The only thing harder than starting a new project is restarting a project that you haven’t touched in over a year. Especially one that you stopped touching because it got hard. And that’s precisely what I found myself doing last weekend: touching something hard that I hadn’t touched in a while. See, I stupidly made a public promise to bring some of my dead half-finished projects back life. Especially my D&D 5E crafting system.

The thing is, I had a really solid idea for how to handle crafting and I had worked out most of the kinks. I knew, more or less, how the whole system was going to work. In my head. And while I was taking my time explaining all of my logic to you via this website, I was also slowly working through the design in the background. Except that the design hit a point where it involved a bunch of work. Gruntwork. Like, say, analyzing and classifying every magic item in the DMG. What a f$&%ing ordeal. Especially because it involved trying to impose an ordered system on something that looked like it had been designed at random by a bunch of monkeys who got distracted while trying to come up with a sequel script for Hamlet and made a role-playing game instead.

Meanwhile, I’d had a bunch of discussions with people who were trying to get projects of their own off the ground. Some simple – like designing a custom monster or three – and some complex – like trying to design an entire subsystem to lay over the D&D combat engine to add variety to the gameplay. And I ended up in a few discussions about the importance of starting with ‘the play experience’ and focusing on ‘game feel.’ Which I was discovering was something that a lot of people just don’t do. Or have never heard of. Which is a shame because it actually makes it easier to design s$&%. And because it makes it more likely your designs will actually do what you want them to do.

I have an opportunity here to kill several birds with one shotgun shell. I can teach all you amateur, budding designers about how to design from the standpoint of game feel and the play experience while, at the same time, applying my excellent advice to my own situation to get myself back into this crafting project bulls$&% by using it as an example of how to isolate the game feel by analyzing the assumed play experience. And if it goes well, then next week, I’ll have a lovely spreadsheet analyzing and classifying all of the magic items in the DMG.

So let’s get started.

How to Start

Whether you’re working on a new game design project or getting back into a project you haven’t touched in over a year, it can be really f$&%ing hard to get started. And that’s because every project is conceived and implanted in the womb of the designer’s brain in a different way. Project embryos might start out as bits of flavorful inspiration like my most recent dungeon adventure that started with ‘evil Shaolin monastery rocking back and forth between the Mortal Realm and the Shadow Plane.’ Unborn project babies might also arise from a mechanical idea, like the idea of using a visible pool of dice to manage tension at the table. Or a project’s inception might come from a vague mechanical need or want like the idea that D&D really needs some way to craft items in it.

Point is every project starts with a single idea or need. No two are alike. But the end results are the same. After a lot of growth and nurturing, the idea emerges screaming and naked from the designer’s brain as a fully formed game design thing. But because every project starts in a different place and needs different details filled in – and I’m going to dispense with the unborn baby metaphor here because human reproductive anatomy is disgusting – there’s no simple, systematic way to get from one to the other. Mostly, designers just keep flinging ideas at the design until the thing seems mostly done and then they just fill in the blanks and tweak the thing.

But that’s really hard. It’s hard to just generate piles of ideas and fire them off like a machine gun at your game design womb hoping some of the bullets will get lodged in there. More importantly, though, it tends to lead to designs that have a disjointed feel to them. Designs that feel like piles of random ideas that have been spackled together. And that’s if the design actually gets finished. Because the random-flinging-of-ideas approach is also really frustrating.

But there’s an easier way. There’s a step you can insert between planting the initial seed and actually designing the game thing. It involves designing around something called game feel.

All About the Feels

Game feel is hard to define in a nice, clear objective way that makes gamer nerds happy. Which is why most gamer nerds dismiss it. Gamer nerds hate anything subjective. Which is weird considering that tabletop RPGs are entertainment products and the play experience is entirely subjective. But then, gamers also have terrible social skills and all of these games are team-based, social activities. So, f$&%ed if I know why these games attract so many nerds

Game feel describes how the game feels. Mind-blowing, right? It’s that sort of revelation that only I – genius that I am – can possibly provide. But that’s really all it is. Game feel refers to the fact that whatever it is you’ve designed; it couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything else. Even if you take off all the fluff and flavor and flair.

Suppose I need some undead ninjas to unlive in my cursed monastery. I design them and put them in my game. But while I’m running the game, I never describe the undead ninjas as undead ninjas. I don’t put them in tattered ninja clothes, I don’t give them ninja swords, and I never call them undead. I just call them “humanoid monsters.” No fluff. No flavor. No flair.

At the end of the game, I ask the players to give the monsters a name based on how the fights with them felt. Or to describe the monsters in some way. If the players call them “undead ninjas” or “zombie assassins” or “kung-fu vampires” or “Bruce Lee back from the dead” then I nailed the game feel. But if I get a bunch of shrugs and awkward pauses and “umms” and “ahhs,” then the game feel just isn’t there.

Now, game feel is hard to work with it. Because it’s subjective, there’s no numbers to tweak or rules or systems to follow. It’s just about hippy-dippy bulls$&% feelings. Which, honestly, is where most of the artistry and genius of game design really comes out. And where most game design screwups happen.

For example, all of the people who complained that every class was a spellcaster in the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons were actually complaining about the game feel. Obviously, every character wasn’t a spellcaster. Fighters didn’t cast spells. They used special moves they learned through intense training which they could use a limited number of times per day. And which weren’t called spells at all.

That’s game feel right there. You can put any name or description on anything that you want. But, if that thing doesn’t feel like what you say it is, it isn’t that thing. And no one will be convinced otherwise. This is why reskinning is to game design what toasting a Pop-Tart is to actual cooking. And also why generic game systems like GURPS will never be as popular as game systems built for specific settings.

Because game feel is subjective, it also varies from person to person. If you actually do that undead ninja experiment I described above, rarely will you actually get anyone to say, “fighting that monster was like if Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was set to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.” Every player brings their own experiences to the table. And that shapes each player’s perspective. But if you say, “what if I told you that was an undead ninja,” the players should say, “oh yeah, that totally makes sense.” And if they later fight a similar-but-more-powerful beastie, they should say, “well, this must be the undead sensei.” Fluff, lore, and description can’t override game feel and it can’t establish a game feel that isn’t there. But if it resonates with the game feel, it helps to keep everyone’s experience on the same page.

And that resonance, that unification of experience all depends on having a nice, big D.

Remember MDA?

A long, LONG time ago, I wrote a couple of articles about a now twenty-year-old but still relevant and respected model of game design called the MDA model.

The idea behind the MDA model is that game designers and players approach games from two different directions. Players enjoy games because they satisfy particular entertainment needs that vary from player to player. Some players like to overcome challenges and win. Others like to play ‘let’s pretend’ in an imaginary world. Others still like to shut off their brains and hack away at something for a few hours and watch their points climb. Those entertainment needs are called aesthetics and they determine whether a player has a satisfying game experience.

Of course, the aesthetics of play are highly subjective and the relative importance of each aesthetic varies from player to player. Because they are based on each player’s individual desires and experiences.

The designer’s goal is to provide a satisfying play experience. And the easiest way to provide a fun experience is to hook electrodes up to each player’s brain in just the right spots so that, when they turn on the juice, the player will experience whatever aesthetics they are looking for. But that’s illegal. And until cybernetic neuroscience advances a bit and the equipment prices come down, it’s also impractical and dangerous. So that’s out. All a designer can do is hope that the game they design will actually produce the right responses in most players’ brains.

But the only tool that the game designer really has at his disposal is the game’s mechanics. The term ‘mechanics’ refers to all of the rules and systems and elements that make up the game. And that isn’t limited to just rules and statistics. It includes all the different systems that make up a game. Things like turn order and the existence of the GM.

So, the designer designs mechanics. When all of the mechanics interact with each other and with the players, they produce a particular game dynamic, a play experience. And hopefully, the play experience causes the players to experience the right aesthetics and everyone is happy and the designer gets rich and famous and he crushes the competition and puts all the WotC designers to work in his Siberian dice mines and then he rules the world.

Hypothetically.

The Missing D

A lot of amateur designers – and even a lot of professional designers – forget the ‘D’ between the ‘M’ and the ‘A’. D&D 4E was a great example of designers forgetting the D. Oh sure, most designers realize they are trying to design mechanics that produce certain feelings in their players’ brains. Certain aesthetics. And, that done, they just start making rules. They jump from aesthetics to mechanics.

For instance, people are always talking to me about building a mechanic that increases the feeling of exploration in the game. Having said that, they start inventing all these rules about what die rolls to make during wilderness travel based on accumulating enough ‘travel points’ to discover your location and get there safely. Or they might want to make some undead ninja for their game. So they just start filling out a stat block.

A lot of times, this leads to a disjointed mess of a design that, while mechanically really solid and balanced, just doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do at the table for reasons no one can really articulate. And that problem doesn’t show up until you actually play with it at the table.

Mechanics do not create aesthetics. Mechanics and aesthetics interact through the game’s dynamics. They interact through the experience of play. And that’s the missing step in the game design process that will take you from embryonic game design seed to actually starting a real design.

Or kick some new life into a design project that’s been lying fallow for too long.

The Missing Step

You always want to plow into your design projects with a nice, big, strong D. And that means that, as early as possible in the design process, you want to define the play experience you’re going for and how that play experience is supposed to feel. You want to figure out what it will be like to actually play with your finished design.

How do you that? Grab a blank piece of paper or open a blank document in your favorite program and write out – in prose – how you see your game or system or monster or whatever actually playing at the table. If you could watch people play with your D, what would it look like? And what would it feel like?

You want to be detailed. You want to describe as completely as possible exactly what people will be doing when they play your game. Or fight your monster. Or explore your dungeon. And you don’t want to describe it in terms of the game’s fiction but in terms of what the players will actually be doing at the table. Will they be rolling dice? Will they be making choices? What choices? How will they make those choices? And how will they feel about them?

Now, you absolutely cannot do that in one pass. So, don’t try. Instead, rewrite it a few times, expanding the details each time until you have something you can actually design. Something you can put actual mechanics too. Often, with each pass through the play description, more and more mechanical ideas will start to emerge.

Every time you finish a pass through your play description, walk away from it for a little while. Then come back and reread it. And as you reread it, ask yourself questions about it. Look for gaps. Look for problems. Look for hang-ups. And ask yourself what happens at the table when something goes wrong with your design. And only when you feel like you have a solid understanding of what it would like for a group of players to play your design should you start actually designing anything.

If you do this right, not only will it help you focus on the play experience and design mechanics to fit the game feel you’re after, it’ll also give you a roadmap. It’ll tell you all the things you need to figure out, all the mechanics you need to design, to get your thing into a finished state. And it will help you head off some – but not all – of the problems that might arise with the finished thing.

Example by Admission

All my above advice is really good. Which is why it’s such a shame that I rarely take it. While I’m proud of the fact that I do focus a lot of my attention on game feel and the play experience because I know the value of a big, strong D, I don’t normally take the step of writing and rewriting a description of the play experience I’m going for. Not on paper. I do it in my head.

And I’m wrong and that’s bad. Writing stuff down is important. Thoughts are mercurial. They are always changing. And not for the better. Thoughts change based on stupid things like your mood and the movie you happen to be watching at the moment and what you ate for breakfast. And you often don’t notice the gradual change in your thoughts over time. When you write something down, though, you commit to it. You can still change it, of course. But you have to change it deliberately and you have to have a good reason to change it.

Thoughts also get forgotten. Even if you’re a supergenius with an amazing memory like me, you forget s$&%. So, if you go away from a project for a month or six months or a year, and you kept all this stuff in your head, you’ll lose a lot of it. And design ideas for games about pretend elves are a lot more important than things like phone numbers and birthdays and your kids’ names. You can’t risk losing them.

So, I’m going to offer an example of this process right now. An example of a play experience I never wrote up. One I kept in my head. And one that has since started to fall out of my head. Which is a problem because large numbers of people are starting to gather up their torches and pitchforks because I never finished a particular project that they really, really want. And I’m going to use that play experience writeup as a road map to finish the damned project. That project is my magic item crafting system for D&D 5E.

I sat down for several hours and made several attempts to describe what it would be like at the table to actually use the crafting system I’ve envisioned. . And then I wrote down some questions that the description raised and how I would answer them. Normally, I’d incorporate the answers to those questions into a later pass of the play description, but I think it’s more useful if I show you the questions themselves. So, what you’re seeing is the very first pass description, a very late pass description – I think it was the fourth pass – and the questions that arose and how I answered them. I’m sharing this stuff pretty raw. It’ll be proofread, but not really polished. It’s as close to my private notes as I can get it.

First Pass

During the course of their adventures, the players find various materials. Between adventures, the players can use those materials to craft equipment including mundane equipment and magical items. Basically, they just trade in particular combinations of materials for the items they want.

Late Pass

There are several ways to find materials during adventures. First, the GM can place materials like treasure in the adventure. Second, the players can salvage materials from the monsters they kill. Third, the players can salvage materials from visible sources that the GM places in the adventure. Fourth, the party can forage for materials during their wilderness travels. By connecting resource acquisition to treasure, the killing of monsters, the discovery of specific locations, and wilderness travel, it keys the gathering of resources to common adventuring tasks.

Because gathering materials happens during the course of adventures, it can involve dice rolls and action resolution. Thus, to salvage materials from monsters and resource nodes, ability checks using skill or tool proficiencies are required. In addition to providing a use for existing tool proficiencies, which are woefully underused in the base game despite the number of character backgrounds that begin play with tool proficiencies, this also makes item crafting feel like a specialized skill or ability that defines a character. It also provides a bit of niche protection, which character customizers definitely appreciate. And it further reinforces the idea that gathering materials is something that is a part of adventuring. That said, the number of proficiencies used for gathering materials should be relatively small as players start the game with only a small number of proficiencies and it is difficult to acquire new proficiencies. It should not be difficult for an average-sized party to have the prerequisites needed to gather many of the different types of materials. And the materials found as part of placed treasure should make up the shortfall easily.

Materials have three descriptors. Materials have a rarity that mirrors the rarities of magic items already in the game. Materials have a form that describes what the material is actually composed of in the world. And some materials have special attributes that describe particular types of magic or effects they are imbued with. It is not necessary to name or keep track of specific materials. Materials can be tracked as a number of units of materials with particular descriptors. For example, three units of very rare, fiery mineral. However, the GM can provide specific names, particularly for items that also work as treasure or trade goods. Very rare, fiery mineral might be ruby. This approach allows GMs who want to add the detail to get specific about their materials while allowing less engaged GMs to still supply materials that feel like real objects that might be discovered to the players. Too much abstraction and the crafting system feels like a matter of just earning enough points to buy the magic item you want. Too much specificity and it becomes a burden on the GM to maintain.

The material descriptors also connect directly to the game’s existing mechanics. The rarity descriptor mirrors the magic item rarities to create a parallel language between the two systems and help connect the materials directly to the crafting of magical items. Because magic item rarities are also connected to the levels at which such items should be available, this also keys the materials to specific adventure and challenge levels, thus helping GMs determine what materials should be available in specific adventures. The form descriptors also describe the general way in which the item should be obtainable. Materials such as hide and bone would be salvaged from monsters. Plant materials would be salvaged from plant-based monsters or by foraging in the wilderness. Minerals and metals would be available from specific mining nodes. Finally, the quality descriptors should connect the materials to specific magical effects, creature types, and other pieces of the game’s mechanics and lore to provide guidance for the GM in placing the items and to provide an easy way for players to assess what a material might be useful for. Fiery materials would be found in the volcanic lairs of red dragons, for example, and would be useful for crafting flaming swords, necklaces of fireballs, and potions of fire breathing.

Every mundane and magical item has a formula that describes the materials required to craft it. The formula describes the number of units of materials with specific descriptors. For example, a flametongue sword might require at least 5 units of rare metal and at least 5 units of fiery material. Thus, the formulas involve some resource management and optimization on the part of the craftsman. For example, if a player’s only source of fiery material is also a very rare material, they may not want to use it to craft a rare magic item. This adds a minor mix-and-match element to the crafting system to emulate the idea of tinkering with materials to find optimal combinations and to also let players make reasonable substitutions. To further enhance this feeling and to make it a workable problem instead of simply a matter of spending resource points, each formula will also specify some materials that cannot be used in the creation of that item. For example, a magic sword could be made with metal, but it might not be able to incorporate any plant matter. Fire items couldn’t use ice materials. Such constraints add an extra dimension to the resource management and optimization game and make it feel more like crafting is working out a puzzle.

To make the crafting system more intuitive and systematic – and to simplify the design work and streamline the end result – the actual recipes and constraints should primarily be based on the type of magic item being constructed. All scrolls, for example, all wands, all potions, and so on would have some common rules for their formulae. This is a particularly good place for constraints on materials that can’t be used for certain objects. In the case of weapons and armor, it might be necessary to have several different sets of requirements and constraints based on general classes of items. For example, all swords might have one set of requirements, all axes another, and all bows might have another. Armor could be divided by weight or divided between metal and nonmetal armors or some combination of both. This also makes it easier for GMs to invent recipes for new magical items they create.

The actual crafting of items should be as simple as a player spending the required materials and then adding the item to their character sheet. This is done not just to expedite the crafting process, but also to emphasize the idea that crafting an item is something that one character goes off to a laboratory to do alone. Off-camera. That also allows players who enjoy the crafting puzzle to spend as much time planning their crafting activities as they want without fear of holding up the game or inconveniencing the GM.

Tool and skill proficiencies serve as a prerequisite for crafting specific types of items, but no roll is required. This again emphasizes the fact that crafting is a specialized skill that not anyone can do and makes the crafting system an opt-in activity at the player level. It also provides niche protection for players. The number of proficiencies that can be used to craft equipment should be relatively small for the same reasons noted above and should have substantial – but not complete – overlap with the proficiencies required to gather materials. Because crafting should be a major feature of a character concept, this requires players who want to go all-in on crafting to invest some character-building choices on it. And because the game is a team-based game and because everyone in the party can benefit from a craftsman in the group, that means that a party could work as a group to make sure they have the relevant proficiencies. Such as one player choosing to be proficient in miners’ tools to gather minerals and metals for another player who’s proficient with smiths’ tools.

Issue: What If the Players Need or Want A Specific Material?

There’s a problem in that the availability of materials is entirely controlled by the GM whereas its’ the players who actually determine what materials they need or want based on the items they want to make. This is already a problem in the existing system wherein magic items are only available as treasure placed by the GM. Because the GM is effectively deciding what materials are available while away from the table and the players are deciding what materials they want away from the table, communication can be difficult. While the GM should ensure a good mix of useful materials turn up in the game as treasure, other methods are needed as well.

First, it should be possible for players to buy materials. So, materials need a cost. This should be useful for getting small amounts of materials needed to complete items that the party has almost all of the materials for, but the cost should be set such that it does not become a substitute for searching for materials during play and therefore detract from the idea that materials are one of the fruits of adventures.

Second, players should be given the explicit option to communicate the need for a specific material to the GM so the GM can create a situation wherein they can acquire the material. An explicit downtime activity, action, or option should exist for researching materials. So, the player can say, “I need to research where I can find some rare metal or fiery materials.” This prompts the GM to create an encounter, side quest, or adventure based around acquiring that resource so the players can complete their item. This provides an increased sense of player agency and gives players a way to ask for a specific material without actually asking for it. It also trains players to communicate with their GM about what adventures and goals they’d like to pursue in a more general way and could improve the player-GM relationship.

Issue: What Will the Players Do with Useless Materials?

Because the GM will now be placing materials in the adventure for use with the crafting system, there is the possibility that the players will end up with undesired materials that simply take up space in their bags. Materials must, therefore, be salable. Thus, through the action of selling useless materials and buying desired materials, players can effectively convert materials from one type to another with the value of the material serving as a conversion factor. This adds another dimension to the crafting puzzle minigame.

Because the materials are effectively another form of treasure, like gems, art objects, and trade goods, this means the GM can place materials freely in treasure hordes based on their value and assume that players that are uninterested in crafting will liquidate their materials along with the gems and statuettes they discover. So, for groups that don’t opt-in – or don’t opt fully into the crafting system – this system simply becomes an alternative treasure system.

In addition, because monster corpses are sources of materials, this means that monsters that traditionally don’t carry treasure can actually have treasure in the form of pelts, ivory, and valuable reagents. While these treasures are gated behind the need for particular proficiencies, it does mean there’s a tangible, material reward for having a tool proficiency. Whereas previously, proficiency with mining tools was likely never used even once during a game, now those proficiencies provide opportunities for the party to earn more treasure.

The selling of materials should thus be an efficient use of those materials, offering the full base value of the materials. Buying materials, however, should not be efficient so as to add a cost to the conversion of materials. If players can freely convert materials, then the differences between materials are meaningless and the idea of constraints and formulae are also meaningless.

Issue: How Do the Players Know What They Can Make?

To craft an item, a player has to know that it exists and what the required materials are to craft it. In D&D 5E, most players don’t have access to the list of magic items available in the game. The magic item list is hidden away in the DMG. That means that a player-facing list of craftable items has to exist. While it’s easy enough to provide such a list, there are several problems with doing so. First, it interferes with the ability of the GM to control magic item distribution in the game. An ability that many GMs appreciate as it allows them to avoid adding items to the game that they find difficult to deal with. These items include game-changing items like wish-granting items or flight-granting items to name a few. There are also items that require substantial extra work and change the nature of a campaign, such as items that allow players to travel to alternate planes. And finally, there are items that some playgroups simply find uncomfortable, such as love potions, mind-control items, soul-imprisoning items, and items that rob players of their agency.

Second, magic items feel fantastic and wonderful partly because they are hidden away from prying player eyes. Putting a list of all magic items in front of the players will rob them of their mystique and fantasy by making them simple commodities. Relatedly, if players have access to a list of everything they can craft, it may dilute the feeling of crafting as a way for players to create things they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. By putting all the items on a list so that literally anyone in the world with the right skills and material could craft them, there’s no sense of crafting something unique. Something no one else could make.

But the nature of crafting requires either a list or a heavy degree of adjudication. And adjudication needs to be avoided both because it puts a strain on the GM and because it takes away that feeling of a wizard or smith working away alone in their lab and creating something wonderful that they then get to show the world. And further, keeping the GM out of the crafting lab also emphasizes that it is something that the players can do to enhance, equip, and customize their characters without any oversight. A compromise is needed.

First, assume that, for every magical item, there is a formula or recipe that describes how that item is made. Something a craftsman could learn or record. These don’t have to be tangible items. Just something that is assumed to exist in the world. A character must know how to craft a specific magic item in order to craft it.

Next, assume that many magic item formulae are commonly known by any trained and competent craftsman, just as there are dishes that pretty much every chef knows how to make and there are only minor variations between those items. Now, classify each magical item as either one whose formula is commonly known or one whose formula is unknown. The commonly known formulae can be put on a player-facing list with the GM getting a master list of all the items in the game.

This raises the question of how players might learn how to craft items that aren’t on the player facing list.

First, the GM can simply modify the player-facing list to make more or fewer items available or provide the players the master list at their discretion. Second, the GM could place formulae as tangible in-game rewards just like other treasures. Notes about the creation of a particular magical item could be buried in some ancient library or discovered in the notes of the necromancer the party just killed.

Third, explicit options should exist that allow players to attempt to extend their magic item lists. If the players know of a specific item or they have specific criteria for an item they’d like to create, they could conduct in-game research as part of an adventure or as a downtime activity to discover a formula. For example, they could seek the recipe for a flametongue greatsword. Or they could, as part of preparing for an adventure to slay a white dragon, conduct research into magical items that do fire damage and the GM could award them with an appropriate formula.

Fourth, it should be possible to discover a new formula through experimentation. Such experimentation could be a downtime activity similar to research. Experimentation could take two forms. First, if the player has a magic item in their possession, they could analyze it to determine the formula for making it. Experimentation should be fairly cheap and easy in that case since the item itself is already available in the game and the player merely wants to copy it. Perhaps the identify spell would allow for the distilling of a magic formula.

A more complicated form of experimentation would allow a craftsman to experiment with a particular material or set of materials in an attempt to discover the basis for a new formula. Because this will require GM adjudication, it should be costly and time-consuming, perhaps destroying the materials in question. The end result would be the granting of a new formula that could be created with the materials in question if such an item exists. If the player presents the GM with multiple materials and their experiment is a success, the GM would give a formula that could be made with that specific combination of materials and with the player’s proficiencies. That approach would award attentive players who understand the system. For example, if a player wanted to specifically discover a new fire-based weapon and recognized that weapons use certain materials like metal and wood – for a hafted weapon – and occasionally minerals, but never, say plants or hide, they could present a combination of materials that was very likely to lead to a weapon and that had the fire quality. Thus, the player gets the fun of experimentation to discover new combinations, but instead of random guesswork, can use deduction and system knowledge to influence the outcomes.

All of this stuff does increase the amount of GM involvement on the crafting side, so the rules of formula and the idea of common-knowledge items as opposed to secret items should be presented as an optional variant to the base system. But it is important enough to deserve a place as part of the core system itself.

Issue: What If the Players Don’t Want to Craft? What If They Change Their Minds?

Reframing this system as an alternate treasure system makes it something that GMs may want to implement even if the players do not want to craft magic items. In that case, as noted, the system simply becomes an addition to the treasure system already in place and the players will just end up selling rare pelts and fiery minerals along with the statuettes and necklaces and pearls they already find in their adventures. However, it is probable that players may find the lure of crafting too great once their packs are full of materials, even if all they want to do is create some healing potions or extra spell scrolls or enhance their weapons. By not taking the requisite proficiencies at character generation, they won’t be able to opt-in later. And D&D makes it costly and difficult to acquire new proficiencies. Likewise, players may want to engage with the crafting system without having to commit their character to it. So, it should be possible to pay to have an item crafted from the materials you have. Players should be able to commission specific magic items and pay a specific cost to have the item made from their materials. Because players can buy the materials needed to craft items, this effectively means this is also an alternative system for buying magic items. Thus, every magic item’s cost is the sum of the cost of the materials required to make it plus the cost of the labor.

Issue: Can Players Sell Unwanted Items? Can They Salvage Materials from Items?

The idea of commissioning and buying magic items and of swapping materials around naturally leads to the question of whether magic items can be sold or whether players can salvage materials from magic items they don’t want. Obviously, both options are entirely in keeping with the system, but neither one should be optimal. In fact, neither should be particularly efficient. They should involve tradeoffs in order to ensure the crafting system itself remains meaningful. Just as the free conversion of materials from one type to another at no cost or the free purchase of materials dilutes the constraints that make the system feel like a crafting system and not merely a different way of buying magic items with arbitrary material points, so would the free and efficient salvaging of materials. Salvaging materials from magical items should result in a loss of value akin to selling the item. And as it stands, once you get through the optional rules and the random dice rolls, the DMG system for selling magical items leads to an expected sale price of half the value of the item. Which is in keeping with the PHB rules for selling equipment.

This leads to the idea of salvaging useful materials from mundane items. D&D is pretty down on gathering the equipment from fallen foes and selling it, probably because D&D wants to avoid asking the players or the GM to do any sort of bookkeeping at all. That said, the idea of salvaging materials from mundane equipment – say, melting down a hobgoblin’s armor into common metal – actually works well in the system if we consider the fact that such materials would be the equivalent for humanoids of dragonhide and ooze fluid. This is especially helpful because it gives an easy way around the very uncomfortable idea that the party might flay the flesh from a sentient humanoid or gather its blood to make some magical trinket by providing a different way of salvaging materials from humanoids. It also expands the number of material types that could be salvaged from monsters, particularly metal.

Issue: Are There Other Uses for Materials? Can This System Do Anything Else?

With the reframing of this system as an alternative treasure system with a crafting system hanging off of it and the idea that a GM might use the system even if the players aren’t interested in crafting, it’s worth asking if materials might be useful for anything else. With materials being tied into various magical effects and keywords in the system, the obvious possibility is to allow spellcasters to use these materials as reagents that give an extra boost to their spells. For example, if you cast a fireball spell and use up a fiery material, perhaps you could reroll any 1s you roll on the damage dice. That would require an easy way to translate specific material keywords to specific spells. Not just spells that do particularly energy types of damage. For example, certain materials might be keyed to specific schools of magic and the rarity of different materials could be used to determine the levels of spells that could be enhanced.

I can also imagine a system for temporarily imbuing items with particular qualities or jury-rigged, slapdash magic items. Which leads naturally to the idea of a class keyed specifically to the crafting subsystem. Something like an alchemist or an artificer. At the very least, it would make for an interesting feat option. Perhaps a feat specifically keyed to item crafting would make it easier for someone to get the proficiencies they need to become a crafter and provide other bonuses besides. While these options could definitely enhance the system for specific types of players, they are beyond the scope of the basic system. Except maybe the reagent system for spellcasters which I quite like.