Once upon a time, there was this crazy, angry gaming guy who decided to create a crafting system for his favorite table-top role-playing games. He had big ambitions. He wanted the system to fit into the existing game without disrupting the game’s assumed progression. And he wanted the system to be one that people would actually want to use. And he wanted the system to lack stupid, arbitrary limitations or requiring the doling out of ephemeral abstract concepts like “downtime” or “ingredient points.” And he wanted the system to work just as well whether anyone at the table actually crafted anything with it or not. And – and this is the crazy part – he decided to build it with the internet watching. And able to comment. Even though he has about reached the point where he’s going to close the comments and let people watch QUIETLY.

So, let’s get a few things straight: there are ground rules and if I have to moderate this any harder, I’m going to just close down all the comments and you can be seen, but not heard. First, as the BRIGHT RED STRIPE ABOVE THE TITLE INDICATES, this is part of a series. And, actually, I’ve set this off as part of its OWN series now. The point is, if you’re jumping in the middle, you’d better go back and read all the coursework before you decide to raise your hand and open your stupid mouth. Because lots of stuff has already been stated, explained, argued, accepted, or rejected. And it will not be rehashed.

Second, I review the goals of this project at the beginning of every article. And I also review the conclusions I’ve already reached. And the project is plowing on in that direction even if you think it’s a bad idea. And no one actually cares that you think the goals or the project are bad or doomed to fail or whatever. I’m too busy doing what you think is impossible to give your dumb-ass comment any credence at all. And if everyone listened to people like you, humanity would still be sitting in a cave arguing about whether rocks are edible. Don’t like this project? Don’t think it’ll work? Think the goals are flawed? Neat. Go away. Shut up. This isn’t for you. And no one cares that this isn’t for you. Go find something that is. It’s not that I “can’t handle disagreement.” I can. There are all sorts of articles I write that are open to disagreement, counterpoints, and alternate views. But, at this point, I’m far enough down this road that it’s past the point of no return. It would take a really amazing, brilliant revelation to make it worth turning around instead of seeing it through. And, let’s be honest, that’s probably not coming from you.

The point is this: this is the project. This is what it is now. And I am limiting the comments to useful discussion because I actually have to read each one of these damned comments. And if you don’t have something useful and constructive to add, you are literally stealing my time. If you want to comment about the methodology or the analysis in the CURRENT article, add a comment. If you want to question the worth of the project or any of the previous conclusions, write your comment on a piece of paper and staple it to your wall, then read it, pat yourself on the back for your brilliant contribution, and that will have exactly as much impact on the world as you posting the comment.

Oh, and protip: if your comment starts with “I hate…” or “I despise…” or “the problem with this is…,” your comment is 95% likely to be worthless verbal diarrhea. Please see the previous paragraph for what you can do with it.

Okay, now, let’s review:

We’re revising the treasure system in D&D 5E. I know I claimed we’re making a magic item crafting system. But that’s just a part of it. Because we have to rip out and overhaul the entire treasure system to do it. The reasons were explained in prior articles. Just accept that as received knowledge. Meanwhile, the goals of the magic item system are thus:

The players will acquire consumable raw materials incidentally during their adventures, in limited quantities outside of their adventures, or through the conversion of items or other raw materials. These raw materials can be converted into mundane or magical objects for use by the players. Such conversion normally takes place outside the game but can take place during the game in a limited fashion. Nothing in this system can distract from the core gameplay engagement of adventuring, though it can provide the occasional motivation for adventure. And this system cannot allow the players to unbalance the game by acquiring more magical items than they would be able to obtain under the core rules, nor to earn a profit.

We have further decided that raw materials – hereafter called ingredients – have three classifications. They have a rarity: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Legendary. And they have a type: Metal, Precious Metal, Wood, Herb, Hide, Bone, Fluid, Mineral, Gem, and Essence. Finally, some ingredients have a trait that describes some magical property that the item has that helps define what items it can be used to make. Traits like fiery or healing or reality warping. We don’t have a list of those yet. We’ll come up with it later.

We also decided that we’re going to use the concept of GP to measure the actual worth of items, ingredients, and everything else. GP is the conversion factor. It is roughly equal to the price of the item in the game world in g.p., but it can be different in some cases. Like how a longsword is worth 15 GP and can be bought for 15 g.p., but can only be sold for 7 g.p., 5 s.p. That’s because some items can only be sold for half their value. If the difference between GP and g.p. is still unclear, go back and read some of the previous articles in the series. It’s important.

Finally, we analyzed the material presented in the PHB, DMG, and in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything to see if we could figure out how a normal, 20 level campaign of D&D would play out if we doled out treasure and magical items exactly according to the guidelines in the book. And we put them in a big ole table. And then, between articles, I cleaned up the table to include only the information I needed and I also rounded off the numbers and evened them out and consider them to be good, reliable numbers that are close enough and won’t break the game. And that really doesn’t need any further explanation, discussion, or nitpicking.

Level (Lvl) indicates the average level of the PCs in the party. Encounters (Enc) lists the approximate number of combat encounters the party needs to reach the next level. Foes show how many enemies total the party is likely to kill across all of the combat encounters they need to reach the next level. It was originally based on an assumption that, on average, any given encounter in D&D would include 2.66 to 2.75 foes, but has been rounded down to 2. I didn’t round it up because, all else being equal, GMs tend to prefer encounters with one monster and D&D supports that as the easiest way to design an encounter. Hordes show the number of times the GM will plant a full horde worth of treasure using the treasure table of the appropriate CR for the level. Total treasure indicates the total GP worth of all cash, art objects, and gems that will be found in all of the hordes and on all of the individual creatures across that level and has been rounded off to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands depending on the level. It was rounded up or down based on the levels around it for reasons I’ll explain below. Found items indicate the number of Minor and Major magical items the party is expected to find across all the hordes of that level. Except that it was figured based simply on averaging the total number of magic items expected overall levels of experience across all the levels. So, if it doesn’t quite along with the number of expected hordes, that’s why. Again, it’s close enough for what we’re going to do with it. Cost of Items is the worth of a magical item of the appropriate rarity for the level of the party and the CR of treasure hordes as described in the DMG. Basically, it’s the value in GP of the rarest item the party is expected to find in a treasure horde at their current level. It is also, therefore, the value that the DMG says should be used if the GM wants to allow the party to buy, sell, or craft the said magical item.

Okay. That brings us up to speed. Now, let’s see what we can figure out from this.

Rounding to the Nearest Face in the Clouds

This is very much a continuation of the last article. I need to make that clear. For the last article, did a bunch of math and made a pretty table to determine what the expected progression of treasure and magical items is in the core game of D&D. If a GM follows absolutely every piece of advice in the PHB and DMG, how much cashy money will the party acquire over twenty levels of play and how many magical items will they find. Obviously, if I want to create a new system for doling out magical items and treasure – one that allows players to craft magical item using some of the treasure they find – and I want it to yield similar results to the existing system, I kind of need to know what those results are. And so, to the best of my ability, I did a reasonably precise analysis of the numbers.

The thing is, though, that the definition of reasonable is pretty broad when it comes to RPGs. Especially D&D 5E. D&D allows a lot of wiggle room. And the designers are pretty clear about that. At least, they are as clear as they are about anything else. They explicitly state in both the DMG and XGE – several times in fact – that they have no assumptions about the raw numbers of magical items in the game and that the GM can safely deviate from their expectations a lot. And this is further supported in those books with the fact that the GM is given the option to allow players to buy, sell, and craft magical items according to various systems. The attunement rules prevent the party from overusing the most game-breaking of magic items. The question is whether you believe them.

And I kinda do. I mean, I think that there’s a lot of room in the system before you start to get to broken. But I don’t think the system is endlessly malleable or completely unbreakable either. Monty Haul campaigns – if you’re under the age of 30, look it up – Monty Haul campaigns have blighted every edition of D&D because, even if the raw numbers don’t seem broken, the sheer amount of versatility a party can enjoy with a massive pile of weird magical items stuffed into a bunch of portable holes can give the GM some pretty severe headaches when it comes to trying to create challenging and fun encounters. And yes, there is the argument to be made that it’s okay for the players to break the encounters if they are smart enough. But there is also a limit to how many times they can do that before they just fall into a series of optimized strategies based on a few off-label uses for a handful of their favorite magic items. It gets dull after a while. And having so many options that there’s something in your bag for any situation and all you have to do is pull it out: that’s problem-solving on easy mode. It’s satisfying to a degree, but eventually, it’s just a matter of going over your list of items and mentally rubbing each item against every situation to find the solution.

Point is, we’ve got a lot of wiggle room, but not infinite wiggle room. And I certainly had enough wiggle room that, when I saw some patterns emerge in the numbers, I felt comfortable rounding off the numbers. I didn’t round them up or down. I rounded them to match the pattern. And I rounded them to the nearest number that seemed significant in the pattern. Tens, hundreds, thousands, whatever.

So, check this out:

It’s funny what you see if you just even everything off a bit. For example – and this example isn’t terribly important for this discussion – for example, notice how there are three different XP progression rates in the game. First, there’s levels one and two. You race through them. You barely have time to even get any treasure. And notice that everything from levels eleven to twenty are at kind of a steady rate. 10 encounters per level, 2 treasure hordes per level, ho-hum. And then, notice that between levels three and ten, the speed at which you level slows down comparatively. A 20th level party has spent almost 55% of their game playing through 40% of the levels. As a fun exercise, think about why that might be. Why did the designers do that?

But I don’t care about that. I mean, I do. A little. Because it suggests that any system in the game REALLY has to work in that sweet spot: from third level to tenth level. What’s more noticeable is the cashy money progression and the cost of magic items. Notice that not only do they basically go up by a factor of ten at each tier of play – from 500 to 5,000 to 50,000 to 500,000 – they are pretty damned close to each other too. Let’s say that a party decides to pool all of its money and spend it only on the best magic item money can buy at each level. They can pretty much afford to buy – or craft – ONE magic item. And that’s between them. Those treasure values are doled on a per party basis. Obviously, first and second level are a little different, probably because members of the party may be saving for valuable bits of mundane equipment, they couldn’t afford at character generation, like better armor.

So, if a GM does allow the players to buy, sell, or craft magic items according to the DMG, if they craft the BEST items available as soon as the money becomes available, they can kit themselves with an extra 20 magical items. More importantly, though, if they kit themselves out with items of a lesser rarity – such as a sixth level party making a bunch of Uncommon rarity magical items instead of one Rare item – they can make ten times or a hundred times as many. Especially if you follow the guidance in XGE and allow the PCs to craft consumable items at half the cost. As a fun activity, see if you can find some items in the DMG that don’t require attunement that you’d love to have every member in the party have one of. Or two of. Or ten of. It’s a fun activity. My personal favorite idea is this: at eleventh level, I hire a hundred mercenaries and outfit them with brooms of flying or caps of water breathing so I have a personal air force or amphibious assault team. My second favorite is to give all of my friends in the party a brazier of commanding fire elementals or two. Sure, fire elementals at that level are a little weak, but ten of them a day every day is pretty cool to help us handle the six to eight encounters we’re supposed to get through before a nap. Heck, once you’ve gathered your treasure from fifth level, you can give all of the people in your party darkvision as long as they are willing to wear silly goggles.

If it sounds like I’m blasting the game, I’m really not. There is a reason why the options to buy, sell, or craft magical items are subject to GM approval. And for all of my claims that time in D&D is meaningless and how players can spend as much time as they want between adventures on crafting, there are practical limits most GMs will lay down once the party starts trying to outfit their mercenary army with brooms of flying and wands of magic missile. It’s not a big deal.

Here’s the point, though: the progression is actually pretty straightforward. Every jump in rarity involves a tenfold increase in value. We already knew that, but we also see that the treasure progression follows pretty much in lockstep. And that’s useful for us to know. Because we are going to have figure out how much all of our ingredients are worth. In GP.

Where Do Ingredients Come From

With the by the book progression for treasure and magical items laid out, I want to figure out this ingredient thing in more detail. Right now, I have only this vague sense that ingredients come from adventuring and that they are somehow mixed in with the rest of the treasure. How are the adventurers actually going to find ingredients? Moreover, how are GMs going to hand them out?

Well, treasure comes from two different sources in the game. At least, according to the DMG, it does. First, there’s individual treasures. Every monster has the potential to yield a small amount of cashy money. The monster is either carrying that cashy money or else it’s scattered around the monster on the corpses of its victims. Now, I realize most GMs don’t give every creature cashy money. It’s actually kind of silly to do that. Some creatures not only do not carry treasure because of a lack of limbs and pockets and higher reasoning abilities that allow it to recognize the value of capitalism and currency, but they are also not encountered in their lairs or dens where they might gather the corpses of their victims. And, actually, that’s kind of a problem, isn’t it? I mean, if the game assumes that every creature yields up a handful of pocket change – and, remember, we have already admitted D&D doesn’t really care too much about this stuff so “assumes” is kind of a strong word and we’re just being hypothetical – if the game assumes that every creature yields up some amount of treasure but treasure only exists in the form of cashy money, it strains credibility. Right?

What we have is an opportunity to fix that. It IS weird for a wolf to have 10 GP worth of stuff lying around it, wherever it might be encountered. But it isn’t weird for it to have a pelt worth 10 GP stretched over its muscles and bones. Skeletons don’t have pockets, but they are made out of bone. And bone has uses. If bone were a treasure, skeletons would be made out of treasure.

And that’s why I say that what we’re really doing is rewriting the treasure system in the game and then assigning uses to some of the new treasure. We’ve created a treasure type called “Common Hide” or “Uncommon Necromantic Bone.” If we assign it a value and allow the PCs to sell it, now they can gather treasure from their fallen foes. And if we also say “you can use Uncommon Necromantic Bone as the base for a wand of chill touch,” that’s the crafting system.

So, some ingredients are just part of the individual treasures for various monsters. Players can harvest that stuff in just the same way they’d harvest coins and gems from the monsters’ pockets. Well, abstractly. There’s a bit more involved. But I’ll come back to that.

How are we going to pull that off? Because the GM has to be able to very easily dole this stuff out. And the designers at WotC didn’t take our system into account when they wrote their game three years ago. Selfish jerks. Now, if we’re going to do a writeup of these rules, we can make a list of every monster in the Monster Manual – at least, the ones we’re allowed to list – and assign them a yield. What crap pops out of their corpses. And that’s good enough. But what about for custom monsters? And for monsters that came out in other supplements? Well, that’s where the systemic approach comes in. Instead of just going through each individual monster on the list and assigning it stuff, we assign the stuff based on a system and then tweak the exceptions and then tell people who are using these rules what the system was and how to tweak the exceptions.

For example, we know that any creature from CR 4 to CR 8 should yield Uncommon rarity ingredients. And we know that Beasts generally have useful hides and horns, antlers, or other useful bits of ivory or bone. Those are good general rules. All else being equal, a CR 5 beast yields Uncommon Hide and Uncommon Bone. But if that beast is a giant spider, it doesn’t yield hide. And if the beast is a giant squid, it doesn’t yield bone. And we could also have the number of potential ingredients be affected by the size of the creature. To some extent.

See, we have to balance the “realism” of the game – which is in massive quotes because you know that I don’t mean realism precisely, but you know what I mean by “realism” – we have to balance the “realism” with the practical and with good game design. We’re going to have to make some concessions to make the game work well. And this is also where the game designer’s own views, biases, and stances will come to the fore. For example, at some point, I am going to say that humanoids do not yield any useful ingredients. And I will justify that by saying that the hides on most humanoids are pretty thin and thin and that their bones tend to be smaller and more brittle. But it’s really to avoid putting a system into the game whereby the heroes could skin sentient, civilized humanoid races – like humans and elves – and turn them into armor. And I will not write a system that supports a style of play I find reprehensible. I’m throwing that out there now because I know I’m going to get some flak over it later. Because I get flak for daring to suggest that in my world and in my game, necromancy is evil. And I’m not having that debate. Nor am I entertaining that debate. So, if you feel strongly about elf-skin armor, write your own system, but don’t assume I give a crap that you feel strongly.

See, I have to say that because a lot of limits and restrictions that get written in are compromises. And a lot of people have trouble with that idea. Something might be unrealistic or overly abstract or too realistic or too restrictive or remove a certain style of play someone really wants. And that’s because any final mechanic is a middle ground between a lot of different forces: streamlining play, “realism,” freedom, openness, tone and theme, and so on. And everyone is going to disagree with where the middle point should lie.

Let’s take, for example, the question of harvesting said ingredients. How do the PCs get the ingredients out of the monsters? Is it just something they can do? Should all groups be able to do it? Should it be gated behind a proficiency? Should it require a roll? There isn’t one obvious, good answer. As far as rolling goes: do you want to stop the game after the party kills every pack of wolves and let them roll a check for every wolf in that pack? Some tables are fine with that. And I know that because they roll on the individual treasure tables whenever the party loots goblin corpses. And maybe that’s the solution. Use a treasure table to determine the yield that the GM can roll at the table or can preroll when planning the encounter just the same way that treasure gets doled out. But then, that removes the element of character skill from the equation. And it’s not reasonable to ask the GM to preroll skill checks because some people write adventures for publication. Or before they know who the PCs are.

And whatever system we ultimately settle on for harvesting and yields, we’re going to have to explain it in the world. Now, that’s not so bad. Because, when it comes to these sorts of raw materials, the question is always whether the corpse yields enough good quality material to be useful. It’s kind of all or nothing. When the party decides to skin random wolf corpse #37, well, that wolf might have mange or a fungus or a lot of scars that ruin the largest part of its pelt. Or it might have taken some brutal hits in the combat that ruined most of its hide. Its blood might be tainted with a disease. It might be anemic. The specimen could be old or runty or have weak bones. Who the hell knows? There’s a lot of reasons why there’s just not enough good material to work with. And there’s also a lot of chances for the person harvesting the corpse to screw it up.

And that leads us to the idea that the heroes are doing this stuff “on the fly” as it were. If you take a wolf corpse to the taxidermist in town, assuming the corpse is in good shape, there’s a lot less left to chance. But doing your own work quickly in the field, that’s different. PCs are rarely able to stay safely in one place for long. And corpses are heavy. They have to take what they can, as they can, and go.

So, what can we do? Well, I don’t want to get sidelined too much by this mechanical question just yet. It’s something to put a lot of thought into later. For now, we are just going to say that one of the places ingredients come from is from creatures and that they may yield some number of ingredients based on various factors, including some element of random chance. But we’ll assume that, on average, creatures yield ONE ingredient each. Some will yield zero, some two or three, but we’re going to assume that the average we’re shooting for is one.

The next place ingredients might come from is from placement in the adventure. The party may find ingots of metal or crates of pelts in the orc’s storeroom. Or they may find a growth of valuable herbs or a vein of precious minerals in their explorations. And again, we have a chance to rethink how treasure is doled out in an adventure. When the party is exploring an ancient cave filled with vermin, the GM doesn’t have to find excuses to put chests full of gold in those caves. The party can discover valuable fungi, minerals, precious metals, and so on. And once again, we face the question of harvesting. Obviously, some ingredients are in a finished form. But others have to be extracted from the environment. And how do we handle that? For now, though, let’s assume the party will find about three ingredients for every treasure horde they come across. Again, on average.

Finally, there’s the possibility of salvage. And this brings us back to humanoids and what I mentioned above about the average humanoid not yielding anything useful. We can add a note about how dark wizards and evil warlocks have different magics and allow the GM to modify the system if they feel it necessary to allow the blood of elves or the skin of halflings to be useful stuff for cursed or evil magical items, but in the general system, humanoids don’t yield anything useful. But they do carry equipment. And if we’re going to allow for salvage, that becomes a source of ingredients. So, if you find a sword or a piece of armor on an orc and it’s mostly in good shape, you can melt it down and refine the metal and extract some amount of Common Metal. Or whatever. Or you can take apart leather armor and salvage some of the material and get some Common Hide. This same system might allow magic items to be broken down into useful, rare components.

Because the primary use of salvage will be to extract individual treasure from creatures who carry equipment and whose bodies can’t be harvested for other stuff, I’m going to assume that, in general, any item can be salvaged for one unit of ingredient. That way, it mirrors individual treasure. That general assumption also helps us to deal with another issue: selling items. So, let’s say an item requires 4 ingredients to make. And you can salvage it for 1 ingredient. That gives us a baseline that an item can be converted to 25% of its GP value in ingredients. And that will help us set the general prices for ingredients as compared to items. Because that’s going to be a big bit of math.

Anyway, what we have now is some assumptions about how many ingredients the party will turn up. And these are just guesses. They are based on nothing. And they are averages. The general numbers we’re going to shoot for. But there will be some wobble. Basically, we’re assuming that the party will find one ingredient through harvest or salvage for every foe they kill and three ingredients for every horde they recover.

Recipe for an Item

So, we have an idea of how many ingredients we’d like the party to turn up. But how do we know if it’s a good number of ingredients? Obviously, the question is “how many items can they make with those ingredients.” And, there’s no way to answer that question because – of course – we’re going to set the answer. Based on what we think will make good gameplay. And realism. And freedom. And all that other stuff.

Now, at the end of the last article, I pointed out that on average, over the course of their entire careers, the game assumed that PCs would find 0.45 magical items per encounter they fought. And they would find 0.19 items per creature they fought. I did this merely out of curiosity. And it suggests that on a per creature basis, magical items are worth five kills. And on a per encounter basis, magical items are worth two encounters. If the primary driver of magic item construction is individual creatures, it stands to reason that every time the party harvests five creatures, they should be able to make one magical item. Alternatively, if the primary driver of magic item construction is finding placed treasure, every time the party overcomes two encounters, they should have enough ingredients to make one item.

If we go by the numbers I’ve already suggested – one ingredient per creature on average – the average magical item should take five ingredients, but also – based on the idea of three ingredients per horde assuming a horde shows up every five encounters – we can actually do some mathemagic to determine that it should take about 1.3 ingredients per magical item. Or round up to two.

So, we have two different answers. We could go back and change our assumptions about the number of ingredients found in hordes. But, we’re just trying to see right now how everything will play out. We’re just stabbing at numbers that feel right. A magical item requiring less than three ingredients just doesn’t “feel” right. But doling out lots of ingredients in hordes also doesn’t feel right out. The ingredients should mostly come from fighting monsters. That’s what the game is about. So, we’re not going to change any of those assumptions yet.

So, let’s say the minimum number of ingredients in a single item is three. Anything less than that is too few to feel like crafting. Now, those ingredients can be repeated. A simple non-magical item – because we want to include all forms of crafting – like a shortsword might require three units of Common Metal. That’s a simple recipe. It’s three ingredients, but it’s really only three units of one ingredient. Easy peasy. More complex items, like a staff of fire, might require three units of Rare Wood or Rare Bone, two units of Precious Metal, two units of Mineral or Gemstone, one unit of Essence, and at least three Rare Fiery components – and I’m just making this crap up as an example. That’s not set in stone. And it’s just an example of how the number of ingredients is separate from the type of ingredients in terms of approachability and complexity. That staff of fire requires five different Types of ingredients and one Trait of ingredient. That takes some mental effort to keep track of, but not too much effort. But it could require eight to ten actual units of ingredients. So, let’s assume the maximum number of ingredients in a single item is ten units and make sure we don’t include more than about three to five types of ingredients in that list. And later, I’m going to introduce another way to increase the number of types of ingredients without increasing complexity.

So, assuming the party finds one ingredient for every creature they kill and three ingredients in every horde and that items, how many items could they craft if all items only required three ingredients? Or five? Or ten? Or to split the difference between five and ten, seven? Let’s work that out.

This table builds on the previous. It uses the estimated number of foes fought and hordes discovered to determine the number of ingredients found – based on the assumptions of one per creature and three per horde – and then just divides them by the number of ingredients required to make a magical item assuming all formulae involve 3, 5, 7, or 10 ingredients.

In other words, if we assume the only treasure in the game is ingredients and that the party uses all of the ingredients they find to craft magical items and they find no other magical items in the game and all magical items require the same number of ingredients, then if magical items require 3 ingredients, the party will end the campaign with 198 magical items. If the magical items require 5 ingredients, they will end the campaign with 119 magical items. If they require 7 ingredients, they will finish up with 85 magical items. And with 10 ingredients, they will have 60 magical items.

Now, the base game assumes the party will have around 100 magical items and have enough gold to craft or purchase – if those options are available – another 20 magical items.

Of course, we’re comparing pure systems here. We’re comparing a CRAFTING ONLY world to a TREASURE TABLE ONLY world. And we’re also comparing the PERFECT CASE of CRAFTING ONLY. That the party turns up exactly the ingredients they need for the items they want and pour every ingredient into items. No waste, no selling off crap. And we’re also assuming all magic items require the same number of ingredients.

So, does that tell us anything? Yes. It tells us a lot. First, it tells us that the two systems yield similar enough results in the perfect case, that if we average the two systems together – say, remove some of the items and gold from the treasure table system to make room for ingredients from the crafting system – we’re probably going to stay reasonably balanced. At least in the perfect case. Now, the case won’t be perfect. But if we allow for the players to make some adjustments – salvaging ingredients, selling unwanted ingredients and buying necessary ingredients to top off a recipe, and seeking ingredients purposely by going on specific adventures and working with the GM on that front – well, we’re probably get about 50% to 75% of the way to the perfect case. It’s hard to pinpoint more precisely than that. We’re just guessing. And that’s okay. For two reasons. First, the magical item and treasure balance is already loosey-goosey as we discussed earlier. The designers said it can handle some wiggle. Second, you can’t precisely nail a play experience with numbers and math and thinking. The math and numbers and thinking just get you to a broad, vague area of “probably okay.” The actual play experience can only be evaluated by actually playing it out. All you can do with math and thinking is to outline the boundaries within which the correct solution probably lies.

We know now that if we assume one ingredient per creature and three per horde, on average, and that items require three to ten ingredients – but magical items never require less than five – we can make room in the treasure table system for our crafting system at a two-to-one tradeoff. That is, if we remove one magical item from every treasure table, we can add enough ingredients to every treasure table to make two magical items and still be playing in the same ballpark. And then see how it goes from there.