Craft

[tukkek]

For each creature killed do the following procedures, all DCs being equal to 15+base CR.

1. Determine base CR (unaltered by templates, class levels, advancement, etc).
2. Identify trophy: Knowledge roll.
3. Harvest trophy: Survival or Heal roll (decide best one before making roll, including ability modifier).
4. Craft trophy: Craft roll.

If all checks are a success, either consult the table in the given link or use the simplified formula =65*EXP(base cr*0.27) to reach bonus gold https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/#Selling_Trophies

On Dungeons, where there is no time to linger around, do this procedure only for the highest CR in a vanquished group.

[tukkek]

Could add an Alchemist Kit/Guild that teaches the Adept Class plus all relevant skills (using Heal, not Survival). Either turn it into a full Kit concept or just don't have any extension upgrades and never allow it as a preferred class.

[tukkek]

With each passing day, also make a Craft roll and generate an amount of gold pieces equal to the roll result divided by 10.

[tukkek]

Requires Alchemists Lab #198.

[tukkek]

One way to take this idea further, especially with the Alchemist kit, is having only trained people use the Crafting skill - and instead of just adding those to the treasure pool, add it to an item called "Reagents" instead. For example, after a battle it could go from "Reagents ($100)" to "Reagents ($300)".

These items can be sold for half their price, as standard but a unit with the Brew Potion feat (requires Adept 3) can invoke the Craft action to instantly convert Reagents into Potions (with a 15% price increase compared to getting them on a shop). They are limited to Potions with Spell of level 3 or less, until the following feats: Enchantment (raises the limit up to level 6 spells, requires Brew Potion) and Major Enchantment (no level limit, requires Enchantment).

Each active crafting action takes 1 hour and cannot be performed inside a dungeon. It fails if interrupted by a random encounter, but does not waste materials, just being interrupted instead and having to restart the process.

In case this is implemented, might as well rename the skill to Alchemy instead (with the very small daily reagent gain representing misc reagents being acquired, traded, etc).

If this is implemented, Alchemists should be able to produce bombs and splash weapons too #199.

[tukkek]

An interesting crafting implementation would be for players to find Crafting Benches as Dungeon Features. These would operate like a "creative recipe" - you get a number of ingredients with each Bench and each ingredient type performs a mostly-random-effect on the outcome. For example: 50% chance of changing the item type to Potion or else a Ring; 25% chance of making the resulting item a level higher or else a level lower (gold-value wise as per Reward Calculator); 10% chance of doubling the amount of items or else ruining the recipe; reroll all ingredients...

The player would approach the bench and be greeted with a predicted outcome (an Item), and a bunch of actions they could take (the ingredients) and their outcomes and chances of succeeding/failing. He could then choose which ingredients to use and which order to use them in to maximize the outcome in his favor and according the party's strategic needs.

These random chances would be affected by the Crafting skill - but the fallback is that a player who finds a bench and doesn't mess with the recipe at all should take something away as-is, without interacting with the minigame at all. In that sense, they could be a particular type of Chest, in fact - except one that can be interacted with if there's a unit with high Crafting present.

This seems like it could be a difficult thing to balance but once a base framework of "how much risk balances the outcome", percentage-wise is laid out then all that's left is to find a Craft DC that results in that percentage, assuming a take-ten of a skilled character of the given Dungeon's level - or even better, based on the Item's wealth level. For example: an ingredient that has 50% chance of doubling the amount of items produced and 50% of voiding the recipe entirely balances itself out on average always.

Another way to approach balance is to have a success chance that can go down or up with certain ingredients - this allows much better items as a base as long as the success chance is low (25% chance = 4x value in gold) and also to design and balance ingredients that could be hard to give chances to otherwise. A recipe should never boil down to "everything against chance, ultimately" - each ingredient acted upon (or not acted upon) should be a meaningful choice that requires planning and adapting when things go unexpectedly. Success chance should be one of the elements being juggled, not the main one.

It would be interesting to let a player use their own items as base and ingredients - for example, you could get the choice to sacrifice any Potion you have so it would produce a certain outcome known ahead of time (either add a new ingredient as an option or get a positive result from any random ingredient before the player confirms to use it). Being able to "tweak" or sacrifice Items that are no longer useful, with a degree of control and predictable risk over the outcome is a cool progression path! Even risking a pre-existing item as crafting base can be an interesting gamble if the pay-off is worth the risk.

Crafting should take time, so after the recipe is "completed", in comes the "brewing" phase - one way to go about it is to have a "time quota" that needs to be met, which a player can fulfill in chunks, with a 10% chance of Encounter per hour. This would be impossible to balance with the actual OGL rules but it can be excused with the notion that these bench projects are "mostly done" and abandoned. Brewing time can also be affected by ingredients.

Between outcome, completion time and chance of success, might be more worhtwhile to allow the player to apply each ingredient to any of the three elements, with different outcomes and chances of success (generated procedurally). This increases the possibility matrix, importance of planning ahead and the opportunity-cost analysis by a wide margin.

The same mechanic could be done as a downtime activity but that's another issue entirely.

[tukkek]

With the Reagents idea from above, a trained crafter could have a chance to produce ingredients by taking away part of the gold reward from Fights. As items, those would have to scale so that an ingredient that adds +10% chance of success to a recpe of a certain level would give a lower percentage to another, more powerful Item. They would be grouped through #239.

[tukkek]

On a crafting bench, a player should be able to deterministically create Runes #245 given the right combination of reagents #281 . These can be randomized during World generation but then remain consistent throughout the playthrough.

The right combination would of course need to be within the price-range of the resulting Rune (possibly more expensive, to avoid meta-gaming exploits) and each valid combination should result in only one Rune.

How to present this information to the player is another matter - it might simply be a matter of showing which Runes can be crafted with their currently available reagents (requiring players to remember or write it down in their Journals) or the interface could remember all previously seen recipes and keep them in another table that players can check (which should also probably be accessible from a World Action).

In fact, if this is used to imbue Items with Runes (rather than generate the actual items) and pages/books #269 with Branches (of branch fields), then it might be a simpler, unified approach to Crafting in itself. The downside is that this is less involved and immersive than the original proposal (but not really for books since it will still be a multi-stage process to develop a page and a book of pages) while the upsides are simplicity (conceptually- and implementation-wise) and perhaps more importantly that there is no reason why the effect can't be immediate (maybe taking an hour at most), while the original proposal is inconsistent with Shop crafting times.

Recipe generation is easier to do for Gear (imbuing Runes) since there's a clear price goal to aim for. For Books and Pages, it might be a matter of tIer-1 Trophies adding one particular field from a random Branch, 2 for Tier 2, etc, with perhaps combining different Trophy types resulting in perhaps a similar cumulative amount of fields but different Branches (15 trophy types = 15 branches or runes; 2 types combined = 210 branches or runes)...

For Books, one reagent per World should be a "cleansing" one - Tier 1 removes a line at random, Tier 2 removes a specific line, Tier 3 blanks an entire page (other than its main characteristics) and Tier 4 blanks an entire book (save for main pages' characteristics, such as name, map type, etc). The cleansing reagent can still be used in combination with other reagent types for other, normal recipes.

If this approach is used, would want to make Rune Shops work immediately (or again, in an hour at most) and perhaps rename this from Crafting to Enchanting.

[tukkek]

In the earlier approach, would make sense for reagents to generate other reagents through "lossy" recipes - ideally in a consistent manner where `1 reagent A + lower-tier reagent B = lower-tier reagent A , with A and B being the same type for all valid tiers.

[tukkek]

An interesting way to neatly organize crafting would be to have Reagents limited to a predefined set of effects. For example: enchanting a weapon (or making a Rune #245) with Trophies) from Outsiders would only grant spell-like abilities from the school of Conjuration.

This gives a thematic flavor to the game while making it more-or-less intuitive what outcome can be done from what input without constraining the procedural generation (as long as there is at least one spell effect per Tier of a given school, a full set of Recipes can be guaranteed, 1 per tier).

[tukkek]

Once it's possible to craft Runes #245 in some way using this, they probably should be removed from the drop pool, while still being available in Rune Shops (Town Labor). The sheer amount of runes pollutes the pool a lot and getting a Rune without the equipment to use it on is not necessarily a satisfying reward, while crafting and buying the Rune should mean you probably want it ahead of time.

Rune Gear (with an enchantment already apply) should still drop as normal, and it's possible that some Chest types could drop Runes - but once again, probably preferable to just have Crafting Benches or similar instead, as long as it's not mandatory to have a Crafter to play the game well (ie. if you need to pay to Craft, players can still happily ignore Crafting and spend their money and sell reagents elsewhere).

[tukkek]

If not contemplated yet, players should be able to craft base Gear from Reagents. This should probably be pretty straightforward with 1 lowest tier reagent = 1 tier base Gear (1 skull bone makes a helm). As Gear is currently worthless without Runes, even asking for one reagent is already too much, let alone two - but if it's inconvenient, it's probably inconsequential the more players gain levels and are able to craft powerful Runes.

Ideally for most typical slots (chest, head, legs...) one static trophy would be used, as in the example above and then for less common ones (medals, trinkets, rings...) then static combinations could be used (say, bone plus precious stone).

Alternatively, it could be possible to just craft whole-sale Rune Gear with one equipment - say, bone plus precious stone generates an enchanted Ring. This is less free-form but if it can be implemented in a thematic way (without random ingredients resulting in nonsensical items) then it overcomes the problems described here and integrates with the previous ideas better.

In this sense, using precious stones would be a good way to extend crafting each Gear type beyond the basic Trophies, being used to generate fixed Gear types when used on top of a base, while other Rune Gear are generated with a base plus an ingredient.

In such cases, probably the average value of a precious stone should be used rather than its actual value, when determining outcomes.

[tukkek]

Recipes/blueprints/schematics could be found at bookshelf-style Chests in Dungeons. They should probably be 10% of the gold value of the crafted Item and could be sold. This opens the question of whether a player needs to actually craft it to learn the recipe for sure or if they can find it, learn it and then sell (possibly requiring a take-ten Craft roll or Downtime #278 action).

Crafting shouldn't become essential to play the game properly so being able to sell and having recipes be pretty rare assures this won't happen. Players can still learn recipes "blindly" or by having enough Knowledge.

Thematically, it would be nice to distinct Chests that drop magic scrolls and those that drop recipes as they are vastly different things, in the same way that woodworking and chemistry are very different even though both books could be found in a library. Maybe recipes could be found on crafting tables directly, a couple at a time perhaps. In fact, it makes more sense for Crafting benches to be recipe chests exclusively and have all crafting happen during in Downtime.

Instead of "learning" a recipe and keeping a list of things "the player" knows, perhaps have a Recipe Book or Craft Journal or similar (#239) that is scanned every time a player enters a Crafting mode - recipes shown would be only those than can be crafted with current ingredients and with either a recipe or enough party Knowledge take-ten instead.

A "show all" option is also necessary so players can view the recipes they don't know yet and those they know but can't craft due to a lack of reagents. This is probably better handled in a dedicated, informative-only Crafting screen rather than the Downtime screen.