I think these revised crafting rules could make for a neat low wealth survival campaign. There are no shops, you adventure to get the resources needed to build the items necessary to adventure further. Maybe the goal is just to escape some nightmare island... oh the brain is awash with possibilities.
@@ashenlion805 formulas could be a reward for adventure (imagine finding books in a post apocalypse, or broken versions of items that can be used as a template for building them)
I feel like the RAW crafting rules can make it hard to justify investment in the crafting skill and related feats as a player Two of my players are invested in crafting and tied crafting into their stories but rarely used the rules, and this is a campaign with lots of downtime. Through the story I eventually set them up with up workshops with apprentices and gave them various bonuses and reduced the time required, but at the cost of paying for wages and upkeep. I think it balanced pretty well and I saw a lot more use of crafting.
I'm curious: what did the players want to get out of it? Was it to make more flavorful items? Items with boons? Or to earn money? Or something else I haven't thought of? If you want benefits to items, Battlezoo's "monster parts" system from their Battlezoo Bestiary has rules that can be adapted well I think. Here is their writeup for that: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I think ultimately the player wants to feel as though the investment feels both useful, worth the effort, and to some degree thematic. Spending way more time to craft as opposed to just buying it for the same price feels real bad and pointless.
@@ashenlion805 I completely agree with those players. It definitely feels pointless in that context. But as many have pointed out, I don’t think the crafting system was intended to craft things that you can just buy at a store. It’s to allow the players to basically dictate the items they want, at the cost of investing in those skills. And hell, maybe even get a cool adventure out of tracking down a rare material.
@@cfalkner1012 here is my problem with this mindset. If crafting is intended to allow players to “dictate what items they get” then one: what is the point of the rarity system in the first place? (My thought was it was to allow the DM to control what kind of powerful items they allow in the game and your reasoning nullifies that) if you meant they could choose among common items I would ask that isn’t that what you do in normal purchasing? You have access to all items of the appropriate level. Two: the players and DM should be in agreement about items they should be able to get. If you are saying players can only get an item through crafting (outside of some obvious cases like the philosophers stone and other super powerful items) that feels like the equivalent of a video game lowering the amount of XP you get just to offer you a XP booster costing money to help you level up. It’s creating a problem where there shouldn’t be one so that you have to sacrifice something in order to do the thing you want to do. To summarize. My problem with crafting is that it requires a minimum of 1-2 feats (potentially more), over time 3 skill increases, and more time than just buying an item in order to functionally do what is already possible with just purchasing (at least in my games and I feel like it’s not just me). Point being it accomplishes almost nothing at the cost of feats, skill investment and a good deal of downtime.
@@PurpleCyanideTube Wow, that’s a lot. I suppose (like all of these issues) it all boils down to what kind of campaign/world you are playing in, and what kind of character the players want to create. I’m not trying to convince you that you should like the rules. Just that they could be useful for people who want to use them.
Crafting an item should fundamentally not cost the same as buying it; because when you're buying the item it's implied that you're paying the craftsman's profit margin. If it cost me 10GP to make a sword then it cost him 10GP to make it, if I buy it for 10GP that means he's made 0 profit on it. Basically this makes crafting your gear only valuable if you can't just buy it, which is a much more niche use and really screws with the character fantasy of being the party's craftsman and producing the gear.
@Gram which is dumb and does not adresse players wanting to fulfill the fantasy of a dude or dudette making their own weapons and armor and enchanting them.
@@sebastienlecmpte3419 Technically you can keep spending days on the item, to 'save money'. But this becomes ridiculous at higher levels. I'm not happy with how the system works atm aswell.
@@gramfero Then how do you get access to the formula? If the formula is available why isn't the item? If the formula isn't available you can't craft it.
I like these new rules mostly. But I think I am going to just let the crafter finish the object for 25% of the item's base cost instead of another 50%. It doesn't feel right that a character has invested in crafting then spends time on crafting something instead of doing other RP things like earn income and then doesn't get any savings without spending a ton of extra days on it which most campaigns are just not gonna allow for.
Yeah the only way I could justify it is by making all shops sell items at 150% or so, which is just a bit more work than dropping the crafting price a bit.
Great stuff as usual, Ronald. The thing that keeps coming back up in the French PF2 community is the lack of any particular rules for crafting mundane objects, like arrows. I often suggest appropriate house rules for that, but it seems like a missed opportunity. I also really like the fact that many items specify monster part ingredients. Progress in roleplaying! After a second look, I have a few comments: - You never mention the need for the Magical Crafting feat, which requires Expert in crafting, which most characters can't get until 3rd level. Of course your example, an elixir of life, is alchemical, and many characters can get that feat right out of the gate at 1st level. - You kind of gloss over the obstacle of obtaining the formula. You do mention the Inventor feat, which requires crafting the formula, adding to the total cost (at least for your first such item) but you didn't mention the option to reverse engineer an item you've managed to get your hands on. The trouble with buying fomulae is that they ostensibly require access to a settlement of high enough level to buy the item outright. This is my biggest gripe about crafting - since magic items are universally available up to the settlement level, exactly the same as obtaining the formula, it doesn't really help you to craft it yourself, unless you can get the fomula through other means. In the best of all worlds, I think the availability of medium to high-level magic items should be more difficult, more random, or often times simply impossible without an adventure to obtain them, while obtaining a formula could be significantly easier. But that would require gumming up the baseline assumptions of PF2's magic item availability paradigm. Clearly the province of house rules.
Good points. I do think Paizo SHOULD have made formulas of higher level more available as a baseline for its settlement "shopping rules." It is even more believable from an in-world standpoint: written knowledge about rare items should naturally be more available than the items themselves.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG is that so believable? How many technical manuals would you expect to exist in a setting with no-one of the level to use them present? Also, in a low-tech environment like most campaign settings, how often would you find a how-to for things that require mastery of a craft? Most experts or masters in a pre-widespread media world would just keep their secrets to train apprentices and attract clients rather than publish them widely.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Note formulas do not have an item level stated on them. They do have blueprints for making an item of a certain level but the formula itself has no RAW level. This I think makes sense, as what’s more likely that a library or artisan might have a book that describes how to forge a magical rune or that the artisan has the materials, skill and need to create such an item (Ie if your a blacksmith in a farming village it’s unlikely you’d make much more than bows and arrows for hunting, farming tools like scythes and sickles, and maybe daggers). To me as a GM means I often allow players to have far more access to formulas as it makes sense for them to be more readily available and seeing as they hand no explicit item level ever stated RAW supports this conclusion I think.
Probably preaching to the choir here but I'll add my two cents in as well. I too felt pretty miffed about the crafting in pf2e. Crafting should make you feel useful to the party, at barest minimum on par with just out right buying the item you need. Because you must consider, you're investing in acquiring a formula, skills and feats for crafting, locating a lab/forge to work, spend 4 days of downtime with no pay, have the money investment in full for the item in question, and after all that hope you don't roll bad and waste all that effort. Alternatively you could just go to your local store and buy it, and spend 4 days getting additional gold. What I eventually found that saved the system for me was the settlement rules, because sure you might be level 20 but if you're in a low level settlement, they're only going to have low level "earn income" tasks while the crafter will always be reducing the item's cost by their full amount regardless of settlement level. You'd have to do the math to see how much of an edge this small positive gives but this still leaves a very sour taste in a player's mouth. While other players are getting cool encounter features, or better means of healing the party, or being able to help the party stealth better, etc; you get to spend abilities to waste time and money on making items anyone could simply buy without investment? Everyone else seems to be able to do better with investment in the skills they choose, except for crafters because buying the items is largely the superior option unless you are in a backwater town with no decent shop, but a forge and just so happen to have the myriad of additional requirements to craft.
The fact classes like Alchemist or the archetype Talisman Dabbler get to skip multiple aspects of both crafting systems highlights this impracticality to me. The best way I have to explain the need for these rules is to prevent someone becoming Franky from One Piece. If you take your eyes off him for one second he will build an ornate bridge to cross a gap or build stairs as he is walking up them so he can punch a giant. Yes we obviously want it to take time, but I as a DM don't actually care once it takes more time than instantly. If a player wants to make a long sword on Monday I am fine with them having it Tuesday. Like why does making a sword need to be realistic when it's made from dragon fangs and forged by a birdman? I rather focus on making cool crafting gear for the creating player like a porta forge, the ever-burning coals, magic engraving tools etc
@@prof.loophole9708 As much as I love Franky, I gotta agree you can't have things go that outlandish. The problem is where we are now with crafting doesn't give any advantage to investing in the skill save for small moments with settlement level shenanigans outlined above, which not all GMs will use. Putting it another way, say you have a stealthy person who's invested ASIs, feats and items into stealthing better only for the rest of the party to spend less gold and not only match them but actually beat them in stealth!? How is that fair? Why would you invest in such a skill when people could easily replicate with less input and get more output? Because that's what crafting is currently. People want there to be some benefit to crafting that will make it worth putting the effort in. Maybe the weapon having some small benefit compared to the store bought one? Maybe you can save on gold on making it but you can't sell said item for a profit, so the party is net positive on gold but can't keep making them over and over to break the economy? Maybe we make formulas several levels lower than the weapons they make so that you can get them easier when using the shop item distribution properly. Anything to make it so the party can't buy your skill into irrelevence. Because sure, cool crafting gear is neat, but if it can't get them past just buying the item, it's lukewarm at best.
The crafting system really just breaks after a certain level. The use of earn income vs. The cost of higher level items becomes prohibitive because of time. I.e. a GM says Apex items are not for sale. They must be crafted. Ok, cool. They research, do a dungeon, find the formula. Great. The party crafter is lvl 18 and Legendary. They want to craft an apex item that costs 24k. They pay 12k, spend the initial days, and then have to spend 134 days to get it reduced to half. Yes, this is an extreme case, but the time required to be meaningful for permanent items is lost by lvl 7-9. Most campaigns don't give you the summer off to finish your items. At nost you get a couple weeks. And then, supposed you get 2 weeks between adventures, by the time you spent your 6 weeks making an item you've likely levelled once or twice or find an item to fill the role of the item you're crafting. Which then makes crafting useful only for consumables (which is still good and works fairly well for items like that) i think permanent items just need a separate system. Use this one for consumables only.
@@PurpleCyanideTube as others have mentioned, crafting is really only good given 2 conditions; long outtings where you rarely get back into a town that has a shop, or when shops where you are don't have what you need or want. Otherwise, yes, just buy it. Yeah, you could save some money crafting but you don't always have the time to do so because of crafting's limitations. An argument could be made for crafting batch consumables as an overall win for crafting, but for most everything else it's almost always easier to buy outright EDIT - I guess I'm saying that buying is almost always the better option because of the way crafting is written. It would be nice and interesting if crafting were just a little more viable given the amount of feats and skill increases you're able to put in it for way less value than anywhere else.
The problem for me isn't even that you have to take a whole two seasons off to finish a legendary magic item. That's honestly fine. The problem is that you can either conjure up that same item in 4 days if you sacrifice a cart of gold to the crafting gods, OR, take a whole two seasons off to craft it yourself. It just doesn't feel like crafting
@@feferson492 valid point. It would make more sense if you couldn't buy it off at all. I feel like the ideal crafting system would take a reasonable amount of time based on item level and whether it was permanent or consumable, not it's cost, and there was no option to just buy out. I do like the quirks and rushing the job of treasure vault, though. The homebrew system I use is 4 days, Craft Check, then you get a percentage of progress on the item every day you work on it, which changes if the item is mundane, magical, permanent, consumable, and the item's level and rarity. No option to buy. My players like it.
Okay, but... what's the problem with taking a lot of downtime? It's not like that happens in real time, or across multiple sessions. As a GM you could just say "you take half a year to make this item", and as long as you weren't under eg. some world-ending time pressure, what's the worry? It's also perhaps a thing to suggest you should _really_ want to craft a particular item, rather than just being "oh I can make every rare top-tier item in the world, no worries". Anyway, the Core book does say the most important thing is to do what makes sense for your group and to have fun. There's never any obligation to follow crafting rules to the absolute letter if it isn't fun for you or your group :)
The diversity of opinions of what Crafting is for in a campaign shows the importance of threshing this out in your Session Zero. If crafting is important to you, make sure to discuss these rules (and possible houserules) and the availability of downtime! I should've said this in the video: the base presumption by Paizo is that the focus of the game is ADVENTURING. Therefore, the main economic activity is adventuring. You craft, not to sell what you're making (that would make this an economic simulation - there are other, better games for that), but to increase your party's ability to kill things and take their stuff. For a similar reason, crafting a legendary magic item shouldn't require the campaign to come to a standstill for months or years at a time. So Paizo wants adventuring to be the default presumption, WITH the option that campaigns CAN have downtime that includes both earning income and crafting living side by side. That design goal necessarily collides with economic realism. There is a thematic disconnect because in real economies, working for a wage is a different economic activity from producing a product for sale. The latter assumes a profit over what you would be doing otherwise. Having BOTH available to PCs leads to two different tracks (economic classes!) within the same party... arguably undesirable. In essence, these rules are reminiscent of PF2's encounter balancing rules. The nature of accommodating what different tables want from crafting is that the designers cannot please every design goal and every campaign. BUT they can present a harmonious, internally consistent system so that a GM can "turn a dial," instead of having to invent bespoke rules for certain situations. ============= DIFFERENT GOALS & COMPLAINTS and GOOD VARIANT RULES/HOUSERULES TO ADDRESS THEM: CAMPAIGNS WITH LITTLE DOWNTIME BUT PLAYERS WANT TO CRAFT: -At Session Zero, the table can decide to use these rules and scale down the times. Maybe at a 4:1 ratio, where every 2 hours count as "1 day" within this system. Like the encounter design rules, I appreciate that we are given an internally consistent system that we can tailor for our needs by simply "turning a dial" instead of inventing rules out of whole cloth. CRAFTING CUSTOM ITEMS: -Absolutely check out Battlezoo Bestiary (by Roll for Combat). One of the co-designers of PF2, Mark Seifter, designed their "monster parts" system, which extrapolates from PF2's rules and economy to allow a PC to add special abilities to items! Here is their writeup on how it works: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/ FORMULAS BEING AVAILABLE ONLY WHERE THE ITEM IS DEFEATS THE PURPOSE: -A good point from Kirby Schmidt, who says the Inventor feat "should be baseline if the only reason to craft something is if you don't have access to it." Yes, the Inventor feat is arguably a "feat tax" for PCs who want to support their party with crafting. Hence I think that making the Inventor feat baseline is a fair houserule. The default rule supports GMs and tables who want the rarity of formulas to be implemented. -All that being said: I do think Paizo SHOULD have made formulas of higher level more available as a baseline for its settlement "shopping rules." It is believable from an in-world standpoint: written knowledge about rare items should naturally be more available than the items themselves. I'll test out formulas of "Settlement Level plus 2" being available within them. (NOTE: Items of "Settlement Level minus 1" are what's assumed for what PCs can find easily.) CRAFTERS SHOULDN'T "LOSE INCOME" DUE TO THE SETUP TIME: -That is a fair concern. Houseruling this would NOT break anything. After more thought I think the reason it's not in these rules isn't because they WANT it to be a financial cost, but to simplify the calculation. I can see what they were thinking with it, but it isn't gamebreaking just to include the "cost lowering" from the initial setup time into the final cost. ============= ADDITION: There is rules support in Treasure Vault, for breaking down magic items for more than 50% of their gold value! (I failed to mention it in the video) It's a Rare downtime activity called Deconstruct, where you can break down an item for either 50% of its value (55% on a crit success) or to support the crafting of a SIMILAR item (GM discretion) for 75% of its value (80% on a crit success). (This of course can be changed by a GM further.) BUT... I think the treasure table in the CRB assumes that some of those items are sold for half their value. So a GM should be concerned about a 100% conversion rate. A GM should be mindful of that.
One thing I want to say about the inventor thing: this is only an issue for permanent items. Consumables are something you'll be crafting over and over, presumably different locations; so buying the formulas isn't too big a deal (my alchemist crafts non-infused alchemical items from their book quite often; especially healing items and level 1 bombs for using as a second attack with quick bomb for easy AoE damage) My DM also gives me formulas as loot; because they are cheap, it doesn't take up much of the treasure budget. Usually, it's stuff for potions and the like, since recipes for permanent items are usually only used like once or twice. It's kinda like stealing the evil wizard's spellbook, except more helpful!
I think they forgot that crafting is... You know, something you can make a living on? Like, as a job it is a way to make money by selling products at a profit So, you ask, why the heck would someone not sit in town all day making items? Because they are an adventurer and people need saving. just because my inventor wants to, you know, invent things doesn't mean they are going to be sitting back at town while the rest of the party is fighting the lich
@@acidnine3692 I don't understand what you mean. If a PC wants to make money, they can go on an adventure if they want to take the risk, or they can Earn Income during downtime until the plot moves forward, which is related to what you said. You don't need a formula to Earn Income with Crafting. If there is no task (or not a high level one) to Earn Income, but there is a high level formula available to craft, you could craft an item and sell it.
I think these rules are an improvement, but for me the whole crafting system is immersion breaking and I feel it necessary to house rule them heavily. By the rules as written, every blacksmith and shopkeeper in the world is selling the items at the price listed in the books at a loss, they paid the full price for materials (or half and spent days/weeks on one item) only to sell it for that amount (or half as it suggests). I understand the idea of game balance, but I have a hard time imagining why anyone would sell the items at the prices listed in the first place.
I came to this video being enthusiastic about PF2 but dissatisfied with the crafting system. After watching this video, I think I understand more of what Paizo was aiming for with their Crafting system and what merits it serves, so that if I do make homebrew changes to it in my own campaign, I'll be doing so from a place of more grounded awareness. Thanks for the practical analysis!
I like those rules but those feel more like an upgrade of the base rules rather than variant. One thing I was looking for, especially with story based crafting, was informations on how to create unique magic items (rules, advice and help on how to have the players create a unique item other than just be a "can we homebrew that item ?")
You might want to check out Roll for Combat/Battlezoo's "monster parts" system, which extrapolates from PF2's rules and economy to allow a person to add special abilities to items! Here is their writeup on how it works: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Yeah I have read about that, and have been considering it. Though monster parts don't really fit the few stuff my players talked about in our current campaign that might be a way.
The core problem with Crafting is that it is a huge exp sink that weakens the player investing in it and it's WILDLY dependent on how the GM runs their game. As written it assumes the GM will never consider what the players want for equipment and will strictly design the game world with only a specific set of resources for the players to find. The problem here is that now crafting allows players to break this carefully curated environment, which is good for the players who did NOT invest in learning to craft. The player who invested a bunch of feats and skill increases into crafting will still be at a lower power level than the rest of the party, but might be able to make up for it with these otherwise unavailable items acting as an overall force multiplier. If a player is this interested in getting specific items, many GMs will figure out other ways to provide those items; likely in the form of a shop, "not so random treasure", or a quest to find that item. In such a game where the GM is willing to provide those items through other means crafting now becomes nothing but a handicap for the player who tried investing in it. The rules also assume the campaign will have huge chunks of downtime for players to actually perform downtime activities. Many campaigns don't do this because it kills any sense of urgency. If the campaign doesn't have enough downtime then any investment into crafting and other downtime-related skills is completely pointless for the players to take and turns those choices into traps. Personally I think Pathfinder 2 needs to separate out the "Downtime" feats from the other feats and provide those downtime exclusive feats as a separate pool of feats to provide the player periodically rather than muddle the Encounter mode feats in with the Downtime feats. However that sort of change would so massively shake up the currently system it wouldn't be feasible without an almost total overhaul of the entire skill system.
It is possible for a campaign to between the two extremes in your 2nd and 3rd paragraphs; that's precisely what happens when you run a Paizo published adventure without adjustments. Many items ARE just useful to every party, take fundamental weapon and property runes, for instance. And some items are not useful depending on what a party wants that the authors couldn't anticipate.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG That's just the issue, it feels like they expect everyone to only be using published content and not any original settings. While that's a fair assumption on their part, I just rarely see actual games where GMs stick rigidly to those pre-written adventures. That's probably just due to circles I've played in, though I definitely have seen many players simply ask to respec their characters because investing in downtime skills left them feeling distinctly unable to contribute as much during encounters. There's just a huge incentive to focus characters on the stuff happening around the table when you get together rather than the downtime segments.
A campaign hat has no downtime, not even a 4 days one between adventures, doesn't sound like a campaign with a sense of urgency to me. It sounds like a campaign with a cartoonishly exaggerated sense of urgency. Like you're playing a video game. If you're playing a campaign like that just don't get any downtime feats. But I don't believe that to be the average campaign an average group of people would play. Edit: To be clear, I'm by no means one who advocates for PF2E's crafting system. Precisely because it feels more like a video game, and not because it doesn't "fit" in the gaming table
i always DM with the assumption that NPCs and PCs have the same crafting rules. for that reason, i cannot abide by a system based on the assumption that "if you had access to that item, you wouldn't be crafting it." somebody had to craft it, and if they couldn't make a profit off of it, why would they have done it? yes, if you are a shop-keeper, or a player that owns a shop, you just roll your "Gain an Income" check to make stuff for your shop that turns a profit. but that system is too vague for me as a crafting enthusiast. i want an itemized list of all my shop's current products, and the "gain an Income" roll is just how much product i succeeded in selling. to that end, i have used custom crafting system that both PCs and NPCs abide by. i also give my players significant amounts of downtime to do any downtime tasks they want.
This channel is great. I’m glad I found it not too long ago. I love the book shelves in the background. Some serious nerd cred on this shelves. It would be great to see what games you have and some of your most prized books.
I believe another common complaint is that these crafting rules still won't work well in a game that has very little downtime. My thoughts on this would be making 8 hours equal to 1 day of work on crafting. If you have adventured for 8 hours, you'll have 8 hours to craft towards something and 8 hours to sleep. The consequence of this is that a day of no adventuring would mean 16 hours of work (which would be "2 days" of crafting progress). It's not entirely unreasonable, but I might make the crafting difficulty check harder for each instance of 16-hour crafting day. My justification for that would be it is potentially monotonous on the mind to be so focused on a project for so long in a day. Different from an adventuring day with time to spare for crafting as it's a bit more refreshing to work on something different.
I think for a campaign with little downtime, the GM is within their rights to scale these things more drastically, maybe at a 4:1 ratio, where every 2 hours count as "1 day" within this system. Like the encounter design rules, I appreciate that we are given an internally consistent system that we can tailor for our needs by simply "turning a dial" instead of inventing rules out of whole cloth.
Alternately to the time compression method, you could also borrow from something like Blades In The Dark, and use a flashback to justify the time spent. Give each character some number of hours of downtime that happened in the past. The players can then decide after the fact whenever they need something how that downtime had been spent, describe the flashback of why they were doing those activities at the time, and where they left whatever products of said downtime.
@@eepopgames2741 that could work, but you can't go too far back with this flashback crafting, otherwise the "why didn't you use this earlier" question comes up.
I like this ruling seems very reasonable. Some recommendations as well are as a GM just get better at working downtime into a campaign. Ie if the players are traveling, they could purchase a wagon with a worship in it meaning they could work during travel time. Run into a town that’s been attacked? Downtime to help the locals clean up and for life to recover. Need to hunt down that Lich threatening the world? Spend a few days going around and gathering info and rumors about them from locals and those passing through town, etc. I think working in downtime into a campaign is very doable and necessary not only for crafting but good pacing as it lets players retrain, earn income, recover from battle fatigue etc.
FYI for arrows, the batch size is 10 You can Craft items with the consumable trait in batches, making up to four of the same item at once with a single check. This requires you to include the raw materials for all the items in the batch at the start, and you must complete the batch all at once. You also Craft non-magical ammunition in batches, using the quantity listed in the Ranged Weapons table (typically 10). From the crafting skills page on AoN
I think it's more the spirit of broken crafting that's the issue. IRL, I'm a craftsman (a goldsmith specifically) and I'm expected to produce at least 15 items a day. Anyone who could only produce 10 gold jumps rings in 4 days would be laughed out of the profession for their egregious incompetence. And this level of incompetence, so much that it's just silly is where players find themselves. I hope they are skilled murder hobos, because they are crap craftsman.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I belive that what they're saying is that it seems that the batch size for arrows (10) overrides the batch size for consumables (4) meaning that you can only craft 10 arrows in a batch rather than 4 batches of batches of 10. Either way, that sentence could probably use a small clarification since there seems to be confusion one way or the other.
Using these rules, you can create realistic expectations for when NPC craftsmen are done with certain items, when they restock new more potent items, what kind of lower tier items they can have available en masse.
Just adding a little more, since I plan to complement these rules by following a suggestion from another video. An adventure should roughly take a week, traveling there, exploring, solving the issue, pillaging, coming back. If it feels particularly long, add more weeks, I'm only doing it this way to keep tracking time easier for me when it comes to how much time has progressed outside of their personal timeframe. It also lets me give out Downtime easier, because it's going to be in increments of seven days.
Personally, I would like to see items upcycled. You can sell items you don't need for half of their value. If your GM gives you a bunch of crap you don't need you can argue you are being gold starved, as you're just going to be pawning those items for half their value to try to get the items you want/need. What if you could upcycle items. Turn 100% of the value of an item into a higher leveled item and you pay for the difference. And you can only upcycle items that make sense to upcycle. You can turn magic weapons into another magic weapon. You can turn talismans into other talismans. This gives a small gold advantage to crafters, but not a huge improvement. This along with long crafting times makes it not feasible for a crafter to completely improve all the items of the party, and the party may end up with less gold in some situations as the crafter encourages keeping items until he can actually make something with them instead of selling them immediately for cash. This is in addition to regular crafting rules where a crafter pays for the full item.
There is rules support for this in Treasure Vault! (I failed to mention it in the video) It's a "rare" downtime activity called Deconstruct, where you can break down an item for either 50% of its value (55% on a crit success) or to support the crafting of a SIMILAR item (GM discretion) for 75% of its value (80% on a crit success). This of course can be changed by a GM further. I think the treasure table in the CRB assumes that some of those items are sold for half their value. So a GM should be concerned about a 100% conversion rate. But so long as the GM is mindful of that it should be alright.
I'm so mad, I just finished a campaign as an alchemist crafter. I maxed crafting and it was great in the beginning but as we got to the end of the campaign we were in a dier situation behind enemy lines for the last like half of the campaign and we basically got no down time. Epic story but my crafting based character had no time to craft anything. With these rules I could've done a lot more and saved a lot of prepared/quick alchemy slots by making potions I needed consistently to help get us through traps and mazes and such....I'm so mad that these rules come out now and not like 2 months ago cause it would've been so helpful. Oh well, it's a great rules update
The new crafting rules are about the same for permanent items, but waaaaaay better for consumables. For permanent items, the base setup time is worse, but the rushed crafting makes up for it after 3 days for items on level. The flat check might be scary, but the DC is such that only a nat 1 can give you a cursed item; most of the time, you'll pass, and on a fail you get a quirk, but the quirks in the book are more weird than anything; they don't even disadvantage you. For consumables, it's straight gold. The setup time is the same for on level, and lower level items have a lower time. The rush time rules are even better because the quirks are even less of an issue since they get used up; doesn't matter as much if the healing potion smells like sulphur vs your armor smelling like suphur. Theres also a lot of consumables that are very much worth crafting throughout your whole career In my current campaign, we have a lot of downtime as we travel, and since we bought a vehicle, I just craft in the back of the wagon. I rarely make permanents outside of upgrading gear; but I make a TON of consumables, so overall, these rules are an incredible boon for me
One issue I’ve heard raised is that both the new crafting system and the one it supplants make use of a resource that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as any others: down time days. I only have access to two of the many APs out there, so I’m wondering: how often do campaigns really include down time? And are there places where advice about how and when to give out downtime are written?
It varies from AP to AP. Both between PF1e and PF2e, you've got some that are a constant race - and some where taking a week or two off won't impact the outcome at all. This difference in pacing can vary wildly even between parts of given books, too. You've also got several APs, like Kingmaker and Strength of Thousands, where MONTHS of downtime are the norm. Pathfinder Society adventures also include a guaranteed week of downtime between every single module.
@@willdigforfood5065 With such wide variance, I'd think a useful rules update would discuss this disparity. If there's tons of downtime to be had, crafting quicker or more slowly is not helpful. If there's none, then people just can't play with characters who craft. Given the suggestions not to homebrew much unless you know what you're doing, some guidance here would be helpful. Similarly, if the PFS standard is a week, direct references between these rules and what can accomplished in a week would be helpful. Dedication feats around crafting that give temporary items tell you how often you get them - usually two consumables per day. If you don't know your downtime budget, taking skill feats for crafting or buying recipes becomes a very unclear investment.
@@benrichetti1360 Yeah, that's absolutely fair. But there are references for how much work can be done in a given set of downtime, though: you can produce any item (or any 4 batches of a consumable item) with a week's worth of downtime (either 4 days with the core rules or 1-6 days using the treasure vault variants) regardless of its price, level, rarity or complexity; if you want to reduce costs below market value, you do so by an amount listed on CRB Table 4-2: Income Earned (CRB pg. 236), based off your character level and degree of training in Crafting, per additional day spent beyond the 4 days/TV variable days. Although it's also, I think at least, a fair point that not every campaign needs to cater to every type of character, and that it's a discussion that players should be having with their GMs before they roll characters and get deeply invested. If the GM lets the group know there's not going to be a lot of downtime before they make their characters, and someone still makes one that invested heavily into Crafting feats and equipment, then that's not a failure or flaw in the crafting rules, that's just a player shooting themselves in the foot. But if the GM sees a player making a crafting-heavy character and doesn't say anything about there not really being time in the campaign to spend weeks of downtime, then that's just bad GMing.
Let's look at it from the Design POV. I do see each sides pros and cons. The key thing: Paizo doesn't want to break the ECONOMY while trying to appease the crowd with new crafting rules. I do appreciate Paizo trying to maintain the integrity of the game from this standpoint. If you read dig into the downtime rules in the Core book, it's the extended downtime which would break the economy. If you could craft and sell for full price, then you most likely would surpass the "earn income" downtime activity which is the CEILING (benchmark) for a manageable economy. Thus making crafting ability the MUST go-to feat/skill to rake in gold - breaking the game. It's the PERMANANCY of these items which differs from the design of spells, talisman, etc. On the other side, a lot of adventures don't have downtime, let alone extended downtime. So these rules sucks for crafters in this campaign - especially for Alchemist class. I think they need to introduce a variant rule that is not allowed for sanctioned (PF Society) play to allow people to play a crafter. Also give the power to the GM to limit the amount of gold/power that a player can do so they don't abuse it.
I agree on the design decision, AND what you say that they should have given us a variant rule for campaigns where people want crafting to have more mechanical benefits (and it sounds like there's different schools of thought on what those benefits should be exactly also). On the design decision - it seems far easier to houserule from THIS starting point, as opposed to the opposite. Happily, I think we can easily extrapolate things by scaling the charts that have been given to us.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG First of all, thanks for all your content BTW! The main factor here is Organized play with Pathfinder Society which I know not a lot of people participate or are familiar with. It's a subset of people but it's contributing to how crafting works and designed. Everyone needs to know the restraints Paizo is working with. I have feeling that most people are complaining because they are not aware of this play mode. Earning Income and Downtime days is a MAJOR factor in that play mode which unfortunately impacts how crafting is officially designed. Buying items is the PRIMARY if not only way of getting magic items.Treasures from play are NOT kept and converts to gold.
The problem I'm noticing with both the original and the new crafting rules is that they are fundamentally exploitable due to the disconnect between Earning an Income and Crafting an Item. Here's an example: PC: "I want to craft a mug, costing 1cp. It would take 4 days so I might as well batch 4 mugs for 4cp. Crafting longer than that to lower the cost is useless due to the time needed, right?" DM: "Practically, yes. You'd be making mere copperpieces worth of value per day." PC: "And that's the case for everyone in this universe? Hirelings don't do any better than PCs?" DM: "Yes." PC: "Hirelings cost, at best, 1sp per day to hire, right? If I hired people to make mugs I'd be losing *a lot* of money because the product would worth so much less than their pay." DM: "Yep, that's correct." PC: "So who's actually making the mugs in this universe?" DM: "This NPC over here makes mugs." PC: "Okay then, I buy up all of the mugs in town." DM: "? Okay?" PC: "I go to this NPC, and explain that I'd be willing to sell them to him for 5cp each, 5 times their original price." DM: "Why on earth would he buy your overpriced mugs?" PC: "He crafts them at the cost of 3.6sp (at 1sp per day minus their value) to his own pocket over just being an unskilled hireling. I'm saving him 3.6sp by selling him the product for resale." DM: "W... wait... that's... uh..." PC: "Logic, I know. The value-added economy in this game is broken, and unless Paizo changes the income or output rate of crafting this will be the case for all the cheap items."
@@Lawrencelot89 Oh really, now? :) Does an NPC make more than one mug per day? Asking as a rules lawyer here. Pray tell, please, give me the rate at which NPCs produce value over that of a PC. I warn you, and any DM, that regardless of which answer you give it will be exploitable by the PCs due to the flawed crafting economy. I'd also like for you to back up your answer with a citation.
16:10 88 more days to craft the holy weapon property rune? 😂 The campaign will be over by then. This to me seems to be more concentrated in making things fair for pathfinder society. As a GM, this would be useless to almost every campaign except for Kingmaker.
I mean, I guess they’re better than before? Still really doesn’t seem like there’s much incentive for my players, or that this would fit into most adventures
Well, the alternative would have been to do a DC 10+item level Crafting check while subtracting your ability bonus and other bonuses and penalties. I think this is more elegant.
Generally, effects that can affect a single check don't work on downtime activities, as you'd need to be able to get that same effect multiple times in a day. So this is why most fortune effects don't work, BUT Assurance does.
I don't think they improved crafting to my liking. Consider this, most groups don't play past level 10, and if they do get downtime, it's almost always while within a city or metropolis. So in these circumstances, someone who has spent feats and abilities on crafting still fares no better than another party member who uses their downtime to Earn Income using whatever their best skill happens to be and then just buys the item from a shop.
Where do u get the Crafting DC from? All i saw in the Books was "the GM set a Secret Crafting DC". Not even in the GM Book i could find a Table for that.
Better but still not perfect. A craftsperson should be able to make money from their craft the price you buy or sell an item needs to include a profit margin so one can earn money. Not just craft items for the sake of having items. I like these rules but still feel I’d need to mod them more to actually play with them. I like the expertise allowing an increased DC but to craft faster a lot however.
I do not understand how anyone could possibly invest in the crafting system of P2 RAW and feel happy with or excited about that investment. I feel bad for any player that gets the crafter fantasy in their head and makes a character with it. They are on the road to disappointment.
Hmm, have they fixed the assurance feat? At least RAW, and clarified by the team, fortune effects can't be used during downtime (it's buried in the rules for rituals). It's possible this got changed in the last printing or two, but just curious if you know.
@@sebastienlecmpte3419 Can you link that? It doesn't say that in the Assurance feat itself, so curious where the rules are/if they were added in a later version.
Here's the link: 2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=541 Specifically, downtime doesn't preclude Fortune effects per se; it prevents abilities that can't be used constantly for the period in question. (I just learned this! I've been disallowing Hero Points during downtime, when that's actually not called for in the rules!)
It sounds like you still need to have crafting plans to make things in the new version. That's always been my problem with it. Crafting is so you can get targeted items for your build without needing to rely on your GM to add them in for you, however since you can't get plans for items anyway besides your GM putting them in for you, I feel like it sort of defeats the whole point
I´m new to Pathfinder 2e and maybe I dont understand everything but i really dislike this crafting. It only has worth if you dont have access to the item. But you need the formular to craft it, which you get in a adventure or you purchase it. It`s a roundabout way to give players this item for more gold as you can buy it. Why not instead give the player the item? In a Dungeon crawl its complete useless and in a Survival setting also because you need a smithy or something. And you need much downtime for it. It`s probaly faster and cheaper in a month of downtime to travel to the biggest city, buy the item and travel back.
I'm not new to Pathfinder 2e and actually what you say is spot on, and unfortunately the 'speeding up crafting' rules presented here don't fix it. Some tips that can help as a GM: - Make formulas of higher levels than the items themselves available in settlements - Give plenty of formulas as treasure, as well as raw materials (alchemical substance, metals, empty potion vials, etc.) that can be used for crafting at full price but can be sold only at half price - Give plenty of downtime, don't allow characters to adventure during that time unless the whole party is ready to start adventuring again. Force characters to rest from their adventures, which is also realistic. -What I also did was homebrew a rule that if you crafted an item that would only be used by you or your party members, you could pretend to be a much higher level for determining how long it takes to finish the item with the Earn income table. But then this item could not be sold. Even with all this, in my campaign the party did not craft much, only some alchemical items for the alchemist, and one useful sword to beat the boss. I hope the other content in Treasure Vault will improve things.
@@Lawrencelot89 okay thanks for the advice. But how I see it you have to plan the whole campaign around crafting to make it somehow work. You have to only implement low level settlements, use specific loot and plan the story that they don't need to rush and have much downtime. I'm really not a big fan. Maybe in one campaign it can be funny but that's it.
At least for my personal experience, this does little to improve crafting. The entire premise of crafting, in my opinion, is to invest skills and feats as a tradeoff for a better wealth curve. That's the purpose they serve. And at least in terms of the games I play in, the DMs are not going to allow you to craft anything you can't already buy. Why craft something spending 4 days of downtime you could instead spend making money for an item you can just go buy? And yes, I do realize this isn't every DM. My complaints are still for my own experiences. What about the rules for what is available in a town based on town level? One of two things happen in my groups. Either the group will just drop everything to go to a city large enough to buy items, or if there are campaign time constraints, will simply hoard the money until they do have time (and in the interem will fall behind on the item curve, then have a massive spike in power when they spend 5 levels or more worth of gold at one time). And you might say, "Well they just shouldn't do that." Maybe, but saying that, even the intent behind the design, isn't going to change player behavior.
you mention the rule for 3.5 those take for ever to finish any permanent magic item... like a year for a magic full plate (if you by the full plate... if you also craft the full plate ad about 3 month easy... if I recall correctly XD)
It sounds like they’ve done a solid job making a part of the fantasy more approachable! I would guess most 5e players would kill for even this much😅. There’s always room for more improvement…
I'm quite curious how this will play with the Inexplicable Apparatus. It's a common Level 18 worn item that, among other great benefits to the Craft skill, reduces "the minimum time required to Craft an item to 1 day." Of course, many campaigns don't run to such a high level, but for those who do, it seems like it could be very easy to rapidly cheese out items using the Inexplicable Apparatus and just the very lowest increase to DC for rushing setup =P Granted, by the time you're level 18, it probably wouldn't feel as absurd to have a character who's just churning out potent items every four hours, considering they've spent all that time getting to that level of competence xD
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG that seems fair, considering (as you said) the Inexplicable Apparatus was designed to work within the core Craft rules as opposed to the new Complex Crafting rules =] Even without that ability, it would still be great for the +3 to Craft, Earn Income, and Repair, AND for further reducing costs each day ^_^
I feel the rules are still broken. Things that should be quick take too long still and things that take time are too quick. The rules should encourage crafting. If I can walk into a store and buy 40 arrows from the shop keeper for 4sp and the whole transaction is 5min gametime, but making those same arrows is going to take me 2days crafting and 4sp I am not going to craft EVER. Now 1/2 a day and 4cp Ill think about it.
I'm new to PF2. My question is: Do you not also need a recipe for each item that is above common or something like that? I can't imagine the character getting to level x and then saying "oh great, I can now build all of these super rare magical items that I have no idea about". I need to reread that section again.
👍This is one I'll have to listen to, read through, and then listen to again, to really get it as a GM. I tend to handwave Crafting issues/problems in favor of what my players are really wanting to do for at-table fun and plans, as well as game-world story at the same time. It's always balanced based upon Item level, but no muss no fuss for us. 🤔🙂
Is there anything in the book about how all these new rules interact with the Inexplicable Apparatus? It's easily one of my favorite items because it speeds up crafting.
I agree with your analysis, but does it actually say RAW that the new crafting alternate rules allow crafting by batches for consumables? I would still run it that way, but does it actually say that? I couldn't find it.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG This? "You can Craft items with the consumable trait in batches, making up to four of the same item at once with a single check. This requires you to include the raw materials for all the items in the batch at the start, and you must complete the batch all at once. You also Craft non-magical ammunition in batches, using the quantity listed in the Ranged Weapons table (typically 10)." The way that reads to me is general consumables is a batch size of 4 items, and non-magical ammunition batch size is 10. (Granted, I think that is overly restrictive and a good bowyer in a fantasy game should be able to make more than 10 arrows in several days.)
Personally I love the crafting system in PF2...it makes it a downtime activity not just a way to spam items. As a GM I appreciate the thought put into the system. Thanks for the rundown of the new rules :)
Random thought but what if we were to bring back the xp cost of crafting to reduce the time needed? Let's say 1xp for each day you reduce the length of crafting by? So if you're in a rush, you spend the initial setup time and then let's say the item requires another 100 days of crafting to complete if you want to reduce the remaining cost to 0. You instead spend 100 xp and finish the item there and then. It's a self limiting system that prevents abuse.
Is there a mistake in your examples or am I missing so something? The level 4 character example says it takes 1 day to add 0.8g/day to finish the arrows. Whereas the level 1 character only said 0.2g/day to finish. Edit: I see it goes up again at level 7 to 2.5g. There’s definitely something I’m not getting.
That is how much that character can "contribute" per day at each level. The fact that the only 0.2gp is needed to complete the item means that in each instance it still only needs 1 more day.
Most people who craft do it solely because they want to roleplay someone who tinkers and makes things, so I don't think that, "You would only craft something that you can't buy," is really true. Players choose to craft things that they could just buy because that's the kind of person they're playing, not because it grabs them some extra access. But it does seem like these rules make that choice less punishing... at the expense of making crafting more convoluted. I think I have two or three new tables to copy into my notes now.
I probably should have mentioned in the video how people who want different things out of crafting could adapt and change these rules. But yes, IMO one thing that can be done here is to scale these times, maybe at a 4:1 ratio, where every 2 hours count as "1 day" within this system.
Honestly, when it comes to making healing potions and elixirs of life, it's hard to beat the herbalist archetype. Especially if you spend lots of time in the wilderness
I don't like that if you want to save money you have to use a month or more of downtime. I feel like allowing masters to use the table 3 times and legendary people 4 times wouldn't throw off the balance. Though for sake of economy it could get bad where you could give those items the rushed trait and are only worth half the money, or can only be sold at 1/4 of its worth
Very good video that actually explains what is going on with this variant rule. Thank you! Crafting is not for every campaign, especially if there is very little to no downtime. That's ok. I am lucky that my lv 6 Inventor, which is heavily invested in crafting, is given downtime. I craft the items my party wants as soon as I have the ability to craft it for them. Meanwhile, they are making money to pay for said items. And here is the kicker: MY TEAM WILL TIP ME SO I CAN MAKE SOME MONEY TOO! This helps fund my personal projects. Find a +1 whatever? Well now the entire party has a +1 in that type of gear. Found a new weapon or armor but like a rune you have been using? I'll transfer that over for them. Got a cracked shield? I'll repair that in short order. Our human Investigator can't keep up with the athletics checks and can't see in the dark like the rest of the party? Well here are some Clockwork Goggles and some Blast Boots to fix the issue. My party and I love that I craft for us, and I get the MVP acknowledgement most nights because of it.
I feel like crafting in games is fundamentally either too strong because you get a significant discount on the item and unbalance the wealth system, or too weak because you don't get a significant discount on the item and also spend time on top of the cost. Though this is speaking from a Pathfinder Society (organized play) player, where the shops in Absalom city can sell you you have rarity access to, for a price. And the Society can requisition most anything else.
Tiny correction in your analysis: You said that on the flat check at level 7, when the DC is -2 that "there might be a chance for a quirk". But the rules directly say that when a flat check is below DC1 or above DC 21, you simply don't even roll, you just take that as a guarantee success/fail. So there's no chance for a quirk, you automatically take the success.
Crafting needs a guided web tool and/or vtt plugin. Walking through the crafting process is still onerous and trying to do it at the table still grinds things to a halt. Crafting in 3e was impractical in the context of most campaigns without a time accelerated demiplane combined with an assistant automotan or a cohort stacked with crafting feats. The time required was absurd.
Another great video, Ronald! I agree with your take on the new crafting rules. A lot of detractors seem to come from the angle of "Crafting an item should always be better than buying an item." But to me, that just shows an ignorance of just HOW tightly balanced the game is. PF2e is praised for how balanced its encounter design system is and works so well. There are MANY disparate game systems that work in tandem to make that work. One of those systems is the recommended treasure rewards per level, which assumes treasure is either found or bought, NOT crafted (because they don't want players to feel forced to invest in crafting). I don't think the detractors truly realize how much it would throw off the game if crafting substantially increased the amount of treasure a party would get simply because you were able to make it. I have a hard time believing those that say crafting should always be better than buying are truly focused on the fantasy of crafting and instead just want a way to make their character overpowered. I've also heard the argument that certain classes rely on crafting to get their power. But all of those classes and archetypes are given ways to make temporary consumables during daily preparations, which bypasses the crafting system. And more importantly, the class/archetype is BALANCED for that. I also believe most PF2e players don't even know that there is a system for settlements. Like you mentioned, settlements are supposed to have a level which indicates what items and services are available. To use Lost Omens as an example, there are very few settlements that are level 20, meaning nearly everything is available. Even the capital cities of the other nations don't often get that high, let alone settlements in obscure places, like in the frozen wastes of the north, or deserts of the Golden Road, or the deep jungles of the Mwangi Expanse. It's also an issue of communication between GM and player. First, if none of the players really care to engage in crafting, then great, nothing really needs to be changed. But if one of the players wants to do crafting, then the GM should make accommodations for that. Give the players more downtime. Let them find recipes instead of actual items. Give the party less items in exchange for an equivalent amount of gold so they just make what they want. I think I ended up rambling at the end, but that's mostly my thoughts on it. I think the complex crafting rules are a nice addition.
There are a few other established level 20 settlements now (or ones that count as level 20 for obtaining certain items and services), particularly in the Impossible Lands (Quantium, Mechitar, Niswan for divine and monk stuff, Oenopion for alchemy etc.), but that's the extreme end of high-magic shenanigans in the core setting, and most other places aren't close to that.
is it really getting access to more treasure, or just more treasure you want. If you get crap you can't use, and sell it at half value to craft things at half value, the total amount of treasure stays the same, its jsut more opptimized to the party (that's how pf1e worked). I much preferred that system, though I will admit 50% was a little much, because some of the treasure came in the form of money or art that could be sold for full value. As such a smaller discount would make more sense, like 25%. But those people are right. Logically, crafting should be financially better than buying, 2e i65ts worse
@@andrewdemarco3512 First, let me just say real quick that my comment was specifically about crafting in PF2e. I wasn't trying to make any assertions about crafting in RPGs as a whole. To address your point though, the GM has complete control over what items are awarded. So the GM shouldn't give the party crap that they feel the need to sell in the first place. Or if the GM is giving items with the purpose of selling them, the sell value should be part of the "treasure per level" budget as described in the core rulebook. And if you're talking about pre-written adventures, the GM can change what items are awarded to better fit the party. I also, in a way, addressed that already in my first comment. The GM should have a conversation with any players that want to engage in crafting and make the appropriate accommodations. And ok, if, logically, crafting should be financially better, shouldn't it, logically, take far longer than 6 days to make a high-level permanent item? Remember that this all feeds into the delicate balance of the overall game. Now if you want say that Paizo should redesign PF2e to support the kind of crafting system you want, ok! That's a discussion that can be had. Just realize that it's going to be A LOT more work to make the appropriate changes.
If it's not better then why do it at all. If it's not worth doing why are they wasting my money on printing general options that are useless? I'm of the sound opinion that if it's never worth doing then it should have never been printed wasting space for something useful. As much as I like paizo they have a bad habit of printing absolutely worthless options which in my opinion hurts the game. A current case for me was the webweaving for the anadi, on first glance it is an amazingly thematic feat then you read it and realize it is 100% useless and a waste of a feat.
@@ashenlion805 I don't concede that the crafting system is useless. Ronald even mentions in the video that if you're party is at a settlement that's too low level, and the item the party is looking for isn't available, then the crafter has the option to make it. And the GM should make sure that option is available. As for the notion that worthless options shouldn't even be printed, try to keep in mind that what you find worthless, other players may find fun, even if it's suboptimal. And essentially saying the Paizo needs to change to accommodate you is very selfish.
think it's more the spirit of broken crafting that's the issue. IRL, I'm a craftsman (a goldsmith specifically) and I'm expected to produce at least 15 items a day. Anyone who could only produce 10 gold jumps rings in 4 days would be laughed out of the profession for their egregious incompetence. And this level of incompetence, so much that it's just silly is where players find themselves. I hope they are skilled murder hobos, because they are crap craftsman.
If you do not have access to an item, why would you have access to the formula? You can't justify that with a 7th level feat, if crafting is meant to get items which you don't have access too, and you can't get the formula without a feat, crafting is useless without the feat. So inventing should be baseline if the only reason to craft something is if you don't have access too it.
I think that's a fair houserule, for GMs and tables who don't want the rarity of formulas to be implemented (I personally after reading a couple comments am for higher-level formulas of SOME levels above settlement being available). Adding to my pinned comment!
Easiest way to fix crafting; You get 2/4/6/8(or 2/3/4/5) hours out of your 8 hour crafting day each adventuring day no matter what (Trained/expert/master/legendary). You can then spend your exploration time to craft, getting as many hours as you'd get exploring in addition. However you take a -2/-1/0 penalty to perception while doing this. (Trained/Expert/Master) up to a total of 8 hours or one crafting day. Additionally you can't rush crafting an item while crafting in this way. Now you can craft during modules with tight windows but it'll take longer to craft, or your taking penalties to the adventuring day itself.
Huh it's interesting that early on you want to shave down the Setup time in these rules, but later on you want to take the safe and easy setup time and then Rush the rest of the piece since that DC scales more slowly.
Yeah, this ain't really it. It's a whole lot of extra rules and choices to make crafting even more uncertain and complex. I much prefer my GM's approach: you reduce the days to craft an item or batch of items by the difference between your level and the item's level, minimum 1.
Maybe I am missing something, admittedly I haven't even played a single pathfinder game yet but why is it being sold at half cost? crafting should cost half the book value, the other half should be profit (which should equal what the book value lists).
Would have liked to see a chapter on making crafting less complex instead. It would also be helpful if each item entry showed all requirements and DCs to craft it, so you don't need to flip pages to figure it out. I suspect the catalogue of magic items alone will make the book worth having. The ultimate version of this book would include all magic items published so far as well as random loot generation tables for all of it.
I'm surprised you're mentioning extra days at all. One example, crafting the lev 11 Holy weapon rune at 6,5 or 4 days. Why bother mentioning 35, 44, 70, or 88 days on a RUSH job that takes less than a week if they're planning on taking months to complete the job? Sorry if you've addressed this already in the comments
After spending some time getting acquainted with the rules for second edition I firmly believe that the combat and action economy and second edition is vastly superior to first edition, and 5th edition d&d but that's an easy line to cross, however the crafting system and oversimplification of the skills from first edition Pathfinder are repulsive. The level of complexity and options I had for creating an interesting character through my skills and crafting abilities, or professions, was one of my favorite features. Considering that crafting in first edition was one of my favorite aspects of playing the game and was a core concept that I developed all of my characters around whether it was one field of crafting or another this may be the end of my second edition journey.
Saw some of the community upset because perma items time got increased but I think there was a big knee jerk reaction here because: 1) The ability to craft consumables quickly was most people’s complaints before. 2) While the increase DC for time reduction is high the simple fact is most perma items are going to be below your level. Ie a +1 striking common weapon is only level 4. Given that you won’t normally get a +2 till level 10 or a greater striking until level 12 this gives you a range of 9 levels where the DC will be lower than a standard DC giving you plenty of times where crafting an item you need can be done quick and I feel like some people just, frankly, didn’t do the math here Ie that +1 striking is going to be useful until level 9 meaning base DC is only going to be 14 while a good crafter will be rocking around a +20 or higher making increasing the DC by even 10 to reduce time still give you good 55% success chance and only a 5% crit fail chance and that’s without someone using aid increasing those odds fairly drastically for the better. So I’m really glad you did the math here. I love Nonat but his reaction was I feel misinformed as he didn’t really consider the math let alone that failure still produced an item increasing odds of actually making it by 45% Edit: Quick note since I’ve had it brought up in a few discussions on the matter people mention formula access and how if you have access to a formula you have access to an item associating the item level of the thing a formula allows you to make with the formula level. The reality is (as far as I can see) formulas do not have an item level meaning they should be far more accessible (up to to the GM). Thematically this makes sense as it’s more likely someone may say have access to a book that says how to make, say, a flaming rune but not the magical materials let alone skill to actually do so because parchment, ink and the knowledge is far more easy to share than the raw materials and talent.
If you guys ever want to know why they put such strict things on Crafting look up D&D 3.5 races of stone look up The Prestige class battle Smith and you'll know exactly why they did this
I think the last point about it resulting in an item and not hard cash is really important. you can never make more cash when crafting. At best you gete an item fo half it's price and then you sell it for the same price. It's good when phasing through gear, but it generally doesn't let you get overpowered gear like someone who got 100gp instead of 200 in items could.
Looks like youtube at my post. I'm going to cut against the grain here---I'm not a huge fan of advanced, specialized crafting for player characters in my games in general. Classed characters are already in specialized professions, and many of these crafts take a lifetime to master. This gets into a bit of game philosophy here, but from my perspective this is what you have expert hirelings for. Here are just a few examples of what I mean. A knight squire, at 1st level might not only be expected to know and practice advanced horsemanship, the care, treatment, and training of horses, and spend several hours a day doing weapons drills on foot and on horseback--he would also be expected to know etiquette, hunting, heraldry, falconry, dancing, reading and writing, have a good understanding of law, basic appraisal so he can tell quality items from shoddy ones, and any number of other skills needed to navigate and survive on a battlefield and in high society. A first level common soldier would also have any number of skills. Vegitius has a extensive list of what a common legionary would need to know. Beowulf gives examples of what and Norse/Anglo-Saxon warrior would be practiced in. These require constant training to maintain ones edge. Mages are constantly working to master forces that can alter the shape of reality and bend the laws of physics and nature. Whether this is by negotiating with spirits or channeling elemental forces, and their times is spent furthering these pursuits--this is a full time pursuit and if done incorrectly things can go terribly wrong. I don't see where they have the time to become master glass blowers or horologists or the like. You could make a historical argument that priests and monks engaged in all manner of industry, from cheese making to glass blowing and staining, etc. But these are not adventuring priests--these priests were specialized artisans. Whether you're playing a demonologist and exorcist or a warrior priest like the Archbishop Turpin from the Song of Roland or a priest who is a physician--these are significant specialized pursuits. At the end of the day, having your character engaged in days of glass blowing or making clocks or forging weapons or anything in between doesn't make for great adventuring.
Don’t forget that the goal of Paizo is to make rules that will work at the most tables possible, not at a specific or a minority of tables. In those cases it is expected that you will create your own rules.
You might want to check out the guidelines in the Battlezoo Bestiary (by Roll for Combat). Here's their writeup on that system: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
Crafting is not to reduce costs or make money. it is just to get access to items... except if your dm decides not to give you the formulas you need... thanks dm
This all seems so esoteric and complicated. Why not just have a cumulative DC? For example. I wanna craft a simple shield. The Cumulative DC is, say, 100. My PC got home from adventuring and has, say, three hours of downtime. So I tell the GM I wanna spend three hours crafting my shield. I roll a crafting check, coming up with a decent result of 19. I take that 19 and times it by three (the number of hours spent working). I get a final result of 57. Now subtract the 57 I got from the original DC of 100. I get 43. So next time I decide to work on that item, the DC is 43. Once the DC reaches zero, the item is complete. Now say I wanna make a legendary longsword that has the spirits of my ancestors imbued in the steel. DC 2000. Sounds like a lot, and it should be. The Rings of Power weren't forged in a day. Bruenor spent months forging Wulfgar's magic hammer. In addition, a system like this accurately represents how crafting works in the real world. Projects take time, but work is cumulative. Some days you only have an hour, some days you can work through til dinnertime. Some days you're on top of your game, others you're a bit slower and more easily distracted. A system like this reflects all of that while giving a PC a real sense of progression. My two cents!
I'm actually rather disappointed. I was hoping for something much simpler to pull off, instead of more complex. They certainly got the name of the variant right though.
4 days for 10 arrows? Forged in Fire, the TV show has REAL people making REAL swords, totally done in 3 days. And they cut. Everything I see about 2e ( as a Pathfinder 1e player) makes it seem like it is a video game. Crafting is based on game balance not reality. It is all the moden move away from making the GM in charge of balancing the game. AS a GM I'd let someone make a ton of arrows in a single day. Arrows for crying out loud. The crafting rules are stupid when applied to the mundane. Saying "well just buy them" is a Game Balance answer, not one set in reality.
I'm starting to think the premise crafting systems don't make sense to begin with. It's a pretty silly notion, that the world-traversing band of warriors and wizards are also master craftsmen at the same time. Creating a set of plate armour, or even a couple arrows, is not something you suddenly sit down and do for half a week. To me, the crafting skill would make more sense in the manner it's used for shields in PF2. Weapons and armour gets damaged or breaks during intense action or harsh weather. Crafting should be you method of performing quick-fixes in the field, until a proper craftsman in town can repair it properly. An appropriate skill feat would be to allow a player to perform maintenance on their kit during daily preparations, redering them immune to damage (save for being targetet by abilities) throughout the day. I feel like that would require a lot of homebrewing work though, and I can't be bothered. xD
crafting sucks because there is really no reason to do it, and it requires massive downtime. If the GM is willing to let you craft, they should be willing to stock the shop with the item. The new version's time reduction based on DC is kind of ehhh, if you are crafting items of your level, how realistic is it to drastically increase the DC. whats the opportunity cost? Basically crafting is mostly only useful if the GM refuses to give you store access to common items you are seeking. Or perhaps if you want to make downtime slightly more gold efficient in exchange for more planning. But since adventuring should give way more gold than downtime, if your goal is gold, don't do downtime. Essentially crafting is only useful if the GM goes out of their way to make it useful, by denying on level items, limiting adventure time, and giving long downtime phases. All of which = bad gameplay for non crafting focused players. I think most of these RP crafting systems don't understand party crafting focused players would really want. A worthwhile way to make interesting/desired/creative items that doesnt ruin the gameplay of the party. For me, preferable if its mechanics are at least a little compelling, but that varies from player to player.
Crafting is still non-sensical, like unless every store in galarian sells their items at a loss what crafting basically is, is you buy the resources required to make the item, dick around for 4 days and then get bored and trade those materials for store credit and just buy the completed item. Part of the items value is the labour that is required to make it and this system doesnt reflect that at all.
So crafting is still broken in one regard. You are still working for no compensation for "x" number of days (4 in the core rulebook). You argue that 4 days is the cost of access to the item but this argument has a flaw. The formula and material cost is the cost of access to the item. Time should be paid for every day you work on crafting an item at your established earned income rate. So if you are crafting 4 3rd level scrolls and finish them in 4 days, your cost should be 120gp each minus 4 days of your earned income. This is a minor tweak and will not harm game balance but it does allow a crafter to earn income equal to someone working at another job and not give their first 4 days away for free.
I think people are too used to Minecraft crafting if they are upset by four days. My first thought about crafting taking four days was thinking that was super fast, particularly if we are talking about a powerful magic item.
I've been arguing with a friend of mine that making crafting rules make sense in a lot of fantasy ttrpgs is pretty difficult. Sure, you have the balancing mechanics that you've got to nail, but also the narrative aspect as well. Anybody who's watched Forged in Fire knows that to make a good sword will take multiple days. How do you make that work in a very dungeon crawl oriented campaign? NoNat1s gave the scenario of "Oh, you just downed the Lich, and leveled up. You can now craft that thing you've been wanting, but it will take 6 days. The lich will revive in 1." One could say that a good campaign is one that will allow for ample down time to let crafting oriented characters shine. I don't agree with this because Dungeon crawls like Abomination Vaults would be automatically bad campaigns, or even adventures like Plaguestone. I argue that a good crafting system has to be able to work well enough in a campaign that has very little down time. I think these new rules are a step in the right direction, but still not something I could accept as good crafting rules.
Idk about that.. At level 1, sure. But every PC becomes superhuman as they level up. Even fighters and rogues, not just the magic casters. Why not the crafters too? Why can't the crafter learn special methods of working materials that drastically reduce the time and cost?
@@symmetry8049 How drastic are you talking here? Because in the example above, I'm talking about balancing it for a dungeon crawl, which would most certainly need it to be less than a day. Under this supposed 1 day crafting system, if you compare earning income for 1 day at level 1, vs crafting a level 1 item at level 1, crafting will blow earn income out of the water. That's comparing 2cp per day to around 10gp per day (if you limit yourself to only crafting composite longbows). I think you're right that we should be able to make PCs superhuman crafters, but this bound is the equivalent of giving a gunslinger a modern day machine gun. Suspends disbelief a bit too much and not well balanced.
It's always kind of odd to me that there are concerns about players having too much money when the GM is literally the bank handing it out. If you want them to have less money to balance things, give them less money. Let your players have fun making the stuff they use, and if you need to balance it out with giving them less gold or loot, do so.
Reminder that Alchemists can choose Efficient Alchemy at level 4 to double the number of alchemical items made in a batch, Crafting 8 items per batch, and Witches can choose Cauldron at level 2 (or level 1 if you’re playing a Human) to make potions and oils in batches of six instead of four.
Tbh, I don't bother with crafting. If I want a "crafter" character I strictly work with classes that give free consumables per day like alchemist, inventor, gunslinger, etc
I mostly like these rules. I feel like an alchemist should have an additional benefit to alchemical items (which doesn't seem to be the case?) and I think that level 0 non-magical permanent items might benefit from a smaller crafting time (i.e. everything you get in the basic crafting book).
About 2/3rd through this video and I understand the idea being presented here, but I don't like it. Its not a matter for me which is faster or has more ways to modify it or anything like that. This new system is just too crunchy for me to really care. When I GM or playing a PC the things I naturally avoid is the system I am going to have to google every time for a refresher or need a booklet on hand to reference all the charts. I did not like 5e "figure it out yourself" approach, but this just feels excessive. I rather it just be a check per item and a deduction of gold. You get the item the next day after you succeed as the time spent to finish it is done throughout the day and evening. If that is two quick then make it two days. The only aspect I as a GM is worried about is "Do I want them making this at all" and "You can't instantly make something as soon as it is needed". The second one should be reserved for things like the alchemist class that's whole thing is crafting. I will probably just use the original moving forward unless I feel like making a homebrew.
Still feels like a player is getting shafted for trying to craft their own items. I think these rules tried so hard to make all sides of an equation equal, and never considered the fun part.
why would they sell it at half the price?? If they made an item worth 1000gp but spent time to reduce it to 500, why wouldnt they sell it at 1000 and make 500 gp profit.
Coming from D&D 5e, I've been checking out PF2E and loving a lot of what I've found, but I can see why PF2E truly *needs* a lawyer to advocate for it. It definitely works, but it's also an inelegant mess that quickly gets almost nightmarish to run or play as levels advance. Unless you're the type of GM or player that doesn't mind memorizing tangles of interacting systems that all strive to approach a firm, yet fuzzy definition of balance, *Mathfinder* 2E is going to take a lot of patience to break into, especially if you enjoy optimizing and homebrewing. At least 5e is arguably an *elegant* mess. That said, PF2E has been a much better inspiration for the creation of my own system, which aims to bring together and enhance the best of systems like PF and D&D.
Wait, people actually complain about 4 days of crafting time? I know it's an apples-and-oranges comparison, but part of me REALLY wants to thrust the old PF1 magic-item-creation-rules under their noses, and then ask them to calculate how long it'd take to hand-craft a Belt of Physical Perfection +6.
I think these revised crafting rules could make for a neat low wealth survival campaign. There are no shops, you adventure to get the resources needed to build the items necessary to adventure further. Maybe the goal is just to escape some nightmare island... oh the brain is awash with possibilities.
Won't work as written because you need formulas for crafting.
@@ashenlion805 formulas could be a reward for adventure (imagine finding books in a post apocalypse, or broken versions of items that can be used as a template for building them)
@@ashenlion805 could the recipes not be part of the treasure or a goal of a specific adventure?
@@ashenlion805 The whole premise involves houseruling it sounds like, since gold isn't presumed either (who would you pay?).
(Sounds like fun!)
@@ashenlion805 Aren't there downtime rules to research and invent formulas in the core or GM guide? I remember seeing that somewhere
I feel like the RAW crafting rules can make it hard to justify investment in the crafting skill and related feats as a player Two of my players are invested in crafting and tied crafting into their stories but rarely used the rules, and this is a campaign with lots of downtime. Through the story I eventually set them up with up workshops with apprentices and gave them various bonuses and reduced the time required, but at the cost of paying for wages and upkeep. I think it balanced pretty well and I saw a lot more use of crafting.
I'm curious: what did the players want to get out of it? Was it to make more flavorful items? Items with boons? Or to earn money? Or something else I haven't thought of?
If you want benefits to items, Battlezoo's "monster parts" system from their Battlezoo Bestiary has rules that can be adapted well I think. Here is their writeup for that: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I think ultimately the player wants to feel as though the investment feels both useful, worth the effort, and to some degree thematic. Spending way more time to craft as opposed to just buying it for the same price feels real bad and pointless.
@@ashenlion805 I completely agree with those players. It definitely feels pointless in that context. But as many have pointed out, I don’t think the crafting system was intended to craft things that you can just buy at a store. It’s to allow the players to basically dictate the items they want, at the cost of investing in those skills.
And hell, maybe even get a cool adventure out of tracking down a rare material.
@@cfalkner1012 here is my problem with this mindset. If crafting is intended to allow players to “dictate what items they get” then one: what is the point of the rarity system in the first place? (My thought was it was to allow the DM to control what kind of powerful items they allow in the game and your reasoning nullifies that) if you meant they could choose among common items I would ask that isn’t that what you do in normal purchasing? You have access to all items of the appropriate level.
Two: the players and DM should be in agreement about items they should be able to get. If you are saying players can only get an item through crafting (outside of some obvious cases like the philosophers stone and other super powerful items) that feels like the equivalent of a video game lowering the amount of XP you get just to offer you a XP booster costing money to help you level up. It’s creating a problem where there shouldn’t be one so that you have to sacrifice something in order to do the thing you want to do.
To summarize. My problem with crafting is that it requires a minimum of 1-2 feats (potentially more), over time 3 skill increases, and more time than just buying an item in order to functionally do what is already possible with just purchasing (at least in my games and I feel like it’s not just me).
Point being it accomplishes almost nothing at the cost of feats, skill investment and a good deal of downtime.
@@PurpleCyanideTube Wow, that’s a lot.
I suppose (like all of these issues) it all boils down to what kind of campaign/world you are playing in, and what kind of character the players want to create.
I’m not trying to convince you that you should like the rules. Just that they could be useful for people who want to use them.
Crafting an item should fundamentally not cost the same as buying it; because when you're buying the item it's implied that you're paying the craftsman's profit margin. If it cost me 10GP to make a sword then it cost him 10GP to make it, if I buy it for 10GP that means he's made 0 profit on it.
Basically this makes crafting your gear only valuable if you can't just buy it, which is a much more niche use and really screws with the character fantasy of being the party's craftsman and producing the gear.
Exactly. I would much rather have a system à la PF1 then what we have now.
Crafting heavily relies on adventurers not having access to any shops
@Gram which is dumb and does not adresse players wanting to fulfill the fantasy of a dude or dudette making their own weapons and armor and enchanting them.
@@sebastienlecmpte3419 Technically you can keep spending days on the item, to 'save money'. But this becomes ridiculous at higher levels. I'm not happy with how the system works atm aswell.
@@gramfero Then how do you get access to the formula? If the formula is available why isn't the item? If the formula isn't available you can't craft it.
I like these new rules mostly. But I think I am going to just let the crafter finish the object for 25% of the item's base cost instead of another 50%.
It doesn't feel right that a character has invested in crafting then spends time on crafting something instead of doing other RP things like earn income and then doesn't get any savings without spending a ton of extra days on it which most campaigns are just not gonna allow for.
Yeah the only way I could justify it is by making all shops sell items at 150% or so, which is just a bit more work than dropping the crafting price a bit.
Great stuff as usual, Ronald.
The thing that keeps coming back up in the French PF2 community is the lack of any particular rules for crafting mundane objects, like arrows. I often suggest appropriate house rules for that, but it seems like a missed opportunity.
I also really like the fact that many items specify monster part ingredients. Progress in roleplaying!
After a second look, I have a few comments:
- You never mention the need for the Magical Crafting feat, which requires Expert in crafting, which most characters can't get until 3rd level. Of course your example, an elixir of life, is alchemical, and many characters can get that feat right out of the gate at 1st level.
- You kind of gloss over the obstacle of obtaining the formula. You do mention the Inventor feat, which requires crafting the formula, adding to the total cost (at least for your first such item) but you didn't mention the option to reverse engineer an item you've managed to get your hands on.
The trouble with buying fomulae is that they ostensibly require access to a settlement of high enough level to buy the item outright.
This is my biggest gripe about crafting - since magic items are universally available up to the settlement level, exactly the same as obtaining the formula, it doesn't really help you to craft it yourself, unless you can get the fomula through other means. In the best of all worlds, I think the availability of medium to high-level magic items should be more difficult, more random, or often times simply impossible without an adventure to obtain them, while obtaining a formula could be significantly easier. But that would require gumming up the baseline assumptions of PF2's magic item availability paradigm. Clearly the province of house rules.
Good points. I do think Paizo SHOULD have made formulas of higher level more available as a baseline for its settlement "shopping rules." It is even more believable from an in-world standpoint: written knowledge about rare items should naturally be more available than the items themselves.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG is that so believable? How many technical manuals would you expect to exist in a setting with no-one of the level to use them present?
Also, in a low-tech environment like most campaign settings, how often would you find a how-to for things that require mastery of a craft? Most experts or masters in a pre-widespread media world would just keep their secrets to train apprentices and attract clients rather than publish them widely.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Note formulas do not have an item level stated on them. They do have blueprints for making an item of a certain level but the formula itself has no RAW level. This I think makes sense, as what’s more likely that a library or artisan might have a book that describes how to forge a magical rune or that the artisan has the materials, skill and need to create such an item (Ie if your a blacksmith in a farming village it’s unlikely you’d make much more than bows and arrows for hunting, farming tools like scythes and sickles, and maybe daggers). To me as a GM means I often allow players to have far more access to formulas as it makes sense for them to be more readily available and seeing as they hand no explicit item level ever stated RAW supports this conclusion I think.
Probably preaching to the choir here but I'll add my two cents in as well.
I too felt pretty miffed about the crafting in pf2e. Crafting should make you feel useful to the party, at barest minimum on par with just out right buying the item you need. Because you must consider, you're investing in acquiring a formula, skills and feats for crafting, locating a lab/forge to work, spend 4 days of downtime with no pay, have the money investment in full for the item in question, and after all that hope you don't roll bad and waste all that effort. Alternatively you could just go to your local store and buy it, and spend 4 days getting additional gold.
What I eventually found that saved the system for me was the settlement rules, because sure you might be level 20 but if you're in a low level settlement, they're only going to have low level "earn income" tasks while the crafter will always be reducing the item's cost by their full amount regardless of settlement level. You'd have to do the math to see how much of an edge this small positive gives but this still leaves a very sour taste in a player's mouth.
While other players are getting cool encounter features, or better means of healing the party, or being able to help the party stealth better, etc; you get to spend abilities to waste time and money on making items anyone could simply buy without investment? Everyone else seems to be able to do better with investment in the skills they choose, except for crafters because buying the items is largely the superior option unless you are in a backwater town with no decent shop, but a forge and just so happen to have the myriad of additional requirements to craft.
The fact classes like Alchemist or the archetype Talisman Dabbler get to skip multiple aspects of both crafting systems highlights this impracticality to me.
The best way I have to explain the need for these rules is to prevent someone becoming Franky from One Piece. If you take your eyes off him for one second he will build an ornate bridge to cross a gap or build stairs as he is walking up them so he can punch a giant.
Yes we obviously want it to take time, but I as a DM don't actually care once it takes more time than instantly. If a player wants to make a long sword on Monday I am fine with them having it Tuesday.
Like why does making a sword need to be realistic when it's made from dragon fangs and forged by a birdman?
I rather focus on making cool crafting gear for the creating player like a porta forge, the ever-burning coals, magic engraving tools etc
@@prof.loophole9708 As much as I love Franky, I gotta agree you can't have things go that outlandish. The problem is where we are now with crafting doesn't give any advantage to investing in the skill save for small moments with settlement level shenanigans outlined above, which not all GMs will use.
Putting it another way, say you have a stealthy person who's invested ASIs, feats and items into stealthing better only for the rest of the party to spend less gold and not only match them but actually beat them in stealth!? How is that fair? Why would you invest in such a skill when people could easily replicate with less input and get more output? Because that's what crafting is currently.
People want there to be some benefit to crafting that will make it worth putting the effort in. Maybe the weapon having some small benefit compared to the store bought one? Maybe you can save on gold on making it but you can't sell said item for a profit, so the party is net positive on gold but can't keep making them over and over to break the economy? Maybe we make formulas several levels lower than the weapons they make so that you can get them easier when using the shop item distribution properly. Anything to make it so the party can't buy your skill into irrelevence.
Because sure, cool crafting gear is neat, but if it can't get them past just buying the item, it's lukewarm at best.
Those rules don't adress the problem of crafting appropriate for your level equipment.
Back to the drawing board for good house rules.
The crafting system really just breaks after a certain level. The use of earn income vs. The cost of higher level items becomes prohibitive because of time. I.e. a GM says Apex items are not for sale. They must be crafted. Ok, cool. They research, do a dungeon, find the formula. Great. The party crafter is lvl 18 and Legendary. They want to craft an apex item that costs 24k. They pay 12k, spend the initial days, and then have to spend 134 days to get it reduced to half. Yes, this is an extreme case, but the time required to be meaningful for permanent items is lost by lvl 7-9. Most campaigns don't give you the summer off to finish your items. At nost you get a couple weeks. And then, supposed you get 2 weeks between adventures, by the time you spent your 6 weeks making an item you've likely levelled once or twice or find an item to fill the role of the item you're crafting. Which then makes crafting useful only for consumables (which is still good and works fairly well for items like that) i think permanent items just need a separate system. Use this one for consumables only.
I agree with this but one question. Even for consumables. Why don’t you just buy them? What are you gaining by crafting them
@@PurpleCyanideTube as others have mentioned, crafting is really only good given 2 conditions; long outtings where you rarely get back into a town that has a shop, or when shops where you are don't have what you need or want. Otherwise, yes, just buy it. Yeah, you could save some money crafting but you don't always have the time to do so because of crafting's limitations. An argument could be made for crafting batch consumables as an overall win for crafting, but for most everything else it's almost always easier to buy outright
EDIT - I guess I'm saying that buying is almost always the better option because of the way crafting is written. It would be nice and interesting if crafting were just a little more viable given the amount of feats and skill increases you're able to put in it for way less value than anywhere else.
The problem for me isn't even that you have to take a whole two seasons off to finish a legendary magic item. That's honestly fine. The problem is that you can either conjure up that same item in 4 days if you sacrifice a cart of gold to the crafting gods, OR, take a whole two seasons off to craft it yourself. It just doesn't feel like crafting
@@feferson492 valid point. It would make more sense if you couldn't buy it off at all. I feel like the ideal crafting system would take a reasonable amount of time based on item level and whether it was permanent or consumable, not it's cost, and there was no option to just buy out. I do like the quirks and rushing the job of treasure vault, though. The homebrew system I use is 4 days, Craft Check, then you get a percentage of progress on the item every day you work on it, which changes if the item is mundane, magical, permanent, consumable, and the item's level and rarity. No option to buy. My players like it.
Okay, but... what's the problem with taking a lot of downtime? It's not like that happens in real time, or across multiple sessions. As a GM you could just say "you take half a year to make this item", and as long as you weren't under eg. some world-ending time pressure, what's the worry? It's also perhaps a thing to suggest you should _really_ want to craft a particular item, rather than just being "oh I can make every rare top-tier item in the world, no worries". Anyway, the Core book does say the most important thing is to do what makes sense for your group and to have fun. There's never any obligation to follow crafting rules to the absolute letter if it isn't fun for you or your group :)
The diversity of opinions of what Crafting is for in a campaign shows the importance of threshing this out in your Session Zero. If crafting is important to you, make sure to discuss these rules (and possible houserules) and the availability of downtime!
I should've said this in the video: the base presumption by Paizo is that the focus of the game is ADVENTURING. Therefore, the main economic activity is adventuring. You craft, not to sell what you're making (that would make this an economic simulation - there are other, better games for that), but to increase your party's ability to kill things and take their stuff. For a similar reason, crafting a legendary magic item shouldn't require the campaign to come to a standstill for months or years at a time. So Paizo wants adventuring to be the default presumption, WITH the option that campaigns CAN have downtime that includes both earning income and crafting living side by side.
That design goal necessarily collides with economic realism. There is a thematic disconnect because in real economies, working for a wage is a different economic activity from producing a product for sale. The latter assumes a profit over what you would be doing otherwise. Having BOTH available to PCs leads to two different tracks (economic classes!) within the same party... arguably undesirable.
In essence, these rules are reminiscent of PF2's encounter balancing rules. The nature of accommodating what different tables want from crafting is that the designers cannot please every design goal and every campaign. BUT they can present a harmonious, internally consistent system so that a GM can "turn a dial," instead of having to invent bespoke rules for certain situations.
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DIFFERENT GOALS & COMPLAINTS and GOOD VARIANT RULES/HOUSERULES TO ADDRESS THEM:
CAMPAIGNS WITH LITTLE DOWNTIME BUT PLAYERS WANT TO CRAFT:
-At Session Zero, the table can decide to use these rules and scale down the times. Maybe at a 4:1 ratio, where every 2 hours count as "1 day" within this system. Like the encounter design rules, I appreciate that we are given an internally consistent system that we can tailor for our needs by simply "turning a dial" instead of inventing rules out of whole cloth.
CRAFTING CUSTOM ITEMS:
-Absolutely check out Battlezoo Bestiary (by Roll for Combat). One of the co-designers of PF2, Mark Seifter, designed their "monster parts" system, which extrapolates from PF2's rules and economy to allow a PC to add special abilities to items! Here is their writeup on how it works: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
FORMULAS BEING AVAILABLE ONLY WHERE THE ITEM IS DEFEATS THE PURPOSE:
-A good point from Kirby Schmidt, who says the Inventor feat "should be baseline if the only reason to craft something is if you don't have access to it." Yes, the Inventor feat is arguably a "feat tax" for PCs who want to support their party with crafting. Hence I think that making the Inventor feat baseline is a fair houserule. The default rule supports GMs and tables who want the rarity of formulas to be implemented.
-All that being said: I do think Paizo SHOULD have made formulas of higher level more available as a baseline for its settlement "shopping rules." It is believable from an in-world standpoint: written knowledge about rare items should naturally be more available than the items themselves. I'll test out formulas of "Settlement Level plus 2" being available within them. (NOTE: Items of "Settlement Level minus 1" are what's assumed for what PCs can find easily.)
CRAFTERS SHOULDN'T "LOSE INCOME" DUE TO THE SETUP TIME:
-That is a fair concern. Houseruling this would NOT break anything. After more thought I think the reason it's not in these rules isn't because they WANT it to be a financial cost, but to simplify the calculation. I can see what they were thinking with it, but it isn't gamebreaking just to include the "cost lowering" from the initial setup time into the final cost.
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ADDITION:
There is rules support in Treasure Vault, for breaking down magic items for more than 50% of their gold value! (I failed to mention it in the video) It's a Rare downtime activity called Deconstruct, where you can break down an item for either 50% of its value (55% on a crit success) or to support the crafting of a SIMILAR item (GM discretion) for 75% of its value (80% on a crit success).
(This of course can be changed by a GM further.)
BUT... I think the treasure table in the CRB assumes that some of those items are sold for half their value. So a GM should be concerned about a 100% conversion rate. A GM should be mindful of that.
Great synopsis of the comments. Good stuff here. I'll also throw in a +1 for the Battlezoo stuff as well they are very well done.
One thing I want to say about the inventor thing: this is only an issue for permanent items. Consumables are something you'll be crafting over and over, presumably different locations; so buying the formulas isn't too big a deal (my alchemist crafts non-infused alchemical items from their book quite often; especially healing items and level 1 bombs for using as a second attack with quick bomb for easy AoE damage)
My DM also gives me formulas as loot; because they are cheap, it doesn't take up much of the treasure budget. Usually, it's stuff for potions and the like, since recipes for permanent items are usually only used like once or twice. It's kinda like stealing the evil wizard's spellbook, except more helpful!
I think they forgot that crafting is... You know, something you can make a living on? Like, as a job it is a way to make money by selling products at a profit
So, you ask, why the heck would someone not sit in town all day making items?
Because they are an adventurer and people need saving. just because my inventor wants to, you know, invent things doesn't mean they are going to be sitting back at town while the rest of the party is fighting the lich
They didn't forget. You can always use Crafting for the Earn an Income activity. Then you end up with gold instead of an item.
@@Lawrencelot89 then what is to stop me, aside from flavor, to get a guaranteed income and just buying the formulas?
@@acidnine3692 I don't understand what you mean. If a PC wants to make money, they can go on an adventure if they want to take the risk, or they can Earn Income during downtime until the plot moves forward, which is related to what you said. You don't need a formula to Earn Income with Crafting. If there is no task (or not a high level one) to Earn Income, but there is a high level formula available to craft, you could craft an item and sell it.
I think these rules are an improvement, but for me the whole crafting system is immersion breaking and I feel it necessary to house rule them heavily. By the rules as written, every blacksmith and shopkeeper in the world is selling the items at the price listed in the books at a loss, they paid the full price for materials (or half and spent days/weeks on one item) only to sell it for that amount (or half as it suggests). I understand the idea of game balance, but I have a hard time imagining why anyone would sell the items at the prices listed in the first place.
I came to this video being enthusiastic about PF2 but dissatisfied with the crafting system. After watching this video, I think I understand more of what Paizo was aiming for with their Crafting system and what merits it serves, so that if I do make homebrew changes to it in my own campaign, I'll be doing so from a place of more grounded awareness. Thanks for the practical analysis!
I like those rules but those feel more like an upgrade of the base rules rather than variant. One thing I was looking for, especially with story based crafting, was informations on how to create unique magic items (rules, advice and help on how to have the players create a unique item other than just be a "can we homebrew that item ?")
You might want to check out Roll for Combat/Battlezoo's "monster parts" system, which extrapolates from PF2's rules and economy to allow a person to add special abilities to items! Here is their writeup on how it works: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Yeah I have read about that, and have been considering it. Though monster parts don't really fit the few stuff my players talked about in our current campaign that might be a way.
The core problem with Crafting is that it is a huge exp sink that weakens the player investing in it and it's WILDLY dependent on how the GM runs their game.
As written it assumes the GM will never consider what the players want for equipment and will strictly design the game world with only a specific set of resources for the players to find. The problem here is that now crafting allows players to break this carefully curated environment, which is good for the players who did NOT invest in learning to craft. The player who invested a bunch of feats and skill increases into crafting will still be at a lower power level than the rest of the party, but might be able to make up for it with these otherwise unavailable items acting as an overall force multiplier.
If a player is this interested in getting specific items, many GMs will figure out other ways to provide those items; likely in the form of a shop, "not so random treasure", or a quest to find that item. In such a game where the GM is willing to provide those items through other means crafting now becomes nothing but a handicap for the player who tried investing in it.
The rules also assume the campaign will have huge chunks of downtime for players to actually perform downtime activities. Many campaigns don't do this because it kills any sense of urgency. If the campaign doesn't have enough downtime then any investment into crafting and other downtime-related skills is completely pointless for the players to take and turns those choices into traps.
Personally I think Pathfinder 2 needs to separate out the "Downtime" feats from the other feats and provide those downtime exclusive feats as a separate pool of feats to provide the player periodically rather than muddle the Encounter mode feats in with the Downtime feats. However that sort of change would so massively shake up the currently system it wouldn't be feasible without an almost total overhaul of the entire skill system.
It is possible for a campaign to between the two extremes in your 2nd and 3rd paragraphs; that's precisely what happens when you run a Paizo published adventure without adjustments. Many items ARE just useful to every party, take fundamental weapon and property runes, for instance. And some items are not useful depending on what a party wants that the authors couldn't anticipate.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG That's just the issue, it feels like they expect everyone to only be using published content and not any original settings.
While that's a fair assumption on their part, I just rarely see actual games where GMs stick rigidly to those pre-written adventures. That's probably just due to circles I've played in, though I definitely have seen many players simply ask to respec their characters because investing in downtime skills left them feeling distinctly unable to contribute as much during encounters.
There's just a huge incentive to focus characters on the stuff happening around the table when you get together rather than the downtime segments.
A campaign hat has no downtime, not even a 4 days one between adventures, doesn't sound like a campaign with a sense of urgency to me. It sounds like a campaign with a cartoonishly exaggerated sense of urgency. Like you're playing a video game.
If you're playing a campaign like that just don't get any downtime feats. But I don't believe that to be the average campaign an average group of people would play.
Edit: To be clear, I'm by no means one who advocates for PF2E's crafting system. Precisely because it feels more like a video game, and not because it doesn't "fit" in the gaming table
i always DM with the assumption that NPCs and PCs have the same crafting rules. for that reason, i cannot abide by a system based on the assumption that "if you had access to that item, you wouldn't be crafting it." somebody had to craft it, and if they couldn't make a profit off of it, why would they have done it?
yes, if you are a shop-keeper, or a player that owns a shop, you just roll your "Gain an Income" check to make stuff for your shop that turns a profit. but that system is too vague for me as a crafting enthusiast. i want an itemized list of all my shop's current products, and the "gain an Income" roll is just how much product i succeeded in selling.
to that end, i have used custom crafting system that both PCs and NPCs abide by. i also give my players significant amounts of downtime to do any downtime tasks they want.
This channel is great. I’m glad I found it not too long ago. I love the book shelves in the background. Some serious nerd cred on this shelves. It would be great to see what games you have and some of your most prized books.
I believe another common complaint is that these crafting rules still won't work well in a game that has very little downtime. My thoughts on this would be making 8 hours equal to 1 day of work on crafting. If you have adventured for 8 hours, you'll have 8 hours to craft towards something and 8 hours to sleep. The consequence of this is that a day of no adventuring would mean 16 hours of work (which would be "2 days" of crafting progress). It's not entirely unreasonable, but I might make the crafting difficulty check harder for each instance of 16-hour crafting day. My justification for that would be it is potentially monotonous on the mind to be so focused on a project for so long in a day. Different from an adventuring day with time to spare for crafting as it's a bit more refreshing to work on something different.
I think for a campaign with little downtime, the GM is within their rights to scale these things more drastically, maybe at a 4:1 ratio, where every 2 hours count as "1 day" within this system. Like the encounter design rules, I appreciate that we are given an internally consistent system that we can tailor for our needs by simply "turning a dial" instead of inventing rules out of whole cloth.
Alternately to the time compression method, you could also borrow from something like Blades In The Dark, and use a flashback to justify the time spent. Give each character some number of hours of downtime that happened in the past. The players can then decide after the fact whenever they need something how that downtime had been spent, describe the flashback of why they were doing those activities at the time, and where they left whatever products of said downtime.
@@eepopgames2741 that could work, but you can't go too far back with this flashback crafting, otherwise the "why didn't you use this earlier" question comes up.
I like this ruling seems very reasonable. Some recommendations as well are as a GM just get better at working downtime into a campaign. Ie if the players are traveling, they could purchase a wagon with a worship in it meaning they could work during travel time. Run into a town that’s been attacked? Downtime to help the locals clean up and for life to recover. Need to hunt down that Lich threatening the world? Spend a few days going around and gathering info and rumors about them from locals and those passing through town, etc. I think working in downtime into a campaign is very doable and necessary not only for crafting but good pacing as it lets players retrain, earn income, recover from battle fatigue etc.
@@eepopgames2741 Or since just give them the downtime since... well, since your giving them the downtime!
FYI for arrows, the batch size is 10
You can Craft items with the consumable trait in batches, making up to four of the same item at once with a single check. This requires you to include the raw materials for all the items in the batch at the start, and you must complete the batch all at once. You also Craft non-magical ammunition in batches, using the quantity listed in the Ranged Weapons table (typically 10).
From the crafting skills page on AoN
I think it's more the spirit of broken crafting that's the issue. IRL, I'm a craftsman (a goldsmith specifically) and I'm expected to produce at least 15 items a day. Anyone who could only produce 10 gold jumps rings in 4 days would be laughed out of the profession for their egregious incompetence.
And this level of incompetence, so much that it's just silly is where players find themselves. I hope they are skilled murder hobos, because they are crap craftsman.
Yes, this is why the example has 40 arrows
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I belive that what they're saying is that it seems that the batch size for arrows (10) overrides the batch size for consumables (4) meaning that you can only craft 10 arrows in a batch rather than 4 batches of batches of 10. Either way, that sentence could probably use a small clarification since there seems to be confusion one way or the other.
Using these rules, you can create realistic expectations for when NPC craftsmen are done with certain items, when they restock new more potent items, what kind of lower tier items they can have available en masse.
Just adding a little more, since I plan to complement these rules by following a suggestion from another video.
An adventure should roughly take a week, traveling there, exploring, solving the issue, pillaging, coming back. If it feels particularly long, add more weeks, I'm only doing it this way to keep tracking time easier for me when it comes to how much time has progressed outside of their personal timeframe. It also lets me give out Downtime easier, because it's going to be in increments of seven days.
Personally, I would like to see items upcycled. You can sell items you don't need for half of their value. If your GM gives you a bunch of crap you don't need you can argue you are being gold starved, as you're just going to be pawning those items for half their value to try to get the items you want/need. What if you could upcycle items. Turn 100% of the value of an item into a higher leveled item and you pay for the difference. And you can only upcycle items that make sense to upcycle. You can turn magic weapons into another magic weapon. You can turn talismans into other talismans. This gives a small gold advantage to crafters, but not a huge improvement. This along with long crafting times makes it not feasible for a crafter to completely improve all the items of the party, and the party may end up with less gold in some situations as the crafter encourages keeping items until he can actually make something with them instead of selling them immediately for cash.
This is in addition to regular crafting rules where a crafter pays for the full item.
There is rules support for this in Treasure Vault! (I failed to mention it in the video) It's a "rare" downtime activity called Deconstruct, where you can break down an item for either 50% of its value (55% on a crit success) or to support the crafting of a SIMILAR item (GM discretion) for 75% of its value (80% on a crit success).
This of course can be changed by a GM further.
I think the treasure table in the CRB assumes that some of those items are sold for half their value. So a GM should be concerned about a 100% conversion rate. But so long as the GM is mindful of that it should be alright.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG oh man now this is something that's interesting.
I'm so mad, I just finished a campaign as an alchemist crafter. I maxed crafting and it was great in the beginning but as we got to the end of the campaign we were in a dier situation behind enemy lines for the last like half of the campaign and we basically got no down time. Epic story but my crafting based character had no time to craft anything. With these rules I could've done a lot more and saved a lot of prepared/quick alchemy slots by making potions I needed consistently to help get us through traps and mazes and such....I'm so mad that these rules come out now and not like 2 months ago cause it would've been so helpful.
Oh well, it's a great rules update
I like these a lot, the base rules aren't bad, but I feel like this rewards you more for investing in crafting as a skill.
The new crafting rules are about the same for permanent items, but waaaaaay better for consumables.
For permanent items, the base setup time is worse, but the rushed crafting makes up for it after 3 days for items on level. The flat check might be scary, but the DC is such that only a nat 1 can give you a cursed item; most of the time, you'll pass, and on a fail you get a quirk, but the quirks in the book are more weird than anything; they don't even disadvantage you.
For consumables, it's straight gold. The setup time is the same for on level, and lower level items have a lower time. The rush time rules are even better because the quirks are even less of an issue since they get used up; doesn't matter as much if the healing potion smells like sulphur vs your armor smelling like suphur. Theres also a lot of consumables that are very much worth crafting throughout your whole career
In my current campaign, we have a lot of downtime as we travel, and since we bought a vehicle, I just craft in the back of the wagon. I rarely make permanents outside of upgrading gear; but I make a TON of consumables, so overall, these rules are an incredible boon for me
One issue I’ve heard raised is that both the new crafting system and the one it supplants make use of a resource that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as any others: down time days.
I only have access to two of the many APs out there, so I’m wondering: how often do campaigns really include down time? And are there places where advice about how and when to give out downtime are written?
It varies from AP to AP. Both between PF1e and PF2e, you've got some that are a constant race - and some where taking a week or two off won't impact the outcome at all. This difference in pacing can vary wildly even between parts of given books, too. You've also got several APs, like Kingmaker and Strength of Thousands, where MONTHS of downtime are the norm. Pathfinder Society adventures also include a guaranteed week of downtime between every single module.
@@willdigforfood5065 With such wide variance, I'd think a useful rules update would discuss this disparity. If there's tons of downtime to be had, crafting quicker or more slowly is not helpful. If there's none, then people just can't play with characters who craft. Given the suggestions not to homebrew much unless you know what you're doing, some guidance here would be helpful. Similarly, if the PFS standard is a week, direct references between these rules and what can accomplished in a week would be helpful.
Dedication feats around crafting that give temporary items tell you how often you get them - usually two consumables per day. If you don't know your downtime budget, taking skill feats for crafting or buying recipes becomes a very unclear investment.
@@benrichetti1360 Yeah, that's absolutely fair. But there are references for how much work can be done in a given set of downtime, though: you can produce any item (or any 4 batches of a consumable item) with a week's worth of downtime (either 4 days with the core rules or 1-6 days using the treasure vault variants) regardless of its price, level, rarity or complexity; if you want to reduce costs below market value, you do so by an amount listed on CRB Table 4-2: Income Earned (CRB pg. 236), based off your character level and degree of training in Crafting, per additional day spent beyond the 4 days/TV variable days.
Although it's also, I think at least, a fair point that not every campaign needs to cater to every type of character, and that it's a discussion that players should be having with their GMs before they roll characters and get deeply invested. If the GM lets the group know there's not going to be a lot of downtime before they make their characters, and someone still makes one that invested heavily into Crafting feats and equipment, then that's not a failure or flaw in the crafting rules, that's just a player shooting themselves in the foot. But if the GM sees a player making a crafting-heavy character and doesn't say anything about there not really being time in the campaign to spend weeks of downtime, then that's just bad GMing.
Let's look at it from the Design POV. I do see each sides pros and cons. The key thing: Paizo doesn't want to break the ECONOMY while trying to appease the crowd with new crafting rules. I do appreciate Paizo trying to maintain the integrity of the game from this standpoint.
If you read dig into the downtime rules in the Core book, it's the extended downtime which would break the economy. If you could craft and sell for full price, then you most likely would surpass the "earn income" downtime activity which is the CEILING (benchmark) for a manageable economy. Thus making crafting ability the MUST go-to feat/skill to rake in gold - breaking the game. It's the PERMANANCY of these items which differs from the design of spells, talisman, etc.
On the other side, a lot of adventures don't have downtime, let alone extended downtime. So these rules sucks for crafters in this campaign - especially for Alchemist class.
I think they need to introduce a variant rule that is not allowed for sanctioned (PF Society) play to allow people to play a crafter. Also give the power to the GM to limit the amount of gold/power that a player can do so they don't abuse it.
I agree on the design decision, AND what you say that they should have given us a variant rule for campaigns where people want crafting to have more mechanical benefits (and it sounds like there's different schools of thought on what those benefits should be exactly also).
On the design decision - it seems far easier to houserule from THIS starting point, as opposed to the opposite.
Happily, I think we can easily extrapolate things by scaling the charts that have been given to us.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG First of all, thanks for all your content BTW!
The main factor here is Organized play with Pathfinder Society which I know not a lot of people participate or are familiar with. It's a subset of people but it's contributing to how crafting works and designed. Everyone needs to know the restraints Paizo is working with. I have feeling that most people are complaining because they are not aware of this play mode.
Earning Income and Downtime days is a MAJOR factor in that play mode which unfortunately impacts how crafting is officially designed. Buying items is the PRIMARY if not only way of getting magic items.Treasures from play are NOT kept and converts to gold.
The problem I'm noticing with both the original and the new crafting rules is that they are fundamentally exploitable due to the disconnect between Earning an Income and Crafting an Item.
Here's an example:
PC: "I want to craft a mug, costing 1cp. It would take 4 days so I might as well batch 4 mugs for 4cp. Crafting longer than that to lower the cost is useless due to the time needed, right?"
DM: "Practically, yes. You'd be making mere copperpieces worth of value per day."
PC: "And that's the case for everyone in this universe? Hirelings don't do any better than PCs?"
DM: "Yes."
PC: "Hirelings cost, at best, 1sp per day to hire, right? If I hired people to make mugs I'd be losing *a lot* of money because the product would worth so much less than their pay."
DM: "Yep, that's correct."
PC: "So who's actually making the mugs in this universe?"
DM: "This NPC over here makes mugs."
PC: "Okay then, I buy up all of the mugs in town."
DM: "? Okay?"
PC: "I go to this NPC, and explain that I'd be willing to sell them to him for 5cp each, 5 times their original price."
DM: "Why on earth would he buy your overpriced mugs?"
PC: "He crafts them at the cost of 3.6sp (at 1sp per day minus their value) to his own pocket over just being an unskilled hireling. I'm saving him 3.6sp by selling him the product for resale."
DM: "W... wait... that's... uh..."
PC: "Logic, I know. The value-added economy in this game is broken, and unless Paizo changes the income or output rate of crafting this will be the case for all the cheap items."
NPCs don't follow PC rules
@@Lawrencelot89 Oh really, now? :)
Does an NPC make more than one mug per day?
Asking as a rules lawyer here. Pray tell, please, give me the rate at which NPCs produce value over that of a PC.
I warn you, and any DM, that regardless of which answer you give it will be exploitable by the PCs due to the flawed crafting economy. I'd also like for you to back up your answer with a citation.
@jerkitof2117 Core Rulebook, page 288. Alternatively search "mug" on Archives of Nethys.
16:10 88 more days to craft the holy weapon property rune? 😂 The campaign will be over by then. This to me seems to be more concentrated in making things fair for pathfinder society. As a GM, this would be useless to almost every campaign except for Kingmaker.
I mean, I guess they’re better than before? Still really doesn’t seem like there’s much incentive for my players, or that this would fit into most adventures
kinda silly they call the rush job a flat check. Minus your PB form DC is the same as adding your PB to the roll.
Well, the alternative would have been to do a DC 10+item level Crafting check while subtracting your ability bonus and other bonuses and penalties. I think this is more elegant.
Can the Halfling luck be used to reroll Crafting checks? What about that flat "rushing" check?
Generally, effects that can affect a single check don't work on downtime activities, as you'd need to be able to get that same effect multiple times in a day. So this is why most fortune effects don't work, BUT Assurance does.
I don't think they improved crafting to my liking. Consider this, most groups don't play past level 10, and if they do get downtime, it's almost always while within a city or metropolis. So in these circumstances, someone who has spent feats and abilities on crafting still fares no better than another party member who uses their downtime to Earn Income using whatever their best skill happens to be and then just buys the item from a shop.
17:28 sorry wouldn't a flat check of -2 mean you'd auto succeed on anything but a 1 since you'd always get higher than -2?
Where do u get the Crafting DC from? All i saw in the Books was "the GM set a Secret Crafting DC". Not even in the GM Book i could find a Table for that.
Better but still not perfect. A craftsperson should be able to make money from their craft the price you buy or sell an item needs to include a profit margin so one can earn money. Not just craft items for the sake of having items. I like these rules but still feel I’d need to mod them more to actually play with them.
I like the expertise allowing an increased DC but to craft faster a lot however.
If the goal is to earn money, you can just use the Earn an Income activity with Crafting.
I do not understand how anyone could possibly invest in the crafting system of P2 RAW and feel happy with or excited about that investment. I feel bad for any player that gets the crafter fantasy in their head and makes a character with it. They are on the road to disappointment.
Hmm, have they fixed the assurance feat? At least RAW, and clarified by the team, fortune effects can't be used during downtime (it's buried in the rules for rituals). It's possible this got changed in the last printing or two, but just curious if you know.
2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=781
On AON it specifically says assurance may apply to downtime.
@@sebastienlecmpte3419 Can you link that? It doesn't say that in the Assurance feat itself, so curious where the rules are/if they were added in a later version.
Here's the link: 2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=541
Specifically, downtime doesn't preclude Fortune effects per se; it prevents abilities that can't be used constantly for the period in question. (I just learned this! I've been disallowing Hero Points during downtime, when that's actually not called for in the rules!)
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG nods, thanks, thought I had responded but must have missed. Assurance working was added in V3.
It sounds like you still need to have crafting plans to make things in the new version. That's always been my problem with it. Crafting is so you can get targeted items for your build without needing to rely on your GM to add them in for you, however since you can't get plans for items anyway besides your GM putting them in for you, I feel like it sort of defeats the whole point
I´m new to Pathfinder 2e and maybe I dont understand everything but i really dislike this crafting. It only has worth if you dont have access to the item. But you need the formular to craft it, which you get in a adventure or you purchase it. It`s a roundabout way to give players this item for more gold as you can buy it. Why not instead give the player the item? In a Dungeon crawl its complete useless and in a Survival setting also because you need a smithy or something. And you need much downtime for it. It`s probaly faster and cheaper in a month of downtime to travel to the biggest city, buy the item and travel back.
I'm not new to Pathfinder 2e and actually what you say is spot on, and unfortunately the 'speeding up crafting' rules presented here don't fix it. Some tips that can help as a GM:
- Make formulas of higher levels than the items themselves available in settlements
- Give plenty of formulas as treasure, as well as raw materials (alchemical substance, metals, empty potion vials, etc.) that can be used for crafting at full price but can be sold only at half price
- Give plenty of downtime, don't allow characters to adventure during that time unless the whole party is ready to start adventuring again. Force characters to rest from their adventures, which is also realistic.
-What I also did was homebrew a rule that if you crafted an item that would only be used by you or your party members, you could pretend to be a much higher level for determining how long it takes to finish the item with the Earn income table. But then this item could not be sold.
Even with all this, in my campaign the party did not craft much, only some alchemical items for the alchemist, and one useful sword to beat the boss. I hope the other content in Treasure Vault will improve things.
@@Lawrencelot89 okay thanks for the advice. But how I see it you have to plan the whole campaign around crafting to make it somehow work. You have to only implement low level settlements, use specific loot and plan the story that they don't need to rush and have much downtime. I'm really not a big fan. Maybe in one campaign it can be funny but that's it.
At least for my personal experience, this does little to improve crafting. The entire premise of crafting, in my opinion, is to invest skills and feats as a tradeoff for a better wealth curve. That's the purpose they serve. And at least in terms of the games I play in, the DMs are not going to allow you to craft anything you can't already buy. Why craft something spending 4 days of downtime you could instead spend making money for an item you can just go buy? And yes, I do realize this isn't every DM. My complaints are still for my own experiences.
What about the rules for what is available in a town based on town level? One of two things happen in my groups. Either the group will just drop everything to go to a city large enough to buy items, or if there are campaign time constraints, will simply hoard the money until they do have time (and in the interem will fall behind on the item curve, then have a massive spike in power when they spend 5 levels or more worth of gold at one time).
And you might say, "Well they just shouldn't do that." Maybe, but saying that, even the intent behind the design, isn't going to change player behavior.
when do you need the formula to craft itens?
always
I still can't figure out how scroll crafting works.... Hope this book addresses how vague the core is for that action(s).
you mention the rule for 3.5 those take for ever to finish any permanent magic item... like a year for a magic full plate (if you by the full plate... if you also craft the full plate ad about 3 month easy... if I recall correctly XD)
But does it fix the problem of taking 4 days to craft a single shiriken?
It is not consumable.
It is not ammo.
in 1e Shuriken were considered ammo and could be enchanted(Etc.) like ammo.
It sounds like they’ve done a solid job making a part of the fantasy more approachable! I would guess most 5e players would kill for even this much😅.
There’s always room for more improvement…
I'm quite curious how this will play with the Inexplicable Apparatus. It's a common Level 18 worn item that, among other great benefits to the Craft skill, reduces "the minimum time required to Craft an item to 1 day." Of course, many campaigns don't run to such a high level, but for those who do, it seems like it could be very easy to rapidly cheese out items using the Inexplicable Apparatus and just the very lowest increase to DC for rushing setup =P
Granted, by the time you're level 18, it probably wouldn't feel as absurd to have a character who's just churning out potent items every four hours, considering they've spent all that time getting to that level of competence xD
I would houserule it to so that is the "maximum" setup time for all crafting, since it was published assuming these rules weren't in place.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG that seems fair, considering (as you said) the Inexplicable Apparatus was designed to work within the core Craft rules as opposed to the new Complex Crafting rules =] Even without that ability, it would still be great for the +3 to Craft, Earn Income, and Repair, AND for further reducing costs each day ^_^
I feel the rules are still broken. Things that should be quick take too long still and things that take time are too quick. The rules should encourage crafting. If I can walk into a store and buy 40 arrows from the shop keeper for 4sp and the whole transaction is 5min gametime, but making those same arrows is going to take me 2days crafting and 4sp I am not going to craft EVER. Now 1/2 a day and 4cp Ill think about it.
I'm new to PF2. My question is: Do you not also need a recipe for each item that is above common or something like that? I can't imagine the character getting to level x and then saying "oh great, I can now build all of these super rare magical items that I have no idea about". I need to reread that section again.
Yes, you do - it's just that those recipes/formulas are not automatically assumed in a settlement of appropriate level... the GM gets to decide.
Short version is yes you need the formula for anything you want to craft. Formula follow all the same rules for items such as level and rarity.
👍This is one I'll have to listen to, read through, and then listen to again, to really get it as a GM. I tend to handwave Crafting issues/problems in favor of what my players are really wanting to do for at-table fun and plans, as well as game-world story at the same time. It's always balanced based upon Item level, but no muss no fuss for us. 🤔🙂
Is there anything in the book about how all these new rules interact with the Inexplicable Apparatus? It's easily one of my favorite items because it speeds up crafting.
I agree with your analysis, but does it actually say RAW that the new crafting alternate rules allow crafting by batches for consumables? I would still run it that way, but does it actually say that? I couldn't find it.
The Core Rulebook allows this, on p. 243 and at this link: 2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=4
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG This? "You can Craft items with the consumable trait in batches, making up to four of the same item at once with a single check. This requires you to include the raw materials for all the items in the batch at the start, and you must complete the batch all at once. You also Craft non-magical ammunition in batches, using the quantity listed in the Ranged Weapons table (typically 10)."
The way that reads to me is general consumables is a batch size of 4 items, and non-magical ammunition batch size is 10. (Granted, I think that is overly restrictive and a good bowyer in a fantasy game should be able to make more than 10 arrows in several days.)
Personally I love the crafting system in PF2...it makes it a downtime activity not just a way to spam items. As a GM I appreciate the thought put into the system. Thanks for the rundown of the new rules :)
Random thought but what if we were to bring back the xp cost of crafting to reduce the time needed? Let's say 1xp for each day you reduce the length of crafting by? So if you're in a rush, you spend the initial setup time and then let's say the item requires another 100 days of crafting to complete if you want to reduce the remaining cost to 0. You instead spend 100 xp and finish the item there and then. It's a self limiting system that prevents abuse.
Is there a mistake in your examples or am I missing so something?
The level 4 character example says it takes 1 day to add 0.8g/day to finish the arrows. Whereas the level 1 character only said 0.2g/day to finish.
Edit: I see it goes up again at level 7 to 2.5g. There’s definitely something I’m not getting.
That is how much that character can "contribute" per day at each level. The fact that the only 0.2gp is needed to complete the item means that in each instance it still only needs 1 more day.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Awesome. That makes sense to me now. Much appreciated. Have a good day Señor Lawyer!
Most people who craft do it solely because they want to roleplay someone who tinkers and makes things, so I don't think that, "You would only craft something that you can't buy," is really true. Players choose to craft things that they could just buy because that's the kind of person they're playing, not because it grabs them some extra access. But it does seem like these rules make that choice less punishing... at the expense of making crafting more convoluted. I think I have two or three new tables to copy into my notes now.
I probably should have mentioned in the video how people who want different things out of crafting could adapt and change these rules. But yes, IMO one thing that can be done here is to scale these times, maybe at a 4:1 ratio, where every 2 hours count as "1 day" within this system.
Honestly, when it comes to making healing potions and elixirs of life, it's hard to beat the herbalist archetype. Especially if you spend lots of time in the wilderness
I don't like that if you want to save money you have to use a month or more of downtime. I feel like allowing masters to use the table 3 times and legendary people 4 times wouldn't throw off the balance.
Though for sake of economy it could get bad where you could give those items the rushed trait and are only worth half the money, or can only be sold at 1/4 of its worth
Very good video that actually explains what is going on with this variant rule. Thank you!
Crafting is not for every campaign, especially if there is very little to no downtime. That's ok. I am lucky that my lv 6 Inventor, which is heavily invested in crafting, is given downtime. I craft the items my party wants as soon as I have the ability to craft it for them. Meanwhile, they are making money to pay for said items. And here is the kicker: MY TEAM WILL TIP ME SO I CAN MAKE SOME MONEY TOO! This helps fund my personal projects. Find a +1 whatever? Well now the entire party has a +1 in that type of gear. Found a new weapon or armor but like a rune you have been using? I'll transfer that over for them. Got a cracked shield? I'll repair that in short order. Our human Investigator can't keep up with the athletics checks and can't see in the dark like the rest of the party? Well here are some Clockwork Goggles and some Blast Boots to fix the issue. My party and I love that I craft for us, and I get the MVP acknowledgement most nights because of it.
I feel like crafting in games is fundamentally either too strong because you get a significant discount on the item and unbalance the wealth system, or too weak because you don't get a significant discount on the item and also spend time on top of the cost.
Though this is speaking from a Pathfinder Society (organized play) player, where the shops in Absalom city can sell you you have rarity access to, for a price. And the Society can requisition most anything else.
Tiny correction in your analysis: You said that on the flat check at level 7, when the DC is -2 that "there might be a chance for a quirk". But the rules directly say that when a flat check is below DC1 or above DC 21, you simply don't even roll, you just take that as a guarantee success/fail. So there's no chance for a quirk, you automatically take the success.
Where is that? I'm not seeing it.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I don't have access to my books atm, but nethys says that it's on p. 450 where it talks about flat checks.
Crafting needs a guided web tool and/or vtt plugin. Walking through the crafting process is still onerous and trying to do it at the table still grinds things to a halt.
Crafting in 3e was impractical in the context of most campaigns without a time accelerated demiplane combined with an assistant automotan or a cohort stacked with crafting feats. The time required was absurd.
Another great video, Ronald! I agree with your take on the new crafting rules. A lot of detractors seem to come from the angle of "Crafting an item should always be better than buying an item." But to me, that just shows an ignorance of just HOW tightly balanced the game is. PF2e is praised for how balanced its encounter design system is and works so well. There are MANY disparate game systems that work in tandem to make that work. One of those systems is the recommended treasure rewards per level, which assumes treasure is either found or bought, NOT crafted (because they don't want players to feel forced to invest in crafting). I don't think the detractors truly realize how much it would throw off the game if crafting substantially increased the amount of treasure a party would get simply because you were able to make it. I have a hard time believing those that say crafting should always be better than buying are truly focused on the fantasy of crafting and instead just want a way to make their character overpowered.
I've also heard the argument that certain classes rely on crafting to get their power. But all of those classes and archetypes are given ways to make temporary consumables during daily preparations, which bypasses the crafting system. And more importantly, the class/archetype is BALANCED for that.
I also believe most PF2e players don't even know that there is a system for settlements. Like you mentioned, settlements are supposed to have a level which indicates what items and services are available. To use Lost Omens as an example, there are very few settlements that are level 20, meaning nearly everything is available. Even the capital cities of the other nations don't often get that high, let alone settlements in obscure places, like in the frozen wastes of the north, or deserts of the Golden Road, or the deep jungles of the Mwangi Expanse.
It's also an issue of communication between GM and player. First, if none of the players really care to engage in crafting, then great, nothing really needs to be changed. But if one of the players wants to do crafting, then the GM should make accommodations for that. Give the players more downtime. Let them find recipes instead of actual items. Give the party less items in exchange for an equivalent amount of gold so they just make what they want.
I think I ended up rambling at the end, but that's mostly my thoughts on it. I think the complex crafting rules are a nice addition.
There are a few other established level 20 settlements now (or ones that count as level 20 for obtaining certain items and services), particularly in the Impossible Lands (Quantium, Mechitar, Niswan for divine and monk stuff, Oenopion for alchemy etc.), but that's the extreme end of high-magic shenanigans in the core setting, and most other places aren't close to that.
is it really getting access to more treasure, or just more treasure you want. If you get crap you can't use, and sell it at half value to craft things at half value, the total amount of treasure stays the same, its jsut more opptimized to the party (that's how pf1e worked). I much preferred that system, though I will admit 50% was a little much, because some of the treasure came in the form of money or art that could be sold for full value. As such a smaller discount would make more sense, like 25%. But those people are right. Logically, crafting should be financially better than buying, 2e i65ts worse
@@andrewdemarco3512 First, let me just say real quick that my comment was specifically about crafting in PF2e. I wasn't trying to make any assertions about crafting in RPGs as a whole.
To address your point though, the GM has complete control over what items are awarded. So the GM shouldn't give the party crap that they feel the need to sell in the first place. Or if the GM is giving items with the purpose of selling them, the sell value should be part of the "treasure per level" budget as described in the core rulebook. And if you're talking about pre-written adventures, the GM can change what items are awarded to better fit the party.
I also, in a way, addressed that already in my first comment. The GM should have a conversation with any players that want to engage in crafting and make the appropriate accommodations.
And ok, if, logically, crafting should be financially better, shouldn't it, logically, take far longer than 6 days to make a high-level permanent item?
Remember that this all feeds into the delicate balance of the overall game.
Now if you want say that Paizo should redesign PF2e to support the kind of crafting system you want, ok! That's a discussion that can be had. Just realize that it's going to be A LOT more work to make the appropriate changes.
If it's not better then why do it at all. If it's not worth doing why are they wasting my money on printing general options that are useless? I'm of the sound opinion that if it's never worth doing then it should have never been printed wasting space for something useful. As much as I like paizo they have a bad habit of printing absolutely worthless options which in my opinion hurts the game. A current case for me was the webweaving for the anadi, on first glance it is an amazingly thematic feat then you read it and realize it is 100% useless and a waste of a feat.
@@ashenlion805 I don't concede that the crafting system is useless. Ronald even mentions in the video that if you're party is at a settlement that's too low level, and the item the party is looking for isn't available, then the crafter has the option to make it. And the GM should make sure that option is available.
As for the notion that worthless options shouldn't even be printed, try to keep in mind that what you find worthless, other players may find fun, even if it's suboptimal. And essentially saying the Paizo needs to change to accommodate you is very selfish.
think it's more the spirit of broken crafting that's the issue. IRL, I'm a craftsman (a goldsmith specifically) and I'm expected to produce at least 15 items a day. Anyone who could only produce 10 gold jumps rings in 4 days would be laughed out of the profession for their egregious incompetence.
And this level of incompetence, so much that it's just silly is where players find themselves. I hope they are skilled murder hobos, because they are crap craftsman.
Isnt a batch of ammo just 10?
If you do not have access to an item, why would you have access to the formula? You can't justify that with a 7th level feat, if crafting is meant to get items which you don't have access too, and you can't get the formula without a feat, crafting is useless without the feat. So inventing should be baseline if the only reason to craft something is if you don't have access too it.
This right here, I don't think most understand that you have to have the formula and they follow all the same rules as the item itself.
@@ashenlion805 in other words, it's always more expensive to craft an item than it would be to just buy it.
I think that's a fair houserule, for GMs and tables who don't want the rarity of formulas to be implemented (I personally after reading a couple comments am for higher-level formulas of SOME levels above settlement being available). Adding to my pinned comment!
Easiest way to fix crafting; You get 2/4/6/8(or 2/3/4/5) hours out of your 8 hour crafting day each adventuring day no matter what (Trained/expert/master/legendary). You can then spend your exploration time to craft, getting as many hours as you'd get exploring in addition. However you take a -2/-1/0 penalty to perception while doing this. (Trained/Expert/Master) up to a total of 8 hours or one crafting day. Additionally you can't rush crafting an item while crafting in this way.
Now you can craft during modules with tight windows but it'll take longer to craft, or your taking penalties to the adventuring day itself.
Huh it's interesting that early on you want to shave down the Setup time in these rules, but later on you want to take the safe and easy setup time and then Rush the rest of the piece since that DC scales more slowly.
Yeah, this ain't really it. It's a whole lot of extra rules and choices to make crafting even more uncertain and complex.
I much prefer my GM's approach: you reduce the days to craft an item or batch of items by the difference between your level and the item's level, minimum 1.
That's how the playtest for the crb worked; not sure why they dropped it.
The rushed crafting though is quite a bit more powerful
Maybe I am missing something, admittedly I haven't even played a single pathfinder game yet but why is it being sold at half cost? crafting should cost half the book value, the other half should be profit (which should equal what the book value lists).
Would have liked to see a chapter on making crafting less complex instead. It would also be helpful if each item entry showed all requirements and DCs to craft it, so you don't need to flip pages to figure it out. I suspect the catalogue of magic items alone will make the book worth having.
The ultimate version of this book would include all magic items published so far as well as random loot generation tables for all of it.
Great video
Kinda disappointed with these rules, they feel kinda needlessly convoluted, but whatever I can just modify stuff if it comes to it
When I ran my campaigns DnD I allowed my players to craft magic components for spells and hunt for materials as part of role play
I'm surprised you're mentioning extra days at all. One example, crafting the lev 11 Holy weapon rune at 6,5 or 4 days. Why bother mentioning 35, 44, 70, or 88 days on a RUSH job that takes less than a week if they're planning on taking months to complete the job?
Sorry if you've addressed this already in the comments
After spending some time getting acquainted with the rules for second edition I firmly believe that the combat and action economy and second edition is vastly superior to first edition, and 5th edition d&d but that's an easy line to cross, however the crafting system and oversimplification of the skills from first edition Pathfinder are repulsive. The level of complexity and options I had for creating an interesting character through my skills and crafting abilities, or professions, was one of my favorite features. Considering that crafting in first edition was one of my favorite aspects of playing the game and was a core concept that I developed all of my characters around whether it was one field of crafting or another this may be the end of my second edition journey.
Saw some of the community upset because perma items time got increased but I think there was a big knee jerk reaction here because:
1) The ability to craft consumables quickly was most people’s complaints before.
2) While the increase DC for time reduction is high the simple fact is most perma items are going to be below your level. Ie a +1 striking common weapon is only level 4. Given that you won’t normally get a +2 till level 10 or a greater striking until level 12 this gives you a range of 9 levels where the DC will be lower than a standard DC giving you plenty of times where crafting an item you need can be done quick and I feel like some people just, frankly, didn’t do the math here Ie that +1 striking is going to be useful until level 9 meaning base DC is only going to be 14 while a good crafter will be rocking around a +20 or higher making increasing the DC by even 10 to reduce time still give you good 55% success chance and only a 5% crit fail chance and that’s without someone using aid increasing those odds fairly drastically for the better.
So I’m really glad you did the math here. I love Nonat but his reaction was I feel misinformed as he didn’t really consider the math let alone that failure still produced an item increasing odds of actually making it by 45%
Edit: Quick note since I’ve had it brought up in a few discussions on the matter people mention formula access and how if you have access to a formula you have access to an item associating the item level of the thing a formula allows you to make with the formula level. The reality is (as far as I can see) formulas do not have an item level meaning they should be far more accessible (up to to the GM). Thematically this makes sense as it’s more likely someone may say have access to a book that says how to make, say, a flaming rune but not the magical materials let alone skill to actually do so because parchment, ink and the knowledge is far more easy to share than the raw materials and talent.
If you guys ever want to know why they put such strict things on Crafting look up D&D 3.5 races of stone look up The Prestige class battle Smith and you'll know exactly why they did this
I think the last point about it resulting in an item and not hard cash is really important. you can never make more cash when crafting. At best you gete an item fo half it's price and then you sell it for the same price. It's good when phasing through gear, but it generally doesn't let you get overpowered gear like someone who got 100gp instead of 200 in items could.
Looks like youtube at my post.
I'm going to cut against the grain here---I'm not a huge fan of advanced, specialized crafting for player characters in my games in general.
Classed characters are already in specialized professions, and many of these crafts take a lifetime to master. This gets into a bit of game philosophy here, but from my perspective this is what you have expert hirelings for.
Here are just a few examples of what I mean.
A knight squire, at 1st level might not only be expected to know and practice advanced horsemanship, the care, treatment, and training of horses, and spend several hours a day doing weapons drills on foot and on horseback--he would also be expected to know etiquette, hunting, heraldry, falconry, dancing, reading and writing, have a good understanding of law, basic appraisal so he can tell quality items from shoddy ones, and any number of other skills needed to navigate and survive on a battlefield and in high society.
A first level common soldier would also have any number of skills. Vegitius has a extensive list of what a common legionary would need to know. Beowulf gives examples of what and Norse/Anglo-Saxon warrior would be practiced in. These require constant training to maintain ones edge.
Mages are constantly working to master forces that can alter the shape of reality and bend the laws of physics and nature. Whether this is by negotiating with spirits or channeling elemental forces, and their times is spent furthering these pursuits--this is a full time pursuit and if done incorrectly things can go terribly wrong. I don't see where they have the time to become master glass blowers or horologists or the like.
You could make a historical argument that priests and monks engaged in all manner of industry, from cheese making to glass blowing and staining, etc. But these are not adventuring priests--these priests were specialized artisans. Whether you're playing a demonologist and exorcist or a warrior priest like the Archbishop Turpin from the Song of Roland or a priest who is a physician--these are significant specialized pursuits.
At the end of the day, having your character engaged in days of glass blowing or making clocks or forging weapons or anything in between doesn't make for great adventuring.
A bit disappointing still, I expected something more elaborate with materials and such
Don’t forget that the goal of Paizo is to make rules that will work at the most tables possible, not at a specific or a minority of tables. In those cases it is expected that you will create your own rules.
You might want to check out the guidelines in the Battlezoo Bestiary (by Roll for Combat). Here's their writeup on that system: www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/pu14gl/how_the_monster_parts_system_works_exactly_for/
Crafting is not to reduce costs or make money. it is just to get access to items... except if your dm decides not to give you the formulas you need... thanks dm
This all seems so esoteric and complicated. Why not just have a cumulative DC?
For example. I wanna craft a simple shield. The Cumulative DC is, say, 100. My PC got home from adventuring and has, say, three hours of downtime. So I tell the GM I wanna spend three hours crafting my shield.
I roll a crafting check, coming up with a decent result of 19. I take that 19 and times it by three (the number of hours spent working). I get a final result of 57.
Now subtract the 57 I got from the original DC of 100. I get 43. So next time I decide to work on that item, the DC is 43. Once the DC reaches zero, the item is complete.
Now say I wanna make a legendary longsword that has the spirits of my ancestors imbued in the steel. DC 2000. Sounds like a lot, and it should be. The Rings of Power weren't forged in a day. Bruenor spent months forging Wulfgar's magic hammer.
In addition, a system like this accurately represents how crafting works in the real world. Projects take time, but work is cumulative. Some days you only have an hour, some days you can work through til dinnertime. Some days you're on top of your game, others you're a bit slower and more easily distracted. A system like this reflects all of that while giving a PC a real sense of progression.
My two cents!
I'm actually rather disappointed.
I was hoping for something much simpler to pull off, instead of more complex.
They certainly got the name of the variant right though.
4 days for 10 arrows? Forged in Fire, the TV show has REAL people making REAL swords, totally done in 3 days. And they cut. Everything I see about 2e ( as a Pathfinder 1e player) makes it seem like it is a video game. Crafting is based on game balance not reality. It is all the moden move away from making the GM in charge of balancing the game. AS a GM I'd let someone make a ton of arrows in a single day. Arrows for crying out loud. The crafting rules are stupid when applied to the mundane. Saying "well just buy them" is a Game Balance answer, not one set in reality.
I'm starting to think the premise crafting systems don't make sense to begin with.
It's a pretty silly notion, that the world-traversing band of warriors and wizards are also master craftsmen at the same time. Creating a set of plate armour, or even a couple arrows, is not something you suddenly sit down and do for half a week.
To me, the crafting skill would make more sense in the manner it's used for shields in PF2. Weapons and armour gets damaged or breaks during intense action or harsh weather. Crafting should be you method of performing quick-fixes in the field, until a proper craftsman in town can repair it properly. An appropriate skill feat would be to allow a player to perform maintenance on their kit during daily preparations, redering them immune to damage (save for being targetet by abilities) throughout the day.
I feel like that would require a lot of homebrewing work though, and I can't be bothered. xD
crafting sucks because there is really no reason to do it, and it requires massive downtime. If the GM is willing to let you craft, they should be willing to stock the shop with the item.
The new version's time reduction based on DC is kind of ehhh, if you are crafting items of your level, how realistic is it to drastically increase the DC. whats the opportunity cost? Basically crafting is mostly only useful if the GM refuses to give you store access to common items you are seeking. Or perhaps if you want to make downtime slightly more gold efficient in exchange for more planning. But since adventuring should give way more gold than downtime, if your goal is gold, don't do downtime.
Essentially crafting is only useful if the GM goes out of their way to make it useful, by denying on level items, limiting adventure time, and giving long downtime phases. All of which = bad gameplay for non crafting focused players.
I think most of these RP crafting systems don't understand party crafting focused players would really want. A worthwhile way to make interesting/desired/creative items that doesnt ruin the gameplay of the party. For me, preferable if its mechanics are at least a little compelling, but that varies from player to player.
Crafting is still non-sensical, like unless every store in galarian sells their items at a loss what crafting basically is, is you buy the resources required to make the item, dick around for 4 days and then get bored and trade those materials for store credit and just buy the completed item.
Part of the items value is the labour that is required to make it and this system doesnt reflect that at all.
So crafting is still broken in one regard. You are still working for no compensation for "x" number of days (4 in the core rulebook). You argue that 4 days is the cost of access to the item but this argument has a flaw. The formula and material cost is the cost of access to the item. Time should be paid for every day you work on crafting an item at your established earned income rate. So if you are crafting 4 3rd level scrolls and finish them in 4 days, your cost should be 120gp each minus 4 days of your earned income. This is a minor tweak and will not harm game balance but it does allow a crafter to earn income equal to someone working at another job and not give their first 4 days away for free.
I think people are too used to Minecraft crafting if they are upset by four days. My first thought about crafting taking four days was thinking that was super fast, particularly if we are talking about a powerful magic item.
I've been arguing with a friend of mine that making crafting rules make sense in a lot of fantasy ttrpgs is pretty difficult. Sure, you have the balancing mechanics that you've got to nail, but also the narrative aspect as well.
Anybody who's watched Forged in Fire knows that to make a good sword will take multiple days. How do you make that work in a very dungeon crawl oriented campaign? NoNat1s gave the scenario of "Oh, you just downed the Lich, and leveled up. You can now craft that thing you've been wanting, but it will take 6 days. The lich will revive in 1."
One could say that a good campaign is one that will allow for ample down time to let crafting oriented characters shine. I don't agree with this because Dungeon crawls like Abomination Vaults would be automatically bad campaigns, or even adventures like Plaguestone.
I argue that a good crafting system has to be able to work well enough in a campaign that has very little down time.
I think these new rules are a step in the right direction, but still not something I could accept as good crafting rules.
Idk about that..
At level 1, sure. But every PC becomes superhuman as they level up. Even fighters and rogues, not just the magic casters.
Why not the crafters too? Why can't the crafter learn special methods of working materials that drastically reduce the time and cost?
@@symmetry8049 How drastic are you talking here? Because in the example above, I'm talking about balancing it for a dungeon crawl, which would most certainly need it to be less than a day.
Under this supposed 1 day crafting system, if you compare earning income for 1 day at level 1, vs crafting a level 1 item at level 1, crafting will blow earn income out of the water. That's comparing 2cp per day to around 10gp per day (if you limit yourself to only crafting composite longbows).
I think you're right that we should be able to make PCs superhuman crafters, but this bound is the equivalent of giving a gunslinger a modern day machine gun. Suspends disbelief a bit too much and not well balanced.
It's always kind of odd to me that there are concerns about players having too much money when the GM is literally the bank handing it out. If you want them to have less money to balance things, give them less money. Let your players have fun making the stuff they use, and if you need to balance it out with giving them less gold or loot, do so.
And the end result being that they don't get a benefit? Without telling them? It's better to be open to the players imo.
Reminder that Alchemists can choose Efficient Alchemy at level 4 to double the number of alchemical items made in a batch, Crafting 8 items per batch, and Witches can choose Cauldron at level 2 (or level 1 if you’re playing a Human) to make potions and oils in batches of six instead of four.
Tbh, I don't bother with crafting. If I want a "crafter" character I strictly work with classes that give free consumables per day like alchemist, inventor, gunslinger, etc
I mostly like these rules. I feel like an alchemist should have an additional benefit to alchemical items (which doesn't seem to be the case?) and I think that level 0 non-magical permanent items might benefit from a smaller crafting time (i.e. everything you get in the basic crafting book).
About 2/3rd through this video and I understand the idea being presented here, but I don't like it.
Its not a matter for me which is faster or has more ways to modify it or anything like that.
This new system is just too crunchy for me to really care.
When I GM or playing a PC the things I naturally avoid is the system I am going to have to google every time for a refresher or need a booklet on hand to reference all the charts.
I did not like 5e "figure it out yourself" approach, but this just feels excessive.
I rather it just be a check per item and a deduction of gold. You get the item the next day after you succeed as the time spent to finish it is done throughout the day and evening. If that is two quick then make it two days.
The only aspect I as a GM is worried about is "Do I want them making this at all" and "You can't instantly make something as soon as it is needed". The second one should be reserved for things like the alchemist class that's whole thing is crafting.
I will probably just use the original moving forward unless I feel like making a homebrew.
Still feels like a player is getting shafted for trying to craft their own items. I think these rules tried so hard to make all sides of an equation equal, and never considered the fun part.
why would they sell it at half the price?? If they made an item worth 1000gp but spent time to reduce it to 500, why wouldnt they sell it at 1000 and make 500 gp profit.
👍for Megan for demanding attention😻
Crafting a major item in four days seems overly generous. Four months would be more logical and balanced.
Coming from D&D 5e, I've been checking out PF2E and loving a lot of what I've found, but I can see why PF2E truly *needs* a lawyer to advocate for it. It definitely works, but it's also an inelegant mess that quickly gets almost nightmarish to run or play as levels advance. Unless you're the type of GM or player that doesn't mind memorizing tangles of interacting systems that all strive to approach a firm, yet fuzzy definition of balance, *Mathfinder* 2E is going to take a lot of patience to break into, especially if you enjoy optimizing and homebrewing. At least 5e is arguably an *elegant* mess. That said, PF2E has been a much better inspiration for the creation of my own system, which aims to bring together and enhance the best of systems like PF and D&D.
I think seeing the numbers like this helps calm a lot of the knee-jerk reactions from the community
Wait, people actually complain about 4 days of crafting time?
I know it's an apples-and-oranges comparison, but part of me REALLY wants to thrust the old PF1 magic-item-creation-rules under their noses, and then ask them to calculate how long it'd take to hand-craft a Belt of Physical Perfection +6.
Ikr? People complain about that use case that RARELY comes up in high fantasy campaigns: crafting things you can easily buy...