Design’s messy sometimes. At least, it is for me. I can’t speak for every designer, I guess. But I can speak for the best designers. Who are me. The best designs are messy sometimes.
I know I make it look like a nice, clean, orderly thing. But that’s just because my genius brain is good at retconning chaos into nice, orderly, clean procedures. Like my Amazing Adventure-Building Checklist. The AABCs of Adventure Design. Nice, clean, and orderly. Just remember you can start wherever you want and do whatever you want in whatever order you want. Procedures are orderly. Brains aren’t. Not creative brains anyway.
Point is sometimes you just have to start doing something and see where you end up. Just start writing or typing or analyzing or whatever. No plan needed. No goal. If you get lucky, you’ll see connections and ideas and things will click into place and you’ll end up with solid gold. Or at least electrum. Maybe rose gold. If you get unlucky, you’ll waste a bunch of hours on a pile of s$&% that’s only good as trashcan filler. The only difference between good designers and crap ones is that good designers can tell the difference between their gold and their trashcan filler. And the only difference between designers and people who are going to design something someday when they find the time is that designers aren’t afraid to spend hours producing trashcan filler on the off chance that they might get lucky one day.
That brings to me this AngryCraft article. Which is definitely not trashcan filler. But it does have a little bit of it in there. Two columns in an otherwise really great spreadsheet. Not that this project hasn’t produced a fair bit of trashcan filler. I just throw mine away. I don’t show it off. Or, you know, compile it into a random book with a beholder and a goldfish on the cover and make people pay fifty bucks American for it.
That said, this article is messy. Because the process was messy. But the end result is kind of pretty. Especially if you like lists and spreadsheets and you want to finish this AngryCraft thing for yourself instead of waiting another three months for me to do it.
The Quest for the Best Materials
AngryCraft. My quest to build an optional crafting system that a GM can just drop into his D&D 5E game without having to uproot anything that already exists. It’s getting to be a bit too much to summarize the whole damned project every time I write an article about it. There’s a whole series of articles before this one. And they’re required reading. If you want to throw your two cents into the comment section at this stage of the game, you’d better have done all the prerequisite coursework. Otherwise, I’mma just call you nasty names and delete that s$&%. Like every GM ever, I’m sick of repeating the same s$&% over and over.
I’ve been doing the biggest, most complicated part of this stupid project. I’ve been figuring out how to define all the materials you’d ever need to craft anything that exists in the core game. So far, I’ve cribbed material rarities from the DMG magic item section. And I’ve got a list of material traits that define the kinds of magic that materials can have in them. All I have to do now is figure out what actual shapes and forms the materials take. What they’re made of. What they actually are in the world.
I had this vague list of material types in my head I thought would work okay. It had things like metal and wood and bone and plant and mineral and stuff. But I need to refine that list down to something solid and useable and – above all – short. Basically, I need to do the same thing for material types that I did for material traits using the magic item list in the DMG. Which gives me an idea. Or rather, it gave me an idea. Because even though I’m using the conversational and informal present tense, the truth is I figured out this s$&% days ago and got to work.
My idea was to do the same thing I did for traits. Except I’d do it with the items in the PHB. Basically, I’d figure out all the different kinds of physical matter I’d need to craft every mundane object that’s available for sale in the D&D universe.
Why use the PHB item list instead of the magic item list I’d already used from the DMG? There’s a few reasons. First, I want this crafting system to cover absolutely everything. Mundane and magical. Even if there’s no sane reason why anyone would want to craft some random item from the gear lists in the PHB, I still wanted it to be possible. Second, there’s a nice logic to it. Each material is a combination of a TYPE – the form it takes – and a TRAIT – the magic it contains. The trait is the magical part, the part that determines what magical properties an object might have. The type is the physical part, the part that determines what you can actually make with it. It stands to reason I’d use the magic items to define the traits and the mundane items to define the types. Besides, third, most of the magic items in the DMG are actually just magical versions of mundane objects in the PHB. And I don’t just mean the weapons and armor. Rods, wands, staves, amulets, and all sorts of other crap; they’re all in the PHB in one form or another.
So, armed with nothing more than a vague list of possible materials and a spreadsheet listing every item in the PHB, I just kinda went to town. I went through every item and tried to figure out what kind of materials I’d need to make the thing based on the description in the book and based on my understanding of historical craftsmanship and based on my willingness just to say, “f$%& it, that’s close enough.” I did a few passes, refined a few things, and ended up with a pretty nice list of materials. As with my previous work with the DMG magic item list, the final result isn’t final final. It’s final enough to move on to the next part of the project. Details will change when I put all the pieces together.
Unlike my work with the DMG list, though, I’m not going to describe the whole process across two excruciatingly detailed articles. I’m just going to whip open the curtain, show you the end result, and say “ta DAH!” And then I’ll describe some of the interesting ideas that resulted from the process itself.
I hope you’ll forgive me for putting less effort into the article than the f$&%ing spreadsheet that took three f$&%ing days to finish.
ta-DAH!
Behold. A spreadsheet. Here’s a screenshot of part of it. Just in case you want to read the article first and then check out the complete spreadsheet later. Or if you never want to check it out because, well, because it’s a f$&%ing list of 200 mundane objects from a rulebook for a game about pretend elves. I don’t even want to check it out and I compiled the f$&%ing thing. Click the image to embiggen it.
If you DO want to check out the entire spreadsheet, you can download it as an MS Excel document or as a PDF document.
And take time to thank Patreon supporter and Discord resident Milokot for helping me clean up and proof the spreadsheet. That was a huge help.
Anyway, it’s a spreadsheet. It shows what materials go into every item in the PHB. And, for your convenience, here’s a list of all the different types of materials mentioned in the spreadsheet:
Raw Materials
- Bone
- Flesh
- Fluid
- Hide
- Mineral
- Plant
- Wood
Refined Materials
- Dye
- Earthenware
- Foodstuff
- Gem
- Glass
- Grain
- Leather
- Metal
- Spice
- Textile
- Wax
If you just want to know where the project’s at now, you’re done. Materials are completely defined and priced and I’ve got a good start on what the formula for a given item is going to look like. Hell, you can probably finish making the system yourself if you want to put in the work. Between the last article and this one, you should be able to figure out how to make a wand of fireballs. See? I told you s$&% would start to fall into place very quickly.
But if you want to know a little more about the why’s and wherefore’s, read on MacDuff. What follows are a few annotations, explanations, expansions, and wild speculations.
Trashcan Filler
First, there’s two columns in that spreadsheet you should just ignore. Or, at least, ignore for now. First, there’s the Materials column. Basically, it’s just the cost of the item – in decimal form – divided by the average cost of one unit of common materials. Second, there’s the Proficiency column. I was curious if I could just assign an EXISTING tool kit from the PHB to every item in a logical way to determine what proficiency might be required to craft an item. And yes, I could. But also, no, I couldn’t. Not quite. So ignore it for now. I’ll deal with the issue in some future article.
Partwise Materials
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
For each item, I listed the materials I – TENTATIVELY – felt a craftsman would need to make the item. And I divided those materials into three different classes: Primary, Secondary, and Add-On. In the final product, those distinctions will probably be hidden away from the players. Maybe even from the GM. But they’re useful for design purposes.
Primary materials are the materials you need a lot of to make an item. Secondary materials are materials you need in smaller quantities. Consider the difference between a spear and a halberd. Both have wooden shafts and thus both require wood as a primary material. But the spear’s head is pretty small compared to the head of a halberd, so metal is a secondary material when you’re making a spear and a primary material when you’re making a halberd.
Things can have multiple primary materials and multiple secondary materials. And some things can be made more than one way. I didn’t detail that in the spreadsheet, but it’ll be part of the final design. A wand doesn’t need bone AND metal AND wood; it can be made of bone OR metal OR wood. And the head of an axe can be made out of bone OR mineral OR metal.
Add-on materials are optional materials. They can be added to customize an object, but they aren’t required to make the object. You can set gems in the hilt of a sword and add a pommel stone. You can add a fancy grip to a sword’s handle. You can dye a backpack or add fragrance to a candle or spice food. S$&% like that.
Note that when I say ‘customize,’ I’m referring to the fact that you can add materials with different traits to give the thing magical properties. If you’re making a flametongue longsword, you can get the fire magic from the metal or you can add fiery gems to the hilt or use the skin of a red dragon to wrap the handle. That said, the possibility of customization can be used flavorfully too. And if I were writing this up for publication, I’d add a sidebar to that effect. I’d note that when you buy leather armor ‘off the shelf,’ it’s just plain, boring, brown leather. But if you’re a leatherworker, you can dye the armor and add flourishes and decorations. It’s purely cosmetic s$&%, but some players eat that crap up and like having a mechanical hook for it.
Obviously, the reason I broke all of this stuff down like this is that it’ll help me easily design the formulae for all the items. An item’s formula will require lots of its primary components, a small number of its secondary components, and accept add-on components as optional extras. Considering I already worked out how many materials of a given rarity an item needs and what traits the item needs, it won’t take much thought at this point to actually create the formulae. Just a lot of grunt work.
That said, breaking things down into primary and secondary materials will also help with two other aspects of the design. First, it’ll help me figure out what materials can be salvaged from unwanted items. Basically, when you break down an item, you’ll end up with some of its primary materials. Second, the primary material will be a useful criterion for determining the tool proficiency required to craft the item.
Showing Refinement
My list of material types includes two broad groups: Raw Materials and Refined Materials. And this is another designation that likely won’t be explicitly described in the final product. Though it might be. GMs might need to understand it.
As I was working through the list, I ended up with a few materials that just weren’t the sort of thing you’d stumble over during an adventure. Like glass. Or textiles. Those are manufactured things. They could turn up as part of someone’s treasure hoard. But they should also be craftable. So, refined materials are just materials that can be crafted from other materials.
You can weave plant matter or certain animal hides into textiles. Yes, I know you technically weave hair into textiles, not hide. Cut me a break and let me abstract a little. You can refine minerals into glass. Some minerals can be smelted into metal. Others contain gems. And some can be ground down into clays to make earthenware. Thing is, since all of these materials are going to need entries in the final revised PHB equipment list that will be included with AngryCraft, those craftable materials will have formulae just like every other item. There’s no need to call them out as special to players. Players will know they can craft those materials because they can see the recipes for them.
And because the refined materials will have entries in the final, revised DMG treasure tables that will be included with AngryCraft, the GM will be able to include bolts of textiles and ingots of metal and sacks of beaded glass in treasure hordes along with the gold and gems and magic items.
But once I got my head around the idea of materials that could be crafted from other materials, I suddenly saw other possibilities. If a material can be crafted like an object, why can’t an object be used to craft something like a material would be? What’s a spellbook but a book with some special traits? What’s a book but a stack of paper or parchment bound together inside a cover? And if I want to craft a flask of oil, can’t I just use a flask I already have? Thus, you’ll see that some items on the list have other items as crafting materials.
And that’s useful because it simplifies the magic item formulae immensely. As I noted, 90% of the magic items in the DMG can be made from items found in the PHB. Any magical wand is just a normal wand – an arcane focus – with some special traits and made with specific rarity components. Same with rods, staves, items of clothing, suits of armor, and so on. Scrolls are just ink combined with paper or parchment. And the non-magical alchemical liquids like antitoxin and alchemist’s fire are basically potions and oils without any magical traits. So, the PHB items would provide the basic formulae for everything and the DMG magic items would just have additional rarity and trait requirements.
And I could make that even more useful if I adopted…
The Transitive Property of Thaumaturgical Craftsmanship
Think this through with me…
In theory, you don’t need a complete formula for a flametongue longsword in the DMG. You can say that one of the ingredients for a flametongue longsword is a longsword, right? But that doesn’t QUITE work. Because remember, I’m using the rarity of the materials to make sure no one can craft items that are more powerful than they’d be able to find at their level by other means. I’d need to specify that the longsword is made of rare materials. Or whatever. How the hell do you get a rare longsword? And do you have to keep track of the rarity of every item ever?
Second question first: no. That’d suck. When you find an item in the game or buy it ‘off the shelf,’ you’re always getting the simplest, plainest version. Everything in the game is made of common materials. Unless it’s a magic item, of course. Then it’s made of materials of the appropriate rarity.
But if you make an item – or commission an item – using rarer materials, the rarity of those materials gets passed to the item itself. If you make a longsword out of rare metal, you get a rare longsword. It doesn’t affect the stats in any way. It still works like a longsword. And so the only reason you’d ever want to make a rare longsword is as part of a crafting project. Which means you won’t have a bunch of rare longswords floating around the world. They get made and used up right away. So you’d rarely – GET IT? – have to track the rarity of such an item.
Moreover, whenever you make any item, the material’s traits get passed to the item too. Thus, you can craft a rare fiery longsword if you have some, I don’t know, volcanic orichalcum or something. And if you want to make a flametongue longsword from an existing sword, starting with a rare fiery sword gives you a head start.
Moreover, this idea allows me to separate enchanting and crafting. A smith with the right materials could make a flametongue longsword from scratch. But a wizard with the right materials could commission a sword of the proper quality and, using the right materials, add the flametongue enchantment without having to know how to pump a bellows or hammer an anvil. Enchanting could have its own special tool proficiency or it could be a spell that certain classes can learn. I actually kind of like the latter more than former, but it also goes against the spirit of giving spellcasters a whole bunch of spell-like abilities that aren’t spells in addition to their spells because f$&% consistency and elegance and ease of play.
Point is, this whole thing of allowing rarities and traits to transfer to mundane crafted items simplifies the formulae for magic items and opens up different avenues of crafting. It adds some creativity to the whole thing. Sometimes, it might be more efficient to just commission a rare sword and then enchant it. Sometimes, it’s better to make a sword from scratch. It depends on the individual character’s skills and what crap they’ve found.
And while I’m talking about this, I should mention dye. Because dye became a THING. Notice a lot of things on my spreadsheet accept dye as an optional material? Well, dye became a way that wily craftspeople can break the rules. Kind of like chaotic materials. Remember how I said that there are certain components you can’t use to make certain things? Like you can’t really add plants or wood or fluid to a sword? Well, what if you could refine those plants or woods or fluids into a dye. And I’m using dye broadly here. In this case, it might be an enamel or a paint or a complex mix of impurities added to a small amount of metal and then inlaid into etched runes on the blade. Dyes are a refined material that you can use to add the qualities of organic or otherwise volatile materials to items that normally can’t accept that crap. It’s an inefficient, multistep process, but if you want to make a flaming sword and all you’ve got is a bunch of pyreweed and magmin ichor, it’ll do the job.
I know all of this sounds complicated. And I want to avoid too many multi-step crafting processes. But I think these options are okay. They logically simplify the formulae by splitting the object from the enchantment and they are otherwise optional ways to get around restrictions and limitations while opening up more crafting options to more characters. I think they’ll be fine if they’re presented properly, but I also don’t intend to go any farther with multi-step crafting processes than this.
But there is one more little complexity wrinkle I need to mention.
Ad-Hoc Traits
Everything was going well. It looked like I’d end up with a nice list of materials and I even got some neat options and ideas out of the process. But then I ran into silk rope.
Silk is technically a textile. But silk is a special textile. Unlike other textiles that can be made from the hair ripped out of animal hides or woven from plants, silk is made from a fluid. A specific fluid. One that comes from bugs. And I needed to allow for that bulls$&%. Just like I needed to allow for a few exceptional magical items that require very specific materials. You can’t make dragon scale mail without hide that has been specifically liberated from the outside of a dragon. It’s in the name.
The only way to handle these few little niggles without adding more traits and types to my nice, clean lists is to crib an idea from card games like Magic: the Gathering and use tags or descriptors. Basically, tags are just traits that only mean something when they mean something. Like, fluid is fluid and [bug] fluid works as well as any other fluid. But when you’re making silk, it has to be [bug] fluid. Nothing else will do.
I have to be careful with that crap because it can get really crazy really fast if I let it. But if I just use those descriptors to cover one or two weird items, maintain a very limited list, and invite the GM to use ad-hoc descriptors for his own story-driven magical creations, I should be fine.
And that’s it. Between the spreadsheet, the list, and these few notes, you should see how this is coming together. And hopefully, it’ll come together in short order. Especially if I can do more than one article’s worth of work a month. Maybe I’ll just stop writing these articles and finish the project quietly by myself. Things go quicker when I just design s$&% without trying to explain it to all to you.
As i understand it, materials come in the form of Name, Tag, Rarity. Right? And items as well. Would it stand to reason to make simple, generic formulae?
Simple item (longsword) needs X amount of primary material, Y amount of secondary material, can add Z amount of add on materials
More complex items (halberd) use .8X of two primary materials, Y of secondary, Z of add ons.
And the materials themselves of the appropriate rarity, based on the rarity of the end result, as you outlined in this article
Am i oversimplifying? Or thinking in the right direction?
That’s definitely a smart way of thinking, but the items vary enough in terms of cost and – and therefore materials required – that it might lead to oversimplification. As you say. Basically, that method will give you a good first draft of a formula for each item quickly and then you just need to go through and tweak/sanity check each. It won’t be as hard as it sounds. Just a little time-consuming.
Every item would at the very least still need to be individually assigned a complexity rating, and a seperate table would likely come in place for the oddball items that need specific materials like bug juice or dragon skin
I recently learned that off-the-shelf armor is called “munition armor” or “munitions-grade armor”. Might be a useful, if slightly esoteric, term for the base quality arms and armor?
Doing the grunt work sounds like something you resort to after a sleepless night or at the end of your day when energy is low. Not sure how that works for you but kudos for getting through all this.
This is true. Of course, I put the phrase “off the shelf armor” in quotes because heavy armors were tailor made. They had to be carefully fitted. That’s why only the nobility could afford to become knights and why knights spent so much of their non-war time competing in tournaments for money. As the armor got more and more expensive and then as gun powder weapons began to appear in Europe, heavy armors like that started to disappear. At the same time, warfare got more sophisticated and standing armies got bigger. Munitions armor made based on a standard pattern was stockpiled starting in the late 1,400s and 1,500s.
Is this something you would take into account in the crafting system? Ie “there’s no such thing as non-fitted plate”, or leave that up to gms and their setting?
Nah. D&D doesn’t. I’m not going to start making an issue of it.
Depending on the group i play with we do something similar.
Pathfinder, so slightly different system. but any armour that’s not fitted specifically to you has -1 Max dex and +1 AC penalty until you get it fitted. Some players just plain appreciate the granularity.
That said, I’m in agreement with angry that it’s usually unnecessary. I only do so with groups that i already know want that kind of thing.
I’m trying to figure out how to reconcile the fact that plate armor in the PHB costs 1,500 gp (or 150 average-priced common materials) and that uncommon, permanent, major magic items like +1 plate armor go for 500 gp. Would an ingredient for +1 plate armor be plate armor (uncommon), which is itself made of 150 uncommon materials? With uncommon materials sitting at an average rate of 50 gp each, that means that plate armor (uncommon) would cost 7,500 gp in materials to make… Or is this just a weird artifact of the system we’ve been given, and in building a crafting system we’re just accepting that uncommon magic plate armors might cost less than their common brethren?
Does someone have to bring up the pricing of plate armor EVERY time I do an article on this? Look, I’ll handle it. Eventually. But right now it’s like arguing about the second-story windows while you’re still trying to pour the foundation. And honestly, if you’ve been reading diligently thus far, you’ll pretty much know how this will likely be handled. Hell, in this very article I explicitly mentioned exactly the thing that would be included in the final system that would let me “fix” the plate armor “problem.”
Just as a point, +1 armor is Rare, not uncommon. So it would make sense for you to instead simply move the armors that are priced around or above 500 GP into the uncommon category, using uncommon component pieces (and thus only 15 pieces of uncommon metal). If you want to make Admantine, Mithril or Mariners armors, you simply have the armor require Uncommon [Tag] Material or whatever, as described in Ad-Hoc Traits section of this article. Boom, problem solved. To get +1 Armor, you simply make the armor out of Rare Materials, instead of common/uncommon. Boom, your new set of armor is super high quality and gives a bonus.
Since this list covers all mundane equipment, there’s some amusing implications from crafting different food at different price points – in particular, that one unit of foodstuffs can produce 20 days of rations (40lb) but 200 days of animal feed (2000lb) due to the monetary cost difference. I like the implicit utility granted to cook’s utensils where you can dedicate less carrying capacity to food by adding an extra step for manufacture in the field, which is a neat emergent mechanic even if that doesn’t hold up to much simulationist scrutiny. Ultimately, this drills down to the source item needing to be different – a ton of raw wheat stalks might go perfectly well into feed bags as-is, but a lot of that is literal chaff if you’re looking to thresh out the grain, mill it to flour, and bake hardtack for humanoid consumption.
Firewood is another example, which didn’t make it to the 5e equipment list, I was just remembering it from 3.5. Each bundle is 20lb for 1cp, which causes similar trouble for a crafting system – the item’s purpose is in low-quality bulk, much like animal feed. While you can technically burn the weapons-quality wood, that’s an expensive approach when otherwise-worthless sawdust and loose branches work just as well as fuel. There’s no meaningful monetary constraint on these items, but your carrying capacity limits your range unless you have an environment conducive to foraging.
The other direction also shows up in expensive armour, where 150 units of 10gp metal are needed to make 1500gp full plate while 7.5 units are enough for 75gp chain mail. Material quality vs crafting quality leave these weird loose ends at extreme price points where the abstraction breaks down. Of course, for the other 95% of items this works great.
The needs for simplicity and good gameplay often make for interesting side effects like these. One of the things I love about tabletop RPGs is that a GM can manage those side effects, as opposed to a video game, where those side effects become exploits, like Skyrim’s alchemy/enchanting loop to get infinitely powerful enchantments and potions/poisons. Here, the GM can just say “Nope – can’t do that. Yes, the rules technically say that you can, but obviously that’s not the intent.”
Wrt your final point about plate vs chain costs: IRL, chain could be made of poorly quality controlled metal, as the act of extruding into wires and spreading them across the shirt meant a single bad batch wouldn’t leave a giant weakspot in the armour like it would if you hammered it into a plate.
Thus those 150 units worth for the plate could actually represent cherry picking the best metals from the set and then working the rest into an acceptable quality with some wastage.
Or thats all far too simulationist and Angry already has something else in mind, like just requiring less of an Uncommon metal) or manually tweaking it cos we’re not slaves to our own algorithms.
Or you could just hand-wave it. “Plate armor is much harder to make therefore it costs x times as much” works fine. Prices are all arbitrary anyway as there is no economy behind it.
This is discussed at length elsewhere on this site, not trying to open up that can of worms again, but essentially you can make a call based on game design considerations and if it doesn’t look outrageous compared to other prices it’ll do.
I have to agree, the inclusion of intermediate items in crafting recipes is something that is completely sensible and logical. And it is something that basically any better crafting system in a game actually uses, so there’s precedent for them as well, even from the Core Rules about Crafting Magic Items from older Editions.
After all, that was basically taking a “rare” or “masterwork” version of an Item and adding enchantments to it.
On the Mundane Item front, you have games like Minecraft, Factorio or Satisfactory, where the entire Gameplay-Loop is effectively “Gather Resource, to make Item, to refine into other Items and Equipment, to gather better/additional Resources”.
I am definitly looking forward to seeing how you will be able to further improve upon or refine this concept.
Great stuff. All magical items are made of rare materials. But not all items made of those same rare materials are magical. They have to be enchanted first.
The solution on how to enchant used in Pathfinder (different system, I know) is to have each magical item be associated to a spell. Given that every item is already associated with traits and materials, adding also spells may be too much if there’s an easier alternative.
A question on salvaging. If a player intends to salvage a magical item found “in the wild”. How does the DM determine what parts of the item have each of the necessary traits?
About the spell association. We have a pile of [Fiery] materials that we want made into a Masochist’s Sword of Fireballs.
We want it to cast a fireball centered on the user on command, so simply bringing the pile to Bob the Bladesmith won’t cut it.
Sure, we’d a nice sword made of nice, fire attuned stuff… But it won’t be the complete item. For that we need some Magic.
We don’t really need someone to keep casting fireball on the sword, (for whatever reason it was required before) since it already has the fiery magic in it, it just needs shaping.
It could be a separate tool like angry mentioned, it could be a thing Spellcasters just *do*, or it could require some sort of a ritual spell to finish the magic-ness of the magic item.
Or maybe you don’t. Maybe it can work either way. Maybe smiths can unlock the inherent magic in stuff because, when you get down to it, crafting is a kind of transformative magic in itself. The sheer act of turning a bunch of dirt and rocks and dead dinosaur goo into an iPhone is pretty damned amazing. Smiths work magic the old-fashioned, hard way. Blood, sweat, envisioning the thing they want to create and then slowly shaping the materials to their will. Wizards work magic the quick and dirty. Vision, pure energy, and mental flexing. So, you can bring a bunch of fiery material to a smith OR you can bring a bunch of fiery material and a good quality sword to a wizard. Either way gets you to the same place.
I remember a twitter thread describing flying as “wizards burn the souls of ancient monsters to travel faster than any man could ever walk”, which is fantastic.
Lesser wizards also burn souls of ancient monsters, but they do it to cut their lawn or blow leaves around.
Far off-topic, apologies.
This may be a few steps ahead since it deals more with time, materials and restrictions (mainly “avoiding players from gathering 500 resources in 10 minutes of table time”).
I realized that one main problems with crafting in TTRPGs is… time. Time is meaningless, as we all know. A videogame will let you grab a shitton of raw resources provided you put the IRL time into that, but a TTRPG allows you to just handwave entire weeks into a few rolls, and using random encounters or enforcing arbitrary limitations ends up getting too complex too fast and too easily.
So I thought, what is a thing where players spend a LOT of their time in? Dungeons. Travelling, even. By turning crafting materials into dungeon dwelling or travelling byproducts, any player who wants to stock up on materials will have to spend time on it. Sure, maybe the dungeon is easy to do, but they still have to go through it. Just like in videogames. Any ingredient that you can get by not risking anything should be handwaved away. You can also use these materials as dungeon loot to help with “how much gold, items and materials should I hand out?” balance. After all, you don’t find gold hoards in open fields.
However, on crafting time, I don’t know much. It tends to fall into the classic “realism vs fantasy” balance so opinions vary a lot. I personally find “an iron longsword takes 2 months to complete” to be absurd. In those 2 months of ingame time you could get a hundred better items (not to mention that your crafting can even fail).
At the moment this is more of a brainstormed concept, and it may struggle in some scenarios, specially campaigns with little dungeon dwelling, but it should be possible to translate to those.
You are correct about time being meaningless in RPGs. I wrote it about more here if you want to see a further exploration of the idea: https://theangrygm.com/time-is-an-illusion/
Interestinf, I already read that one (long ago to be fair) and turns out it hits the same notea on crafting hahaha
Glad to see that you have that in check
Thanks again, angry. I appreciate your content. You’re nearly finished and can be done with questions about this.
I see in your previous artical where you assigned qualities to each magical item, the only ones without a quality were the +x weapons and armor. With what you’ve got now regarding a “rare longsword” made up of rare materials, it raises the question of what needs to be added to a rare longsword to turn it into a +2 longsword?, Or would it be reasonable to say that a rare longsword is actually a +2 longsword and leave it at that?
You know… that’s actually a brilliant bit of streamlining for the issue of enchanting weapons and armor. Yoink.
So, would it be easier to gatekeep the higher cost/quality items behind NPC crafting expertise, and not introduce those NPCs until appropriate PC levels? Like, instead of escalating quantity and quality of materials, there’s a cap, and you switch to quality of craftsman for the next level(s) of items? Showing that a talented smith can do more with the same materials as an average/competent one?
Also, will these formulae be intended to include adding the quirks of magic items, like minor and major qualities in the DMG, or the little extra things that usually have charges attached to their uses?
I know my players will have ideas to work spells or extra benefits beyond damage types into items. How would you make a bag of holding, for instance?
You may have already addressed this, and I’ve read the whole series up to now, but my memory isn’t the greatest.
All that said, my players are going to love this, especially the addition of dye and the ability to make bone weapons. Talk about making mundane things exciting again.
I’m fairly sure all of that has been addressed except for the first part. From my imperfect memory:
Including quirks, charges, etc: Yes. I can’t remember exactly how charges were going to work, but it was in a past article. As for the quirks, a big part of this series it that it will include every magic item in the game, so it should all be there. Feel free to look up details in past articles. Angry seems to be quite “angry” about repeating himself in the comments, (understandably) so I would encourage you to look back for any details you need.
Spells/extra benefits beyond damage: Included – see above. It’s including every magic item, which of course includes the bag of holding.
If your concern is more whether you could have an effect like the bag of holding on a different item, I believe the DM would be expected to invent the new magic item and a formula for it. (likely based on existing formulae)
As for gatekeeping with NPCs of varying expertise, keep in mind that players can craft these items themselves, as well. Light gatekeeping might be nice to help players with crafting abilities feel more important, but if you go too far, you just make crafting abilities mandatory for the party, and then it will become a chore that someone at the table has to take on, rather than a fun perk. How much gatekeeping is appropriate would likely vary a lot from group to group. I think you’d be just fine without any gatekeeping, so if you choose to use it, I’d be very cautious of going overboard.
I see your point about gatekeeping, I should clarify I mean making items of a certain level or complexity not craftable by PCs, period. Think a Hattori Hanzo sword from Kill Bill; a legendary item by a lifelong craftsman.
If the PCs can craft every level of magic item, they will find a way to cheese it. It’s like giving everyone a way to modify their class abilities on leveling up depending on their diet or training regiment.
It might be better to set a ceiling so you can control those game changing items. Then again, maybe that makes the whole thing disappointing, like the Forge Cleric, where your crafting abilities are heavily muted.
The plan was to integrate crafting and resource availability with the treasure tables already present in 5e, so if you stick to that you’re already limiting what they can do theoretically.
True, and maybe adding another quantity material requirements for the extra abilities of items (like you see in a lot of Griffon’s Saddlebag magic items) would make it more difficult to cheese the lower level items.
Maybe it’s more of a problem in my head, and once the system is done, it’ll disappear.
What do you mean by cheese the system in this case? The point of a system like this is that it turns a PC’s item loadout into something that they have control over. They’re not bound exclusively by the whims of the GM and/or the treasure table.
You as a gm have control over how much material they find to cheese with and can end it in many ways if need be and if you want to.
Remember also that, by default, characters must know the formula for creating the magic item in question and they do not know all the formulae for all the items. That is where the GM is able to gate what is available for players to create.
I’m an impatient crafting lover, so I finished AngryCraft myself over the past three weeks. In doing so, I developed three nontrivial concerns about your system. To summarize:
1. Smaller: Quality demand (# of items requiring a quality) is seriously out of whack with quality supply (# of monsters that drop that quality.).
2. Smaller: 1 material/monster is awkward. It’s verisimilitude-straining to have a winter wolf and a dragon drop the same # of materials; the vast majority of high-CR enemies really should drop more than one quality of material; many (probably even most) of the monsters players battle are of a lower CR than the players’ level-appropriate rarity range (a fact you didn’t account for in your distribution calculations); and finally, getting absolutely nothing from a dragon off one lousy roll is heartbreaking.
3. Serious: There is not NEARLY enough difference in cost between Major and Minor items (“If it will have some effect on 1/3 or more of your sessions going forward, it’s Major, otherwise Minor”) to prevent a ballooning number of longterm magic items from taking over gameplay. If the party’s volcano adventure lasts even ONE adventuring day, it’s CHEAPER for them to craft PERMANENT fire resistance armor for everyone in the party than it is to maintain continuous fire resistance over that day’s encounters via potions.
To summarize my solutions:
1. Rejigger the quality names and definitions a little and tweak the spreadsheet. If you want, I’ll send you my spreadsheet with the assignments I made for each item, and the quality name/definitions in decreasing order of desirability.
2. Higher CR enemies drop more materials. Players get an “undisturbed materials” bonus to the FIRST roll they make to harvest from a given monster (they choose order of attempt), which limits how many materials this adds some. However, I do want to drop more materials, because:
3. A major item costs three times as many materials to make as a minor item of the same usage. Weighting the costs by the usage distribution of Major/Minor items, this makes the average Major item cost 4.12x as many materials as the average Minor items (enforcing the treasure tables’ 4:1 Minor:Major ratio.).
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these issues, whether you have some solution in mind or simply think I’m overestimating the problem.
I don’t understand what is going on here. These “problems” your are accusing the system of having are all from parts of the system that Angry has yet to write about. Angry has 0 item formulas. Angry has said nothing about the actual amounts of materials that the system would provide. It seems like your accusing Angry of you getting the numbers wrong when you were finishing the system?
I apologize if my comment seemed hostile; I greatly respect for AngryCraft’s foundation! But as Angry is a much more famous DM than I am, it will be easier to get player buy in on Angry’s system than on mine, so I want it to be as good as possible.
However, Angry HAS written about all these things:
1. The quality assignment sheet is downloadable in AC Article 11, “The Great Magic Item Analysis: How to Describe an Item” (which also gives guidance on which monsters drop various qualities). Using a COUNTIF(I:K,”Acidic”) function to count how many times the Acidic quality appears in that sheet, and ignoring the “Special” quality, the (rounded) distribution is:
Theurgic 21%; Forceful 13%; Mercurial 7%; Necrotic 6%; Chaotic 5%; Dimensional 5%; Phantasmal 5%; Vital 5%; Zephyrous 4%; Inert 4%; Poisonous 4%; Radiant 4%; Fiery 4%; Psychic 3%; Cold 3%; Lightning 2%; Thundering 2%; Acidic 2%; Void 1%; Fiendish 0%.
Constructs, the creatures article 11 says drop Theurgic quality, constitute a paltry 3% of MM creatures (4% of all creatures). Fiends are 9% of the MM and 11% of all official published monsters.
2. Articles 6 and 7, “Accounting for Magical Items” and “More Accounting for Magical Items” conclude that “…if we assume one ingredient per creature and three per horde, on average, … we can make room in the treasure table system for our crafting system…” This is where I got 1 material/monster (3/hoard) from. Article 6 also notes that “… one of the places ingredients come from is from creatures and that they may yield some number of ingredients based on various factors, including some element of random chance. But we’ll assume that, on average, creatures yield ONE ingredient each.”
3. The number of materials required to craft a magic item is laid out in article 10, “The Great Magic Item Analysis: How to Price an Item.” Then you can download an excel sheet from article 11 “The Great Magic Item Analysis: How to Describe an Item” that lists the number of materials needed for every dmg item. The same article also provides a sample theoretical complete recipe for a Frost Brand Greatsword.
First, I don’t think you realize quite how condescending the first paragraph of this comment is.
Second, the last line of your comment demonstrates precisely what @FriskyJacket was trying to tell you. That “theoretically complete recipe” from article 11 has an entire paragraph before it reminding people that it is a completely hypothetical asspull and had literally no thought put into it and shouldn’t be taken as anything other than a draft of a possible format. Everything I have done so far has been caked with reminders that it is draft work, that all of the lists and spreadsheets will be revised as things come together, and so on. For example, I am already well aware of the high distribution of Theurgic materials among magic items. How could I not be. Literally every charged item in the game requires a Theurgic material. That is something that will have to be accounted for in the final design. I can count. And I have a Monster Manual and an Excel license too.
I’m gratified that you decided to take my drafts and notes and to try to finish them yourself. I’m not so gratified at the idea that you did so just so you could capitalize on my “fame” to get your players to buy in. Or whatever. But the fact of the matter is that you finished the system yourself and you’ve identified problems in your system that come from just using my drafts as-is. The only thing I did when I made the spreadsheets you referred to, for example, was to brainstorm ideas and then to pare them down to a short list of broad categories. I’ve made no attempt at balancing anything yet. And I have REPEATEDLY made that clear. I’m sorry you missed that and then ended up with a system that didn’t work for you.
If you want to keep polishing your system, if you want to finish it and use it, do so. I encourage that. Use my work as a jumping off point. That’s why I put this out here. But before you assume my end result is going to have problems based on your own assumptions and your own design goals, maybe let me finish the thing.
I see now how the previous 1st paragraph sounds condescending. I’m sorry about that; I only intended it to convey “No, I’m not trying to say the system is or will be a failure, I’m just trying to help and/or receive help.” I swear I’m not intentionally trying to be accusatory or condescending (Okay, I was annoyed at FriskyJacket dismissing me for solely talking about “parts of the system that Angry has yet to write about” when you had written 1-2 full articles on every topic I discussed in the initial comment.).
I am guilty of impatience. Full disclosure: The campaign I hope to use this system in starts in early October. I have DM’d before, but in that campaign I’m a player. I decided to try finishing AngryCraft because, after I described the system to the DM, they expressed interest in trying it—IF I provided a complete ruleset before October.
However, I know that I’m a much less experienced DM than you are, and I’m commenting mostly because of that insecurity (which I tried to hide, because, well, insecurity). I wrote up the issues I’ve found hoping for a response that would either a) explain why I’m wrong about them being issues or b) agree they’re issues and either validate my solutions or suggest better ones. I knew you might tell me to wait and see, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to mention, especially since I didn’t see any other commentators discussing my concerns.
About the “fame” thing—this is a complicated homebrew subsystem. My best compression is 5 pages of base rules & tracking handouts (an overview and setup page; a page defining all the rarities, types, and materials; a DM distribution planning/tracking aid page; a page of player instructions on how to get recipes, make a new item, or upgrade an existing item outside of the game; and a material tracker handout page for the players’ in-game use), 4 pages of custom item recipe creation instructions, and an 849-line long excel sheet of recipes. It’s much easier to convince people it’s worth their time to read through that long of a homebrew system and try it if I can say “this was made by a professional game designer, here’s his website, you might have heard of him before.” My system will never have that level of creator credibility/prominence backing it, and yours will. So I’m hoping to get mine close enough to your ultimate finished product that switching will be doable, as I expect yours to be more intergroup compatible.
All I’m going to say is this, and then I’ll leave it at that…
I am not a professional game designer. I’m a professional author at this point. And I was not always famous. I’m just a passionate person – like you – who, twelve years ago, starting sharing his ideas on his blog. And when I started this blog, I was just hacking basic D&D rules like you’re modifying my rules and systems. The only difference between me and you is time and work invested. And you can do that too. Don’t think too much of me and don’t sell yourself too short. Build stuff. Make it your own. Share it around. Keep doing it long enough – and keep doing it despite any failures you encounter – and you can have someone call you a famous professional.
In the meanwhile, thank you for your input. You recognized some important issues that definitely will have to be addressed before the system is finished. And a few that likely won’t be big issues at the table. But only time will tell on those. I’m sorry for misunderstanding your tone.
You both see problems in percentile distributions of commonly needed mats coming from uncommon sources (assuming one runs on completely random monster tables). I see a reason for my players to spend downtime looking for the dungeons of ancient [mad] arcanists and artificers, contemplating the robbery of that one wizard’s tower (you now the one), pinch other adventurer’s claims because the group missed a tasty job offer, and/or hunting down rogue warforged/golems. And all because constructs tend to be rarely found in random tables? Kind of a score.
But the system has to work equally well for GMs who do not want to make up their own stories and adventures around it. Because you will always be able to make up stories and adventures around it. There’s plenty of levers and hooks. The GM should not have to change their campaign or adventure plans to make this system work.
That surprises me that you can only make blowgun needles out of metal, instead of bone or wood. I figured the weapon itself is based primarily on those made by indigenous tribes that had no access to metal.
Nothing is final yet. As I keep saying.
Very excited to see how this develops. I was also concerned about how you’d treat silk in this game, as it’s solid, liquid, and a thread. But you definitely understand it too.
Also, perhaps something like a longsword made of Uncommon materials is automatically a +1 Longsword? Or would it not make sense for something like a +2 Longsword to be made into a Flametongue Longsword? I always imagined +1 weapons and armour to just be made with more expertise and understanding than their Common counterparts. If this won’t be the case for AngryCraft, I think you’ll have to define a difference between something like a Rare Handaxe and a Rare +2 Handaxe.
Thanks for all your work, and all the philosophy in previous articles.
Your thoughts on silk got me thinking my own thoughts, starting with “Surely raw silk isn’t a [bug] Fluid; it’s a [bug] Fiber!” Of course, Fiber isn’t there in your list, so I thought about trying to fit it in, but then I realized that it wasn’t really doing anything except acting as a precursor to Textile.
Okay, so maybe raw silk is a [bug] Textile. This got me thinking about refinement, and stuff like Iron Ore. Iron Ore’s a Mineral that can be refined into a Metal or a Dye. That makes it implicitly more valuable than Iron ingots, so it feels like refinement should have a cost, if only so that players wouldn’t rather have Ore than Iron (which would feel weird).
So if we denote refinement options with parens, then Iron Ore is a Mineral (Metal / Dye), and maybe raw silk is a [bug] (Textile). Or maybe it’s still a [bug] Textile, since making players pay to use the treasure you gave them isn’t gameplay, it’s taxation. I dunno. My feelings are mixed, and it might just depend on what kind of players you have.
Anyways, very interested to see where this goes, and how you decide to handle refining.
While using real world logic isn’t usually the best for game systems, but this might be a case where it could work. Iron ore is filled with so many impurities that the weight and space it takes up is orders of magnitude above the refined ingots. Processing ore into ingots, while academically interesting, is not exactly hard once you know what you need and how to do it. The biggest cost refining ore was probably the time it took to do it. As we know, time is worthless in an ttrpg, until it very much is not. So all that being said, especially since this is unlikely to be any sort of game breaking problem, i think it would be fine if raw Ore is more versatile than the refined ingots, but takes up more inventory space and requires an extra time component before it can be used.
Taking a step back from the details discussed here, I can see the crafting of a magic item becoming the focal point of an adventure arc.
Example: the party, after fruitlessly fighting the bad guy, discover they need to build an item of bad guy slaying. The recipe is hidden in the forgotten temple of remoteness, the components are all distilled from bits of rare monsters and the crafting itself involves a ritual in a dangerous location. This item magically overcomes the damage immunity of the bad guy and he can now be fought in an epic showdown.
Granted, we could do this without the crafting system, but I bet if crafting has been a part of the campaign from the start the players will catch on to it easily.
For the crafting limit on items made during a Short Rest or Long Rest or whatever, the limit should be the amount of individual materials that can be ‘processed.’ This directly connects to how your system balances items by its number of materials–so maybe during a short rest someone can only ‘process’ 3 individual materials. That would give you room to craft some arrows but little else.
This is the plan I’m using in my version of this crafting system, maybe you can find use for it too? Hope this helps, thanks a lot for this project–I don’t know how but the fact that crafting itself doesn’t use ANY rolls is just genius. That was the thing that stopped me from ever using any other crafting systems, I didn’t want to potentially waste my stuff just because of bad luck. Moving the luck to gathering instead of crafting is really legit.
What has always bothered me about these additional tags is that they make it quite difficult to write everything on a character sheet.
I don’t mean the usual equipment sheet. I mean an extra sheet. Where there is a table with all the resources and rarities.
If there weren’t you would only need 5 columns for rarities and 20 lines for types.
But since these have elementary properties, a 3D table would be created that also counts the different tags.
I think it would be nicer if these standard materials existed: minerals, bones, liquid etc.
And in addition to that an own table with magic / elemental resources.
Quasi structure giver: From which the object is made
And
Arcane catalysts: with which magic is inserted
So that you would simply have 2 tables. Instead of a material list with many tags which is quickly filled with extremely many exceptions like (bug) fluid, when more and more magic items are added.
Thanks for all the work you put into the project.
Looks good Angry. I was hoping to wait until the final episode to implement this in my game, but alas my players are impatient and I couldn’t delay it any longer. Well, I could, but where’s the fun in that? So using what you’ve provided so far I’m soldiering on ahead.
No doubt I’ll handle a few things differently, it will be interesting to see if I’ve captured the intent or not once you publish the final piece. In some ways I’m glad I decided to tackle it early, gives me the opportunity to really “look under the hood” and make sure it makes sense to me rather than relying solely on someone elses work.
To be honest though, other than just the amount of digging through the spreadsheet, it’s coming together fairly organically and I haven’t had to tinker much with it at all. Even in it’s unfinished state, it’s a better approach than I’ve seen from some published crafting systems. Excited to see the final product.
Is it safe to assume this series is officially dead now?
You’re never safe.
It would be a real shame to leave this amazing system in an unfinished state. I may try to cobble together something from the work that Angry has done here, as the previous system I cobbled together involved a lot of handwaving and “umm… I am not sure” responses. Keeping my fingers crossed (when not inconvenient) that more will articles on this topic will magically pop up when I am not looking.