Quests for legendary treasure aren’t just a staple of fantasy gaming, they’re the roots. The foundation. If fantasy gaming was civilization – and, if the online gaming community is any indication, fantasy gaming is anything BUT civilized – if fantasy gaming was civilization, quests for legendary treasure would be the City of Ur. Or, rather, El Dorado, the City of Gold. And in the vaults of the City of the Gold – located off the Fountain of Youth Plaza – you’d find the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, the Missing Eighteen Minutes of the Nixon Tapes, D. B. Cooper’s lost ransom, Jimmy Hoffa’s body, and a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.
We LOVE quests for legendary treasure. They make great stories and great adventures. Which is NOT what this article is about.
Ha! Gotcha!
No. This article is about the beginning of my own, personal search for the Holy Grail of table-top role-playing gaming. An elusive treasure that many gamers and game designers and armchair amateur game design enthusiasts like me have been pursuing for years. It’s a treasure that many gamers are after – especially players – but that many gamers don’t even believe exists – especially GMs. It’s a treasure that we’ve caught glimpses of many times, but they always turn out to be hoaxes and forgeries. Unsatisfying crap. And every day, another hopeful treasure hunter becomes embittered with the false leads and fakes and, exhausted by the search, just gives up hope.
This article is about the quest for a crafting system in a fantasy, table-top role-playing game. One that works. And this article is the start of a journey we’re going to take together. Because – like so many people who have come before me – I think I have a lead. I think I have a map. I think I know where it is and how to get there.
Now, I tend to make big promises. And I eventually deliver on most of them. But it usually takes a lot longer than I expected to fulfil them and involve a lot more work. I’ve talked about that before. I admit it’s a problem. I’m really good at coming up with ideas and planning and scheduling and even implementing and testing and tweaking. But when it comes to finishing and polishing? Let’s just say I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner. Now, that said, I do also finish things eventually. And even when I don’t, I get most of the way there and leave people to fill in the details. Someday, I’ll have employees who will be paid to finish what I start. Ha.
The point is, I’m not promising a completely finished, polished, publishable system for D&D. That’s because it’d be too damned big and take up too much damned time. That’s not to say it won’t happen. But likely, it’d be the sort of thing that’d end up inside SOME OTHER project than hacked into D&D. At least conceptually. Thinking through how to solve a problem in one system makes it easier to build the solution into the foundation of another system. You get what I’m saying, right?
But I do want to take some time to work out what a good crafting system for a fantasy RPG would look like. Specifically, D&D. And I don’t mean conceptually. I mean mechanically. What would the rules look like? I might not do a conversion for every craftable item in D&D or every possible ingredient, but I’d like to get close enough to rules that it’d be just a matter of filling in the details and tweaking a little. In short, I don’t know how long this will take or what the final form will be. But I do have an idea of where it has to go and what it has to look like.
Why am I doing this? Frankly, because there’s a demand. I get e-mails all the time asking about crafting systems or asking whether I’ve seen so-and-so’s PDF for sale on Drive-Thru RPG or whether I’d look over someone’s draft or whatever. I hear A LOT about crafting systems. And it seems to be a feature that a lot of people want to see in D&D. It’s all divisive as hell and there’s a lot of bitterness too.
So, let me say this right now: if you’re not interested in the idea of a crafting system in D&D or don’t think it’d be useful, great. Don’t read this article or any of the follow-ups and don’t implement one. But I don’t need to hear that. I know there are people who AREN’T interested in that option. And you’re already taken care of. Because the anemic crafting rules that already exist in D&D and Pathfinder are such utter crap that they might as well not exist. Your need for not crafting is already served. Shut up.
And if you think that a good crafting system can’t be done because every execution thus far has been a steaming pile of Grade A Bat Guano (Uncommon), great also. I don’t need to hear that either. I already know the world is divided into two types of people: the ones who tell everyone what’s impossible and the ones who are too busy accomplishing things to listen. In short, if you think it can’t be done, go sit in the corner and don’t do it. Just get out of my way because I’m busy doing it.
Comments are for useful people with useful opinions, not for people who piss and moan about other people inventing other options for their own games and for people who think everything that can be done has already been done.
Okay. Ground rules out of the way. Let’s talk about crafting.
Why Crafting Always Goes So Wrong
Very few table-top RPGs have managed to implement good crafting rules. In fact, I really can’t think of a game that I would say handled crafting well. And that’s kind of weird. Because crafting is a natural fit for fantasy adventure games. And, these days, crafting systems get crammed into pretty much every video game. Hell, there are some video games that are nothing but crafting. There’re entire genres that are nothing but crafting. And, for the people who like that kind of thing, there are some really great systems out there. So why can’t table-top RPGs do it?
Now, I can’t speak for every RPG out there. And even though I can speak for a lot of them, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to limit myself to looking at D&D and its derivatives. And the problem there – the major problem with making crafting work – is that it’s part of a pile of “afterthought rules.” That is, if you read about the developments of the major editions of D&D, there’s certain rules that the designers always seem to put off and say “well, we’ll figure out how the core system works and then we’ll work out the other stuff later.” Mutliclassing, for example. And magic items. Pretty much everything that isn’t character generation or combat.
When you get down to it, though, I can understand why crafting ends up being an afterthought. See, crafting is something that appeals to certain gamers, but not to everyone. Unlike combat – which is a core part of the D&D experience – not everyone is going to want to engage with crafting rules. But then, D&D also has a problem dealing with the issue of core vs. non-core vs. optional gameplay elements and I could write an entire separate freaking article about that. I mean, they stated their core modes of play are “combat, exploration, and role-playing.” What does that even mean?! And how the hell did that guide their design? What decisions about the game did that statement actually drive? And how can you even see that in the mechanics of the game? What the motherloving hell is an exploration mechanic? Is inspiration really as central to the game as combat? REALLY?
Back to crafting. I’m not saying crafting should be part of the core gameplay. It should be optional. It should be something players can engage with if they want to and ignore if they want to. But it can’t be an afterthought. Because crafting affects the core of the game, right? I mean, you can do all the careful mechanical balancing stuff, right and decide exactly how many spells characters have access to on a daily basis and their damage outputs and their healing capacity and all that crap, but if you then build an optional rule that allows players to break all of that, well, you done screwed up. Big time.
In the broadest terms, crafting is just a way of acquiring and customizing equipment. So, at the very least, the crafting system has to tie into the equipment system. And the equipment system includes the magic item system, right? And that also connects to the treasure system, right? I mean, treasure is just another way of acquiring and customizing equipment, right? It’s all connected together.
And that’s the problem. D&D has this very carefully balanced and controlled system for building and customizing characters in terms of inherent powers and abilities. That is, there’s a progression for class abilities. But the balanced and controlled system for customizing characters in terms of equipment is pretty piss poor. It’s almost nonexistent. As I’ve discussed before, there’s only a vague hint of a magic item progression and there’s no progression for mundane equipment. Beyond raw numbers and a few, very minor keywords, there’s nothing to distinguish one weapon from another. Or one piece of armor from another. And once you get beyond magical items that give a numerical bonus, well, it’s a haphazard mess.
What’s really weird is that there’s already a very carefully crafted progression of non-numerical abilities in the game. Well, there’s a progression. I don’t think it was crafted with care. But it’s there. It’s spells. A flying carpet is the equivalent of a mass flying spell. If it takes a 7th-level character to cast a fly spell on the whole party, then a flying carpet should be a seventh level magical item. And if that’s the case, then it should be craftable by a 7th-level artisan.
Honestly, the real problem with D&D is that there’s only one progression built into the game. You gain XP, acquire class levels, and get new powers. All other progressions have been gradually removed in the name of simplicity. Your only option for customization is your class build. Especially now that feats are such a small part of the game. Sure, it’s approachable. But it’s also simple. And restrictive. And it reinforces the idea that you must have certain archetypes to have certain abilities. If you don’t bring a divine character, for example, you don’t get healing. No spell-caster, no elemental damage.
So, it’s not just that crafting is an afterthought. It’s an afterthought of an afterthought.
And it leads to other problems. For example, the fact that literally every class now has a giant slate of magical or supernatural abilities and weird resource management mechanics and stuff? That’s precisely because some classes – magical classes – are inherently more versatile and customizable – and therefore more interesting – than others. The wizard will always be more interesting than the fighter because the wizard gets to choose from dozens of new abilities every other level. It never occurred to them that equipment – and skills – should be to fighters and rogues what spells were to wizards. The way they customize their characters and gain not just more numbers, but new abilities. 4E tried to do a lot of this, but it got buried under all of the problems with that system.
Ultimately, the reason crafting systems fail in D&D is because they need to hang off a core part of gameplay that doesn’t exist.
Why Craft Anyway?
“But Angry,” you’re probably saying, “so what? Does D&D need another progression system? Why not just put everything into the class progression? Equipment progression makes the game more complex. The GM would have to dole out equipment and keep everything in balance? And crafting on top of that? That’s even more complex. And crafting is only interesting to the player who’s doing it. Why make the rest of the players sit through that?”
Well, you raise a good point in your pissing and moaning, you whiny naysayer. Not your actual points, mind you. You’re wrong there. But what you’re at least asking the right question: what would it add to the game?
I know people want a crafting system. Well, I know players want a crafting system. They tell me all the time. And I want a crafting system. So, there’s a demand. But, if we’re going to add a system to the game, we do need to understand why anyone would want it. And it’s especially important for you to understand it if you’re not the sort of person who wants it. Otherwise, how will you deliver a game that appeals to anyone who isn’t you?
So why? Why do people want a crafting system? Why do people want anything? Because there’s some kind of reward. And there’s two basic kinds of rewards: extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards.
Let’s start with intrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards are those that are valuable for their own sake. They have some inherent quality that makes them desirable, in and of themselves. Now, we’re going to consider a crafting system to be a system whereby a player can acquire or customize their character’s equipment. And, when I say equipment, I’m referring to both permanent stuff like swords and armor, and temporary items like potions and consumables. But, I’m also going to add the caveat that it has to be distinct from your class abilities. And that distinction is important.
See, Pathfinder has gotten around the crafting problem – the problem being the crafting system in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder are so needlessly complicated, costly, and unrewarding that nobody uses them – Pathfinder has gotten around the crafting problem by just inventing classes whose class abilities are skinned as crafting. D&D did a few of those two. Classes like the Alchemist and the Artificer are just spellcasters whose spell list is called crafting. It’s not quite the same thing. And the reason is because of the intrinsic rewards of crafting.
See, crafting allows for a level of customization that lies outside the choice of a character archetype. It’s a different axis of character customization. Kind of like how skills and feats used to do that. Except that many feats were only useful for certain classes and the generalist feats weren’t that great. And skills are married to class and background. And unlike background choices, which are very limited and simply serve as a modifier to an archetype, customized equipment is completely unique. There are lots of fighters in the world. And lots of dwarven fighters. And many of them are guild artisans. Because those are archetypes. That’s the point. But only one dwarven fighter artisan in the world chose to make this particular sword or axe or whatever.
From a level of pure creative expression, the open-endedness of crafting is part of the appeal. Choosing your race, background, class, and build is just answering a series of multiple-choice questions with a very limited number of options. But building your own custom equipment loadout is different. Oh, sure, there’s still only going to be a limited number of choices. There’s only so many different types of armor and weapons and so many modifiers and abilities you can add, but there’s a vast explorable space there in the sheer number of options. If you have 15 different weapon choices and each weapon has, say, two different slots for modifiers, and there’s 20 different modifiers, that’s 6,000 different weapon variations. Or 5,700 if you can’t double up on the modifiers. If you have the same number of armor choices and then add in all sorts of other equipment, you quickly balloon up to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of possibilities.
Beyond the creative expression aspect, there’s also a discovery aspect. See, I referred to the total number of options as a vast “explorable space.” And that’s because, even if every option is spelled out on a list and you just mix and match components to create your weapon, there’s still the opportunity to explore. Mixing and matching combinations of abilities and special powers – at different power levels – and combining different equipment matchups with different class abilities for different synergies? That offers a lot of potential to fool around and tweak and tinker. Exploring the system and finding really cool combinations that work for your character? That’s a form of discovery that a lot of players enjoy.
Purely intrinsically, you satisfy players who are seeking a way to express themselves in their character and the players who like to explore the game mechanically and figure out the best ways to do things. And that’s not even mentioning the players who just want the experience of playing a craftsman or self-sufficient adventurer because that’s the fantasy they are after.
And that, of course, plays into the extrinsic rewards. Those are the rewards that are valuable because of what they do. In this case, custom equipment is rewarding because of whatever it allows you to do. A flaming sword is cool because it does bonus fire damage. Armor that protects against poison is valuable because it nullifies poison. Duh.
Now, normally, in D&D, those sorts of extrinsic rewards are limited to class abilities – which means that choosing a class actually locks you into a subset of all possible abilities and powers – or the magic items that the GM chooses to dole out. Or roles randomly. But if you’re able to select your own custom equipment, you have the power to select your own abilities and to do so without being limited to a class list. That means that you’re better able to prepare for challenges, cover some of the weaknesses in your class or race, or enhance your strengths.
All told, allowing players to somehow build custom equipment offers a great degree of creative expression, a chance for discovery, and the ability to prepare for upcoming challenges. And, call me crazy, that list sounds pretty close to what I might call the core engagement of a role-playing game.
But, Is It Crafting?
So far, though, all I’ve argued for is some system for customizable equipment. Or just a really complicated equipment list. Wouldn’t that fit the bill? Well, yes. Actually. And now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. It’s not actually the crafting that’s important. That is, except for the fantasy seekers and expressive for whom the in-world archetype of “craftsperson” is important, it doesn’t matter whether the character is the one building the equipment. I suspect that a lot of the people who want a crafting system actually just want a player-controlled equipment customization system. They want their equipment choices and magical item choices to matter. And they want to actually have those choices. And they want those to choices to lie outside the scope of their character archetype.
The thing is, once you have a customizable equipment system, it’s actually very easy to lay a crafting system over it. That is, the method by which characters can create their equipment instead of buying it or finding it is pretty easy to build into the system. Because making equipment and buying equipment can be exactly the same. And they are the same as gaining levels.
Look at it this way: during the course of an adventure, the players overcome challenges and gain XP. The players are able to periodically “trade in” that XP for a new character level. And that character level comes with some new abilities, some perks. The more XP they trade in, the more levels they gain, and the better the abilities they acquire. Effectively, XP is just a currency for acquiring levels.
Well, that’s just what buying equipment is. During your adventures, you find money. Periodically, you “trade in” that money for new or upgraded equipment. And that equipment comes with some new abilities, some perks. The more money you trade in, the more powerful the abilities and perks. Equipment is basically just a spell list that isn’t tied to a specific class. And it’s gated behind gold instead of XP.
“But Angry,” I hear you whining, “then GMs will have to go back to the days of tracking wealth by level and doling out exactly the right amount of gold for levels. How will we do all that terrible, horrible math?” Tracking? Do you TRACK XP? Or do you just hand out XP as it’s earned? “You killed a goblin, you get 25 XP.” It’s as simple as that. Why is handing out wealthy any more complicated? I will never understand why GMs make such a big deal about “if your adventure has 2,000 XP worth of monsters per character, make sure it has 500 GP per character.” It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Now, once you’ve figured out how to handle the whole “buying custom equipment” thing and you’ve gotten over having to do math like “if one goblin has 10 GP, how much gold do four goblins have,” now you’ve got a space for crafting. Because crafting is simply an alternative to spending gold on equipment. Mechanically, it’s a different way of getting to the same place. If buying custom equipment is the equivalent of paying to commission a particular item, crafting equipment cuts out the middleman. How would you express that, mechanically?
… I’m not going to tell you. Yet. I have some answers, but they have to wait until the next time I revisit this topic. Because the point of this article was just to lay the ground work. To identify why a crafting system is even worth pursuing and what rewards it might offer. And, in doing that, we actually discovered that it isn’t really crafting that’s missing from the game at all. It’s actually a better, more robust equipment system. And we need that before we build anything on top.
Because a craftsman is only as good as his materials. Or something like that.
I enjoyed your analysis for crafting system, one thing I believe is a problem of the crating systems that you did not cover is that designers seems to turn the game into a reality simulator and forget about the game part of RPG. So you end up with crafting that takes forever and involves way too many dice rolls. You might need to spend 15 or more days of downtime to craft something and roll a dice everyday to track progress… so if the pace of the campaign offers little or no downtime at all crafting can’t be done… and, in my opinion, it also makes crafting overly complex and boring.
If we look at video games, what do we see ? Crafting systems are fast, you want a new armor ? Spend the materials and its done instantly, the focus is placed on getting the materials, plans, whatever and that can be alot of fun. In my campaign there is little downtime so crafting time is reduced alot, to a point that makes no real life sense but the characters are heros who cast spells, slays dragons and do tons of incredible stuff, why not add inhumane craft speed ?? There is more to it, but this alone solved alot of problems with crafting.
I’m really looking forward to your crafting systems
You’re right, but it’s also more complicated than you are saying. There’s something very weird about the “time” aspect. I’ll leave you to figure it out. Until I get to it later.
The time part is what really irks me. I like to use every day of the ingame month and the thought that “you need one ingame week to make a potion” is just nonsensical and has no place in these games
D&D does have one reason for crafting rather than commissioning, even if it’s not a great one – crafting an item effectively substitutes XP for GP when buying the item. So the boring solution would be to just tweak the numbers so that taking a craft feat is actually a discount and not just a trade between the two currencies. That way, even if you can commission any item you want, a craftsman in the party will do it cheaper.
But it would be nice to have an expressive, at-the-table component as well. We want a reason to have a scene where you reforge Roy Greenhilt’s family sword rather than buying a new +5 sword off the rack. Something like your Herbalism hack where the herbalist can whip up a cure for poison when the party needs it. The problem there is that crafting isn’t really a portable skill – the herbalist can be foraging as you travel, the blacksmith can’t carry his hammer and anvil with him. It’s always something that happens once the adventure is over.
Maybe magic items can be “attuned” to you in some way, so there are certain things that can only be custom-made instead of bought? Or maybe a Diablo-ish socket system that lets you make certain tweaks to your weapon on demand? Or some sort of “minor crafting” that lets the wizard pull some one-shot items out of his pocket that he happened to be tinkering with?
I did something similar with the magic items in my game. I made all weapons and armor mundane, but magical gems can be added to them to make the whole thing magical. So, gems of frost or acid, gems of resistance, etc. Each of these can be swapped out of the weapon or armor as needed. I made them all give a flat +1 to hit for weapons and no bonuses for armor to keep the AC from getting too high.
With a price sheet modified from the sane magic item price list (google it), I lowered a lot of the prices when I removed the extra +’s. My group enjoys it and it allows for some variety similar to the old 3.5 magic item compendium’s gems. It’s something that I’m going to expand on when I move to Genesys in the next campaign.
I think pocket crafting would be more like tinkering or repair. But for repair to be a thing equipment has to break, which I do as a GM all the time; but thats a personal stylistic choice and shouldnt be an enforced thing. I mean unless we want to get into like equipment durabilities or something dumb.
One thing I would like to point out about levelling analogy, is that D&D class levelling system is very restrictive in how it is applied by design. It IS possible to add dozens of various options to take number of builds into thousands and more, and maybe even make some of them viable. But there still will be demand for ‘crafting’ (or another) system, because of 2 qualities of exp levelling – it is passive and exists outside gameworld.
Passive, meaning it happens passively regardless of player actions and choices. Basic assumption being, you do any stuff – you get exp, and occasionally level. There is no such thing as going ‘grinding’ for exp on one hand, on the other, not getting exp while doing interesting stuff is also impossible, or at least supposed to be.
Outside gameworld, meaning it is not supposed to have any logical explanation at all. People randomly get physically tougher and magically learn new abilities they never knew they had overnight. Because they accumulated a certain amount of unexplainable cosmic currency. Nevermind those abilities may be 100% not they stuff they did, they still get it for their ‘experience’.
A perfectly normal use of a material-crafting system, for example, would be for a party to go on a quest to gather a certain rare material, and then find a blacksmith better then the one they have in the party, to forge Sword of Awesomeness +2 (or Armor of Rejecting Awesomeness +2) for everyone in the party. But such thing is fundamentally impossible inside class-levelling structure. A direct analogy would be, party going to do specific time-efficient exp grind, and then find and convince a trainer(s) higher level than them to give them all a level.
Unless of course, it is all EXPECTED by designers to be handled by DM fiat. But in that case, what is the reason DM should waste ton of their precious time learning quirks of a rules-heavy system and trying to supplement its shortfalls with his own (probably subpar) game design, because actual game designers were too lazy to actually design a game?
“People randomly get physically tougher and magically learn new abilities they never knew they had overnight. Because they accumulated a certain amount of unexplainable cosmic currency.”
That is pretty much exactly how it is working in my current D&D game only it’s not random, it’s from killing things and taking that cosmic currency.
but my game is also pretty goofy with the idea the people are kind of aware of the rules of the gamist world.
Another intrinsic reward for crafting is the feeling of accomplishment of making something yourself over simply buying or finding it. “I made this!”
I can see gating different magical effects behind rare materials (gems, etc.) that the GM can dole out at appropriate times. So instead of finding a frost sword, maybe the players find a gem of frost, gaining the ability to infuse any item with a frost effect. And if they’re seeking a particular effect, they can set out on an adventure to find the special components needed. This way, the GM can easily and transparently set the pace of the options opening up, while the players still get the choice of how to use them.
This is how I would handle crafting. Instead of “just another way to make plate armor”, have it as a way for the players to get to rare items.
Crafting was in the original game; see Men and Magic, page 7. But the original game was also designed as a campaign; _time_ was a far more important feature, structurally (whether it was clunky or not, ten minute terms, etc) and in wound recovery (1 HP per day) time mattered in a way that it doesn’t matter in D&D 5e unless the DM puts a bit of effort into it. If you want to insert a crafting system, I’ll suggest that it needs to go hand in hand with a “time flows” system to complement it. As currently written, D&D 5e is a whole bunch of “instances” of D&D loosely attached to each other. (A significant exception is the Tomb of Annihilation published adventure, that has a bit of a ticking clock element to it).
You nailed one particular point nicely: the carry over of crafting from video and CRPG formats into the expectation in this edition of D&D (not to mention 3/PF’s mechanical effort with WBL approach).
I’ll be interested to see what you come up with, and how you put in checks and balances so that crafting doesn’t create more _overhead_ than it does satisfaction. The current D&D 5e crafting outline (and that’s what it is, a skeleton that needs to be fleshed out) is good enough: but I have experience from a bunch of previous editions and a few other similar games. For the newcomer, I can see your point on its “add on” character.
Lastly: crafting and public play. For those who do the public play/adventurer’s league, crafting has the potential to be messy, but AL tends to have its own subset of rules so maybe that’s not a problem you have to address in your quest for this grail.
Good hunting.
Solution to the time conundrum that I am considering is to require characters to spend time on training when they level up. Then they can either spend time crafting or leveling up. It is a half-measure because it relies on transfering a resource (time) from one progression system to the other (as the old XP costs of creation did).
Unrelated thought:
The crafting systems with dice rolls are different from just buying the items because they are gambling. Players bets their resources (time, XP, gold etc.) on their Crafting roll. So players who engage with the system want to stack the odds as much in their favor as they can.
That leads to problems where someone who invests a lot of their build into crafting has to get good return but without becoming ‘OP”.
DnD5e has a nice equaliser there with static proficiency bonus and very cheap entry cost of getting a tool proficiency. Many character get tools as an afterthought, but that means almost anyone can create items. If you get more invested in a crafter build you cannot get better at one tool (no skill points), you can get more tools. You can increase the flexibility of your crafting but not the power. (Ignoring expertise here). So leaving the tool proficiencies as is could be a good choice in a theoretical not-shit D&D crafting system.
Possible way of going about crafting is that buying ingredients and crafting an item is almost equal in costs to just buying the items. The monsters drop ingredients as loot. But appropriate ingredients discount the item. You could buy ingredients to create a Staff of Fire Magi (1200 gold) for 1000 gold. Or you could spend 500 gold and Heart of Elemental worth 250. Here you would have to explicitly state that it is gamist system so that the player doesn’t want to buy the Heart on a local market.
Long and rambling stream of consciousness. Let’s see if it survives moderation.
Ah, old AD&D 1e training to level up. Some folks like it, some don’t. Whatever works at your table. I guess while one PC is training, another can be crafting. Sounds workable.
I see in my crystal ball an assortment of exciting and tasty new spells for the crafter-on-the-go! “Heward’s Hasty Hammer”, “Find Forge”, “Elemental Assistant”… the possibilities are endless!
I’d rather go for a sockets-and-gems system so anyone could customize their weaponry without having to find a damn anvil
I like sockets-and-gems, and it definitely makes things easier, no question. Mostly I was just making a joke about some of the goofy spells D&D has to avoid the tedious parts of adventuring. Crafting is a prime opportunity to expand upon that tradition 🙂
This hit the nail on the head for me. Usually I find crafting systems in video games tedious, because having to learn all those recipes and collect the components is just busywork. It’s worse than exposition, because I’m not even learning things about the world or the story, it’s just chores before I can get back to the fun of the game. However, once I have things to play around with I LOVE customizing my character and equipment, especially in small bursts. There is a huge value to expression and discovery for some players when making and upgrading their characters, especially when those choices matter in the game later on.
If anyone’s interested in an idea for a simple way to make some basic customization work, one of the house rule systems I ran a while back was a magic gem structure, sort of like a materia system. Mundane items were mundane, but masterwork items had slots (typically 2 per item). You could slot gems into your weapons or armor (or accessories). So a fire gem in your armor granted you fire resistance, but in your weapon it added a little extra fire damage, or in a necklace it might give you a 1/day effect like Fire Bolt or something (I used item value as a gate for abilities like this). In the background I had “ancient technologies” which were really just magic items as we know them – premade, unchangeable. These were generally more powerful and more rare than my gem system, and the players were made aware early on that society had lost the making of such items. Seemed to work out pretty well and satisfied that want for customization. Also kept me on my toes for combat designs – when the players can easily swap gems and change their damage type or resistances playing with monster synergies is important.
This was a very simplistic system that I tried to shoehorn into the existing system with as minimal a disruption as possible, so I’m looking forward to what Angry does because a more robust equipment upgrade path is a fantastic idea.
The simplest way to make this work that occured to me after reading this, is to make the vast majority of equipment upgrades applicapable to gear that martial characters typically use, while casters have less to work with/more expensive. Then systems such as potions and herbs, and making sure it somewhat lines up with the gold level alloted.
Interesting, I’m building a world at the moment with the aim of running a campaign with my regular group of players, they would be very into something like this. It ties into the ‘there are many guns like it, but this one is mine’ thing. Look forward to the future posts on this. Also using your making travel interesting article, thought that was great.
Interesting.
I always had a soft spot for 2e’s (was it 2e?) concept of creating magic items with weird things like ‘the breath of the wind’ or ‘the roots of a mountain’.
To me crafting is not something mechanical to be done between adventures, it’s the adventure itself.
A knight wants a fiery sword? Go find the sword that the first knight of your name wielded. Imbue it with the soul of a fire elemental and forge it in the depths of a volcano. Instead of finding a magic item at the end of the adventure, make creating the item the point of the adventure(s).
Now admittedly I’m not sure this provides the customisation that Angry alludes to. It could though: “what item do you want to make?” “Great I’ll go create your supernatural shopping list”.
I think what you are saying here is unnecessarily limiting, but I also think the reason for that is a really important one that needs to be brought out. There are really two different things that a magic item can be:
On the one hand, you have magic items as almost technology. In the fluff, the secrets of crafting magic items are well known. They may be expensive, but they are still readily available from the right people, and they are a regular part of the world. Magic items become tools that the players should reasonably be assumed to have access to at appropriate levels, and the GM builds his monsters under the assumption that parties of level X will have appropriate levels of magic equipment.
Then on the other hand, you have magic items as wonders. This is something more like what you’re getting at. Each magic item is unique, and may require special adventures to find the components to craft it. Magic items become unique rewards, things that bend the rules and make players feel special and extraordinary.
Now, either of these systems can work just fine for a game. You can even combine them: Perhaps any wizard of appropriate level can craft a +1 sword, but to go any higher requires special quests to retrieve unique components. Perhaps potions and scrolls can be crafted freely, but permanent items necessitate jumping through hoops.
But the point is, you have to know the difference, you have to plan for it, and if possible you have to be able to accommodate both sides of the issue. Because there are players who like magic items as technology, and players who like magic items as wonders. And if you’re going to build any kind of general system, it should cater to both.
My issue with crafting as adventure hook is that it assumes the party (or GM) didn’t already have an adventure in mind.
It also assumes that the rest of the party are on board with one player’s quest for crafting.
If you’re in the middle of an exciting campaign that everyone’s invested in, you don’t want to derail the whole thing by dragging the entire party off on some personal tangent. Especially if there’s some kind of impending doom you urgently need to prevent.
I feel the same way when people suggest any problem be solved by turning it into a plot hook, whether it be retrieving your soul from the afterlife or tracking down an ancient mystic to teach you a new class feature. Too often I see the phrase “This isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity for adventure!”, but in my experience it’s just not a viable solution and I don’t see people argue this enough.
Very excited to see what you come up with!
I’ve found it very tricky to properly implement alchemy in tabletop RPGs, because the idea of alchemy incompasses a lot of different situations, and mechanics could only support some of those, while failing at others.
First, I’ve made alchemy-based resource minigame. The way I’ve designed it allowed players to optimize the ingredients they had to get specific potions of particular qualities (with this set of ingredients you can brew potent Health potion and mediocre Waterbreathing potion, OR weak Healing potion, strong Poison and dangerously toxic Levitation potion, OR maybe something else, if you make the right combination). The puzzle-solving process was amusing, but felt rather dry and mechanical, and didn’t help fleshing out the world or the characters.
Then, in Blades in the Dark, I’ve tried crafting as a “get anything you wish, custom-built for you” ability. It’s very clever and adds both uniqueness to crafting character and colour to the world. But the hand-waiviness takes out the whole idea of mastering rules to earn power (which is considered powergaming when you do that to your character, but feels very in-character when you treat alchemy this way).
Finally, there are checklist-based systems (like Fighter’s Signature weapon in Dungeon World, or Sanctuary in Urban Shadows) which, despite being restrictive, feel surprisingly rewarding as a character-customziation option.
I would judge crafting systems on following criteria:
– it is convenient to use at the table, meaning it doesn’t make all players except the crafter do nothing for half on hour, and doesn’t heap a few hours worth of homework on the crafter.
– it says something about a character (you can create unique things that reflect your character’s personality).
– it says something about the world (each area offers different ingredients and crafting opportunities which reflect this area’s theme and mood).
– it gives you set of knowable laws that you can explore, master and exploit, just like laws or physics or whatever.
The “table convenience” criteria is far and away the most important criteria for me, as high table cost frustrated my previous efforts to allow crafting. The player(s) with crafting skills were constantly going out of their way to search for – and dragging everyone else along to the detriment of everyone else’s engagement.
But your third criteria seems to imply that gathering (location-specific) ingredients is essential. Doesn’t that necessarily impose those kinds of costs? Or do you have thoughts on how to achieve those in tandem?
For my part, I like the concept of “downtime activities” in principle, but think they’re rather mundane in their current form. I’d be most interested in crafting rules that were one component of a complete “downtime” rewrite that also offered other equally heroic options (e.g., training new abilities, earning worthwhile sums of gold, managing an estate or business, etc.). This could serve a similar role to the “metagame” of MtG – a second set of challenges and tradeoffs for players to explore and optimize in their own time as deeply (or superficially) as they prefer.
Signing up for email…
It would be nice if we could subscribe to comments without having to post a comment ourselves.
Perhaps that’s the point, to encourage more comments, but sometimes I feel like I just don’t have anything useful to contribute, and I don’t want to tarnish the otherwise insightful comment section.
You can use a RSS aggregator to subscribe to the article and comment feeds.
I don’t understand what that is. :/
For example the extension “RSS Feed Reader” on Google Chrome (it’s what I’m using) : When you’re browsing theangrygm.com it shows a little ‘+’ sign. Click it and you get to add two RSS feeds to the extension : one for the articles and one for the comments. Then you’ll be notified whenever an article or comment is posted.
How this works : whenever an article or comment is posted, the website automatically updates an XML file with a new entry. Your aggregator wil periodically check all the feeds it subscribed to to see if this file has changed. If it has, then it will take note of it and notify you.
When designing a board game, it’s often useful to think about what the major ‘commodities’ are in the game. Sometimes they’re literal commodities, like the wood, ore, and sheep from Settlers of Catan. More often the key commodities are at least sort of abstract, like “cards in hand” and “number of actions” and “number of buys available” from Dominion. What make them commodities is that you can trade them off against each other, exchanging wood for ore, or cards for actions. In games that have well-designed commodities, you can win the game or at least gain a useful advantage by finding ways to reliably trade the commodities off against each other at a profit. If you can trade 1 wood -> 2 ore, and then trade 2 ore -> 3 sheep, and then trade 2 sheep -> 1 wood, you now have a free sheep that you were able to ‘earn’ just by trading stuff around in a circle.
I think there’s a good case to be made that in D&D, the commodities are time, XP, and GP. You spend your time killing monsters or fulfilling quests, which earns you XP and GP, and then you use XP to level up, which helps you get more done with each day, and you use GP to buy better equipment, which also helps you get more done with each day. When you buy equipment, you are basically trading GP for time.
When you craft equipment, you are cutting out the middle step in that process. Instead of moving from time -> GP -> equipment -> time, you just move from time -> equipment -> time.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but you need some kind of mechanic that stops the positive feedback loop from getting out of control. If you have an army of golems or skeletons or enchanted badgers that are constantly manufacturing new tools for you, which in turn can be used to make more golems, then your power level can become awkwardly high in very little time.
The power gap that should exist between fighters and wizards because of lore but often doesn’t because of game balance always irritated me. The two were always in conflict. The idea I like, that echos your idea of equipment being a warriors advancement, changes how magic can be expressed. I like the idea that everyone has magical talent, and those unskilled in casting can instead channel it through weapons and armor. The character is the source of any magical effects, the equipment only provides the channel. Explains why mages can never have the best armor, they are using their magical energy in spells and can’t fully devote their energy to their equipment, and gives a way fighters can challenge mages. The advantage of a mage is versatility and area effects at the expense of time to cast a spell and vulnerability from lack of armor. The advantage of a fighter is direct damage and defense.
Bricks weigh more than feathers, but a pound of bricks weighs the same as a pound of feathers.
Level is an absolute measure of mechanical power.
Even if wizards are canonically more powerful than fighters, a level 15 fighter would be exactly as powerful as a level 15 wizard, it might just be that high-level wizards are more common than high-level fighters in a given setting.
Besides, I personally prefer when the power gap doesn’t exist in lore either.
In my ideal fantasy world, legendary warriors can be just as effective as legendary mages, capable of seemingly inhuman feats that mere commoners could not dream of. Fighters and Wizards being unbalanced simply suggests a lack of imagination for what Fighters can do.
This is why 3.5e Fighters didn’t have “mundane” abilities, they had “extraordinary” abilities which may or may not defy real-world physics without being classified as “magical”.
My favorite crafting system to date has been from Starfinder, due to its utter simplicity.
All items have an associated level. If you have a number of ranks in an item’s associated crafting skill that is equal or higher than the item’s level, you can make the item. No roll is required, and it takes you four hours to make it, two hours if you have 5 additional ranks, 1 hour if you have 10 additional ranks.
You must also have enough materials to make it, which come in the form of UPBs (Universal Polymer Base). These are small, mass produced multi-functioning components, which can be altered to become diodes, braces, wires, microchips, etc. Each UPB costs 1 credit, so if you have UPBs equal to the item’s cost, you can create the item.
You can even pull UPBs out of items you find, allowing to craft new items while you’re out away from civilization. The number of UPBs you can pull from an item is equal to the price you would sell it for, meaning scrapping an item right away nets you just as much UPBs as if you’d sold the item.
I’m excited to see your take on this, but I have one particular worry that I’m excited to see your solution to. Crafting as you seem to have described it is a mechanically “crunchy” affair with lots of individual overlapping features and choices, which seems really good for players like me who really enjoy that sort of deep customization. I’m just afraid that if this is supposed to be a core progression mechanic like class levels, it’ll effectively lock “beer and pretzel” players who don’t want to deeply explore the game’s options out of the game. I’m really looking forward to seeing how you deal with this, because it’s stumping me.
I believe Angry has already taken this into account.
I could be wrong, but I gather from what he says in this article that he intends to make the crafting system wholly optional since not everyone will be interested (or even have the requisite proficiency), and he explicitly didn’t want everyone at the table waiting for a single player to craft something.
I’m thinking it will end up being more for customisation than for power. If you don’t care about crafting, then you can buy equipment from a shop instead (or just use whatever loot you find, which in turn can be tailored by the GM if nobody wants to do any shopping).
Crafting brings up a related issue with D&D, weapons. As a fighter or monk I loke to customize my weapons, but D&Ds weapons are a poorly designed afterthought, and you’re going to have to build off of a flawed foundation to make crafting weapons not suck. The main problems with weapons I think have to do with only a small few weapons being viable, and all of them being boring mechanically.
If the crafting scheme allows the player to (for a cost) take that ‘boring mechanically’ weapon and customize it (someone above mentioned gems/sockets as a rough template) does that solve your problem?
Very much looking forward to this series as it’ll touch on a lot of things I’ve been pondering the past couple years.
To prevent the game from lagging, Crafting needs to be a mechanic that happens largely off screen, requiring little in the need of dicerolls or GM supervision. This is not to say that there can’t be some attention paid to it during the session, but requiring the game to stop every time the blacksmith wants to patch maile or make a sword is asking too much. I think a good template is wizard spellbooks. They passively learn some spells over time, but they can also actively work on getting new spells without it being terribly disruptive to game flow.
I’ve seen a lot of advice in the past about making crafting into its own quest, rather than having it be a series of rolls, but I think these actually share similar problems. While a group is likely to entertain the tangent for an important plot point, they won’t want to sit through it for every item the crafter wants to add to their toolbox . Imagine if someone tried to haggle over prices for every healing pition and inn stay, it drive you nuts.
If you have the fantasy of being a crafter you ideally want two things, a) to be crafting all the time b) to craft significant upgrades to your character and their party. I think it’s important for any crafting systems to facilitate these two needs WITHOUT having them stack on top of eachother. A character who is constantly prodicing powerful enhancements will throw the game out of wack just as surely as a fighter with a broken feat combination or a wizard with an overpowered spell.
A passive system that worked something like ” every week you spend with your toolkit, you produce one (potion/stack of ammunion/basic item)” with modifiers that allowed for the shortening of time, or the production of multiple items simultaniously could fufill the “always crafting” need without much fuss.
To fufill the need for big crafters, make them keep track of projects. Materials put aside, insights made, days spent successfully experementing. Tally these up till they have enough (say maybe 10?) And THEN give them their new toy. This would force them to split their attention between competing interests and make a great use of downtime/ when other characters have stuff to dl in town.
I always imagined a good pen and paper crafting system would work similar to how crafting works in the witcher series.
No apology, but just allowing my brain to splat onto the post here unrefined…
I’m wondering how efficient it would be for a crafting mechanic that operates like Hit Dice, where you get so many [craft] dice per character level that you can spend during [appointed time] and just have to hit a target DC to obtain [craft recipe].
Would solve the time constraint maybe? Maybe not?
I think that this makes a good tradeoff between effort and realism. One thing I would recommend is that you’re required to have the appropriate materials on hand. This wouldn’t be a big deal for mundane items in regular campaigns, but if it’s a survivalist adventure or a magic item, players might have to go to some lengths to obtain the items.
Most definitely, I don’t agree with “I rolled a die so I intimidated that guy” style of play so I definitely wouldn’t endorse “i rolled a die so now I have a new fire-runed sword”
Angry, I was struggling with the crafting problem since a very long time, so I am really enthusiastic that you started publishing on this topic.
My only question is: once you have a system for customizable equipment, which is (or needs to be) the difference between crafting a custom item and simply purchasing the custom item?
If I understand well your post, there should be no real difference, because the point (= the Holy Grail) is just the customization itself. Is this the right understanding?
Hey there long-time reader first-time commenter. Great article! I especially like your point on customization. Allowing the players to make their own gear or upgrades would be really exiting. I’m instantly thinking about how fun it would be to hand out schematics and recipes instead of actual items.
I’ve always been enamored with the crafting system from the 1st Witcher game. Ingredients had only a few potential magical properties, but the combination of those properties had different results. I feel like that same principal could work well for magic items as it would encourage player experimentation. Instead of needing a “fang of dragon” or whatever, you just need something with “essence of fire”.
A system like the above would also probably need to be tied into the magic system if it would be used to make magic items. But maybe that would be good. The same component types for a fireball spell could also be melted into steel to imbue a sword with burn damage. Except you might need more of the same components for the weapon than the spell. And if a player doesn’t want a FIRE sword , maybe they could take he same recipe and substitute fire for frost or something.
Anyway, thanks for the food for thought. I look forward to more of this series.
I really like this idea, but it also has some inherent drawbacks. Not having to get the mystical tooth of wily bandersnatch would save table time. It would create more upkeep time for the GM to place items around and have an idea of what each player might have available.
I think I’m going to swipe this one (especially since it’s similar to games I’ve played in the past) and add in that there are tiers of each of these items. Maybe all teeth from monsters are useful in crafting, but stronger monsters teeth have more ‘value’. So, ‘Lesser’ teeth come from cr 1-4 monsters, regular teeth from cr 5-8, etc. and have these match proficiency bonuses. It’ll let you gate what players can get to and make searching out tougher monsters more rewarding.
Then it’s all about deciding what parts are needed for each item and if there is a special bonus for specific monsters. Maybe you can only get a fire effect if the monster has a fire type or ability. I think it could drive exploration and engagement.
I’ve made a custom potion crafting D100 table for a player once. Based on his specific skill level (increases with his total number of potions crafted), he could reduce the odds of failing or creating a potion with a (unknown) negative side effect. The chance on a minor positive side effect remained steady at 3%. Both + and – side effect had a small d6 table.
Getting the right components could at times be difficult, impossible or even a minor side quest, but in the end he could save money and was not dependant on the stock of local merchant, if there were any local shops at all. This also thought him something about downtime; you can’t brew a potion and still join the discussion in the smithy with the berserker. Nope, you’re brewing alone somewhere else to make sure it goes well and you don’t put the place on fire.
I also incorporated his skill as a way of influencing a major quest. He could choose to aid in the brewing of an antidote, which could save different levels of live stock for the dwarves, something their lives and economy were depening on. The better he performed the tasks, the more animals could be saved and the more time the party had to find the culprit or reason for the infection.
Just typing all of this gives me the idea for NPC’s requesting potions from the PC; giving either chances for skill increase or access to otherwise none-accessable noble NPC’s or favor from important storyline NPC’s. Or just for some random storyflavour.
In short; time, skill growth and additional world interaction are some key components in my book for customisation/crafting, and don’t forget to add a little twist of randomness for some good times and player experiences.
My concern about a crafting system in 5e is how to make it worthwhile while still allowing it to be optional. With the bounded accuracy system, adding even a +1 to damage or to-hit is a major advantage and to be doled out cautiously. It doesn’t leave much room for a system to give a minor but still worthwhile benefit.
Where is the space for giving the player who engages with the crafting system a meaningful advantage without messing up the entire XP economy (need tougher monsters, which give more XP, which levels up players faster, etc) or making the players that don’t engage feel like they are materially underpowered, relative?
In a broader system, you could more easily give small advantages to the player, the player would see those advantages, but it wouldn’t be equivalent to an entire level’s worth of progress.
As an aside, I’m interested in the fact that custom crafting system ideas (in the comments) are jumping straight to the duplication of magical effects. I recognize that ‘magical effects’ have come to mean ‘any mechanical advantage from equipment’. I miss the old masterwork rules. What are people’s opinions about dialing back magical items, or rather further reducing the amount of low magic items, to make room for a crafting system of effects.
My problem with wealth-by-level wasn’t the math. it was that by having the thru-line of money to direct character power, it added in another layer of balancing. How much is Steve dragging the party down by spending all his gold on getting drunk and gambling (both equally valid forms of character expression as making a custom axe), and how much is Maureen going to stomp over all these encounters after spending all her gold crafting a Staff of Magic Bull$#!%?
And most importantly, how am I going to afford a castle if i have to pinch pennies for the next +X to my sword?
Those were the problems that came out of Wealth By Level, for me at least.
Why do you have to monitor all of that? If Steve spends his gold badly, that’s his problem. And if you’re handing out balanced amounts of treasure, why do you have to worry that Maureen is crafting something unbalanced? Why are you being a control freak?
Oh, and, if you want a castle, you can’t have a sword too. And if you aren’t giving something up, a choice doesn’t mean anything. You’re just writing fanfic.
Fair. i’ll try to distill this down and stop editorializing.
Halfway through writing this I realized I was, in fact, being a dumb. My concern was with how it would affect encounter design, but i remembered that encounter design in 3e (and a lesser extent 4e) was borked for way more reasons than WBL. So yeah, if it’s balanced it would be as simple as adding in a specific cash prize along with the XP. Sorry to bother you, sir.
Late to the party here, but I have a few thoughts.
1) Why does every crafting system I’ve seen have a die roll? Why is there a chance of failure? If I’m trading in a resource (gp) for a benefit, it should just work. Just like there’s no chance of failure for trading in XP for a level.
2) In general, I think the creators of tabletop games should be looking to video games for inspiration. Per example, many video games lock crafting by character level; you have to be lv 10 to create a +2 sword or whatever. Also, since video games craft an equipment system ALONGSIDE the leveling system as a means of progression, you are able to buy the Mythril Sword at the appropriate level from the appropriate town for the appropriate amount of gil/zenni/gold/soul pieces. DND should do the same; monsters should drop a certain amount of gold (or salable loot, or valuable monster parts, etc) based on their CR. I think Angry gets this; I saw him hinting at it, but I wanted to outright say it.
3) Am I the only one who thinks that fighting with a polearm vs a battleaxe vs a rapier should feel way different? And not just “you can attack one square farther” or “you can use your dexterity modifier instead of your strength.” Weapons and fighting styles should affect movement, defenses, how many attacks you get, number of enemies you can attack… each weapon has inherent strengths and weaknesses. This doesn’t necessitate crafting per se, but it would be nice to see included in a hypothetical RPG some blogger may or may not be working on. Same thing with armor… someone using a shield and light armor doesn’t defend in the same way as someone wearing heavy armor, despite what the AC rules might say about how hard to damage they are. Why are a parry and riposte a feat and maneuver instead of something built in to certain equipment or fighting styles? I think we ought to divorce the idea of being hard to hit and damage resistance; heavily armored tanks are EASY to hit but hard to hurt; lightly armored and/or shielded guys are hard to hit but easy to HURT when you do. And as a player, that’s an interesting choice to have to make about how my character fights, instead of just saying “this number is bigger than that number.”
1) PnP RPGs are generally about the chance of succes/failure, and players stacking the odds in their favour while keeping their losses minimal. As something that would take skillpoints or whatever the game’s local character building resource is (it takes dedicated investment to become a master craftsperson, after all), crafting should follow the same rules as other skills. Moreover, it’s not just a simple exchange between money and items. That’s called shopping. Crafting is the process of turning resources into things that you couldn’t obtain otherwise, or into something that you could get but for cheaper, which is a significantly larger benefit.
However since crafting, especially for major magical items, is often very resource intensive, the loss of those resources on a failure IS kind of prohibitive. Either you should lose only a portion of those resources on a failure, or the check should affect something about the crafting process itself, such as the amount of time it takes, or the quality of the resulting product.
2) Gating this kind of stuff directly behind levels feels artificial and gamey. I’d look towards Dark Souls for this: if you want a +2 sword, you need some super rare ore of awesomeness, which is either commonly found in level 10 treasure hoards, or perhaps purchasable for an amount of money that lower level characters aren’t likely to have. This way you have similar level requirements without telling the player “no, your abstract numbers aren’t high enough”.
3) That’s a bit of a tangent, but hoo boy. I know some peeps wanting to do a Monster Hunter campaign in DnD 5e which… just doesn’t work. Monster Hunter is a game series about choosing between vastly different weapon types and learning how to master their movesets. DnD doesn’t do that beyond some “this weapon uses dexterity instead of strength” or whatever, which doesn’t feel really different when you roll the dice. It’s a series about choosing when to strike, as the wrong moment will get you chomped mid-swing with no chance to dodge. It’s a series about cutting up your enemies and using their body parts to make gear that gives you concrete effects to help you kill even tougher enemies.
But no, apparently just putting big monsters in your game is enough to make it like Monster Hunter.
Haven’t played monster hunter, but from what I gather the weapons are essentially that game’s version of class. D&D already has a wide variety of class options that determine your fighting style. I’m not saying it couldn’t have both, but you would have to consider how they interact.
Personally, I like that weapon choice doesn’t matter, it allows me to choose a weapon I think looks cool without worrying about it behaving differently (currently playing a 5e blade lock that can change weapons on a whim, and I already feel too restricted because my fighting style prefers reach weapons). To be honest, even 5e has too much weapon choice for my taste, but that’s just me. I really don’t like tables in RPGs, but it seems I’m in the minority in that sense.
WRT your point 3: Yes, what you are proposing would provide a lot of interesting variety and be more realistic. It would also have a HUGE complexity cost. One of the big advantages of the current system is that it’s extremely easy to understand. All weapons work more or less the same way, and the list of weapon properties and special rules is small and intuitive enough that you can keep track of it pretty easily. What you’re proposing would require a massive amount of effort to learn and keep track of all the different weapon properties. It would appeal to a certain section of players (expression players would like the opportunity to customize their character’s fighting style, challenge players would enjoy the additional tools to master, and fantasy players would approve the increased verisimultude), but even for them it would be a pretty hefty complexity cost. And for the rest of the players, it would be a huge cost for minimal benefit, rendering the game nearly unplayable.
I’m curious to know how close the Weapon Feats come to achieving the desired level of expression (accompanying the existing fighting styles, of course), and whether something like that might be a better route to your goal?
https://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/UA-Feats-V1.pdf
You know what else a solid gear system with customization built into its core enables?
The ability to have an engaging game involving characters whose equipment is more powerful and important than their own personal capabilities, and where the gear “levels up” too. I’m thinking especially of Secret of Mana here — a video game I have a strong nostalgic love for, but I never felt D&D was a good fit for. Yes, I know Weapons of Legacy exists; no, I don’t think that’s a good enough answer since it’s only an awkward attempt at addressing HALF the problem.
Clockwork: dominion had an amazing crafting system, it was more based on mechanical rather than magical crafting but I would recommend checking it out
Go and read Ars Magica, 5th edition. 4th edition is free online, but is less balanced.
Players can make semi-precisely defined custom spells, and bake spells into items so that the items cast spells without the mage. Making them costs a non-renewing universal magical resource that competes with your ability to heal wounds permanently, create permanent objects/wealth, etc; and you need a magical laboratory that costs upkeep; and you spend a large amount of downtime to make the item. The only way to advance a character is by spending downtime, in these forms: learn spells, enchant items, acquire familiar, acquire apprentice, improve spellcasting skills, improve other skills (fighting, hunting, rhetoric, knowing places/organisations, reading people, etc). The game is designed around spending downtime, and adventuring happens between downtime. In D&D it’s the other way around.
The system is very niche and takes far too much bookkeeping to run out of the box. It can be run painlessly with a GM familiar with the rules, and if he’s smart about handling downtime (eg. only do the accumulated bookkeeping after every eight sessions).
I use the Ars Magica magic system to gauge power/difficulty when I make custom spells in D&D.
A LOT has been said in this thread. And there is much related to the thoughts in my head. Some key points that come to my mind:
1. Players like (or don’t like) crafting systems for various reasons.
2. The system should fit in with the core mechanic system (e.g. d20 skill rolls)
3. They crafting system should provide something more than just “here’s another way to buy stuff”.
One thing I came across in my experience with crafting in D&D 3.x was that the very few players in my groups that wanted to pursue the Craft(whatever) skills typically did so because they wanted to find a way to get items for a lower cost than the standard “buy it” methods. So if a +1 sword had a “market value” of 1,000 gp, they wanted to be able to make that +1 sword for some amount less than the 1K gp. It was a mindset similar to “why buy a dog house when you can build your own for half the price?” (which I’ve seen dozens of times on the internet and also dozens of odd-looking doghouses).
I’m definitely interested in the concepts behind the building of an integrated crafting system!
I’ve used the spell-level analogy in the past to balance my own system to great effect.
When one of my players wanted to craft poisons with various effects, I simply treated them as spell scrolls and priced them accordingly (of course, it look more than that to make the system work, but balance-wise it felt great). I also look the liberty of deciding that an effect that can hit multiple times (such as poison applied to a weapon) should do comparable damage to an effect that hits multiple targets (of which there are already many examples for comparison).
I’ve been on a “goblin slayer” binge, and as the titular slayer doesn’t have any magical powers, it is the items he bring with him that give him the edge. knowing what to bring is customization in play, genius.
Thank you, Angry, for putting into words what I’ve been struggling to express for years! I was really disappointed by the “Artificer” in 5e–if it can even be called that. I’ve always been very much into the intrinsic reward for crafting: “I made this. There is none other like it. It looks how I describe it, and not how anyone else does!” In fact, the extrinsic rewards are secondary to me.
The 5e artificer feels like they acquiesced to a purely extrinsic form of crafting and then hog-tied it to conform to a class.