Downtime and Crafting

 The campaign I've been running for over four years now is pretty heavy on the downtime. While it's not a perfect 1:1 ratio, as I'll sometimes carry over a fight between sessions or some time-sensitive adventure, generally speaking I like to say that the same amount of time that passes in the real world is the time that passes in-game. The party got together in 10,076 ZC, and it's now 10,081 (there was a one-year time jump - one big notable exception to this idea).

And the party has an Artificer, who has done a lot of crafting of magical items, using weeks upon weeks of downtime to perform this.

And even then, it kind of sucks.

The rules for crafting magic items found in Xanathar's Guide to Everything follow the same general rules for crafting: you need a (I believe 40-hour) week of work for every 50 gold of the item's value, with consumables taking half as much time. The cost of materials is then typically half the cost of a finished product.

Artificers, of course, can cut down on some of that time and cost because they're the magic-item-crafting class. But it's still overall based in gold and time.

The gold part I think works ok: While I think folks like Brennan Lee Mulligan have made pretty compelling arguments about why money isn't really a thematically appropriate system for most fantasy RPGs (Dimension 20's Starstruck Odyssey season being a big exception, where money and more importantly debt were major factors in the plot,) the acquisition of gold is still a pretty well-ingrained aspect of D&D, and is a reasonable resource to force players to spend on crafting items (and frankly, gives non-Wizards a better place to put their gold after the first few levels).

Now, there is still a problem even when we're just talking about gold: Magic items don't have clear costs. There are ranges of price depending on a magic item's rarity, but none have an explicit cost. I actually accidentally slipped earlier in the campaign I'm running when I let a player purchase a set of Mithril Plate armor for I think 1,200 gold because that was somewhere in the Uncommon magic item price range - only to be reminded later that a fully mundane, non-magical set of plate costs 1,500, meaning that they got a discount!

I noticed when I was looking deep into Starfinder that every single piece of equipment you can get has a clear cost in Credits. Admittedly, it's a game set in an industrial, futuristic setting (like Starstruck, actually) but even if you simply award such items for completing quests or finding them in secret rooms, you can deduct this from the overall number of credits that you allow them to find as loot, letting you pretty tightly balance your rewards (my general impression is that Paizo's games are more tightly balanced, but perhaps the cost is that they're extremely crunchy).

But the thing is, even if we have a clear gold cost to craft things, the real downside is the downtime required.

Downtime to craft an item is based on the gold cost. Again, it's one week for someone with the right tool proficiencies (like blacksmithing tools for crafting metal armor) per 50 gold of the item's value. Crafting an enchanted item also requires that you have the Arcana skill proficiency.

And you really have to spend that week (again, I think it's basically like a 40-hour workweek, if not 8 hours for all seven days) to count.

First off, this means that crafting a set of plate armor will take you 30 weeks. That's about seven and a half months.

Tell me, how many campaigns do you play in or run when you'll have over half a year of downtime?

For sure, a set of plate armor is a complicated thing to engineer and build. Real-world plate armor is surprisingly flexible if it is built right, with areas of articulation everywhere your body can bend. The idea of a set of armor that severely limits your movement would have basically made such armor suicidal to wear on the battlefield - there's a reason why people actually used this stuff. And all of that means some very delicate, careful craftsmanship.

It seems a bit excessive, but not being an armor historian, I couldn't say whether over half a year was required to make a suit like this (to be sure, it was mostly rich nobility who could afford to wear this stuff) but the point is:

It doesn't really work for the game.

Granted, the example I've given here is basically the most expensive piece of mundane equipment you can buy before we start getting into, like, airships. But even if we pull back and talk about a set of splint armor, worth 200 gold and giving one less AC than plate, that's still four weeks of crafting. More likely to occur, but still won't happen in... honestly I'd say most campaigns.

And this is really where the problem lies: crafting, as it stands, is only accessible to players in campaigns that have a lot of time between adventures.

And in an old-school D&D campaign, this actually would be pretty common - when you ran basically one or two dungeon crawls per level, each separated from each other by in-game weeks and months, as sort of separate and usually not really time-sensitive affairs, it made perfect sense to build the system around downtime.

But most campaigns I've played have not had much in the way of downtime at all - the two campaigns I've played in longest, we've never had anything like a home base, and have simply been on the road, traveling between adventure locations, these journeys usually being adventures in and of themselves.

I know the Artificer isn't getting an update in the PHB (and I'm torn between whether I'd want them to do an update on them or if I'd rather they add some brand-new classes,) but given that the Artificer has class features that relate to crafting items, it feels like that system shouldn't be kind of at the mercy of the story pacing of the campaign you're in.

Now, one of the preview videos we're getting next week will actually focus on the new Crafting system. I'll confess that I'm a little wary - these videos are, of course, in part marketing. Jeremy Crawford's excited description of the Ranger as a totally redesigned, brand-new class, was perhaps a bit overselling it - I wouldn't say it's all that much more changed than other classes (and that's ok - I think that in most cases they made the classes work better, and the Ranger in particular suffered from being underpowered compared to its class fantasy).

I'd be disappointed if the "brand new crafting system" was simply what appeared in Xanathar's Guide to Everything with minimal revisions.

In my long-running Ravnica campaign, I played around with a system in which crafting was fast - maybe requiring a week at most - but if it was a magic item, there would also be skill checks required to complete the process, wasting the materials and forcing them to either give up or start anew if they failed them (when the Artificer finished the final check for the group's Artifact, restoring an angelic sword associated with the Planeswalker/Goddess Serra, I had the Artificer and an NPC both make a roll - the DC I set in my mind was 25, but when both the player and the NPC hit a 30, I just told them that that had been the DC to make it all that much more epic - actually, I think what I did was allowed the artificer to infuse some of their Izzet magic into the sword at this last moment, so that now its bonus damage could be radiant as normal, but now the wielder could also choose to make that damage fire or lightning instead).

I think this skill-challenge approach, while it might stretch credulity to anyone who actually knows how much time it goes into making some of these things, at the very least allows for the crafting of a magic item to be a high-stakes moment rather than this kind of sure-thing that requires the story to have some long lull.

One of the things I did with mine was to really play with "off-label skills," such as making a Dexterity (Arcana) check to engrave runes in just the right way. This might need to be more standardized for a piece of equipment.

I also think that when pricing magic items, if it's not a wondrous item (which would be basically just a trinket if it weren't magical,) we could have a simple formula like "the price of the base item plus X for uncommon items, Y for rare items, Z for very rare items, etc." And then we could just kind of give a base for wondrous items.

But the pricing here wouldn't be to determine how long it was to make it - instead, the price would give you the cost of the materials required. Then, the real danger of failing your skill checks is that the materials you bought become ruined, and your out a bunch of gold.

I do think that the rules for tool proficiency presented in the playtest (unless they were in Xanthar's or Tasha's first) actually work very well: if you have proficiency with a tool, you get to add that proficiency bonus to a check related to it even if check uses a skill you aren't proficient in. But then, if you are also proficient in that skill, you then get advantage.

And this doesn't even have to be crafting skills: One of the weird things that I think a lot of DMs get wrong is whether a Rogue (or I guess anyone) trying to pick a lock is making a Sleight of Hand check or a "Dexterity (Thieves' Tools)" check. I believe that it's meant to be the latter, but perhaps as a relic of earlier editions or simply because tool proficiency is so vague in the 2014 rules, many say it's just Sleight of Hand. But that then means that having proficiency in Thieves Tools is sort of meaningless.

With this system, the Rogue with thieves' tools (and as a Rogue, they're proficient) who also has Sleight of Hand as a skill - let's say they have +3 Dexterity and +2 proficiency bonus - will be able to roll with a +5 and advantage. Simple enough.

This also retroactively makes Artificer's tool expertise that much more useful: if they can get their tools involved, they might wind up getting an enormous bonus (the Artificer who got a 30 on that check to finish fixing their artifact sword has an Ioun Stone of Mastery and had gotten the equivalent of that magic item that lets them get up to a 22 Intelligence, so they were rolling with +6 INT, +6 PB (this was at level 14 or so, I think) and then expertise in glass-blowing tools (it's a Benalish weapon, so the blade is made of stained glass) meaning that they had a +18 and advantage on the Arcana check required to finish the job.

Again, we'll have to see how and by how much the crafting system changes. As I understand, crafting potions and spell scrolls will be in the PHB, but the rest of the crafting rules will be in the DMG. I do think that is probably wise: while I want to see crafting as a possibility in more campaigns, I also understand how a DM might want to retain some degree of control over it - maybe when you're running a Ravenloft campaign you don't want to let your players get their hands on silvered weapons until they've had a few harrowing encounters with your Loup-Garou villain.