chunk of the time, player characters will be bartering for a finished product with raw materials plus surplus, or for raw materials with a share of a finished product.

- Survival skill has rules for the number of people a character can produce food for in the wilderness. You can then use rules for food and mundane equipment to calculate value of food and raw materials produced this way. Additionally, you can use these rules to approximate the fraction of people who need to be out hunting and gathering to feed a primitive settlement. This also tells you how many people are available for other and further forms of production. If you're willing to a bit of advance work before your game, you can take this to a further level of abstraction and turn people into resources tokens.

- Expect that a lot of time the player characters are managing large groups of followers and retainers.

- Expect that a lot of gameplay consists of players telling you what they want to build and then you calculating how many in-game days it takes for them to build. Or if you want to be cruel, you can just have them do that part and don't accept plans for building anything before they've shown you what and how. In any case, the characters won't be facing four combag encounters a day. They might not face four encounters in a week. The corollary is that in-game time will speed by fast. Fifteen minute work day? If you are spending fifteen minutes of real time for one in-game day, that's a long day.

- Remember to keep a calendar. Pay attention to day, night, weather, seasons, migrating animals and monsters, all kinds of events that will happen even when the player characters are just staying in one spot building a camp.

[Myth27]

in my experience crafting never works on a tabletop rpg, it only works in videogames

[NichG]

I guess the main thing in the end is to make it so that the sword made by one player and the sword made by another player can be meaningfully different, that the players have agency over, understand, and can be creative with the forms of those differences, and that there isn't just an obvious one size fits all best combo of features. If you're playing a crafting game, your creations are sort of like your characters when you do character building - for a given creation maybe you can make it lighter but flimsier for the low-Strength party member, have it synergize with the martial arts of the party's monk in a way that would be useless for the wizard, etc. Bonus points if there's a whole 'make the tools to make the tools to make the thing' aspect where those tools are also going to be diverse between characters or at least workshops - so not only are Bob's swords different than Sarah's, they can't actually make each-others' style of sword without a major retooling.

GM willingness to let players invent new kinds of crafting properties is also a plus here. It's nice when you find some magical location or weird monster material and can say 'I'm going to build a forge that channels the forces at the intersection of this magmatic leyline and this portal to the Plane of Dreams, use materials from a salamander as part of the crafting, etc, etc - anything interesting happen as a result?'

[warty goblin]

I, and my various family members, make a lot of things by hand. So I'm coming at this question with a bias of representing crafting as I understand and experience it.

Broadly there are three concerns when making something: getting the materials, getting the tools needed, and having the skill to apply the tools to the materials to get what you want.

Of these three, I'd say games, whether tabletop or video, only really meaningfully engage with the first two, mostly because it can be used as a motivation for the player to go explore and fight stuff. Yes TTRPGs have craft: whatever skill checks, but this is about as deep an engagement with making something as reducing combat to fight: orcs is.

The most interesting part of making something isn't the laundry list of stuff you need, it's using it. This is always particular to the thing being made, and the circumstances of making it, particularly when dealing with natural or hand made tools and precursor materials. To pick an easy example, wood is never a uniform substance, every piece has its own unique ways to be a complete pain in your ass. Wool varies by year and breed of sheep. Metal produced by preindustrial methods is going to vary from ingot to ingot. Nothing is uniform, and all that variance requires the application of judgment and skill.

The actual mechanic I'd go for here is a sort of tetris, where the materials are the blocks, and the player's skills with their tools allows them to modify or substitute the blocks to better produce results. Better materials give you better, more uniform, blocks, higher skill with better tools lets you transform them in more substantial ways to produce results. Making harder things, or better things, requires completing more lines with your blocks. A really cool way to make it very organic would be to assemble the raw material blocks out of Legos, so the players could actually remodel them according to their skills directly.

There's a lot of development needed there, but I think its a workable foundation to produce an actual game mechanic with meaningful choice and advancement in a way that just getting higher craft numbers is not.

[Vahnavoi]

To the original poster: NichG's reply illustrates why you need to clarify which kind of crafting you want to focus. NichG is giving tips on how to make an interesting game based on customizing individual items, versus my tips on hoe to make a game based on logistics of crafting items for needs of post-apocalyptic survival.

[Anymage]

Most craft focused games I've seen are single player, whether solo protagonist or factory management. The former might be about exploring a detailed world in a way that leans into the strengths of video games, while both can be about optimization problems. Neither really translates all that well to TTRPGs where the world is verbally described and you have multiple players who will all want their turns in the spotlight.

You can handwave the actual mechanics of crafting stuff in favor of the management questions of how to apply your citizens and resources to best effect, and going on adventures to access additional supplies and/or access to resources. Computer games towards that end certainly exist and I'm sure board games do too, but I can't think of any TTRPGs with that goal. I'm sure someone else can mention good sources to crib from for how your PCs can use their leadership to cause the citizens following them to prosper.

[NichG]

The actual mechanic I'd go for here is a sort of tetris, where the materials are the blocks, and the player's skills with their tools allows them to modify or substitute the blocks to better produce results. Better materials give you better, more uniform, blocks, higher skill with better tools lets you transform them in more substantial ways to produce results. Making harder things, or better things, requires completing more lines with your blocks. A really cool way to make it very organic would be to assemble the raw material blocks out of Legos, so the players could actually remodel them according to their skills directly.

There's a lot of development needed there, but I think its a workable foundation to produce an actual game mechanic with meaningful choice and advancement in a way that just getting higher craft numbers is not.

I think this is a very good idea. I'd only suggest that there's some way for players to work out those combinations off screen, and to track the diversity of building blocks the players have access to in a way that doesn't rely on player bookkeeping too much.

Integrating with something like Roll20 so you could literally just dump all the material templates on a special map and the players can mess with it offline for example...

[Vahnavoi]

Legos as they are can already be used as resources for a tabletop game and for things like buildings and vehicles, you can have player craft those. In addition to block availability, you can put a limit on real time used for construction. There are a lot of ways to work in the multiplayer aspect, for example, large tasks can be split between players, players can barter with each other for parts, blueprints can be hidden from all but one player, so on and so forth. That's how we used to play with them as kids. The downside to such plans is that you need a metric ton of legos.

[Jay R]

In general, if you want the PCs to use craft skills, you need to leave lots of time between the encounters or the sessions. I've taken craft skills and never gotten to use them, simply because we never spent a week or more in town.

[stoutstien]

I kind of want to run a game that's based off a "post apocalyptic D&D earth" with the point being rebuilding society. But that seems like it involves a lot of item crafting. Is there a system that handles that well?

Take a look at world without numbers. One thing it does well is crafting and is basically set up for post apocalyptic fantasy settings.

The Mod sub system is great for the crafting types to be very useful to a party while still needing to be part of the party in order to maintain them.

[LibraryOgre]

For tabletop, if you want to run something based on crafting, I would focus on locating sources of resources, with the actual crafting taking place largely in downtime (both player and character). If you want a cRPG analogy, you want Fallout 4's settlement building system, not its crafting system. For table top examples, you might look at Ars Magica, which has a developed crafting system for magic items (while 5e is the current edition, they have 4e core as a free PDF, (https://atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG0204) which is a good resource for this idea).

So, let's say we want to make swords. We need sources of coal/charcoal and steel. To secure those, we need to go on an Adventure to secure the town auto dump from the Car Warriors (who don't actually DRIVE cars, but they use their fortress made of old F-350s to control the area). We might raid and get some resources, or we might secure the site to create a long-term resource. Securing the site might be negotiation or war, depending on the Car Warriors and your players.

If Bob wants his character to make a Special Sword, then you might have him go looking for specific materials (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0134.html), but leave the actual forging of the sword to more background tasks.

[Satinavian]

I know a couple os systems with somewhat elaborate crafting subsystems here and there, but none of them is able to support a whole campaign focused on crafting, especially if the whole group is supposed to do. So i would homebrew for that.

One needs a system that has not only enough different crafting skills/abilities to differentiate the PCs, it must have both a huge focus on both ingredients and products to fill gaming session after gaming session with it. I would here probably steal heavily from video games, specifically the Atelier series. One of the less complex ones.

[Pauly]

Going on my experience with investigative heavy and diplomacy heavy games.

1) You want light combat options. The more bells and knobs players have to play with in combat the more they are going to focus on that aspect in character creation and gear selection.

2) The players need to obtain resources without relying on combat. A game that has crafting ingredients like troll’s blood or dragon scales will inevitably lead to players seeking out said monsters in combat to obtain crafting items. If crafting items are gatekept behind combat the players will quickly move into combat focussed play.

3) I would personally recommend making combat highly dangerous. Either by one bad die roll can kill a character a la Cyberpunk or by having enemies stronger than the party a la CoC. This will encourage players to seek out non combat ways of solving problems.

4) know clearly what the purpose of crafting in campaign is. Various motives can be survival, trade or combat. Communicate that purpose to the players before the campaign starts.

5) General non combat skills such as survival/diplomacy/research need to featured as viable routes for characters to pursue.

Edit to add:
6) Don’t fall into the Shadowrun decking trap of having the GM and a player wandering off for 20 minutes to have a minigame while everyone else twiddles their thumbs. Try to have the whole party contribute to crafting an item. For example if the party are making a sword
Player A can use bladesmithing to craft the blade
Player B can use tanning to create leather for the belt and scabbard.
Player C can use leatherwork8ng to make the belt and scabbard
Player D can use Jewelry to craft the handle for the sword and decorations for the belt and scabbard.
Depending on just how far down the rabbit hole you want to go there can be other tasks such as hunting animals for leather, making charcoal and keeping the forging fires burning hot enough, mining/trading for raw matériels and so on.