Crafting Changes

[prestonhunt]

From the standpoint of someone who has dedicated a lot of time to crafting on my current character, I just want to express my dislike of the recent changes to Crafting.

If the issue was that items that were "hard to discover" were becoming too readily available and filling the inventories of players and unbalancing the module, then some small changes to the items in question, or the addition of a cooldown (similar to the one that was added) would seem to have been a sufficient remedy.

The additions to the crafting DC though have effectively made recipes that players have invested time in obtaining basically useless.  What use is the recipe at all if the DC has been ballooned to unreachable levels?

I've read the announcement post, and if I understand it properly, it seems to indicate that recipes made with rarer reagents will have lower DCs, so existing recipes remain at the higher DCs, correct?  

I'm unsure if the DM team understands the amount of time that is invested in order to be able to get to a point where you can do these things.  Not just in experimenting, learning recipes, gathering the stuff you need to test with, or to craft with, but also the actual time spent just doing it.

Add to that the fact that a pile of characters that were once "top of their craft" just got relegated to "rank amateur".  I mean, so what if a recipe still exists, if you cant ever succeed at crafting it.  Might as well have just deleted all crafting recipes.

Anyways, my 2 cents.

[Lenthis]

I guess they see this as more of a reset for it. To be honest my last alchemist had a hard enough time finding all these things. And that was when dc's were low and the like Alchemy is -very- hard, and that was before the supposed tweak of higher dc's.
 
If players have issues with the high amount of alchemical goods, it should have been delt with IG then, rather then an OOC augment. How do you solve this IG?
Kill Alchemists. Simple.

[MetallicSlime]

I agree. It was already easy enough to die, instantly or otherwise when crafting. As it is now, You have to go out and get a huge amount of reagents to find a recipe that works. Then once you've found a recipe that works, you have to go through all of your reagents, wasting them as you attempt to find something that will lower the DC to a respectable level.

TLDR; Point being, that the time invested in gathering reagents was bad enough when you're not almost assured to waste them. As it is, the reward to time invested ratio seems so far askew that there's no longer even much motivation to try.

Of course, you cant please everybody, just posting what I feel to be a legit concern.

[Rose of May]

As something of an alchemy/herbalism failure, I can only say that I found the original system difficult enough to contend with in regard to time spent vs results found and can only assume that the new inflation to most crafting DC's will see me fairly disabled should I try crafting on future PC's. I'm not suggesting that things should be changed again, or that for those who had the capacity to excel with the previous system weren't able to produce high volumes of fairly powerful items, but simply stating that for some players this might be a potentially destructive feature.

[Professor Death]

I think we had something along these lines of a discussion back when v 2.0 of crafting was implemented as well.  In v 1.0 I had a character who had mastered if not all, then enough, recipes using the in-game clues to make a decent living selling tanglefoot bags, healing bundles, and the like. Then when the switch came and my "master" crafter was relegated to apprentice status again I was miffed but attempted to utilize the ingame clues once more to rebuild. I never made so much as anything more powerful than a torch after that point until people shared some recipes and I started saying WTF how did using the clues ever bring you to craft THAT!  I swore off crafting at this point and haven't screwed with it since.  The character went back to brewing, but even that was relatively reduced in payback once players figured out the new crafting system and undercut what I could sell potions for and still make a profit.  

Now in v2.5 we have a similar type of reset - except that his time maybe the pendulum will swing a little back to the traditional wand and potion makers.  

I see where the DM team is coming from a little here. As. PnP DM years back there were times when some part - money, magic items, or whatever, got out of the balance I was shooting for. The solution is then to either stop the campaign and restart with wipe or institute some kind of sweeping mechanics change like we have here. And we cannot blame the team necessarily either since there cannot be any real playtesting of this with enough people before going live with it.

So, try it out and revel in the chance that if you stumble on some of the secrets that you will have a tremendous advantage on the people who don't and you have a chance to RP with others now as they want to learn from you or you from them. Can you say alchemist guild anyone?  Someone won't join?  Press them to do it or face the wrath!

[Nihm]

If players have issues with the high amount of alchemical goods, it should have been delt with IG then, rather then an OOC augment. How do you solve this IG?
Kill Alchemists. Simple.

Yes, it should be up to players to govern a crafting system which had become too well known by griefing anyone who used it. A fine and sensible in-character motivation right there, especially for non-evil characters. And for those who don't parade their creations in the marketplace, hearing about them on IRC is good enough too. Excellent idea.
 
To reply to the original post: this is indeed much like a reshuffle, many things will need completely new methods, but reshuffles have happened before and will again. The addition of a timer is a nice improvement - though some don't appear to make much sense. This combined with having to lower dcs using rarer or costlier items just means that crafting has become much slower and more expensive to progress in. That is a good thing, and it achieves that nicely.
 
Only discontent for me is that the dcs for some of the baseline ingrediants seem to have gone too high, making it hard to even start.  Otherwise the addition of pacing, more challenge, and effectively requiring the imput of more types of objects are all very positive changes.

[prestonhunt]

Well, having just seen all my time spent researching, experimenting, gathering, and crafting go up in smoke, I almost have to think it would be better just to ask to be deleveled so I can reallocate all my skill points and efuss points into non-crafting stuff so I dont get periodically screwed by reshuffles.  

It just seems rather arbitrary, and when it happens suddenly like this, its a real stab to the heart of pre-existing characters.  I'm not even sure how to RP something like this.  "Yesterday I was able to make this, this and this.  Today I suddenly lack the skill to do so completely!".

Not a fan of this change really.

[Spiffy Has]

Crafting PCs already make enormous investments to create what they make, often spending hours to do so. A cool down timer was probably the only thing the crafting system needed.

[Nihm]

Being a wilderness-based pc, you probably didn't notice how every second wizard was a fairly good alchemist, with a number of them having been led by the hand by friends.
 
Increased familiarity with the crafting system, which is inevitable, has probably been one of the motives for every restart.
 
And it does suck to suddenly lose the ability to make those items we've come to enjoy and rely upon.  Even if you look back at the times those items have helped your pc survive, it may still feel like a waste.
 
Items are a grand bonus and motivation, but the best feature of crafting is that it's a built in goal : become a master herbalist, alchemist, or both.  The goal loses its interest when too many people reach that point.
 
So, while it certainly does suck to lose abilities, the goal is made more interesting again.

[Johannes]

Thank you sincerely for all of your heartfelt contributions to this discussion. You may trust that the system will continue to undergo observation and review during the course of the following weeks, but in time I have little doubt that you will all come to acknowledge that things are better this way.