Preview - Crafting 3.0: Alchemy & Poisoncraft

It's really not quite ready, but I gave myself a hardline that I'd share this out today, as I was supposed to be sharing out progress every week this month on it. I've been working on this quite a bit behind the scenes and gathering feedback from some helpers, and I always thought it was one little tweak from ready, but I want to try to make that process a little more public (if belated from when I was supposed to).

This will still include Blacksmith and Enchanting, but for now we are nailing down Alchemy more completely; those are being tested and worked on, but have a lot of work.

So what is new to this system?

Innovations and recipes are gone. They were ultimately a layer of complication the felt like very little reward, and they added a lot of overhead to system. The sense of discovery was nice, but the amount of gold and materials required made the system daunting to get into, and the amount of record keeping and time meant it was just hard to use the system. So they were scrapped.

The crafting die is a d20. I wanted to reduce the variance and be able to "guarentee success" with high enough modifiers in the old system, but ultimately it was just a little too nonstandard, and people didn't like it. So I've opted for another simpler route... reintroducing "Taking 10" to crafting. You can always double a craft time and take 10 if you don't want to risk the roll.

Gold has been moved to the PHB scale by default. I dislike how the PHB does gold costs - they are absurd, involve lugging around hundreds of pounds of gold, and make no sense. That said, this isn't my attempt to fix the economy of D&D (currently), it's my attempt to make a crafting system. So rather than try to sell both at the same time, this will use the PHB gold costs with some optional tables to convert to what I use.

Critical Failure and Critical Success have been removed. They were ultimately another layer of complication that most people found unnecessary. They didn't add a lot to the system, and they meant that everything had to be more complicated.

The Crafting Skill Modifier is Gone. Ultimately it was redundant with proficiency for players, and I just couldn't find a way to make it work that was simple and made sense with expertise. I liked the more granular approach, but for players ultimately their skill in skills is proficiency and expertise. I may add a variant for this in the future, but it will be balanced around the assumption that it's folded into proficiency and expertise in tools.

For those of you that are new the system, the document explains many of it's goals at the start. Despite that it may appear 20 pages long, it's actual quite simple, and the block "Putting it Together" shows the core loop, with the "Quick Reference" section at the start of each crafting branch further detailing how to quickly navigate crafting.

The overhead of using this new system is very low. You just need tool proficiency (preferably with expertise). 

The interaction with Artificer crafting bonuses will be further detailed at a later point, but know that it's something in the plan :)

Anyway, I will not yet tell you to "go forth and craft" (though the system is largely useable right now... people are using it) but I am happy for any thoughts and feedback. We will see at least two more updates this month for the system, so we will make up some lost time there, even if we are a bit behind. I don't think Enchanting will be in this system this month.

That said, Crafting is one of things I am considering to include the potential upcoming Kickstarter, so it's something that will receive a lot of focus for the remainder of the year. For the time being (and likely into the future for now) crafting will remain a patreon thing, but I'm still evaluating the future of things like that.

As always, I love to hear your feedback, and this time I think we are going forward with it... i think we have a good system, even if a lot of polish and detail still needs to happen. Players have been more engaged and more hands on with this version, and more people are getting involved with it with the lower barriers to entry and lower complexity.

I should note that as some of you know, explosives will part of alchemy, they will be a subdomain of it just like Poisoncraft will is. Its coming, even if it's not included here yet.

Thank you all so much for your support; you guys are the best!