Last week, I had a mental f$&%ing breakdown and did something insane. I decided to jump back into that giant magic item crafting project I started and abandoned a year ago. I spent about five hours writing and rewriting a play experience description and then wrote a whole, long article about how writing and rewriting play experience descriptions was a good way to start a project. For an encore, this past week, I looked really carefully at that whole play experience thing and isolated the steps I’d need to take to the finish the thing and looking for a good angle from which to attack the project. The problem is that I’m stuck with the major handicap of having to design this whole system for Dungeons & Dragons.
In the end – as you’ll see – the angle I have to come from involves a hell of a lot of tedious grunt work. Which I’ve now started. And which I have to fit in between other projects and, of course, other articles that I also have to write. After all, this can’t be the only thing I’m doing on the site.
So, while I finish a massive spreadsheet analyzing every magic item in the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide so that I can finalize the list of materials and assign values to all of them, I’m going to take you through the reasons WHY I have to do all of that s$&% and also layout the five major steps that have to be done to bring the AngryCraft system to life. Consider this part one of two. And part two will likely come in two weeks with another article inserted in between.
And yes, I DO know about Sane Magical Item Prices, thank you very much. And I will explain below exactly why I can’t use it and why I have to do all of this work myself.
It’s Good to Have a Plan
Today, I’m continuing my work on my crafting system for Dungeons & Dragons. I’m just going to jump right in. Let’s go.
Having gone to great lengths to describe the AngryCraft play experience – that’s what I’m calling the crafting system now – last week, I actually have an easy way to break the project down into a list of things that have to be done to finish it. By going through my play experience description with a highlighter, I can make note of all the different mechanical pieces I need. Here’s a list of all the s$&% I highlighted in the order I found it.
- Placing materials as treasure
- Placing materials on monsters
- Salvaging materials from monsters
- Salvaging materials from nodes
- Foraging materials
- Skill and tool proficiencies for foraging and salvaging
- Material rarities
- Material forms
- Material traits
- Formulae (recipes) for all magic items
- Formulae for all mundane items
- Skill and tool proficiencies for crafting
- Material values
- Researching where to find materials
- Material sale prices
- Player-facing list of magic item formulae
- Researching formulae
- Experimenting on materials
- Commission price for magic items
- Sale price for magic items
- Salvaging materials from magic items
- Salvaging materials from mundane items
- Materials as spell reagents
Of course, that list is pretty ugly and it’s really out of order. But, it’s actually pretty easy to clean it up and group things together. And after I do that, I can identify the five major design components of the AngryCraft system.
First, there’s materials. I have to define all the different possible materials in the system. They need rarities, forms, traits, and values.
Second, there’s the craftable items. For every magical item and mundane item that already exists in the game, I need a formula, a proficiency required to craft it, and I need to decide whether the formula is common knowledge. I also need to assign a commission price to every item and determine what can be salvaged from the item. That will result in a master magic item list. And I can break a player-facing list off of that. I also need to explain to GMs how they can assign all this stuff to magical items from other sources or to magical items of their own making.
Third, there’s materials placement. I need to tell GMs how to place materials in their adventures. How to place them as treasure, how to assign them to specific monsters, how to place them as resource nodes, and how to make to them available to foragers during wilderness exploration. I know part of that process will end with me rewriting the treasure tables in the game to include materials.
Fourth, there’s the rules for actually gathering materials. I need to explain how the players actually gather, salvage, and forage the materials and how the GM resolves those actions.
Fifth, there’s some ancillary stuff that amounts to rules for how players research and experiment. I need to explain how players can research where specific materials can be found, how they can research new formulae, and how they can experiment with materials to discover new items.
Now, remember this is just the design work. This is not ‘finishing the product.’ So, there’s some conspicuous absentees from that list. For example, nowhere on that list is “explain how to actually craft an item.” I know how that happens already. The player erases the materials from their character sheet and writes down the new item they just made. And I also left off the stuff about using magic items as reagents because that’s an optional system that might not end up in the final product. I want to be aware of it because it affects the design, but I ain’t going to waste time on it unless I have some extra time lying around at the end.
So, it’s just the design part of the process, but it’s a good roadmap nonetheless. With five easy steps: define the materials, assign needed mechanics to all existing items, figure out how materials get placed in adventures, design the rules for gathering the materials, and design the mechanics for crafting-related downtime activities. Super easy, right? Barely an inconvenience.
Well, there is one inconvenience. Actually, it’s a giant f$&%ing bugbear strangling the entire AngryCraft project. It’s a bugbear named “not writing the system from scratch.” The AngryCraft system is meant to layer onto an existing rules system. Dungeons & Dragons. And it should be useable by anyone playing D&D. It shouldn’t matter if they are running their own game in some homebrew universe or whether they are just slumming around running Descent into Avernus or whether they’ve implemented a bunch of variant systems and house rules or whatever.
With no idea what other rules those hypothetical GMs might be using or how their hypothetical homebrew games work, the only thing I can safely assume is that either their stuff aligns with the core D&D rules or that they – the hypothetical GMs who want to use AngryCraft – are prepared to adjust anything that works with the core D&D rules to their own system. So, I have to make sure AngryCraft hooks into the D&D core system and lays on top of it. I can add new s$&% to the game – new mechanics, new features, and new options – but I should avoid removing or rewriting or changing anything that already exists. Otherwise, it’s too much work to add the AngryCraft to a heavily modified game.
And that fact changes everything about how I have to approach this design.
United by a Free Market
Look back at those five major components of the AngryCraft system.
- Define the materials
- Assign required mechanics to existing items
- Determine how to place materials into adventures
- Design mechanics for gathering materials
- Design ancillary downtime activities
If I were building this system from scratch, I might do those things in precisely that order. Except I wouldn’t. But stick with me. I’m trying to make a point. Let’s pretend I would do those things in precisely that order.
But I’m not building AngryCraft from scratch, am I? I’m building it as an addition to an existing game system. And that means there’s already stuff in the game that will interact with those components. Like an extensive list of existing mundane and magical items that already have a bunch of defined properties. And rules and tables for placing valuable stuff into adventures. And mechanics for resolving player actions. And already-defined tool and skill proficiencies. And all those mechanics interact with each other and with all of the other existing mechanics in D&D. And, in theory, those interactions are carefully, mechanically balanced. At least, they’re as balanced as the designers felt they had to be to make a fun game.
Spare me all the “D&D is broken” s$&% in the comments. Even I’M tired of it and I’m the one who usually starts it. It’s what we’ve got. It’s what we’re working with. We have to accept it, warts and all.
The point is that all the magical and mundane items in D&D are already very clearly defined and so are the ways that those items are acquired. I’m just adding a new way to acquire those things. I can add some extra traits and qualities to facilitate that, but if I f$&% with the existing items and the ways they’re acquired, there might be unintended consequences that ripple through the entire system and ruin the whole game. Moreover, my additions have to align with the existing balancing factors in the system. For example, the game assumes that each PC in the party will acquire one consumable item per level and will find six permanent magic items throughout twenty levels of play. I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining how to figure that out, but I will provide links to two excellent analyses. One is from DM David and the other is from Andy Pearlman and was posted at the EnWorld forums.
Aside from that, the Dungeon Master’s Guide actually provides a simple set of rules for crafting magic items on DMG 128 – 129. Mechanically, it’s just a way a player can convert cash into magical items. While the DMG does say the system is optional because “magic items are the DM’s purview,” it also doesn’t provide any warnings, limits, or advice. Just some vague stuff about special materials and pointless stuff about how much time it takes to craft an item. I say pointless because, in D&D, time is an illusion, downtime doubly so.
The DMG also allows players to buy magical items outright at the DM’s discretion. And, again, it doesn’t provide any warnings or limitations. It just grants the DM permission to let the players buy magical items.
Why is this important? Because the safest thing I can do with the AngryCraft system – the most inlinest with the core rules – is to allow players to only acquire magic items as freely as the DMG’s loose optional rules already do. As long as I don’t allow any more magic items into the game than that, any balance issues that arise are issues with the core game. So, call WotC, not me.
Assuming the GM is allowing players to both buy and craft items freely using the optional permission granted by the DMG, what sets a limit on how many magical items a PC can get ahold of during the game? That would be the amount of treasure the PCs find. All of this is to say that I have to treat as sacrosanct the existing treasure tables – at least the amount of total wealth they provide – and the existing cost of each magic item. As long as I don’t let the players find MORE treasure than the DMG does and as long as I don’t make magic items CHEAPER, I’m in line with the core rules. Roughly. Within a reasonable tolerance.
After all, if you strip off all the s$&% that makes it feel different, all AngryCraft actually does is introduce a different kind of treasure and allow players to convert that treasure to magical items. As long as materials convert to magical items at roughly the same rate and as long as I fix the treasure tables to evenly swap some of the gold and gems and art objects for materials, then my system won’t let players acquire too many more magic items than they otherwise could.
Roughly. I have to keep saying that because I know already it won’t be exact. But then, neither is the game. So that’s okay.
Why is this crap important enough to waste almost a dozen paragraphs explaining? Because I have to define the materials in my system. More specifically, I have to assign each rarity and type and quality of material a value. And I can’t do that arbitrarily. Materials are treasure and have to get allocated like treasure. But materials will be converted to magical items. And they have to convert at the same rate.
It’s like this: I can’t say that rare healing plants are worth 5 gp a pop and then require ten of those plants to make a potion of superior healing. If I did that, I’d be allowing players to convert 50 gp worth of treasure into a magic item that the DMG wouldn’t let you buy for less than 500 gp. Or craft for less than 5,000 gp.
And no, that ain’t a typo. You can buy a potion of superior healing for no less than 500 gp, but it costs 5,000 gp to craft it. And that non-typo is where AngryCraft runs into a huge-a$&% issue. In the DMG, there’s three places where magical items are assigned values based on rarity. On DMG 129 and DMG 130, values are assigned for crafting and for selling magical items. Fortunately, those two tables are the same. And the values run as follows:
- Common 100 gp
- Uncommon 500 gp
- Rare 5,000 gp
- Very Rare 50,000 gp
- Legendary 500,000 gp
The problem is that there’s lots of different magical items of each given rarity. And they aren’t all equal. For example, the following items are all rare:
- +2 armor, which just gives you +2 AC over what the base armor gives you
- belt of dwarvenkind, which bumps up your Constitution and consequently your maximum HP and gives you darkvision and poison resistance and some other benefits
- potion of superior healing, which you can swig once to recover 8d4 + 8 HP and then it’s gone forever
- 5th-level spell scroll, which lets you acquire a new spell for your book if you’re a wizard or lets you cast a single, 5th-level spell one time and then it’s gone forever
- wand of fireballs, which lets you fling an average of three fireballs a day every day forever or more if you get some lucky recharge rolls or you’re willing to risk the wand breaking forever
- +2 weapon, which gives you +2 to attack and damage rolls with that weapon
To say those items all have exactly the same value is f$&%ing ludicrous. Fortunately, the DMG doesn’t actually say that. Because there’s a third list of magic item values on DMG 135. That’s where the GM is told there’s a range of values for each given rarity. And those ranges are:
- Common 50 gp – 100 gp
- Uncommon 101 gp – 500 gp
- Rare 501 gp – 5,000 gp
- Very Rare 5,001 gp – 50,000 gp
- Legendary 50,001 gp – 500,000 gp
And those are the prices at which the GM is told they can allow the buying and selling of magic items. That’s also on DMG 135. And we’re going to ignore the fact that it’s cheaper to just buy most magic items than it is to craft them according to the DMG and that many magic items could actually be sold for more than their purchase price according to the DMG. We’ll let that slide because we’re going to fix all that with AngryCraft.
What we can’t ignore though is that the DMG doesn’t actually tell you what items are worth how much. It just says that all of those rare items I listed above and every other rare item in the book – of which there are 365 if you count all the variations of different items, I f$&%ing counted – every rare item in the book has a value somewhere between 500 gp and 5,000 gp. And that’s pretty f$&%ing irksome. Because I need something more definitive than that.
Being Materialistic
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
As I noted, the point of this whole diatribe is that materials are a kind of treasure and the value of any given useful item in the game tells how much treasure you have to give up to acquire it. If you find X amount of treasure, you can exchange it for this useful thing Y. I’m inventing another, different conversion factor. If you have treasures A, B, C, and D, you can give them up to acquire useful thing Y. I have to ensure that I don’t give two different values for Y. A + B + C + D must equal something close to X. There can be some wobble. Some wiggle. And there’ll be premiums and discounts built in to make some conversions more efficient and some less efficient, but the basic relationships have to hold. Fortunately, I’m pulling A, B, C, and D out of my a$&. So I can assign them whatever values I want. But they have to match the values that already exist.
To define the values of the materials, I need to know the values of the magic items and I need to know how many materials go into a magic item. And the values of the materials will determine how they get placed in treasure hordes and on monster corpses. And that’s the right way to do it.
See, I COULD just pick the values of the materials arbitrarily and then compare them to the values of the magic items to determine how many units of material are needed to make an item. For instance, if I decide a unit of rare metal is worth 100 gp and I know a +2 longsword is made of rare metal and is worth 4,000 gp, then I can use the magic of simple arithmetic to determine that a longsword is made of 40 units of rare metal. Except I really can’t do it that way. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.
Recall that AngryCraft involves a little bit of a logical optimization puzzle thing wherein you – the craftsman – try to meet the requirements for a magic item while using the smallest number of the least valuable components you have. If a magical fire sword requires at least three units of rare metal and at least three units of fire material, you could make it with any of the following combinations:
- 3x rare fire metal
- 2x rare fire metal, 1x rare metal, 1x uncommon fire mineral
- 1x rare metal, 2x rare acid metal, 1x very rare fire mineral, 1x uncommon fire fluid, 1x uncommon fire mineral
Obviously, you want to use the most efficient combination you can based on what you’ve got in your pocketses. That way, it feels like you’re doing something like what a craftsman would do. It’s that game feel thing. To make that manageable, the formulae have to be pretty small. You don’t want people trying to juggle a combination of fifty different ingredients. Nor do you want anyone tracking hundreds of units of anything on their character sheet.
My gut tells me that a formula shouldn’t require less than three materials or more than eight. That seems like a nice, manageable number to work with. Some really rare, powerful items could require as many as ten materials, but that seems like an absolute ceiling. Actual playtesting will have to tell me if my gut is right.
Knowing that I want most items to require about five materials on average and knowing that common magic items are worth, say, 100 gp, that tells me that common materials are probably worth about 20 gp per unit. Roughly. This is all hypothetical right now. It just shows how the value of the magic items sets the value of the materials.
But that ain’t all. Remember that the rarity of the magic items sets the rarity of the materials needed. That’s important. Rarity is how D&D sets the ‘level’ of a magic item. That is, the items you can find or craft according to the DMG are limited to specific rarities based on your level. And if materials can be harvested from monster corpses, the rarities should align with the CR of the monster. And thus, the rarity of a material determines what monsters yield that material and what treasure table that material appears on.
But that’s not all either. Remember that some magic items require materials with special traits. Traits like fiery and healing. Traits that describe what types of items that material can be used to craft. Well, I can’t pull those traits out of my a$& either. Every magic item that currently exists in the game has to be craftable using the materials I invent. So the list of traits must include every trait necessary to define every magic effect that currently exists. In some logical, intuitive way. Obviously, fire minerals make fire swords, but what makes a ring of protection? Or the well of the planes?
And that isn’t all either. Every material has a type, which determines where it can be found in the world. Metal comes from the ground, hide comes from monsters, plants come from nature. But what about those traits? There has to be a way to decide what traits the materials from any given monster might have. Sure, a red dragon will have fire blood in it, but what the f$&% might an otyugh yield?
Thus, the traits have to encompass all the different possible magical effects in the game and all of the different qualities that monsters might possess in the game. And they have to be logical and intuitive. And the list has to be manageable. I can’t have a hundred different traits because then people are tracking hundreds of different materials. Ideally, I want to keep it around ten, but that’s probably not possible just given the number of things already in the game.
See, to make sure the whole list is as intuitive and logical as possible, I want to overlap with as many existing game terms and concepts as I can. So, for example, there’s ten different types of magical damage in D&D: acid, cold, fire, force, lightning, necrotic, poison, psychic, radiant, and thunder. And that’s the strongest list of magical traits in the game. By that I mean it’s a list most GMs and players are familiar with and one which interacts with a lot of other parts of the game. You have to add healing to that because healing is also a very strong descriptor. And with that, you’ve already got eleven traits that need to be on the list. Probably in that exact form.
But that ain’t everything. There’s eight schools of magic in the game. And all those descriptors fit, effectively, into just one school: evocation. Which means I’ve got seven more game concepts to shove onto the list somewhere. Maybe. After all, the schools aren’t as familiar and intuitive to most players and GMs as the damage types are. But these concepts are part of the game and they might be needed in AngryCraft.
In the end, I can’t arbitrarily invent the values of the materials and I can’t arbitrarily invent the rarities and I can’t arbitrarily invent the traits. All three of those things must fit the existing game. Which means I have to work backward from the list of all the magic items in the game to derive those things.
Which brings me too…
Analyzing the F$&%ing Magic Item List
Before I can do anything else, I need to run through every single magic item in the core game – every one in the DMG – and define it in terms of the AngryCraft system. I need to assign every item a specific, exact value. One that falls into the range of values stated in the DMG for items of that rarity. And every item has to have its special qualities and magical affinities…
Wait. Stop. I hear you typing that comment. Let me deal with that s$&% right now.
The Sane F$&%ing Magical Item Prices List
I actually already started working on the analysis I’m describing. And I’ve been talking about it off and on in the super awesome Discord server I maintain for people who support my work on Patreon. And every time I’ve started talking about this project in the last week, someone has asked me if I’m aware of the Sane Magical Item Price List.
Let me say this definitively: yes. Yes. For f$&%’s sake, I am very much aware of that document. But I can’t. F%&$ing. Use. It.
Sorry. I know everyone is just trying to help and they are trying to save me some work. I greatly appreciate that. But nonetheless, I can’t use it. Let me explain.
See, I’m not the only one who noticed that those magic item values in the DMG are a little goofy in the same way that the Joker from Batman is a little goofy. They’re f$&%ing insane. The ranges are huge. And the rarity groupings involve some very odd choices. Well, a bunch of users over at Giant in the Playground and r/DnDNext and the EnWorld forums got together and decided to fix those values. They ran through all the magical items in the DMG and repriced every single one of them. Individually. They did it using sound reason and clever logic by comparing other, similar game effects to the items in question.
It’s good work. And it’s very reasonable. But it’s useless to me.
See, I have to stick as close to the core rules as possible for the reasons I explained above. AngryCraft is meant for casual users. Any GM – any table – should be able to use it. But the Sane Magical Item Prices are a little too sane. Many fall well outside the ranges given in the DMG. And that creates some troublesome interactions. For example, there’s some legendary items priced for less than 500 gp. I understand the logic and I don’t disagree with it, but I’m using the item rarities and values in D&D to ensure balance with all of the game’s existing systems. I can’t f$&% with that stuff without having to redefine every item, every treasure table, and every value. And AngryCraft isn’t about overhauling the entire game’s ‘economy.’ Not that that word means anything. AngryCraft is just a crafting system overlay.
The big problem with their drastic changes is that the authors of Sane Magical Item Prices are relying on discerning, savvy GMs who won’t just let players freely buy and sell magic items willy-nilly. Because based on the wealth that the PCs acquire from the treasure tables in the book, there are some very powerful items that a group of 5th-level PCs could afford to outfit their entire party with. That’s not a problem because the introduction of the document is pretty clear on who it’s for and why it exists. But it means that I can’t use that list as the basis of a system that DOES let players freely buy and sell magic items with little GM oversight.
The important thing is that their goals and methods were very different from my goals and methods with AngryCraft. They wanted to create an in-world economy that felt like it made sense. They say so throughout the text. And they nailed it. More or less. Good for them. And the way they did that was to say things like, “if a horse only costs 100 gp, why should a magical figurine that lets you have a slightly faster horse for one day a week cost 50,000 gp?” That’s just an example. Don’t check the numbers or tell me how much horses cost or which figurine of wondrous power I just misdescribed.
But I’m trying to build a modular system that adds to the existing rules while not invalidating or changing any of them. My goal isn’t to fix the system. My goal is to provide another option without breaking the system any more than it might already be.
Believe me, I wish I could just steal their work and use it for myself. It’d make my life a lot f$&%ing easier. But I can’t. Which means, I’m back to…
Analyzing the F$&%ing Magic Item List
Before I can do anything else, I need to run through every single magic item in the core game – every one in the DMG – and define it in terms of the AngryCraft system. I need to assign every item a specific, exact value. One that falls into the range of values stated in the DMG for items of that rarity. And every item has to have its special qualities and magical affinities identified so I can work out the list of traits I need in AngryCraft. And that’s a big pile of work. But it’s not as big as it could be. There is a systematic way to do it. Once you get past one huge f$&%ing monster of a problem with the values on DMG 135.
- Common 50 gp – 100 gp
- Uncommon 101 gp – 500 gp
- Rare 501 gp – 5,000 gp
- Very Rare 5,001 gp – 50,000 gp
- Legendary 50,001 gp – 500,000 gp
Full disclosure: I derived that last number – the high number for legendary items – from the values on DMG 129 and by spotting the simple pattern in the rest of the numbers. And that simple pattern is also the massive f$%&ing problem.
As items increase in rarity, their value increases by a factor of 10. That’s an easy enough number to work with. And it tells me that, all things being equal, rare metals are worth ten times as much as uncommon metals and legendary plants are worth ten times as much as very rare plants.
But the pattern also establishes that the most expensive item of a given rarity is ten times as valuable as the least expensive item of a given rarity. That is, if the cheapest rare item is that potion of superior healing, it’s worth one-tenth the value of the belt of dwarvenkind, the most expensive rare item. While that range ain’t a problem in the core rules, it will be a problem when I start designing recipes.
Let’s assume that the value of a magic item is exactly equal to the value of the materials used to make it. We know that it won’t work that way in AngryCraft. There’s a commission price in there too. And there will be premiums and discounts built in for different types of conversions. But let’s ignore all of that for now. And let’s assume the prices of all the different types of material – metals and plants and blood and minerals – are all roughly the same. Given that, if the cheapest magical item of a given rarity requires 3 units of rare material, then the most expensive item will require 30 units of rare material. And that number is just not manageable.
Now, I could work around that by varying the prices of the different materials a lot more. Say, metals are always worth ten times as much as plants, for example. But that makes things complicated and it might lead to problems. For example, there might be a magic item whose nature suggests it must be made out of cheap materials but whose value requires it to be made of expensive materials. And even if that’s never a problem, I still have to make sure that the GM using AngryCraft understands that aspect of the system so that, when they create a magic item of their own, they can give it an appropriate formula using the proper number of expensive or inexpensive types of materials. That’s an extra constraint, an extra rule, and an extra layer of complexity.
That factor of ten is just too damned big. I need to tighten the range. Fortunately, I can do that pretty easily. See, I can’t bring down the high number because that would make the most powerful magic items – and all magic items by extension – cheaper overall. That high number seems to be the real number anyway. It’s the one the designers set in stone for crafting and selling magic items in their optional rules. It’s the one they must have balanced around. So honestly, I probably shouldn’t touch that number at all. I shouldn’t even increase it. But I can bring that lower number up to tighten the range. There is actually only one place I can spot in the rules that refers to that lower number. And that’s the price for a potion of healing listed on the PHB equipment table.
So, let’s say the largest number of materials I want to use in a recipe is maybe 10 but is closer to 8. And the smallest number of materials I want to use is 3 but I could go down to 2 if I absolutely had to. That says the low end of the price range should be one-third or one-quarter of the high end. At the very least, that’s a good place to start. And if I split the difference and look for nice clean numbers, I get a list like this:
- Common 50 gp – 100 gp
- Uncommon 150 gp – 500 gp
- Rare 1,500 gp – 5,000 gp
- Very Rare 15,000 gp – 50,000 gp
- Legendary 150,000 gp – 500,000 gp
Of course, that’s a starting point. Those numbers will likely change before the end. But they are numbers I can work with for now. All I have to do is assign every magic item that exists a value in those ranges. Easy, right?
Well, actually, it is pretty easy. At least, it’s easy with a lot of elbow grease. Because there is a systematic way to do it. I know because I’m already doing it. Actually, I’m doing a lot more than that. And in two weeks, I’ll show you the end result. One that not only assigns a proper value to every magical item in the DMG in a nice, systematic way but which also defines about 75% of the other s$&% I need to define to about materials. Because the master magic item list – the complete one – is basically the lynchpin that drops the keystone of the whole AngryCraft system right in the kitten caboodle. Whatever the f$&% a caboodle is.
I don’t understand why the design decision to be unable to make changes to the core rules is set in stone. I get why a person would want it as a design goal, it makes it easier for everyone to use, but for a system this big…I’ve already read more words on the design process of this system than are written in the “Playing the Game” chapter of the Player’s Handbook. That chapter is less than 30 pages long with lots of pictures. The crafting, buying, and selling rules for magic items as presented in the DMG just do not make sense. Why shackle yourself to them? Is the intent to sell this as a product on Dmsguild.com? Because if it isn’t, why not just let it be a system for DM’s willing to put a little work into incorporating it into their games? With this system a Potion of Superior Healing costs at least 3x as much as a Broom of Flying. And I’m not suggesting just using the Sane Prices, those exist to make a magical economy make sense, they don’t address the power of items as they relate to an adventuring group, which is arguably the only thing that matters in D&D.
I’m not trying to come across as critical, I really believe that you have some compelling reasons for your decisions and that you’ve thought them out. I just don’t understand what they are.
I agree
While I’m not TTRPG’ing so much these days, I did just massively mod Skyrim again, so I’m using that vernacular and this all seems very familiar. AngryCraft is a mod. there isn’t any obligation to adhere to all or any of the D&D core rules as long as there is a disclaimer of what the system changes. It is specifically a design decision to do so based on principles Angry desires, but it’s not a hard requirement, and one I also do not fully understand
In my opinion, since he’s already modding the game, he might as well tap into other popular community tools, this is common in modding communities. A GM that might want one is likely to want the other, and if they don’t want either they probably don’t want both. Both of these mods really just fall under Economy Overhaul mods. People are suggesting Sane Magical Prices because it’s popular, similar in scope and direction, and they should play nicely with each other. Either way it’s up to the GM to determine what they want to install it into their game. They can either keep the “vanilla” system, or install AngryCraft as-is, or adhoc it to work alongside any other mods they want with a little effort
That being said, it’s a great idea to change as few vanilla systems as possible to ensure compatibility with any other mods a GM might be considering. But vanilla prices are so broken that I feel if you’re not willing to adjust them you probably shouldn’t be adding in a crafting mod anyways
It’s funny you mention Skyrim because that game is notorious for getting overmodded to the point that it constantly crashes or becomes otherwise unplayable. Because mods don’t always play nice with each other. I’ve definitely passed over mods that required you to install a bunch of other mods, or ones that didn’t work with certain other mods. He did explain why he did it this way.
Let’s say I understand the reasoning but not necessarily the philosophy behind it. Aiming for compatibility for casual users (ie. those who are happy to just play 5e as-is), but intentionally trying not to be compatible with other popular mods (ie. those who are most likely to want and use a crafting system). Angry said he was invariably asked if he knew about SMP, so he should have at least some idea that his mod should tie into it, at least at some level, because that’s what the community is suggesting
Modding Skyrim is fine if you either know what you’re doing, or follow the instructions of someone who does. It’s notorious because just throwing a bunch of mods together and hoping it works is not going to go well. I recommend Lexy’s LotD guide for a look at the amount of work it takes to do it correctly. Yes it’s a lot of work, but it’s both stable and playable, and much more fun than vanilla
I still feel that attempting to incorporate other popular mods into your own mod design is not only a smart use of time (no reinventing the wheel) but going to be more useful because the types of players that like to mod will want to use more than just a crafting mod. There’s a reason that many of the most popular mods are inter-compatible with each other
So I guess the point is, if we want both an economy that makes sense (SMP), AND a simple and effective crafting overlay, then what should we do?
Keep in mind, I think that all this work should be done by the individual DM, or perhaps the community at large, not just Angry, there’s no reason why we can’t come up with a “SaneMagicPrice patch for AngryCraft” I’m just here for the advice and inspiration, not the hundreds or more hours of work it takes to be done for free. And I’d much rather see all of the effort be put towards the AngryRPG anyway
Because Angry isn’t designing this system for his use, or even our use. He’s designing it for everybody’s use, and making as few assumptions as possible about the end user. Like he said, he has no idea what else the end user is doing, or what the end user of the system is or is not willing to do. Maybe the DM is running AngryCraft only grudgingly because his players insisted, and wants as little to do with it as possible. That DM would have almost no tolerance for AngryCraft messing with the game.
Or maybe the DM is very inexperienced, but this system is so near and dear to the hearts of her and her players that she decides to try using it anyways. She CAN’T rebalance her game on the fly yet; she needs to count on Angry having done enough work to ensure that AngryCraft isn’t going to break her game worse than her own inexperience would.
That and once you get into the “if I just fix this one little thing it’d all work so much better!” mode, you end up redesigning the entire system because 5e is fundamentally weird, janky, and busted. We’d all rather Angry put that whole-system effort into Angry RPG, not 5e. or at least I would, at any rate.
*sniff* that was beautiful. I’m choked up…
Seriously, you nailed it pretty much exactly. Granted, if I explained it, it would have been less sentimental and more sweary.
Actually, nevermind, sorry Angry, not trying to make your life any harder. You’ve already explained why you want to design it this way, just that if I were the one making this system and had to do the massive amount of work involved with analyzing all of the items in the DMG and assigning them prices, it would infuriate me not to fix all the glaring issues with the rarity system and assign prices based on how useful the items were, not how arbitrarily rare the DMG says they are.
I guess I just need to bite the bullet and do it myself sometime, since the prices in the DMG bother me so much. And the Sane Magical Prices aren’t much better. I understand the appeal of trying to figure out how much magic items should cost based on an economical sense, but why anyone would put the effort into doing it before figuring out how much items should cost based on their usefulness to people actually playing Dungeons & Dragons is beyond me.
Interestingly, the usefulness of an item and its cost are rarely equivalent in real life. A solid gold toilet cost more than a regular toilet because the gold needed to craft the toilet is more expensive than porcelain. I have no problems with some magic items costing more than their usefulness would otherwise indicate.
The problem is games are not real life and most people hold games and fiction to a higher standard. Things that we accept in real life because we have no choice but to accept them, but in fiction, they f$&% with suspension of disbelief. Characters in fiction must behave more rationally than real life people – which many writing instructors and authors frequently struggle to convince aspiring writers of – and prices in games have to convey some sense of the utility lest it feel like a screw job. Wobble and variation are okay, within reason, but the average player generally gets annoyed when discovering that the amazing Pokémon they paid through the nose for was a frigging fish who can only splash at his foes. People use the price of a thing in games as a shorthand for its power and utility.
If the magic item is purely for flavor, then it’s fine to rate it on a luxury scale, so the waterskin of infinite ale’s cost could determine if it’s feasible to use that to run a bar instead of shipping the ale. That’s an interesting world-building consequence of crafting, and if you’re running something with industrialized magic like Eberron, you may care about that sort of thing.
But for all the actual adventuring gear that PCs are expected to use/buy, it’s a terrible idea to not have cost and usefulness be strongly linked. An item with a disproportionally low price essentially becomes that must-take item that everyone uses and the item that’s priced disproportionally high becomes an item that nobody uses. Either way, it makes the game less interesting.
I don’t know how actually useful this would be, but if you’re looking at a slog of systematic, elbow-grease-needing calculations and data entry, there’s plenty people on this site who’d be happy to help out with the project. Of course it depends on how easy the rules are to explain and everything, but if it would be a help then there’s no need to do absolutely everything on your own.
Supposing your design goals are to be DMG compatible, while allowing for judgment of the designer to price magical items within the DMG range. I would note that consumables are inherently less valuable than permanent magic items, and that they have a very different style of play (never use unless absolutely necessary), while a +2 sword will get used every single round of combat, anywhere from 8 to several dozen times in a day.
I would price consumables in the lower half of the range that Angry has set up, ie:
Common consumable: 50 – 75 GP
Common permanent: 75 – 100 GP
Uncommon Consumable: 150 – 325 GP
Uncommon permanent: 325- 500 GP
Rare consumable: 1500 – 3250 GP
Rare permanent: 3250 – 5000 GP
and so on. This could be adjusted to become the lower third, or lower quarter of Angry’s price range.
From here, I would arrange the Sane Magical Item pricing into a spreadsheet.
At a first pass, I would take the Sane price, and check if it falls in the designated range of prices. If it does, then great – keep that price. If not, simply cap the price of the item within the above range. If this produces too many items all clustered at the cap, I might simply order the items of each rarity and category, then devise some interpolation between the upper and lower bounds. This seems to me a good compromise of keeping to the DMG guidelines, while also not having to do all of the grunt work of starting from scratch.
i’ve just kept using consumables cost 50% of what a non-consumable would. So a potion of healing is worth 50 gold, because a common magic item is worth 100, repeat down the table.
In this system, that works just fine – consumables will usually only require 2 or 3 ingredients to make.
Easy way for Angry or DMs using his system to do that is to make consumables pop out in batches. So the price works is as a equally rare item, but you get 2 or 3 or whatever you think is fair. Obviously don’t allow resale.
Angry mentioned several times that there would be discounts and premiums for different items. I bet that one of these discounts will be on consumable items as a class.
If this was 3.5e or Pathfinder, I’d just say to key it off of the gold values of the items – an 8,000 gp flaming sword costs 4,000 gp worth of fire material and 4,000 gp of metal material, and the inventory puzzle comes from figuring out how to hit that value as efficiently as possible without excess. But 5e doesn’t have a set list of prices for magic items and you don’t want to use the community one, so… hmm. What else does the DMG have to determine an item’s value more precisely than rarity?
You could use the random magic item tables at the beginning of the Treasure Chapter of the DMG. They are broken down (sort of) between major and minor magical items, and then by rarity. A Rare item that shows up on the mostly Uncommon table is likely to be on the cheaper end of the Rare items. And each item is assigned a random chance to get it, so an item that you are less likely to get is probably costlier than a more common item, even at the same rarity level. I haven’t done any kind of analysis of those tables though to see how that plays out.
5E’s item system is just a total mess. Unlike 3E, it just wasn’t built for players making their own items. I mean things like the Horn of Valhalla are just outright game-breaking if PCs can make them. I mean for a rare item, you can summon 3d4+3 berserkers (each with 67 hit points) and they last 1 hour. Due to the horrible game-lag that you suffer from introducing an average of 10 extra figures to the battle everytime the horn gets blown (a total of 670 extra damage soaking capability), you probably don’t want the PCs getting even one of these things, let alone crafting multiples. But it’s the same rarity category as horseshoes of speed and elven chain.
Honestly you kind of just have to go through the entire list and assign a price yourself like 3E did, because the rarities make zero sense and you’re asking for trouble if you let those be the thing that determines the difficulty of crafting.
I’d argue 3E wasn’t built for players making their own items either! It’s an overly complex mess with all the classic 3e RAW loopholes that allow people to break it easily if they read it carefully enough.
Particularly shortsighted in that area was the rule that you could cut the price of a magic item if it could only be used by a given alignment or class. This therefore invited people to create items that just so happened only to be useable by their character’s class and their character’s alignment. It’s that bad that virtually no DM I know of allows that rule to be used, and no player I know of actually uses it (probably out of sheer embarrassment.)
3E was more or less fine when you were using items that the book already priced. I mean as fine as 3E can get, granted 3E itself had a lot of glaring balance flaws, but it wasn’t so much the magic items themselves as just the system in general.
Using the magic item pricing guidelines to make custom items, yeah, you were going into the danger zone if you did that. As with any set of guidelines, if you tried to maximize them for cheese, you could. The DM could take the monster creation guidelines in pretty much any system and build an insanely low CR monster that was super powerful for instance.
But then again, they were rough pricing guidelines with the idea that a DM would use some common sense and modify pricing accordingly. The DMG itself didn’t follow them religiously and I’d blame the DM if they let players make custom stuff without double checking it. As with any custom homebrew, whether it be items, spells or classes, the DM always needs to be vigilant with that stuff.
I’m glad to know your opinion of the sane magic items price list.
And don’t forget, folks, Angycraft is supposed to be executed by the players away from the table and be quickly checked by the DM for cheating.
Instead of a linear/log progression, have you considered for the lower levels using a half step exponential progression and just add a zero? 1/4 (fourth root of rare price) for common (84gp), 1/2 (square root of rare) for uncommon (707gp), 1 for rare (5000gp), After that, return to linear/log.
While reading this I kept thinking, “This is the answer to the question of how to make gold matter.”
I think I’ll be using that range of costs to include mundane materials. And for higher tier items the players will need more than just a kit. Forges, laboratories, and even spinning rooms come to mind.
Thank you, sir.
I was thinking along the same lines…Shop Supplies. Still that would present an issue in that it isn’t easily formulaic…
It could be formulaic. First handwaved, establish a series of workshop levels. To make a magic item you must have access to a workshop of same or higher level. Note first tier is always the toolkit available at first level.
For shop supplies you could handwaved x gold of stuff with the quantity of gold filling the cost gap to avoid needing 20 treasure components. Alternately and what I’ll look at are some “standard stocks” with appropriate flavor adjectives. So piles of flax that must be ratted and spun and woven to form the Virgin linen cloak or coat or uppers for slippers. I figure every craft will have a half dozen real world basic components I can grab for … Not really fluff but not Angry’s treasures either. Filler?
Whatever, it’ll wait for part two.
Formulae for Rare stuff includes a special extra ingredient called Craft Time that eats GP cost difference.
Time to create item fills in the missing GP cost, PC have a listed labor value in GP. They can spend longer or hiring a ton of workers to go 24/7.
Formulae for Very Rare stuff includes a special extra ingredient called Equipment that eats GP cost difference.
Formulae for Legendary includes a special extra ingredient called Location that has to traveled to or a toll paid to activate.
Angry is to D&D as Euclid was to Geometry. Geometry existed before Euclid, he stripped it down and and reordered it logically. Angry is doing the equivalent to D&D.
Am I right in assuming AngryCraft will overlay DMG crafting in place of the revised crafting system in Xanathar’s? The revised system, in addition to having more sane values for crafting potions (1,000 gp vs. 2,500 gp), has lower Gold Piece costs but has suggested CR levels for monsters or encounters that result in materials for that crafting.
Seems like it would be difficult to have the two systems co-exist. They both somewhat require player agency (“We want to go on a quest for Fire Materiel!” vs “We want to go on a quest to get stuff for +2 Armour”) but have enough “exposed” from the DM screen to be fairly lightweight.
Are we accounting for labor are we not? A $50,000 car does not have $50,000 worth of parts in it, after profit is taken into consideration, labor, taxes, overhead costs, etc. the actual parts which make up a car are worth $12,000-$15,000. But we don’t want players to become capitalists, this is fantasy, getting away from the real world…
Which is why, if players want to craft magic items, they need to pay the blood price. So, using AngryMath(tm) of experience by tier, and breaking magic items into seven tiers, we can then decide how much “resources” the players put into the crafting of magic items. First let’s match up the tiers:
Tier 1: Apprentice: Consumable Common Magic Items (75xp per item level)
Tier 2: Journeyman: Permanent Common Magic Items (300xp per item level)
Tier 3: Adventurer: Consumable Uncommon Magic Items (750xp per item level)
Tier 4: Veteran: Permanent Uncommon Magic Items (1300xp per item level)
Tier 5: Champion: Consumable Rare Magic Items (2250xp per item level)
Tier 6: Heroic: Permanent Rare Magic Items (3300 xp per item level)
Tier 7: Legendary: Legendary Magic Items (5000 xp per item level)
Item level is a rating of 1 to 5, so each tier is divided into quintiles by AngryCraft(tm) value. That gold/material, etc. still needs to be obtained. But in addition (or the way of getting the specified material) the party goes on a “quest” which they churn through the required amount of xp of encounters WITHOUT EARNING THE XP for levelling.
This results in a Level 1 Magic Item of the appropriate tier take an extra encounter the party goes through in their adventuring, and a Level 5 Magic Item of the appropriate tier takes an extra Five Room Dungeon worth of encounters.
And if one is foolish enough to allow players buying anything but consumable items, the price should be at least four times as much as the crafting price, of course if the players want to sell their items, they only recover half the cost. Supply/demand curves, blah blah
Players do the AngryMath(tm) away from the table for AngryCraft(tm), DM works up the appropriate encounters, more content, more fun, and actual sacrifice made so thought and effort is put into the crafting process. (and the party gets its crap together and combos their crafting desires into focused efforts which takes ACTUAL time and not fictional “downtime”)
3.5e had xp costs for crafting items. That was not fun, especially when only the crafter suffered the xp loss; the party can’t contribute their xp. Angry has mentioned in at least one other article that spending xp for anything is undesirable, and I know he has considered and rejected the concept by this point.
There is not a “spending of XP”, there is not getting XP. The “reward” or “power boost” is from the items themselves. Plenty of other instances of not getting XP whilst getting rewards or power boosts in the game and modules. Reverse the concept if you like, it would tie in ingredients ability to craft to tier levels as well, so the loot in the encounters is tied to to the risk/reward concept of xp in general.
So using Angry’s Random Encounters, they won’t be harvestable for ingredients, since they aren’t worth xp, for example.
Justify it however you want, but it was spending XP. You were required to give up XP you had earned. However that might balance out from a mechanical perspective, it was spending XP and it made the system very unpopular as a result. The designers of both 3.5 and Pathfinder have talked extensively about that during the development of other games and editions. And the whole thing is similar to the famous game design cautionary tale of the development of World of Warcraft. Asking players to spend XP – the most valuable currency in the game and the de facto goal of the game – runs headlong into a number of psychological issues including loss aversion and ownership bias. It was a mistake. The people who made the game admitted that. Everyone knows it. You can explain the balance until you’re blue in the face, but people were asked to spend XP and they almost universally hated it.
As a player I would NEVER give up exp for an item, especially a consumable. It’s just a gut wrenching NO to even consider it. And I would love to have a crafting system to work with so, yea. Your idea is kinda dead on arrival to me.
You mention the price range of a given rarity being a problem, because then you’d need too many things to craft the items at the upper end. I’m a bit confused by this.
The way I envision it, the rarity of a crafted item is the max of the rarities of the reagents used. You won’t have any rare reagents until Tier 2 of play, so you can’t craft them until then, for example.
So, couldn’t you have the rare-level healing potion use 1 rare reagent and 5 uncommon reagents, while the rare-level belt uses 6 rare reagents? Or is there a constraint I’m missing?
I think the difficulty with that, as I see it, is that it will make the recipes a lot more complex and a lot less intuitive. How is a player supposed to understand why one item takes 5 rare things while something else takes 3 rare 2 common and another takes 1 rare 4 common?
Also I think it’ll be harder for DMs using this to slot a new item into the system since there are so many more variables that go into a recipe.
Don’t forget that the game expects a party to stop receiving a tier of loot after so many levels based on the treasure tables they will be rolling against. Sure, the party will be able to buy certain materials in town, but not everything they’d need.
Keeping all materials for a formula in the same tier allows the GM to just roll for loot at the groups level easily. Inexperienced GMs and GMs that dislike crafting but have added it for the party’s benefit will gain the most from this decision, while the GMs willing to put up with added complexity will lose nothing.
This is a useful suggestion Arakasi.
In general, simple intuitive formulae would be best – and following your example seems like it would be a great solution to reducing the material cost of consumables compared to other items, while not really making the formula significantly more complicated.
Are you going to put a similar system into the Angry RPG?
And by similar I mean “also allows the players to gather resources that they can use to craft magic items, but is of course completely different in that it was designed for a different system.”
In the back of my mind I always imagine each d&d hack was inspired by Angry working on similar things for his own system.
Crafting, monster strength by player tier and group size, maybe action resolution soon or a neat system to keep track of encumbrance.
We’ll all buy his core books in a few years, think “there’s nothing new in here!” and whinge about it like a bunch of ungrateful trolls.
Well… if I were making an RPG, modding ideas for D&D 5E would be a great way to test general concepts and ideas. And also to gauge the community reaction to certain ideas. But, if I were making an RPG, I’d also be careful not to give away all of my best ideas so that there’s a few surprises in store.
That would be so clever!
If only..
FWIW, I think you could equate necrotic with necromancy and have one less descriptor to worry about.
also force, bludgeoning, and thunder are all basically the same if we’re talking magic
Force and thunder and bludgeoning are not the same. The game makes them mutually exclusive.
Radiant could be used for generally positive energy effects, like healing. That would drop another Keyword.
Aw I was hoping to be the first one.
Yes, Radiant & Healing must be one trait.
It’s relatively new for radiant/holy damage & healing (or ‘positive’) energy NOT to be the same concept, as his Angryness is certainly aware.
Whether people will agree with the rest of my comment, Idk…
I’d agree that force and thunder (and bludgeoning) are not the same – but for the purposes of crafting, a material that is somehow infused with pulsing waves of “force” could readily – and intuitively – be used to craft a thunderous weapon, imo. And vice versa; a bead of rare thunder gem could conceivably be used to build a ring of protection, despite my association of ‘protection’ with ‘force’ energy.
I would say the trick is to name the trait for neither energy type, but something that encompasses both in flavour.
“Resonant”- “Pulsing”- “Resounding” Rare Mineral…?
And… honestly the ‘energy’ of poison, acid, and necrosis are arguably very similar. I don’t mean to say that they are the same – but …
Whatever, I’ll go for it…
Cinnabar mines in real life were historically associated with death. They didn’t always know what mercury poisoning was, exactly, but they knew that if you were sent to work in a cinnabar mine, it meant you had been sentenced to wither and die.
When I say poison and necrotic energy – and acid too – can all be lumped into one crafting trait, I don’t see it as detracting from any one of them – rather I’m making a statement that poison, acid, rotting and death are somehow tethered to each other in terms of “magical energy.”
I like ‘Noxious’ (latin, Noxa: ‘harm’) for this broad descriptor.
“[…] knowing that common magic items are worth, say, 100 gp, that tells me that common materials are probably worth about 20 gp per unit. Roughly.”
There’s a table in the PHB for trade goods and base metals for example cost 1-5 sp per lb. The cost of common materials is trivial in d&d, are you trying to stay consistent with that as well?
The most obvious solution is a high labour cost or having to purify components and needing other stuff for this.
“Extracting 100 grams of phosphorous requires boiling down 500 litres of urine over a week, 300 gp please”
“Working these 5 dragons’ nail clippings into your armor will reduce fire damage by 2 but granting resistance will require extracting and concentrating the ascribe component of hundreds of clippings using alchemy”
Not unreasonable. After all, in the real world high purity compounds are much, much more expensive than their “normal” counterparts.
I love your site, I extra love your book, and now I double extra love it all for your Pitch Meeting reference.
Double extra loving things is tight!
It is worth making a distinction between ‘mundane materials’ basically what you call common materials, and ‘materials worthy to be used for common magic items’.
The first class is just normal silver piece price based stuff.
The second class is the kind of thing that just for whatever reason breaks into gold piece worth due to the scarcity or the labor involved in production. An intact dragon scale (rare but people find ones all the time just lying about), high grade iron (requiring an expensive forge and expert), a pound of ground up fish bones (takes forever to make but really trivial material).
I was pretty happy to see that people tackled the magic item costs already, but I’m still really excited to see your take on it Angry. The players in my group currently still really care about gold because they’ve just come to a place where there is more stuff than they can afford, and they feel emboldened by their choices, but I don’t want the readily available products to suddenly surge just because they leveled up. Having them go after ingredients instead of buying stuff ready made from the store would be a great boon for me.
I’ve been working on a list of elements and I think I like what I’ve come up with so far, though it may need some work, there are a few spell concepts that I’m not sure where they fit. At first I was just trying to come up with a list and that was hard going, but then I got the idea to instead draw them out in a diagram so I could visualize how they opposed each other and how they combined and it really started to come together.
I started with the four most well known elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water. Air + Water = Storm (Thunder and Lightning), Water + Earth = Ice (Cold), etc. Then I added in another circle of elements around those four, consisting of less tangible concepts, Light, Shadow, Spirit, and I decided on Aether as an opposing force to Spirit. I’m thinking Spirit represents everything intangible that makes up a person, the mind, heart, soul, that sort of thing, while Aether represents space, and that which exists outside the material world. The results of some of the combinations aren’t completely intuitive, which I don’t love, though I do like the idea of there being space on the chart for players to explore. In theory I like the idea of an Alchemist performing experiments not knowing exactly what they are going to get for results but possibly being able to predict the reactions using logic. Not sure how it will play out in practice though.
Trying to find the traits necessary to encompass both all the sources of materials and all the magic items reminds me of how Mendeleev had to arrange all the known elements to make the periodic table.
In a video I saw, he used cards to represent each element and then shuffled them around until he got what he was looking for (for which he had to leave some gaps).
I don’t know how practical making cards would be with hundreds of sources of materials, including monsters, and hundreds of magic items. But it makes me think that It might be easier to find the group-pairs of sources and items first, and give each group-pair a trait, than to make traits first and then seeing what fits with them.
Spoiler alert!
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It seems to me that Xanathars Guide to Everything address a few of the issues that AngryCraft faces. Specifically, the alternative crafting rules (page 128-130) and the section “Awarding Magic Items” (page 135-136). For instance, the crafting rules gives a basic table of tool proficiency requirements for item types, a table showing how rare an ingredient that a monster gives depending on its challenge rating, and a new table for item crafting costs based on slightly modified base costs (page 133). The rule-variant also sets the cost of consumables to be half of the base cost, as suggested in other comments, which can still fit into the DMG’s price interval.
Page 135 present a table of magic items that a party is expected to receive through each tier of play. It derives from the treasure hoards and is therefore very similar to the table given by DM David. However, XGE’s table distinguishes between minor and major magic items (DMG’s Magic Item Tables A to E and F to I, respectively), and the text claims that the DMG also makes this distinction implicitly. These two categories could be used to differentiate the price of items of the same rarity, and possibly even determine which items are visible to player by default and which require research/questing. Or at least serve as a first draft for the master list.
On a different topic: should AngryCraft allow for spell-casters to use spells in the crafting? This is the default way in D&D core, and I think it makes thematic sense, but I am not sure if it is a good idea to make crafting options that inherently excludes non-caster classes. And then there is the question of how to it. If, for example, a wizard can use fireball spell in place of a fiery material, that would mess up the price of items. A work-around could be that some materials have a generic descriptor like “arcane” or “evocation” that allows the right spell-casters to customize the descriptor further or allow for caster to change all descriptors through spells, but wouldn’t that take some uniqueness and flavor out of the quest to gather the materials in the first place?
I’ve been working on a similar system myself. Except instead of adding components to make magic items, I make players create their own spells using components. Which frees me from having to screw around with prices, I just need to make sure players get the right amount of components during play to have a similar amount of spells available for their level (they don’t get spells any other way).
Also, because it’s a play by post campaign, I don’t have to have a master list of combinations for how to create each spell (or what spell is created by each combination). I can take the time to make a decision for every combination the players come up with.
To keep the system somewhat intuitive, I based it for a large part on the magic system of Two Worlds II, which was actually fairly easy to adapt to D&D. One part of each spell is its element, which is tied to the different planes, which are all tied to a different magic damage type. Then there’s the manifestation of the spell (affecting body/mind, conjuring something, affecting an object/surface or in the form of raw energy), the range and area of effect and a list of modifiers (like making the effect last multiple rounds, affecting multiple objects/creatures, etc.).
Instead of trying to make this a neat system, I decided to just start a campaign and see how the players respond to the basic mechanics I had worked out so far. My players are just about to start experimenting, so I’m excited to see if they enjoy this mechanic or if it’s too confusing or bothersome.
If it turns out that the basic mechanic is actually fun, I can consider going over all the spells and seeing if I can create general rules on determining the outcome of any combination of components.
So, the idea of crafting items leads me to the idea of being able to repair broken equipment (it’s been a while since I’ve read the articles, so I don’t remember if that was mentioned), which brings me to my question: can (or should) some sort of sunder mechanic be hung off these rules? Would sundering be too much complexity?
There’s always the mend cantrip, or regular tool proficiencies.
Damage to equipment could be done on critical hits if you want to keep things simple. Maybe reduce damage somewhat if you feel that adds too much to an already powerful blow..