Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Slapstick 09-15-06, 04:30 AM	I am working on a setting where civilzation was overrun by the monsters and humans live in small scattered villages where there is little trade, and none by coin. Magic is almost none-existant, but my heroes will come upon this forgotten lore and learn to master it. My question is how to handle crafting magic items in this setting, where gold simply cannot be an expense (as there is no gold in the first place). I want to make skills such as craft and profession more important in this setting, and I'm considering making skill checks substitute the need for gold. After all, the gold cost of making magic items represents the players going out and bying "stuff" to make the items. As such, picking up the feat "craft magic arms and armor" (which is only available after finding a certain tome) will also give you the knowledge you need to make these miscellaneous items that you would normaly pay gold for. Perhaps a craft(metallurgy) for arms and armor and profession(herbalist) or craft(alchemy) for brew potion. What I would like is some feedback on is whether this would work or not, and how to go about the skill checks. I'm thinking that a skill check could give X amount of "resources" (read: gold) to work with, and can only be done once per level or something along those lines. After they become powerfull enough and get their own serfdoms (sp?), villages, lands etc, they could then teach their underlings (I don't know the correct word :P ) how to tend their gardens or whatever, and get a certain amount of 'resources' to work with per month or somesuch. So in short... How do I do away with gold for crafting items, would skill checks work, and how would it scale by level? - Slapstick
Bulletproof_Condom 09-15-06, 07:51 AM	The various Craft feats now enable you to create magic items with the Craft skills. When creating a magic item, the same rules apply (check result X DC = work completed), only magic item work is always done by day, and you convert the market price to platinum instead of silver or copper. The craft DC for a weapon or armor is the item's normal craft DC plus the total bonus. The base craft DC for other items should be 15, plus the level of the highest level spell needed to make the item, i.e. if you were making a scroll that contained magic missile, mage armor, and fireball, the DC would be 18. I guess it's up to you what they use for raw materials.
Slapstick 09-15-06, 08:32 AM	Thanks for your answer, but I didn't quite get it. Maybe I was unclear... Normally the gold price for magic items would limit how many items a wizard could create before going bankrupt. If there is no economy with coins, no cities and such, this won't work. I was thus wondering how to allow wizards to craft items without spending gold (any type of valuables really, because they'll only encounter this after quite a few levels and even then only a handfull of merchants will be able to trade in such amounts), but limit the amount he could create along the lines of the original rules. It was in this regard I was wondering if I could replace gold with a craft/profession check (to simulate the creation of raw materials), and how much they should be getting, how often they should be able to make the check, how this would possibly affect the game over time etc. - Slapstick P.S. Guess my last post was a bit long and beside the point.
jagggar 09-15-06, 10:23 AM	Hmmm, what are you doing with treasure? Are there valuable jewels from lost civilizations to find? Okay, not the answer you wanted, but I'd probably lean towards hard to come by materials. Specific gems or bodyparts from rare or dangerous monsters. Nothing comes to mind for skill checks the way you imply them at the moment, but I'll think on that if I can.
SirTodd 09-15-06, 11:08 AM	Perhaps you should look behind the gold cost involved? For magic items the gold piece cost is the materials you buy to go make the item. A good way to do this would be to make a list of the special supplies and materials the person would need for each item. For example: A flaming sword may require powdered ruby, fire beetle glands, and some sort of heat conducting inlay. Using the actual price of the components is a good guideline for how much or how little you will need. Then your characters can go locate the ingredients instead of paying the gold cost.
MorandirNailo 09-15-06, 02:47 PM	Just wanted to second SirTodd's suggestion. Using special components in place of GP is an excellent idea (one I use in my homebrew world). It allows you to control what items can be created, gives items special meaning, and provides tons of adventure material. A fighter will feel more of a connection to a flaming sword that required months of searching in exotic locales for the perfect gem/animal bit/metal; it won't just be a flaming sword, it will be his flaming sword, that he earned with sweat and blood. Have him name it too, for that much more flavor. Much more interesting than the wizard locking himself in a room for a few weeks and coming out with something that may as well have been purchased at MageMart. Mor
Thelon Fairblade 09-15-06, 03:07 PM	I worked out something like this ages ago for a wild druid character. He wanted a system by which his wilderness druid could create, for example, a wand of cure light wounds without having or needing a gold piece. His exagerated example was to gather together and sacrifice 3750 chickens (worth 1 sp each)... Of course, now I can't remember the exact rules we worked up, but it was sometihng along the lines of having a "gather" skill that worked like Crafting to generate raw resources, which your feat then consumes to make the magic item. So something like Knowledge/Nature skill checks, I think squaring the result, in silver pieces per day or gold pieces per week. Example: Druid 5, K/Nature skill bonus +11. Rolls a 14, gets a 25 = 625 gp of resources gathered in week of effort. One day then spent crafting a Wand of Cure Light Wounds; the rest of the materials are wasted. (a nice GM might let him only spend 6 days gathering, and 1 for crafting) Example 2: Wizard 9, K/Arcana skill bonus +16. Takes 10, gnerates 26^2 = 676 gp each week. Needs 7 weeks to gather enough resources to enchant a +3 suit of armor. The materials gathered aren't actually "worth" anything, leftovers are wasted, and the materials only apply to the current project (if generous, perhaps to multiple itterations of the same item, like potions and scrolls and wands). Now, crafting mundane objects could work the same way.... Knowledge/Nature to gather silver pieces worth of materials for Craft/Woodworking, for example.
Andrew 09-15-06, 07:54 PM	Experience, and lots of it. Book of Exalted Deeds suggested an option for ascetic characters to use 1 XP for every 5 GP of material components when casting spells, which you could extrapolate to a bigger scale. I think more accurate to wealth-by-level would be a higher rate - not sure exatly what it should be. That would mean crafting would take much more than the standard XP cost for crafting, but wouldn't take expensive components beyond the basic masterwork items. I have no idea how robust such a system would be. You would probably want to make it so that the character the item is made for pays most of the XP cost, and the character making the item pays 1/25th the base price to help keep levels even. Maybe the reason magic items are so rare is that nobody is willing to sacrifice that much of their life-force to make crude material objects.
Bulletproof_Condom 09-16-06, 07:56 AM	Just assign a behind-the-scenes gp value to anything that constitutes a resource.
Slapstick 09-18-06, 03:47 AM	Thank you all very much for your responses! I'm currently leaning towards either having them quest for ingredients like SirTodd and Morandir suggested, or using Skill check squared for ingredients. I have the feeling that one of my players would like to play an "alchemist" - brewing up potions left and right. For that, questing for special materials for every potion won't really do. I'm going to do both actually. Skill checks squared for consumables like potions and wands, and for permanent items (swords, armor, staffs) I'll add the requirement for special materials. Oh, and it was a good suggestion that I should just use the existing knowledge for checks, no need to complicate things eh? hehe Thanks guys! - Slapstick
lostone 09-18-06, 08:22 AM	Just because trade isn't done in gold there would still be a barter system. Just make them trade for the supplies needed in crafting the items. Rarer things that are necessary like salt and spices for curing food would have greater value than commonplace simple goods like firewood (which anyone with an axe can get). Blacksmiths make a good living in a barter system, because everyone needs their tools, work knives, axes, saws, horseshoes, nails, kettles, etc. An easy way to handle the bartering is to lookup the gold value of an item and trade for similar value items. Groups with a lot of wealth looking for easilly transportable tradable goods would be wise to convert large items into small packages like spices. I'd say masterwork knives and tools, but it sounds like the economy is so down that no one would be able to pay full value for masterwork items.
Slapstick 09-18-06, 09:54 AM	Well, trade is mostly lokal (as in just between the villagers, not between villages), because the wilderness is so extremely dangerous that only the most desperate turn to the profession of traveling tradesman :) Some steel coins are in circulation, but no one can make them anymore and very very few know where they came from. They are of course relics from an old empire and a handfull of steel coins will buy you a decent house in any village, or a few cows. I will try to make trade by tradegoods believable and viable. But my effort in that region is going to depend on how much interest the players show. They might just want to head out into the forest and investigate all the ruins in an attempt to find out where everything went wrong so they can go and fix it :) - Slapstick
Millennium 09-18-06, 10:09 AM	Another way you could do this is to just completely eschew the standard crafting rules. DMGII and Weapons of Legacy both include very interesting methods of creating items which are a lot more dangerous, but don't require the huge expenditure of resources that the traditional D&D rules do. In a world where the economy is destroyed and resources become scarce, I would imagine that methods like these would emerge as the dominant ways of creating items.
Slapstick 09-19-06, 03:15 AM	I took a look at Weapons Of Legacy. It seems very interesting. I think I'll actually include these rules, perhaps as optional. After all, there are some penalties. Legacy weapons is actually pretty cool :) And as a coincidence I named my setting/campaign 'Legacy' :P (Before I looked at the Weapons Of Legacy book). - Slapstick
Thelon Fairblade 09-19-06, 11:26 AM	I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but UA has a system of Crafting Points, right? Could those be used? I.e. taking the feat gets you a certain number of points to spend. Assume that you have or find the resources required to spend those points, and when they are gone, you must wait until you gain a level? Of course, I like my "skill check, squared" rule better. :-)
Slapstick 09-20-06, 03:12 AM	So do I :) I'm going to limit it so that they can make a skill check when they embark upon an adventure (you can't find all the rare ingredients in a small outback village), so they don't take a few months off and gather enough resources to craft everything they want (I'm not making them pay xp for crafting. It's just so stupid). I hope this works out! I've never made any campaign from scratch, only a few adventures here and there. - Slapstick