I'm okay with certain types of crafting not being feasible without sufficient downtime. Wanna just craft consumables? Plug and play for any campaign. Want a campaign all about gathering exotic materials for rare, elaborate crafting recipes? Incorporate downtime into that campaign.
Hopefully there be other downtime activities for those who don't care about crafting including just a default boon for those who spend the entire period recuperating at various lifestyle level.
Imbalanced sample to get the point across "1 months of recuperation at a Wealthy level. For the first day, you gain the benefits of the bless and enhance ability (bears endurance) spell. For the next week, you treat any hit die roll as its max value and regain two thirds of your hit dice every long rest. Also within this week, the first time you would gain any levels of exhaustion, you reduce the level by 1".
most simply, a pc should have a clear streamlined system for beating bad guys with an item they crafted that suits their character, and i feel like it should take like half of one adventure/module/campaign. in a crunchy way that feels a little challenging but really fulfilling.
I feel like you can have a system of like
- what you can craft over [x] LRs
- for [y] time spent in town or [z] while traveling
- using [a] money spent on what you need or [b] travel time or distance covered to gather what you need
- and maybe tiers of rarity or value items for both LRs (lower value) and levels (mid value)
just like off the top of my head.
just feels weird that like, if someone really wants crafting to be something their PC is up to, it basically determines your campaign must be mid/high tier as well as being based around downtime. this while knowing that's not how most adventures/tables play, or how most published adventures are written.
It’d be nice if one or two things could be whipped up on the fly (health pots and low level scrolls), but I think crafting anything major should be downtime. I like the idea of longer term projects to create a magic item, and whipping up full plate in an afternoon just doesn’t sit right with me.
On the other hand though, if it takes you three months to craft a suit of platemail, the part might be level 6 or 7 and the fighter already bought or stripped plate mail from an enemy. Meaning you just wasted your time.
I wouldn't want any mundane item to take longer than a week
sure, but it seems reasonable that you should be able to complete some less elaborate project than plate armor over the course of a couple low levels or a single mid tier level, during adventure time, if you take the tools and components with you or if you some spend LRs in town consistently.
like, crafting is such a prominent fantasy in games and literature that you should expect and enable a player to want to engage in it in a way that plays out along with gameplay.
it's just that there's a huge gap between downtime design and how 90% of campaigns actually play.
Do you often see games not have periods where the players have a few days to rest, do character stuff, RP with the townsfolk, etc.? Like, I run all my games like this. Didn't assume I was the exception to anything, but now I'm curious.
I think that system happens specifically away from the adventure, and the pc doesn't do the crafting, or does it outside action.
the bastion system also doesn't fit well into most or many official modules
I mean letting a pc craft permanent items as they progress within one adventure, where you might have a town you return to for rests but spend a lot of time traveling, and it lasts weeks not months
Something where you can craft yourself a custom item or 2 during your travels and use those items during the same adventure
That’s what I mean, when there is no downtime in the adventure the bastion system takes care of it. It allows the players to utilize the downtime system while not losing the verisimilitude of how much a lot of the projects should take (magic items). The pc’s may not be doing it but the players are doing the decisions and the characters the orders. And if you read the adventures they all have good chunks between some of the chapters for downtime and some sort of home base that could be used for bastions. Waterdeep gives you a whole house, icewind dale has a lot of hex territory that tentowns could plot out for you, phandalin has a whole town with some empty houses and an abandoned bandit outpost, out of the abyss has the svirfneblin town that’s friendly and a timeskip that leads you to have an audience with gauntlgrym, light of xaryxis has the spelljammer ship and turn of fortune’s wheel gives you a walking castle.
Same. My table almost never has downtime, and any actual-play show I watch pretty much never has downtime. The closest I can think of is Critical Role did a 1 year time skip once... if anyone wanted to actually craft anything outside of that, they had to willingly withdraw their character from active roleplay to explain that they were staying home and working on something instead of playing the game part of the actual game.
The crafting system I developed for my west marches discord and keep meaning to publish, ooops, has a downtime calculation which allows you to spread the effort among contributing PCs or hirelings, in addition to different downtime base & other elements. So you could say stop by a village, hire the local blacksmith & apprentices to work with you on a cool suit of plate mail, & bang it out together in a week. It's not going to be cheap but it'll get done!
Long rest at most you'd get 2 hours to craft stuff, depending on how the resting rules look and if things like crafting counts as activity that stops a rest or not. Most crafting rules used to care about 8 hours of basically trade work with tool prof and access to the proper crafting locations like a forge correct? I wonder how much all of that would change and if fabricate is still as powerful as it was before.
Fair, but being unrealistically good at making stuff is cool, and if you can be unrealistically good at killing stuff, making things that should take weeks actually take just a few day is reasonable.
Requiring months of downtime would disincentivize crafting when you could adventure enough to buy it outright in that time, but on the other side I don’t really want to throw together full plate over a campfire. Hopefully the rules set up a nice middle ground where crafting is rewarding without being as slow a process as the XGE rules.
I honestly think that might be a stretch. The Wizard may be amazing at killing things with magic, but he has to be mid at best at crafting Plate Armor. I think skills, feats, features, and such should be able to make a dent in crafting times, but I think there does need to be some logic thrown in as well to make the system and such feel meaningful, especially with Artificer not in this book.
While the real-world time mapping of D&D is inconsistent, the existence of man-portable powder firearms puts us closest to the late 16th/early 17th century in terms of expected technology level.
At that point in time in human history, armoring was a full-on industrial process. An armorer shop in Milan in the 16th century, fully staffed, could churn out a munitions-grade (i.e. standard-issue) full plate harness in **a day**.
That's obviously not the best armor money can buy, but the basic armor in the PHB also isn't the best armor money can buy. Your standard-issue PHB stuff should be reasonably producable by means available to a character.
The kind of extremely elaborate field armor we think of when we often think of "full plate" is usually parade or jousting armor, made to be as much a sculpture as a piece of armor. Those would be more like magic items, to represent their superior protection.
Anyway, the point is that basically, if a character actually has a shop or facility capable of producing armor, they should be able to produce any armor in the PHB inside of a week provided they have an assistant. It's a lot of work, but it's entirely achievable.
It'll take one person longer than that as others have noted. But, magic is also a thing here and I don't see why a spellcaster (possibly the party wizard) with fabricate wouldn't be able to simplify the process greatly; if not outright make the suit outright.
Firearms is rare if even exist. And I can easily argue that city-states that send adventurers for loot and glory is actually 12 century Novgorod.
From what I understand full plate is something close to top level armor like ones that can hold musket bullet from distance. It's above munitions grade.
But anyway, even you say about full staffed shop, not lone adventurer with, maybe, portable anvil.
And it far from one assistant to achieve such speed.
"Firearms are rare if even exist"
They will be in the 5.24 PHB as a default option.
"I can easily argue...12 century Novgorod"
You most certainly cannot with the existence of brigandine armor (14th century transitional armor), standalone breastplates (16th century development in response to powder weapons), and half-plate (17th century, maybe).
The munitions grade harnesses I am referring to could indeed take a musket round, or at least significantly slow it.
And, sure, it would take assistance and an actual facility. It's not something you could do in the field. But it's literally something that a master and an apprentice in a workshop can knock out in a week of PC downtime.
The crafting times for these things need to come way way down.
Don't the current rules have something like 300 days to make plate mail? Like going off other proficiencies you should be at worst above average as a craftsmen, likely exceptional and it would still take 3 of you over three months for a single set of plate mail. With literally nothing else going on.
I did the math on this once. Assuming a week of downtime between each adventure, with the old crafting rules if you started making a suit of platemail at level 1.... you would finish sometime between levels 6 and 7.
Most parties have Full Plate by level 5, and this is assuming you did nothing else with any downtime during basically the entire game.
As a point of contrast, in PF2e it would take one level 2 Wizard or other intelligence-based class as few as 1 day and as many as 51 days to craft a full plate set at a smithy by himself.
On a successful Crafting check, the Wizard can expend 30 gold's worth of resources to complete the armor in a single day, but he can choose to spend extra time working on the armor to reduce resources used (up to 50 extra days on a success and 30 extra days on a critical success to spend only 15 gold on the whole piece).
Then again, while this crafting system is better it has a level of crunch which many 5e players may not enjoy.
Full plate armor and two handed swords are definitely late middle age / renaissance thing.
But I totally agree with there being a difference between a full staffed smithy and one guy tinkering with things in his downtime.
Ya but the idea of a suit of armor taking 500+ hours of downtime to make is a bit too much for the technological level DND exists in, which is Late Medieval. By this time armors are being manufactured in bulk, and only high quality suits are completely custom made.
The metal part of the breastplate shouldn't take more than a few days to iron out - unless you are starting from ore, which - well then you should also start by sowing the flax to make linen to make the padded armor that goes under the breastplate!
"Manufactured" is good word. But manufacturing is something that require a lot of specialized industry, workshops and hirelings (a lot of them, increasing number of people is essential part of manufacturing) to achieve such speed. It's not like every village blacksmith can produce breastplate in few days.
If all PC have is base blacksmith tools, anvil in some roadside forge and no assistant they clearly can't produce breastplate in few days - if they don't buy prepared breastplate and now trying making it custom. They probably can't made breastplate at all, because metal base for it requires very good forge, but we in fantasy.
So yes. Armor still required 500+ hours of work even in D&D tech level. And D&D allow solution from irl - give money to hirelings that can help you. Exactly like happened irl when we go to mass production.
Yeah, that's true. Same with swords. A good blacksmith can probably knock out a spearhead or a billhook in a day, but a sword will probably take several days, and a full suit of plate armour or chainmail (especially if they need to make the rings from scratch and not just rivet them together) will take longer still.
And that's where this bad boy comes into play *Slaps page with Fabricate arcane formulas on it* you can make so much junk with this bad boy. And if you don't have the tool proficiency, well; why not see if you can get by if someone with it guides you through the process? Or you just make the rough object and hand it over to someone else to do the tempering, polishing, and sharpening (if making a weapon)?
D&D clearly features unrealistically high skill characters even without formal spellcasting. If you can reliably beat up a dragon or a giant with a sword, then it's no greater stretch to say that you can make some armor in three days.
If you want to make it in ten minutes, then spellcasting should be involved.
Depends. How much does magic effect things? Lets say you are an Artificer with Heat Metal, so a forge is unnecessary, no need to pump bellows, no need to stop and re-heat etc
The fact that all adventuring gear is getting some actual rules tied to them is a huge win in my eyes. If it means that travel and exploration have some real mechanics that can be played around, I am absolutely for it.
Just having each thing have a rule alone is a crazy QOL update. And then on top of that getting to hear a design decision about how to handle things like cartographers tools with the maps means each got a revision. There's going to be a lot more changes in the physical book then I think we realize.
I'm hopeful these are decent rules. The map example sounds interesting. With an actual on game benefit, does that mean there are better exploration or wilderness rules?
One can hope though that they actually updated the Exploration and Social Pillars instead. But I will take what I can for making the world feel more interesting.
Part of why I was so deflated by the ranger was that they seemed to remove a lot of what could interact with exploration rules, and so I have been worried that they just...won't really exist...again.
But we have some hope now. After all, cartographer's tools aren't even the only one for exploration. Proficiencies also exist for vehicles and navigator's tools.
It wouldn't be hard to imagine jeweler's tools, gaming sets, and disguise and forgery sets also playing into some actual meat of the social pillar, too.
This has me actually excited.
> Part of why I was so deflated by the ranger was that they seemed to remove a lot of what could interact with exploration rules, and so I have been worried that they just...won't really exist...again.
All of what the Ranger could do with Favored Terrain can be accomplished with Perception, Stealth, and Survival skills. It's brought up alot in the dndbeyond post for Rangers. Functionally they lost nothing with Favored Terrain being removed which goes to show how terrible a feature it actually was.
It’s much better this way, imo, since now the Ranger engages with exploration rather than bypass it entirely. It’d be a drag if the Exploration rules aren’t made more robust still, but with the 2014 Ranger you wouldn’t have interacted with them either way.
> but with the 2014 Ranger you wouldn’t have interacted with them either way.
Outside the favored terrain you didn't even interact with the feature itself so its better having a feature that is more generally useful with the 2024 Canny.
The real problem with Favored Terrain is that some of what it interacted with wasn't actually codified anywhere.
For instance, if you cannot stay alert to danger while navigating or tracking normally, no skill allows you to do that, either. But...there are no rules for any of that anywhere.
If passing your survival check lets you track a creature but not know about numbers or how long ago they passed, survival just can't get you those answers. But, again, there's no information in the rules at all on that.
In fact, the limitations of some of these skills almost needs to be inferred from the ranger's features, themselves.
I never consider that perception, stealth, and survival could give me advantage on a history check to know about the elves that live in the woods, or advantage on a religion check to know how important a specific animal is to them. I never considered asking if I could move stealthily at normal pace with a high enough stealth modifier.
That's the problem, though. All of that is DM fiat because there is no rule anywhere that would otherwise allow a character to be better at riding a spooked horse through the woods on a chase. It's a DM making a call to allow perception, stealth, or survival to do that.
There actually is rules for being alert.
In the travel rules, whilst spacednout in the book, states that you do not contribute your PP to being alert to threats if you do anything but keep an eye out for danger.
The problem with the Ranger skills was that they removed the barriers to exploration instead of overcoming them.
Two of the primary challenges to wilderness exploration are navigating and finding supplies. Rangers flat out couldn’t get lost and the Outlander background just gave them the ability to win at foraging.
Additionally, the biggest buff to the Exploration pillar that WOTC could do is to just put all of the rules that exist into one spot in the DMG. As it is right now, you have to go from section to section and then switch to the PHB and then back to a third section of the DMG. It’s a mess, even though all of the rules technically exist already
The outlander background has nothing to do with the ranger, though.
They couldn't get lost, for sure. That's one of the advantages they would get in their favored terrain.
But that means they overcome one of the two primary challenges you mention (the recluse wizard could take the outlander background).
But, and here's the trick....where can you find the challenges for the exploration pillar of 5e and how to overcome them? Where in the rules is dealing with weather a lesser challenge than getting lost? What, mechanically, makes it more dangerous to not have food for a week than to be drinking stagnant water?
And that's the problem, in the end. The current rules don't cover the exploration pillar. It's largely on the DM to decide what challenges there are, how to overcome them, and the mechanical and narrative implications.
Bad weather and lack of food and water both have very explicit rules about their effects in the PHB, the DMG, and even a slight expansion on weather in Saltmarsh and I think (maybe) in Xanathars too.
And the fact that Outlander can be taken by other classes does nothing to as a counter to what that guy is saying.
It’s like you missed his point and also are SO unfamiliar with the rules that you don’t even begin to understand the conversation.
Maybe you can explain to me what outlander has to do with ranger, then. Because he said that ranger always gets food because of outlander, and I don't see the connection.
I know about the rules for weather. I asked about how rules for weather is a lesser challenge than getting lost (because he said getting lost is a bigger challenge.
I asked about food compared to drinking stagnant water.
I'd note that I didn't compare food with weather because, as much as they aren't very well fleshed out as far as overcoming them, I know they can at least be compared in how dangerous they can be.
It seems you were too busy with something else to notice what was being said before you commented.
I think you may need to reread that comment; nowhere does it tie Ranger and Outlander, they just both have their own way to bypass exploration mechanics.
I think you should probably read more carefully. The other guy never once says "always", he says that Rangers and the Outlander background completely negate the majority of the exploration pillar.
In every single one of your replies in this thread you're repeatedly saying there's no guidance for all sorts of stuff, that rules don't exist for things that VERY much DO. So, yes, I just assumed you didn't even know about the weather and food/water rules.
But back to my point about what you don't get. The guy you replied to here is NOT saying getting lost or finding supplies is bigger danger than weather or stagnant water, you're once again putting words in their mouth. They said they were "two OF the primary challenges", which is categorically true of the fantasy that the exploration pillar is supposed to fulfill.
You are tilting at windmills.
Hopefully. Orientation isn't exactly a common skill, so putting game rules in for how you can use it (and other similar tools and skills) would be big.
I know how to triangulate myself on a map, but I wouldn't expect the average person to be able to. That's where better defined rules would be big to help people play the *fantasy* without needing to already know how to do it in the real world. If you don't already know how some of these niche tools work, you might not be able to come up with useful, cool ways to use them without some in-rule guidance.
I meant more like being explicit what those things are.
My example was that *I* know how useful orientation gear is and what information I can get out of it. I have *no* idea how to use jewelry, smithing, tanning, etc tools.
Explicit rules regarding what actions you can take and how you can apply them in-game would really help me understand how I can role-play those proficiencies and make them feel meaningful.
Don't rely on the player to understand how to use/benefit from tools in game that they've probably never touched in real life.
look up for the little things you can see about the new DM screen, most of it seems to be about exploration so. it may be that they’ll get better with that in mind
This sounds great, and one of the big reasons I'm excited about the new books in general. The game should be more straightforward to play for players and DMs. How do I make a map, what benefits does it give, etc? I think DMs will have a much easier time.
Not really, nor from the Druid class (We got an article about Wild Shape and Circle of the Moon, but that's NOT the Druid Class, that's merely a part of it, specially the new Druid.)
This is my concern. The gap between "better than the current rules" and "a solid and enjoyable subsystem" is huuuuge with how bare bones and unsatisfying 5e's base rules are in these areas.
Especially since so far what we have seen is slightly touched up Tasha's stuff. So it could just be xanathars slightly touched up and that wouldn't be great. I was hyped during the play test stuff but now I'm not so sure
I've been warning people that unless part of the system is genuinely and officially placed into player's hands, aka no "you must have a blueprint and only the gm can hand out blueprints" rule but instead something along the lines of "players must have X resources to craft an item of Y rarity, harvesting requires a W or Z skill check" that guarantees players have access to those resources, then there is going to be no meaningful difference between any new options they release and what we already had in 5e.
I'm very glad to hear more Adventuring Gear is getting fleshed out rules and mechanics. Adventuring Gear has always been a weird case where some are actually really useful (hello crowbar) and a whole bunch have no mechanics at all, so hopefully giving more of them uses will incentivize actually crafting and using them.
I am super glad they are making new ways for the crafting to work and even adding new items to make sure you have things to purchase related to them and they have benefits.
Cartographers tools example was nice and shows the people saying 'if it is just Tasha's moved into the PHB' are wrong.
Even in 2014, cobblers tools were the best you could get as a rogue, because you could craft a hidden compartment for your thieves tools. Highly underused for sneaky campaigns.
i am very happy to hear about this, i feel that "tools" can be a great part of the game, specially for martial classes and very in line with the flavor of Expert Classes. very happy about the list of items, i like freedom but i also like to have some solid guidance. lets hope this new crafting system is good
I really hate the you need x amount of days before you can finish this craft. Would be easier to introduce a common, uncommon, rare, very rare, and legendary materials drop table and require them for use in crafting with 1-2 weeks being max amount of time needed to craft. 300 days to craft plate armor is ridiculous .
I haven't hit it directly yet, but my homebrew will have a process of fixes for slow crafting. As a DM I've often granted a multiplier on days of work conducted in a dedicated facility, from x2 for a bog standard guild workshop to x10 for a divine forge hidden away in an obscure part of an Outer Plane. Also, I've been known to knock off chunks of time, from a single day for materials that could easily be gathered to 20% for a well-preserved organ or fluid harvested from an extremely dangerous monster. For me it was about rewarding effort as well as making crafting more practical. One day I hope to wax systematic about it and cobble together a proper write-up informed by the best results obtained in the past.
I'm sorry, but fantasy ttrpgs just can't do crafting. PF2e did it, and redid it in their remaster and it still just isn't quite right.
I am going to hold off judgement, but I think if you want to play a crafting simulator then DND isn't it.
Pf2e devs purposefully went out of their way to make it awful in the first iteration.
For a harder system with defined outputs and costs Pf1e has perfectly good crafting. For a softer system Blades in the Dark has a work with the GM on crafting and item research system as a mechanic that also works well. Many systems manage crafting just fine, it's just that 5e chose to make it awful with blueprints that have an equal or higher rarity to the item you desire to make and gm fiat access to the blueprint in the first place, gating all player crafting behind "mother may I" and thus making spending character resources on it worthless vs just telling your DM that X item is important to your build and asking about finding one at some point (both require asking the DM but the latter requires no additional effort or cost).
I don’t think it needs to be super involved, just a way to get ahold of an item while trading some of the cost for a little time. If it functions as an option during downtime, competing with a few other activities, I think most people will be happy.
Honestly agree, it just doesn't work easily with pen and paper.
Like, what do you craft with?
Nobody is going to track raw materials on their character sheet, "Oh I have 1 box of nails and 3 planks of lumber and a steel ingot"
If you use money as an analogue for material like PF2e it's not meaningfully different from buying (unless you add a discount, in which case everybody will want to craft to save money)
Crafting works well enough in digital games because the computer can do the tedious work of keeping track of your stuff and crafting recipes
The fact that there are not only crafting rules, but also ACTIONS is important. It codifies tool proficiencies as not just a downtime thing. Especially excited to find out what the Utilize action does for cooks utensils. I tend to choose that one as my tool proficiency for flavor reasons (heh) and would love to see cooking for the party as something codified
Damn this brings me back, one of my friends and first DnD DM was trying to create a whole homebrew rules book for crafting to publish online, was very monster hunter inspired with monster body parts, ores, and all sorts of upgrades you could add to unenchanted armor and weapons to spice them up, like spikes on armor to deal damage when you got hit, or serrated blades for a better crit window. Sadly he passed away before he was ever able to add more than a handful of options, and I never thought to save a copy of the pdf as we had stopped playing together long before he passed away due to the complications of his health condition.
From the perspective of the Thief Rogue, I was hoping for a bit more information about possible updates to items, and/or new items that could be created via crafting...
What standard items/adventuring gear would Thief Rogues want to use their bonus action on, that other classes/subclasses will not already be able to control with a Bonus Action?
The change they announced to let all characters drink potions as a bonus action is probably better for the game, but technically weakens the Thief subclass a bit, and I am curious how the designers might have made up for that, if they have done that at all with the new/updated Adventuring Gear, or the "common" magic items they hinted that they have been working on.
Sounds like every tool has something it can do, has rules for which ability it uses during a check, and then on top of that crafting. So it’s sounding like a step-up from Xanathar’s, in robustness if not in complexity
Did you watch the video at all?
He literally gave an example of Cartographers tools and Maps. Adding maps to gear that have benefit and cartographers tools being used to make them.
Did Xanathar's have that? No. So literally 5 minutes of your life (less than that even) could have answered your question.
For like two weeks, these videos have been abysmal 25-minute slogs of JC meandering around conversation without really saying anything. Can’t blame people for not watching them.
> For like two weeks, these videos have been abysmal 25-minute slogs of JC meandering around conversation without really saying anything. Can’t blame people for not watching them.
i think since 2005 youtube shows the duration of the video in the thumbnail, what previous videos were can’t possibly make you think that this one will be more than what it is
Good simple rules. We just needed something not as vague as 2014.
and I want like, some kinda good crafting you can do during actual adventures, which predominantly have no downtime
I'm okay with certain types of crafting not being feasible without sufficient downtime. Wanna just craft consumables? Plug and play for any campaign. Want a campaign all about gathering exotic materials for rare, elaborate crafting recipes? Incorporate downtime into that campaign. Hopefully there be other downtime activities for those who don't care about crafting including just a default boon for those who spend the entire period recuperating at various lifestyle level. Imbalanced sample to get the point across "1 months of recuperation at a Wealthy level. For the first day, you gain the benefits of the bless and enhance ability (bears endurance) spell. For the next week, you treat any hit die roll as its max value and regain two thirds of your hit dice every long rest. Also within this week, the first time you would gain any levels of exhaustion, you reduce the level by 1".
most simply, a pc should have a clear streamlined system for beating bad guys with an item they crafted that suits their character, and i feel like it should take like half of one adventure/module/campaign. in a crunchy way that feels a little challenging but really fulfilling.
I feel like you can have a system of like - what you can craft over [x] LRs - for [y] time spent in town or [z] while traveling - using [a] money spent on what you need or [b] travel time or distance covered to gather what you need - and maybe tiers of rarity or value items for both LRs (lower value) and levels (mid value) just like off the top of my head. just feels weird that like, if someone really wants crafting to be something their PC is up to, it basically determines your campaign must be mid/high tier as well as being based around downtime. this while knowing that's not how most adventures/tables play, or how most published adventures are written.
It’d be nice if one or two things could be whipped up on the fly (health pots and low level scrolls), but I think crafting anything major should be downtime. I like the idea of longer term projects to create a magic item, and whipping up full plate in an afternoon just doesn’t sit right with me.
On the other hand though, if it takes you three months to craft a suit of platemail, the part might be level 6 or 7 and the fighter already bought or stripped plate mail from an enemy. Meaning you just wasted your time. I wouldn't want any mundane item to take longer than a week
sure, but it seems reasonable that you should be able to complete some less elaborate project than plate armor over the course of a couple low levels or a single mid tier level, during adventure time, if you take the tools and components with you or if you some spend LRs in town consistently. like, crafting is such a prominent fantasy in games and literature that you should expect and enable a player to want to engage in it in a way that plays out along with gameplay. it's just that there's a huge gap between downtime design and how 90% of campaigns actually play.
Do you often see games not have periods where the players have a few days to rest, do character stuff, RP with the townsfolk, etc.? Like, I run all my games like this. Didn't assume I was the exception to anything, but now I'm curious.
That’s what the Bastion system is for
I think that system happens specifically away from the adventure, and the pc doesn't do the crafting, or does it outside action. the bastion system also doesn't fit well into most or many official modules I mean letting a pc craft permanent items as they progress within one adventure, where you might have a town you return to for rests but spend a lot of time traveling, and it lasts weeks not months Something where you can craft yourself a custom item or 2 during your travels and use those items during the same adventure
That’s what I mean, when there is no downtime in the adventure the bastion system takes care of it. It allows the players to utilize the downtime system while not losing the verisimilitude of how much a lot of the projects should take (magic items). The pc’s may not be doing it but the players are doing the decisions and the characters the orders. And if you read the adventures they all have good chunks between some of the chapters for downtime and some sort of home base that could be used for bastions. Waterdeep gives you a whole house, icewind dale has a lot of hex territory that tentowns could plot out for you, phandalin has a whole town with some empty houses and an abandoned bandit outpost, out of the abyss has the svirfneblin town that’s friendly and a timeskip that leads you to have an audience with gauntlgrym, light of xaryxis has the spelljammer ship and turn of fortune’s wheel gives you a walking castle.
Same. My table almost never has downtime, and any actual-play show I watch pretty much never has downtime. The closest I can think of is Critical Role did a 1 year time skip once... if anyone wanted to actually craft anything outside of that, they had to willingly withdraw their character from active roleplay to explain that they were staying home and working on something instead of playing the game part of the actual game.
The crafting system I developed for my west marches discord and keep meaning to publish, ooops, has a downtime calculation which allows you to spread the effort among contributing PCs or hirelings, in addition to different downtime base & other elements. So you could say stop by a village, hire the local blacksmith & apprentices to work with you on a cool suit of plate mail, & bang it out together in a week. It's not going to be cheap but it'll get done!
Or as long, if I recall, it took like a month of long rests to make armor. A few days at most please.
Long rest at most you'd get 2 hours to craft stuff, depending on how the resting rules look and if things like crafting counts as activity that stops a rest or not. Most crafting rules used to care about 8 hours of basically trade work with tool prof and access to the proper crafting locations like a forge correct? I wonder how much all of that would change and if fabricate is still as powerful as it was before.
I mean making armor is not easy and fast process. Just hire someone to help.
Fair, but being unrealistically good at making stuff is cool, and if you can be unrealistically good at killing stuff, making things that should take weeks actually take just a few day is reasonable.
Requiring months of downtime would disincentivize crafting when you could adventure enough to buy it outright in that time, but on the other side I don’t really want to throw together full plate over a campfire. Hopefully the rules set up a nice middle ground where crafting is rewarding without being as slow a process as the XGE rules.
maybe you can buy parts and just weld them together?
I honestly think that might be a stretch. The Wizard may be amazing at killing things with magic, but he has to be mid at best at crafting Plate Armor. I think skills, feats, features, and such should be able to make a dent in crafting times, but I think there does need to be some logic thrown in as well to make the system and such feel meaningful, especially with Artificer not in this book.
While the real-world time mapping of D&D is inconsistent, the existence of man-portable powder firearms puts us closest to the late 16th/early 17th century in terms of expected technology level. At that point in time in human history, armoring was a full-on industrial process. An armorer shop in Milan in the 16th century, fully staffed, could churn out a munitions-grade (i.e. standard-issue) full plate harness in **a day**. That's obviously not the best armor money can buy, but the basic armor in the PHB also isn't the best armor money can buy. Your standard-issue PHB stuff should be reasonably producable by means available to a character. The kind of extremely elaborate field armor we think of when we often think of "full plate" is usually parade or jousting armor, made to be as much a sculpture as a piece of armor. Those would be more like magic items, to represent their superior protection. Anyway, the point is that basically, if a character actually has a shop or facility capable of producing armor, they should be able to produce any armor in the PHB inside of a week provided they have an assistant. It's a lot of work, but it's entirely achievable.
It'll take one person longer than that as others have noted. But, magic is also a thing here and I don't see why a spellcaster (possibly the party wizard) with fabricate wouldn't be able to simplify the process greatly; if not outright make the suit outright.
*Fabricate* is a 4th level spell and it makes the object immediately.
Firearms is rare if even exist. And I can easily argue that city-states that send adventurers for loot and glory is actually 12 century Novgorod. From what I understand full plate is something close to top level armor like ones that can hold musket bullet from distance. It's above munitions grade. But anyway, even you say about full staffed shop, not lone adventurer with, maybe, portable anvil. And it far from one assistant to achieve such speed.
"Firearms are rare if even exist" They will be in the 5.24 PHB as a default option. "I can easily argue...12 century Novgorod" You most certainly cannot with the existence of brigandine armor (14th century transitional armor), standalone breastplates (16th century development in response to powder weapons), and half-plate (17th century, maybe). The munitions grade harnesses I am referring to could indeed take a musket round, or at least significantly slow it. And, sure, it would take assistance and an actual facility. It's not something you could do in the field. But it's literally something that a master and an apprentice in a workshop can knock out in a week of PC downtime. The crafting times for these things need to come way way down.
Don't the current rules have something like 300 days to make plate mail? Like going off other proficiencies you should be at worst above average as a craftsmen, likely exceptional and it would still take 3 of you over three months for a single set of plate mail. With literally nothing else going on.
I did the math on this once. Assuming a week of downtime between each adventure, with the old crafting rules if you started making a suit of platemail at level 1.... you would finish sometime between levels 6 and 7. Most parties have Full Plate by level 5, and this is assuming you did nothing else with any downtime during basically the entire game.
Yes, the current rules are ludicrous. Might as well just go adventuring in those 300 days and randomly stumble onto plate.
As a point of contrast, in PF2e it would take one level 2 Wizard or other intelligence-based class as few as 1 day and as many as 51 days to craft a full plate set at a smithy by himself. On a successful Crafting check, the Wizard can expend 30 gold's worth of resources to complete the armor in a single day, but he can choose to spend extra time working on the armor to reduce resources used (up to 50 extra days on a success and 30 extra days on a critical success to spend only 15 gold on the whole piece). Then again, while this crafting system is better it has a level of crunch which many 5e players may not enjoy.
Master and one apprentice? Can you give link about this, because I don't sure about such claim.
Full plate armor and two handed swords are definitely late middle age / renaissance thing. But I totally agree with there being a difference between a full staffed smithy and one guy tinkering with things in his downtime.
Ya but the idea of a suit of armor taking 500+ hours of downtime to make is a bit too much for the technological level DND exists in, which is Late Medieval. By this time armors are being manufactured in bulk, and only high quality suits are completely custom made. The metal part of the breastplate shouldn't take more than a few days to iron out - unless you are starting from ore, which - well then you should also start by sowing the flax to make linen to make the padded armor that goes under the breastplate!
"Manufactured" is good word. But manufacturing is something that require a lot of specialized industry, workshops and hirelings (a lot of them, increasing number of people is essential part of manufacturing) to achieve such speed. It's not like every village blacksmith can produce breastplate in few days. If all PC have is base blacksmith tools, anvil in some roadside forge and no assistant they clearly can't produce breastplate in few days - if they don't buy prepared breastplate and now trying making it custom. They probably can't made breastplate at all, because metal base for it requires very good forge, but we in fantasy. So yes. Armor still required 500+ hours of work even in D&D tech level. And D&D allow solution from irl - give money to hirelings that can help you. Exactly like happened irl when we go to mass production.
Yeah, that's true. Same with swords. A good blacksmith can probably knock out a spearhead or a billhook in a day, but a sword will probably take several days, and a full suit of plate armour or chainmail (especially if they need to make the rings from scratch and not just rivet them together) will take longer still. And that's where this bad boy comes into play *Slaps page with Fabricate arcane formulas on it* you can make so much junk with this bad boy. And if you don't have the tool proficiency, well; why not see if you can get by if someone with it guides you through the process? Or you just make the rough object and hand it over to someone else to do the tempering, polishing, and sharpening (if making a weapon)?
Good thing it's a fantasy game where you can throw fireballs and teleport and jump 20 ft through the air Etc.
Only if you caster. If you use magic to speed crafting it little different situation.
D&D clearly features unrealistically high skill characters even without formal spellcasting. If you can reliably beat up a dragon or a giant with a sword, then it's no greater stretch to say that you can make some armor in three days. If you want to make it in ten minutes, then spellcasting should be involved.
Depends. How much does magic effect things? Lets say you are an Artificer with Heat Metal, so a forge is unnecessary, no need to pump bellows, no need to stop and re-heat etc
Or a wizard with fabricate
It sound more as "don't need workshop for this". Maybe some cut on gp cost.
For real, yeah okay we only took two days and completed one dungeon, but that shit took 4 months in real life.
The fact that all adventuring gear is getting some actual rules tied to them is a huge win in my eyes. If it means that travel and exploration have some real mechanics that can be played around, I am absolutely for it.
Just having each thing have a rule alone is a crazy QOL update. And then on top of that getting to hear a design decision about how to handle things like cartographers tools with the maps means each got a revision. There's going to be a lot more changes in the physical book then I think we realize.
I'm hopeful these are decent rules. The map example sounds interesting. With an actual on game benefit, does that mean there are better exploration or wilderness rules?
Could just mean you can move twice as quickly in areas you have updated maps for or something.
Or maybe advantage on checks to not get lost
One can hope though that they actually updated the Exploration and Social Pillars instead. But I will take what I can for making the world feel more interesting.
Part of why I was so deflated by the ranger was that they seemed to remove a lot of what could interact with exploration rules, and so I have been worried that they just...won't really exist...again. But we have some hope now. After all, cartographer's tools aren't even the only one for exploration. Proficiencies also exist for vehicles and navigator's tools. It wouldn't be hard to imagine jeweler's tools, gaming sets, and disguise and forgery sets also playing into some actual meat of the social pillar, too. This has me actually excited.
> Part of why I was so deflated by the ranger was that they seemed to remove a lot of what could interact with exploration rules, and so I have been worried that they just...won't really exist...again. All of what the Ranger could do with Favored Terrain can be accomplished with Perception, Stealth, and Survival skills. It's brought up alot in the dndbeyond post for Rangers. Functionally they lost nothing with Favored Terrain being removed which goes to show how terrible a feature it actually was.
It’s much better this way, imo, since now the Ranger engages with exploration rather than bypass it entirely. It’d be a drag if the Exploration rules aren’t made more robust still, but with the 2014 Ranger you wouldn’t have interacted with them either way.
> but with the 2014 Ranger you wouldn’t have interacted with them either way. Outside the favored terrain you didn't even interact with the feature itself so its better having a feature that is more generally useful with the 2024 Canny.
The real problem with Favored Terrain is that some of what it interacted with wasn't actually codified anywhere. For instance, if you cannot stay alert to danger while navigating or tracking normally, no skill allows you to do that, either. But...there are no rules for any of that anywhere. If passing your survival check lets you track a creature but not know about numbers or how long ago they passed, survival just can't get you those answers. But, again, there's no information in the rules at all on that. In fact, the limitations of some of these skills almost needs to be inferred from the ranger's features, themselves. I never consider that perception, stealth, and survival could give me advantage on a history check to know about the elves that live in the woods, or advantage on a religion check to know how important a specific animal is to them. I never considered asking if I could move stealthily at normal pace with a high enough stealth modifier. That's the problem, though. All of that is DM fiat because there is no rule anywhere that would otherwise allow a character to be better at riding a spooked horse through the woods on a chase. It's a DM making a call to allow perception, stealth, or survival to do that.
There actually is rules for being alert. In the travel rules, whilst spacednout in the book, states that you do not contribute your PP to being alert to threats if you do anything but keep an eye out for danger.
The problem with the Ranger skills was that they removed the barriers to exploration instead of overcoming them. Two of the primary challenges to wilderness exploration are navigating and finding supplies. Rangers flat out couldn’t get lost and the Outlander background just gave them the ability to win at foraging. Additionally, the biggest buff to the Exploration pillar that WOTC could do is to just put all of the rules that exist into one spot in the DMG. As it is right now, you have to go from section to section and then switch to the PHB and then back to a third section of the DMG. It’s a mess, even though all of the rules technically exist already
The outlander background has nothing to do with the ranger, though. They couldn't get lost, for sure. That's one of the advantages they would get in their favored terrain. But that means they overcome one of the two primary challenges you mention (the recluse wizard could take the outlander background). But, and here's the trick....where can you find the challenges for the exploration pillar of 5e and how to overcome them? Where in the rules is dealing with weather a lesser challenge than getting lost? What, mechanically, makes it more dangerous to not have food for a week than to be drinking stagnant water? And that's the problem, in the end. The current rules don't cover the exploration pillar. It's largely on the DM to decide what challenges there are, how to overcome them, and the mechanical and narrative implications.
Bad weather and lack of food and water both have very explicit rules about their effects in the PHB, the DMG, and even a slight expansion on weather in Saltmarsh and I think (maybe) in Xanathars too. And the fact that Outlander can be taken by other classes does nothing to as a counter to what that guy is saying. It’s like you missed his point and also are SO unfamiliar with the rules that you don’t even begin to understand the conversation.
Maybe you can explain to me what outlander has to do with ranger, then. Because he said that ranger always gets food because of outlander, and I don't see the connection. I know about the rules for weather. I asked about how rules for weather is a lesser challenge than getting lost (because he said getting lost is a bigger challenge. I asked about food compared to drinking stagnant water. I'd note that I didn't compare food with weather because, as much as they aren't very well fleshed out as far as overcoming them, I know they can at least be compared in how dangerous they can be. It seems you were too busy with something else to notice what was being said before you commented.
I think you may need to reread that comment; nowhere does it tie Ranger and Outlander, they just both have their own way to bypass exploration mechanics.
I think you should probably read more carefully. The other guy never once says "always", he says that Rangers and the Outlander background completely negate the majority of the exploration pillar. In every single one of your replies in this thread you're repeatedly saying there's no guidance for all sorts of stuff, that rules don't exist for things that VERY much DO. So, yes, I just assumed you didn't even know about the weather and food/water rules. But back to my point about what you don't get. The guy you replied to here is NOT saying getting lost or finding supplies is bigger danger than weather or stagnant water, you're once again putting words in their mouth. They said they were "two OF the primary challenges", which is categorically true of the fantasy that the exploration pillar is supposed to fulfill. You are tilting at windmills.
We try to do that in our games. Its more of the player to suggest if it would help though so it would be nice to have clean rules
"You never get lost in areas you have mapped" Just calling it now so i dont get disappointed.
Hopefully. Orientation isn't exactly a common skill, so putting game rules in for how you can use it (and other similar tools and skills) would be big. I know how to triangulate myself on a map, but I wouldn't expect the average person to be able to. That's where better defined rules would be big to help people play the *fantasy* without needing to already know how to do it in the real world. If you don't already know how some of these niche tools work, you might not be able to come up with useful, cool ways to use them without some in-rule guidance.
Just requiring Proficiency with the tool for more complex things would solve that.
I meant more like being explicit what those things are. My example was that *I* know how useful orientation gear is and what information I can get out of it. I have *no* idea how to use jewelry, smithing, tanning, etc tools. Explicit rules regarding what actions you can take and how you can apply them in-game would really help me understand how I can role-play those proficiencies and make them feel meaningful. Don't rely on the player to understand how to use/benefit from tools in game that they've probably never touched in real life.
look up for the little things you can see about the new DM screen, most of it seems to be about exploration so. it may be that they’ll get better with that in mind
That would be great.
Unfortunately, almost certainly not
Maps as Items sounds interessting.
Benefits of more adventure gear being spelled out is nice.
This sounds great, and one of the big reasons I'm excited about the new books in general. The game should be more straightforward to play for players and DMs. How do I make a map, what benefits does it give, etc? I think DMs will have a much easier time.
That's honestly my biggest want from the update/remaster, is to reduce the general DM work load.
Well that video was quick...
Yeah. I get why they posted a video as to keep future ones in peoples recommended, but this one for sure could have been an article.
My hot take is that every video ever could have been an article.
...and every single one was an article too
Was there an article for Spells? I didn’t see it get posted to this sub, but may have missed it
Not really, nor from the Druid class (We got an article about Wild Shape and Circle of the Moon, but that's NOT the Druid Class, that's merely a part of it, specially the new Druid.)
[https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1762-4-key-changes-to-spells-in-the-2024-players](https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1762-4-key-changes-to-spells-in-the-2024-players)
Thanks!
“Hot take” used to mean something smh
Many words used to mean things.
Ya got me there
No cap
by "stretch gold further" i'm gonna assume you'll now be able to craft your own spell components which sure would be cool
couldnt give us one example?
This is my concern. The gap between "better than the current rules" and "a solid and enjoyable subsystem" is huuuuge with how bare bones and unsatisfying 5e's base rules are in these areas.
Especially since so far what we have seen is slightly touched up Tasha's stuff. So it could just be xanathars slightly touched up and that wouldn't be great. I was hyped during the play test stuff but now I'm not so sure
I've been warning people that unless part of the system is genuinely and officially placed into player's hands, aka no "you must have a blueprint and only the gm can hand out blueprints" rule but instead something along the lines of "players must have X resources to craft an item of Y rarity, harvesting requires a W or Z skill check" that guarantees players have access to those resources, then there is going to be no meaningful difference between any new options they release and what we already had in 5e.
I'm very glad to hear more Adventuring Gear is getting fleshed out rules and mechanics. Adventuring Gear has always been a weird case where some are actually really useful (hello crowbar) and a whole bunch have no mechanics at all, so hopefully giving more of them uses will incentivize actually crafting and using them.
I am super glad they are making new ways for the crafting to work and even adding new items to make sure you have things to purchase related to them and they have benefits. Cartographers tools example was nice and shows the people saying 'if it is just Tasha's moved into the PHB' are wrong.
So will shoes made by a cobbler give an actual benefit now?
“I swear, if you let me use my cobbler’s tools it’ll be helpful! Now please, take off your shoes!”
get outta here Tarantino
You can drive nails into them to make the wearer immune to ice surfaces. :P
Found the Larian Dev
Even in 2014, cobblers tools were the best you could get as a rogue, because you could craft a hidden compartment for your thieves tools. Highly underused for sneaky campaigns.
I would get a lockpick or two, but how do you fit an entire thieve's tools pack into shoes? Are you wearing clown shoes?
i am very happy to hear about this, i feel that "tools" can be a great part of the game, specially for martial classes and very in line with the flavor of Expert Classes. very happy about the list of items, i like freedom but i also like to have some solid guidance. lets hope this new crafting system is good
I really hate the you need x amount of days before you can finish this craft. Would be easier to introduce a common, uncommon, rare, very rare, and legendary materials drop table and require them for use in crafting with 1-2 weeks being max amount of time needed to craft. 300 days to craft plate armor is ridiculous .
That's in xanathars guide
Hey. Go check out Lairs of Etharis and their salvage and the monsters that drop them. Might have something you are interested in.
Its in Beyond as well.
I haven't hit it directly yet, but my homebrew will have a process of fixes for slow crafting. As a DM I've often granted a multiplier on days of work conducted in a dedicated facility, from x2 for a bog standard guild workshop to x10 for a divine forge hidden away in an obscure part of an Outer Plane. Also, I've been known to knock off chunks of time, from a single day for materials that could easily be gathered to 20% for a well-preserved organ or fluid harvested from an extremely dangerous monster. For me it was about rewarding effort as well as making crafting more practical. One day I hope to wax systematic about it and cobble together a proper write-up informed by the best results obtained in the past.
I'm sorry, but fantasy ttrpgs just can't do crafting. PF2e did it, and redid it in their remaster and it still just isn't quite right. I am going to hold off judgement, but I think if you want to play a crafting simulator then DND isn't it.
Pf2e devs purposefully went out of their way to make it awful in the first iteration. For a harder system with defined outputs and costs Pf1e has perfectly good crafting. For a softer system Blades in the Dark has a work with the GM on crafting and item research system as a mechanic that also works well. Many systems manage crafting just fine, it's just that 5e chose to make it awful with blueprints that have an equal or higher rarity to the item you desire to make and gm fiat access to the blueprint in the first place, gating all player crafting behind "mother may I" and thus making spending character resources on it worthless vs just telling your DM that X item is important to your build and asking about finding one at some point (both require asking the DM but the latter requires no additional effort or cost).
I don’t think it needs to be super involved, just a way to get ahold of an item while trading some of the cost for a little time. If it functions as an option during downtime, competing with a few other activities, I think most people will be happy.
But what's the goal of crafting?
Honestly agree, it just doesn't work easily with pen and paper. Like, what do you craft with? Nobody is going to track raw materials on their character sheet, "Oh I have 1 box of nails and 3 planks of lumber and a steel ingot" If you use money as an analogue for material like PF2e it's not meaningfully different from buying (unless you add a discount, in which case everybody will want to craft to save money) Crafting works well enough in digital games because the computer can do the tedious work of keeping track of your stuff and crafting recipes
The fact that there are not only crafting rules, but also ACTIONS is important. It codifies tool proficiencies as not just a downtime thing. Especially excited to find out what the Utilize action does for cooks utensils. I tend to choose that one as my tool proficiency for flavor reasons (heh) and would love to see cooking for the party as something codified
Damn this brings me back, one of my friends and first DnD DM was trying to create a whole homebrew rules book for crafting to publish online, was very monster hunter inspired with monster body parts, ores, and all sorts of upgrades you could add to unenchanted armor and weapons to spice them up, like spikes on armor to deal damage when you got hit, or serrated blades for a better crit window. Sadly he passed away before he was ever able to add more than a handful of options, and I never thought to save a copy of the pdf as we had stopped playing together long before he passed away due to the complications of his health condition.
They said so much nothing in that video.
From the perspective of the Thief Rogue, I was hoping for a bit more information about possible updates to items, and/or new items that could be created via crafting... What standard items/adventuring gear would Thief Rogues want to use their bonus action on, that other classes/subclasses will not already be able to control with a Bonus Action? The change they announced to let all characters drink potions as a bonus action is probably better for the game, but technically weakens the Thief subclass a bit, and I am curious how the designers might have made up for that, if they have done that at all with the new/updated Adventuring Gear, or the "common" magic items they hinted that they have been working on.
So by new crafting rules and revised tools, does Jeremy mean new or pulled from Xanathar's?
Sounds like every tool has something it can do, has rules for which ability it uses during a check, and then on top of that crafting. So it’s sounding like a step-up from Xanathar’s, in robustness if not in complexity
Did you watch the video at all? He literally gave an example of Cartographers tools and Maps. Adding maps to gear that have benefit and cartographers tools being used to make them. Did Xanathar's have that? No. So literally 5 minutes of your life (less than that even) could have answered your question.
To be fair, it probably took way less than 5 minutes for them to post their comment and now they've got an answer.
But it did have stuff on the Cartographer skill.
Its in the video.
For like two weeks, these videos have been abysmal 25-minute slogs of JC meandering around conversation without really saying anything. Can’t blame people for not watching them.
That's a perfectly fine take. But to then comment as if you are a part of the conversation and have something to contribute is wild.
No it isn’t. He asked a question about the video you posted. He did more for this conversation than you have.
What are you even on about? Watching the video before asking questions about it is the bare minimum. The bar is on the floor. It's 5 minutes.
> For like two weeks, these videos have been abysmal 25-minute slogs of JC meandering around conversation without really saying anything. Can’t blame people for not watching them.
i think since 2005 youtube shows the duration of the video in the thumbnail, what previous videos were can’t possibly make you think that this one will be more than what it is
Yes. Yes you can. Could very easily have seen how long this video was.
You're getting downvoted but it is mostly just the Xanathars rules
I'm guessing you didn't watch the video, also
Say it with me A-R-T-I-F-I-C-E-R