Ua 4/10/17 Downtime

[DizzyWood]

Are we getting UA today? If so can this be the discussion thread? Also what do we expect?


EDIT: Link! http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA_Downtime.pdf

[nickl_2000]

I don't think so, didn't the last UA say that they would be releasing them monthly instead of weekly now?

[DizzyWood]

I do not know... I am having major problems with my work computer and this is one of the few sites that will load.

I mean If i can not google I will ask you guys. Ya'll know everything I am interested in anyway.

[Trum4n1208]

It looks like we'll get weekly UAs until the end of the month. From April on, it's back to once or twice a month.

[Maxilian]

They said:

For a while now, we’ve been releasing Unearthed Arcana multiple times a month as part of a special series of articles. That series wraps up at the end of April 2017. After that, we’ll return to releasing Unearthed Arcana once, sometimes twice, a month, and the Sage Advice column will return. In the meantime, Jeremy Crawford will continue to provide official rules answers on Twitter (@JeremyECrawford), as well as in the Sage Advice segment in the Dragon Talk podcast.

So i guess we got a couple more UA this month, then we will have less of this, but more Sage Advices (that makes me happy)

[jaappleton]

We'll be getting new UA until the end of April, is my understanding.

So...

SPECULATION!

Moar spellz plz

[Level2intern]

Would love some crafting rules or example skill DC charts.

[MrStabby]

We'll be getting new UA until the end of April, is my understanding.

So...

SPECULATION!

Moar spellz plz

Yeah, guessing the medium and high level spells next?

[Foxhound438]

We'll be getting new UA until the end of April, is my understanding.

So...

SPECULATION!

Moar spellz plz

i think L2, 3, 4 this week, followed by 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 the week after is a safe bet. Higher spell levels getting progressively fewer options, so we'd probably see about the same total number of new spells in each.

but what I really want is soME GOD DAMN FEATS ALREADY

[jaappleton]

Yeah, guessing the medium and high level spells next?

Honestly? I think this one and the next one are spells. Levels 2-5 and levels 6-9.

I mean, in all sincerity, they don't need to add many high level spells. They're already supposed to be very encounter-altering, and some are world-altering. So that shouldn't be a big article, honestly. Levels 2-5? That's where the proverbial money is.

Now... What's the last one? My guess is races.

[KorvinStarmast]

i think L2, 3, 4 this week, followed by 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 the week after is a safe bet. Higher spell levels getting progressively fewer options, so we'd probably see about the same total number of new spells in each.

but what I really want is soME GOD DAMN FEATS ALREADY The 42 in the PHB aren't enough? :smallconfused:

[hymer]

So...
SPECULATION!

A really great recipe for chicken curry?


The 42 in the PHB aren't enough? :smallconfused:

There are 42? It's a sign! :smallbiggrin:

[jaappleton]

The 42 in the PHB aren't enough? :smallconfused:

Honestly? No. There's always room for more! But I'm cautious about what they could put in.

[MrStabby]

Honestly? No. There's always room for more! But I'm cautious about what they could put in.

Certainly there is enough to always have something you want, just not enough to have something you want and to be able to set apart your character. For example I would like to see a whole bundle more cleric spells - enough that a cleric could feel they were taking a domain spell at each level from 6 to 9 by using that spell.

[jaappleton]

Certainly there is enough to always have something you want, just not enough to have something you want and to be able to set apart your character. For example I would like to see a whole bundle more cleric spells - enough that a cleric could feel they were taking a domain spell at each level from 6 to 9 by using that spell.

The fact that Cleric domain spells stop just before the possibility of getting Sunbeam on the Light Cleric has always irked the crap out of me.

[Corran]

My guess is more spells. I have a good feeling about this...

[Trum4n1208]

Wouldn't mind more spells. I'd love to have feats, and would be happy with new crafting rules.

[thepsyker]

Honestly? No. There's always room for more! But I'm cautious about what they could put in.

I'd like to see a feat for throwing weapons, something that would let you draw them like ammunition.

[Dman]

At this point id like more spells too I think especially army builder spells, Something for conjuring other things (Plants specifically) and maybe an option for getting other undead for a necromancer. it seems like a very big gap between Animate and Create undead

[Chunkosaurus]

All I really want are crafting rules. Every week since the artificer came out that it wasn't crafting rules has made me like the artificier less and less

[Kite474]

Please Wizards: More items both plain and magical and new item crafting rules!

[jaappleton]

Please Wizards: More items both plain and magical and new item crafting rules!

New magic items is one I can definitely get behind. No such thing as too many magic items to choose from.

Though I don't expect a UA on it. They'll save those for published adventures.

[Matrix_Walker]

I'm guessing we'll get more spells, maybe even twice (Mid and High level).

[jaappleton]

Did Crawford just spoil the contents of todays UA article?


https://twitter.com/jaa0109/status/851478125758296069

[Dudewithknives]

What I want:

A new warlock pact or 2, or even better, Warlock 2.0 like they did with the ranger rebuild.
A fixed Kensai Monk v2.
Magic items or feats for classes that do not fit the normal mold.
ex. Where are the magic holy symbols, or magical +1, +2, +3 instruments or other foci for Bards, Clerics, or Paladins?
There is sharpshooter and Great weapon master for pushing those fighting styles through the roof on damage, where is the ones for other fighting styles.
I really, really, want a duelist subclass for fighter or even monk. I miss my unarmored fencer.
New weapons and actual weapon traits.

What I expect:

More spells, or caster specialties.
Subclasses that make full casters take the place of martials.

[jaappleton]

What I want:

A new warlock pact or 2, or even better, Warlock 2.0 like they did with the ranger rebuild.
A fixed Kensai Monk v2.
Magic items or feats for classes that do not fit the normal mold.
ex. Where are the magic holy symbols, or magical +1, +2, +3 instruments or other foci for Bards, Clerics, or Paladins?
There is sharpshooter and Great weapon master for pushing those fighting styles through the roof on damage, where is the ones for other fighting styles.
I really, really, want a duelist subclass for fighter or even monk. I miss my unarmored fencer.
New weapons and actual weapon traits.

What I expect:

More spells, or caster specialties.
Subclasses that make full casters take the place of martials.

Kensei is coming. They acknowledged a second, alternate version when the first one was released and people screamed "WHY AREN'T KENSEI WEAPONS CONSIDERED MONK WEAPONS?!?!?!"

[JumboWheat01]

I'm gonna go out on the limb and hope for more skills. Something that can actively/passively spice up a character and maybe change how that character's even played.

Of course, whatever shows up is what shows up, might be more DM toys since we've had a couple of weeks of players' toys now.

[jaappleton]

I'm gonna go out on the limb and hope for more skills. Something that can actively/passively spice up a character and maybe change how that character's even played.

Of course, whatever shows up is what shows up, might be more DM toys since we've had a couple of weeks of players' toys now.

Ya'll got enough ways to murder us players. :smalltongue:

[nickl_2000]

You would think I would have figured it out by now, but what time do they usually release the UA?

[JumboWheat01]

Ya'll got enough ways to murder us players. :smalltongue:

Don't look at me, I'm no DM. Heck, I barely even homebrew. I'm pretty much a dedicated player.

Besides, what's one more horrendous death in a mass of horrendous deaths?

[Dudewithknives]

Kensei is coming. They acknowledged a second, alternate version when the first one was released and people screamed "WHY AREN'T KENSEI WEAPONS CONSIDERED MONK WEAPONS?!?!?!"

My main issue with Kensai was that their ability that gives them 2 AC when using their Kensai weapon requires them to attack with it LESS.

You design a subclass around using select martial weapons in combat but one of their better abilities requires that you punch them anyway while you hold the weapon?

[solidork]

You would think I would have figured it out by now, but what time do they usually release the UA?

It varies wildly from week to week.

[Chunkosaurus]

It's downtime thank you lord

[Foxhound438]

The 42 in the PHB aren't enough? :smallconfused:

are the 12 classes in the phb not enough? are the 3 subclasses of most of those not enough? are the however many cantrips in the phb not enough?

[jaappleton]

You would think I would have figured it out by now, but what time do they usually release the UA?

Typically like 1:30pm EST.

EDIT:

Here it is.

http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA_Downtime.pdf

[Misterwhisper]

New UA is up.

Read the title and skipped it.

Never once since 5e has come out have I ever seen a single GM even USE downtime in their game other than a 10 min, info gathering or shopping break.

[jaappleton]

New UA is up.

Read the title and skipped it.

Never once since 5e has come out have I ever seen a single GM even USE downtime in their game other than a 10 min, info gathering or shopping break.

Same.

I honestly don't see the need for this article. If you've run out of ways to utilize 'downtime', and needed a whole article on it... What's going on? Are you fried as a DM? Take a night off.

[Jobogz]

New UA is up.

Read the title and skipped it.

Never once since 5e has come out have I ever seen a single GM even USE downtime in their game other than a 10 min, info gathering or shopping break.

It contains rules for things people have wanted for a long time. Including rules for magic item economy as well as magic item crafting. Seems significant, though I only gave it a quick glance.

[JumboWheat01]

Well, it's definitely a DM tool. Like others before me, I can't see this being a big game changer for my group. Ah, well.

[nickl_2000]

Same.

I honestly don't see the need for this article. If you've run out of ways to utilize 'downtime', and needed a whole article on it... What's going on? Are you fried as a DM? Take a night off.

I skimmed it, it appeared that they were trying to make downtime more interactive for the players. Giving a DM the ability to add in conflict to the downtime.

[TentacleSurpris]

The Crafting Magic Items section refers to a brewing potions section. Am I just not seeing it or is it omitted?

[Chunkosaurus]

The Crafting Magic Items section refers to a brewing potions section. Am I just not seeing it or is it omitted?
It's​ lower down it there keep scrolling it's right before the crime section

[KorvinStarmast]

I skimmed it, it appeared that they were trying to make downtime more interactive for the players. Giving a DM the ability to add in conflict to the downtime. Magic Item Price is too low. (p. 5 of the UA article). I'd at least triple the costs listed there.

[Foxhound438]

those (loose) crafting rules tho

[Chunkosaurus]

Magic Item Price is too low. (p. 5 of the UA article). I'd at least triple the costs listed there.
I think they are balancing it around the difficulty of obtaining the material, and a legendary material can only be had by getting through the androsphinx in the example.

[KorvinStarmast]

I think they are balancing it around the difficulty of obtaining the material, and a legendary material can only be had by getting through the androsphinx in the example.
I was referring to the "buying" section rather than the crafting section .. but the adventure element of crafting magic items is (IMO) a good feature (in my old games, it was mandatory for any attempt at crafting magic items).

[Chunkosaurus]

I was referring to the "buying" section rather than the crafting section .. but the adventure element of crafting magic items is (IMO) a good feature (in my old games, it was mandatory for any attempt at crafting magic items).

Oh in that case looking at it I might agree the price for a legendary is 50000-300000 which isn't a ton on the low end

[dejarnjc]

I like the rules. This gives a good reason for a DM to end a session back in a town (when possible) and to allow the group a few days of rest so that everyone can continue interacting by email or however. Keeps the interest and interactivity of the game going week round vs. just at the table.

[Sir cryosin]

It's not a super exciting UA but I like it as a DM.

[Misterwhisper]

Despite my first impression I have read over the article to give a better impression:

It is a completely worthless waste of someone typing.


1. If you have complications and people actively getting in the way of your activities, that is not downtime, that is an adventure point that is happening in the city. The moment you introduce a foil it is no longer downtime.

2. The concept that it costs 100G at least to LOOK for a magic item is completely stupid. That is a Persuasion roll, or you spend 5 gold and employ some grunts to look for a proper seller for you.

3. Carousing: Again if you are rolling to cause problems for the group, you are not doing downtime, you are starting a small adventure.

4. Crafting Magic Items: Wow, so I can spend ALMOST TWO YEARS of hard work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week to make that +3 weapon... Nobody will EVER do that because nobody ever has that much down time.

5. If you are committing a crime, you are not using a chart, you are running an adventure.

6. Pit Fighting, same thing. You think I will ever let my character get in a fight and just roll on a chart to see if they won? Hell no, and neither will anyone else. Also the results have nothing to do with whether you can actually fight, it is 3 skill checks not attacks, ac, hp, or anything related to actually being in a fight.

7. Religious services, again, not a downtime activity, you are actively going out to gain favors with certain NPCs, that is part of an adventure, not downtime.

8. Scribe Scroll: 1/4 MILLION gold, and almost 2 years to make a 9th level scroll... well, I guess those have never once existed anywhere cause nobody will ever do that. for 1/100 the price just get someone to cast it for you, or for even 1/10th the price hire someone to come with you who can cast it and have them cast it where you need it if it is not the right location.

9. The rest is something that does not even need a chart or an entry for because it is basic.

[thepsyker]

Does anyone else think it is odd that the gambling section includes a Charisma(Intimidate) check, but no option for a check using proficency in gaming equipment (cards, dice, etc)? I get Insight and Deception for reading an opponet and bluffing, and could even see how Intimidate might work in a getting in your opponets head and psyching them out sort of way, but you would think proficency in gaming equipment would be an option somewhere. Or is gaming proficency not a thing? I seem to remember it being included with the soldier background, but I'm afb.

[Foxhound438]

(snip)

largely I agree... I kind of like the crafting magic items and potions bit, but particularly the fighting and crime sections really don't seem like things I'd like to see handwaved after one roll.

[dejarnjc]

4. Crafting Magic Items: Wow, so I can spend ALMOST TWO YEARS of hard work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week to make that +3 weapon... Nobody will EVER do that because nobody ever has that much down time.


Some DMs do campaigns with long gaps. The times actually seem appropriate in my opinion. Yeah it's not something you'll see in a regular published campaign though.

[Steampunkette]

Personally, I love it.

It's a great basis for a system to create downtime activities and a way to run through them. I also like how Complications and Foils create the option of taking a downtime activity and turning it into a story-point moving forward.

No one gives a darn about how you spent 100 gold to find a seller who has a few magic items. But they would love to hear the story of how you purchased a cursed weapon and had to go on an interesting sidequest to break the curse so you could use the item to fight off a powerful foe.

This will be particularly useful for my Princes of the Apocalypse game set in Dark Sun.

And -super- useful for games that rely on the "Gritty Realism" variant when it comes to healing/recovery. You get -tons- of downtime in those.

[dejarnjc]

Does anyone else think it is odd that the gambling section includes a Charisma(Intimidate) check, but no option for a check using proficency in gaming equipment (cards, dice, etc)? I get Insight and Deception for reading an opponet and bluffing, and could even see how Intimidate might work in a getting in your opponets head and psyching them out sort of way, but you would thing proficency in gaming equipment would be an option somewhere. Or is gaming proficency not a thing? I seem to remember it being included with the soldier background, but I'm afb.

I agree that's odd and you're correct about it being in the soldier background. I'll definitely mention that in the survey.

[Nicrosil]

I like it! It has some very useful ideas for more social-focused campaigns, especially on making foils.

[Doug Lampert]

Some DMs do campaigns with long gaps. The times actually seem appropriate in my opinion. Yeah it's not something you'll see in a regular published campaign though.

Yep, playing your first set of character's children was once a fairly common thing. This implies games that run enough game-time that a child can grow to adulthood during the game.

Similarly, building that keep you got at what's now considered mid-level wasn't something that happened overnight.

2 years for a +3 weapon? If that were the only obstacle I'd be wondering why they aren't common. But the GP and quest requirements explain why they are somewhat rare.

[TentacleSurpris]

Despite my first impression I have read over the article to give a better impression:

It is a completely worthless waste of someone typing.


I respect your analysis but I don't agree. As a DM I like this section.

You are right that if a character wants to commit crimes or earn favor with NPCs that can be handled as an adventure. But as a DM, I put a lot of planning into adventures. I ran a year+ long campaign where the players managed a city that they had liberated from hobgoblins and then repopulated with refugees. Downtime actiosn were a big part of the campaign. I would have months tick by, and each month I would roll "your blacksmith business brings X revenue" or "you manage to recruit 2 thieves to your thieves guild who bring in X revenue", or complications like "a small fire at your Inn set you back this month."

Sometimes a DM just wants a quick way to resolve character activities that don't derail the adventure from what I have planned. If I spend my week designing traps for a Dragon's lair and the players want to rob a jewellery store, I want a way to quickly resolve it and get back to what I have written.

This system also helps for characters to feel like people who have these professions instead of adventurers who have a bunch of skills. I'm not sure if that makes sense. What I mean is that sometimes a Thief or Assassin character can just feel like an adventurer with certain skills if you're not actually ever stealing or assassinating. A character with the Sage background should be doing research, instead of just using his skills on whatever happens to be in the dungeon that week. But when I don't want the adventure to focus on this stuff, it's nice to have a handy chart.

The Foils will often derail the quick downtime activity into a roleplaying or problem-solving session, so that will take up time, but they keep the players from feeling "safe" all the time. I also notice that most of the Foils don't have an immediate effect. They are akin to "you make an enemy", which as a DM I can take home and think about and plan a future encounter around. The foils don't derail the adventure too much (and if they do, I can just pick another result). Rolling on the foil charts is about as relevant as rolling on the Backgrounds charts; I would rather just choose.

I like the crafting and buying magic items rules.

The 100 gp bribes you have to pay are like paying to use other people's contacts, like I can imagine the church of Waukeen charging 100+ gp as a magical item brokerage service, or the thieves guild turning you towards a shady dealer but wanting a little something for their troubles.

As for the crafting rules, the use of an exotic ingredient keeps the system from becoming too "gamey" and keeps the focus on roleplaying. I would further stipulate that players shouldn't be allowed to choose exactly how the item works from the DMG. Instead they should try to craft "a staff that can charm people" instead of a Staff of Charming, and accept whatever tweaks the DM comes up with. Otherwise people will make characters whose sole purpose is to craft something they need for their "build". Yes it takes an absurd amount of time to craft a higher-level item. Maybe some kind of a sliding scale should be used instead of a linear conversion of gp to time. After all, the exotic ingredient is really the important part. If I slay a pit fiend and take a shard of metal from its blade, taking six months to craft a sword from it is anticlimactic.

I like the Pit Fighting option, except I think that the gp reward should be in scope with character level; like boxing matches have bigger prize payouts depending on how accomplished the fighters are. I get that you want to use all your skills and weapons, but a pit fighting match would probably be nonlethal, and furthermore, watching one player roll-play combats for his own ego is boring for the other players.

I try to never let players do solo things, because it's a waste of time for the rest of the players. If one person has one hour of solo adventure time, he gets to feel special, but that's 3 man-hours (assuming 4 players) for the other players wasted on a Wednesday evening. Even if I give each player their own Special Hour to rob banks, fight in pits, and carouse, that's 12 wasted man-hours. DND quickly becomes a waste of everyone's time. Nobody wants to show up so they can only play for 1 hour a night, even if that hour is specially catered to them. These rules let me do solo-things so that players can feel special and do what their characters should do, without detracting from everyone's experience.

Now as an experienced DM I can come up with my own ways to resolve things like this, but the point of a DM's guide is to do some of the work for me.

[jaappleton]

Yep, playing your first set of character's children was once a fairly common thing. This implies games that run enough game-time that a child can grow to adulthood during the game.

Similarly, building that keep you got at what's now considered mid-level wasn't something that happened overnight.

2 years for a +3 weapon? If that were the only obstacle I'd be wondering why they aren't common. But the GP and quest requirements explain why they are somewhat rare.

And that's during 'downtime'. Not time to go to work, sleep, etc.

[Misterwhisper]

Some DMs do campaigns with long gaps. The times actually seem appropriate in my opinion. Yeah it's not something you'll see in a regular published campaign though.

You mean like all those official campaign books put out with the extensive use of downtime... oh wait, that does not exist.

Also everything is resolved with a SKILL check, not the actual abilities that the activities would use.

Say you make a rogue who is an expert at slight of hand and gambling with his cards.

Oh well, being proficient or having an expertise in a gaming set means nothing because you do not roll it to ACTUALLY gamble.
The same way that being proficient with performance means nothing when you are actually playing an instrument or trying to use it to impress people.

Well, Pit fighting, sounds like just the place for my Barbarian or fighter. Too bad being actually good at fighting means nothing to being in a Pit Fights, its all based on skill rolls and not AC, HP, or even proficiencies or fighting. I guess the best pit fighter in the city will be that bard/rogue who has good proficiencies and expertise.

Research: So what if you are proficient in investigation and plenty of social skills and knowledges. Everyone just roll flat intelligence to see if we can research something.

Most of this article boils down to the concept that: Hey look GM's want a way to screw your players over while doing simple downtime activities that should take 10 mins, now you can use complications and foils to be able to cheat them and not have their actual skills, role playing, or class abilities mean anything. Yay.

[KorvinStarmast]

1. If you have complications and people actively getting in the way of your activities, that is not downtime, that is an adventure point that is happening in the city. The moment you introduce a foil it is no longer downtime.
Yep. It looks like a Gygaxian table in the 1e DMG. One more table for the DM to roll on ...

3. Carousing: Again if you are rolling to cause problems for the group, you are not doing downtime, you are starting a small adventure. Yean.

4. Crafting Magic Items: Wow, so I can spend ALMOST TWO YEARS of hard work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week to make that +3 weapon... Nobody will EVER do that because nobody ever has that much down time. depends on the campaign, and IIRC, if two people are working on it the time is halved (per the DMG).

5. If you are committing a crime, you are not using a chart, you are running an adventure. Agreed


6. Pit Fighting, same thing. You think I will ever let my character get in a fight and just roll on a chart to see if they won? Hell no, and neither will anyone else. Also the results have nothing to do with whether you can actually fight, it is 3 skill checks not attacks, ac, hp, or anything related to actually being in a fight. yeah.

7. Religious services, again, not a downtime activity, you are actively going out to gain favors with certain NPCs, that is part of an adventure, not downtime. yeah

The Gambling section did not look to provide benefit if you have proficiency in a gaming set. Huh?

[Chunkosaurus]

I respect your analysis but I don't agree. As a DM I like this section.

You are right that if a character wants to commit crimes or earn favor with NPCs that can be handled as an adventure. But as a DM, I put a lot of planning into adventures. I ran a year+ long campaign where the players managed a city that they had liberated from hobgoblins and then repopulated with refugees.

Sometimes a DM just wants a quick way to resolve character activities that don't derail the adventure from what I have planned. If I spend my week designing traps for a Dragon's lair and the players want to rob a jewellery store, I want a way to quickly resolve it and get back to what I have written.

This system also helps for characters to feel like people who have these professions instead of adventurers who have a bunch of skills. I'm not sure if that makes sense. What I mean is that sometimes a Thief or Assassin character can just feel like an adventurer with certain skills if you're not actually ever stealing or assassinating. A character with the Sage background should be doing research, instead of just using his skills on whatever happens to be in the dungeon that week. But when I don't want the adventure to focus on this stuff, it's nice to have a handy chart.

The Foils will often derail the quick downtime activity into a roleplaying or problem-solving session, so that will take up time, but they keep the players from feeling "safe" all the time. I also notice that most of the Foils don't have an immediate effect. They are akin to "you make an enemy", which as a DM I can take home and think about and plan a future encounter around. The foils don't derail the adventure too much (and if they do, I can just pick another result). Rolling on the foil charts is about as relevant as rolling on the Backgrounds charts; I would rather just choose.

I like the crafting and buying magic items rules.

The 100 gp bribes you have to pay are like paying to use other people's contacts, like I can imagine the church of Waukeen charging 100+ gp as a magical item brokerage service, or the thieves guild turning you towards a shady dealer but wanting a little something for their troubles.

As for the crafting rules, the use of an exotic ingredient keeps the system from becoming too "gamey" and keeps the focus on roleplaying. I would further stipulate that players shouldn't be allowed to choose exactly how the item works from the DMG. Instead they should try to craft "a staff that can charm people" instead of a Staff of Charming, and accept whatever tweaks the DM comes up with. Otherwise people will make characters whose sole purpose is to craft something they need for their "build". Yes it takes an absurd amount of time to craft a higher-level item. Maybe some kind of a sliding scale should be used instead of a linear conversion of gp to time. After all, the exotic ingredient is really the important part. If I slay a pit fiend and take a shard of metal from its blade, taking six months to craft a sword from it is anticlimactic.

I like the Pit Fighting option, except I think that the gp reward should be in scope with character level; like boxing matches have bigger prize payouts depending on how accomplished the fighters are. I get that you want to use all your skills and weapons, but a pit fighting match would probably be nonlethal, and furthermore, watching one player roll-play combats for his own ego is boring for the other players.

I try to never let players do solo things, because it's a waste of time for the rest of the players. If one person has one hour of solo adventure time, he gets to feel special, but that's 3 man-hours (assuming 4 players) for the other players wasted on a Wednesday evening. Even if I give each player their own Special Hour to rob banks, fight in pits, and carouse, that's 12 wasted man-hours. DND quickly becomes a waste of everyone's time. Nobody wants to show up so they can only play for 1 hour a night, even if that hour is specially catered to them. These rules let me do solo-things so that players can feel special and do what their characters should do, without detracting from everyone's experience.

Now as an experienced DM I can come up with my own ways to resolve things like this, but the point of a DM's guide is to do some of the work for me.

Very well said this will actually allow an artificer to feel like they can do things

[TurboGhast]

I've noticed that a lot of the complications involving foils introduce new ones, instead of being an interaction with existing ones. Edit: Might be a good way to dynamically add a foe that shows up during the actual adventure, and not just during downtime.

Most of the downtime actions feel somewhat overpriced, but otherwise okay. Edit: I agree that the option to do major heists with downtime alone is awkward. I'm okay with minor ones that aren't likely to go wrong, though.

The magic item buying rules feel too RNG based for me, and have unsatisfying corner cases where having too high a skill check could deny you access to your search target. I like the system I'm currently using more: There are specific magic item shops with predetermined lists of what you can buy, and the PCs can expand that stock of items by bringing extra ingredients, making trade routes safe, or similar tasks along their main adventures.

Additionally, it seems weird that the chance of a complication is defined for normal work, but unspecified for the rest of the possible downtime actions. You'd think that all or none of the options would have a defined complication chances, rather than just one. EDIT 2: Oh, I missed them bringing up the idea of a blanket 10% chance of complication. Still doesn't explain why they restated it when talking about normal work.

[thepsyker]

I agree that's odd and you're correct about it being in the soldier background. I'll definitely mention that in the survey.
I think that for a number of those "make 3 check to see how you do" options instead of just giving a set three checks they should give a selection of 4 or 5 checks that could be appropriate and tell the DM to choose which are appropriate. For example maybe the crime I want to engage in is Pickpocketing, so Slight of Hand might be a more appropriate choice for my check series than Thieves Tools.

I would also say that, with what I said above taken into consideration, I like the way Crime and Pit Fighting are presented. It allows for a thief or thug type character to engage some archtype appropriate behavior without necessitating a whole side quest mini-adventure of planning/carrying out a heist or fighting through a street brawl. Unless of course the players choose to take up a story hook presented by any complications. I think that sounds like it could be useful to keep thing rolling smoothly in a more sandbox type adventure.

[Misterwhisper]

Very well said this will actually allow an artificer to feel like they can do things

Other than the fact that mr artificer with his like 6 tool proficiencies or expertise in the use of those nice tools never actually rolls them to do any of the things in down time and they are now worthless.

Also there is a nice big chart for almost every activity for how you can get screwed over by doing it with a 10% chance.

Where is my chart for if you have something good happen due to your activity?

No, compelling the activity is not the positive, because complications are not dependent on how you perform on the activity it is a flat 10% It is like double chance to roll a 1 and get screwed but no chance to roll a 20 and have something good happen on top of completing an activity.

[SharkForce]

many of the complications seem excessive. i mean, sure, fine, complications can arise sometimes, but there shouldn't be a complication every single time you try to scribe a cantrip or sell a level 1 spell scroll.

some of them have reasonable complications... like the one for robbery. you failed your checks? guess what, complications! that makes sense. i mean, the part where you can boil down a major heist into 3 rolls, i'm not a *huge* fan of, but i can definitely get behind the idea that if you screwed up, something undesirable happens. or even the carousing one where a number of them are fairly inconsequential. embarassing, sure, but ultimately something that can be quickly dealt with and then you move on, because it's downtime. but some of them are just a bit ridiculous... you get in a pit fight, and you've got like a 50/50 chance to make a permanent enemy.

i'm also slightly annoyed that they have research as an option and they don't even acknowledge the possibility of researching a spell.

and i would also like to see some of the resolution methods tweaked... pit fighting for example could represent that you're basically grappling and trying to throw each other off of a small platform (acrobatics to keep your balance, athletics to grapple) and placing side bets (using insight to make a judgment call on who will win). but if you're not on a narrow platform, why acrobatics? i mean, you could use it to resist grappling, but on that basis you should be able to use athletics twice instead. i feel like there should be more variety to represent the different kinds of challenges you might be facing. meanwhile, research doesn't seem to care if you have any relevant proficiencies at all... i would have to suspect that a botanist would be better at researching information about plants than i would, and that a priest would do better at researching information about theology than i would. but a druid with nature proficiency or a cleric with religion proficiency gets no bonus whatsoever on research.

[Anderlith]

Some people like to play "Adventure of the Week" kind of games like TV shows, where characters have an identity beyond adventurers. This is what the gambling/pit fighter/bandana juggling rules are for. So you can say your character is a thief & will have some rules for side jobs that don't relate to the plot.

I like that they have rules for foils for when you play something close to Three Musketeers/Robin Hood action/intrigue game then you have some rules for using Foils.

[joaber]

4. Crafting Magic Items: Wow, so I can spend ALMOST TWO YEARS of hard work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week to make that +3 weapon... Nobody will EVER do that because nobody ever has that much down time.


a +3 weapon isn't the type of magic item you should get with downtime activities at all. Two years is nothing.

[Hrugner]

This is over all a weird thing to have rules for. I'm not sure why it got made. Yay for crafting rules I guess. I'm excited to see how my adventurers fail at mundane activities. Hopefully this article is a segue into more comprehensive walking/stumbling rules.

[pwykersotz]

Potions of healing and spell scrolls are exceptions to the following rules. For more information, see “Brewing Potions of Healing” in this section on crafting and “Scribing a Spell Scroll” on page Error! Bookmark not defined..

:smalltongue:

[solidork]

I really like the open ended nature of the 'floating' contacts from carousing, where you get to decide on a later date who they are. Getting the same effect purely from in character actions with named NPCs that the DM has to come up with is a huge chore for everyone. I personally would love the option to replace any of the normal rewards for some of the other downtime activities with social contacts. I'm not super thrilled that it is so closely tied to Charisma though.

[mephnick]

I'd like to see a feat for throwing weapons, something that would let you draw them like ammunition.

This is all I did.

Dead Eye
-Light weapons with the Thrown property may be drawn as ammunition as part of a ranged weapon attack.
-Being within 5 feet of a hostile creature doesn't impose disadvantage on your ranged attack rolls
-The short and long ranges for weapons with the thrown property increase by 10 feet

Not sure if it's perfectly balanced by I would expect something of that nature if they made a feat for it.

[mephnick]

Oh there was actually an article. Maybe edit that first post.


Oh it's downtime and crafting. Never mind. D&D is about adventurers, not labourers.

[N810]

Did a little searching, and it seems that real sword smiting would only take somewhere between
2 days to a week to make a good sword, and maybe up to 2 months to make something Really Fancy.
a simple helmet might take a few days while a full suit of fancy custom armor might take a year.

[SharkForce]

This is all I did.

Dead Eye
-Light weapons with the Thrown property may be drawn as ammunition as part of a ranged weapon attack.
-Being within 5 feet of a hostile creature doesn't impose disadvantage on your ranged attack rolls
-The short and long ranges for weapons with the thrown property increase by 10 feet

Not sure if it's perfectly balanced by I would expect something of that nature if they made a feat for it.

have you seen their feats article? they'd almost certainly put a +1 to hit in there somewhere. apparently the part of the team that gave a crap about limiting the number of finnicky bonuses is the part of the team that was let go.

[dejarnjc]

This is over all a weird thing to have rules for. I'm not sure why it got made. Yay for crafting rules I guess. I'm excited to see how my adventurers fail at mundane activities. Hopefully this article is a segue into more comprehensive walking/stumbling rules.

It got made because many people have been badgering the game creators for this for the past couple years.

[thepsyker]

Did a little searching, and it seems that real sword smiting would only take somewhere between
2 days to a week to make a good sword, and maybe up to 2 months to make something Really Fancy.

A Longsword is 15gp so 15 / 50 = .3 so about 3 Longswords a week which is about 1 every 2 days. So that at least seems close.

[N810]

Oh I can't view the pdf at the moment, did they base forging time on item cost this time ?

[thepsyker]

Oh I can't view the pdf at the moment, did they base forging time on item cost this time ?
Basically half items value in materials, access to needed equipment, and a number of workweeks equal to the items value divided by 50. Items sell for listed price. For regular items Magic Items have more complex rules.

It kind of makes sense since it means items that take longer to make are more expensive.

[MrStabby]

Whilst I am not that excited by this I do feel they did an OK job on something that was never going to make everyone happy.

The challenge of downtime is to make it interesting and interactive whilst at the same time being pretty quick for all players so that we can get back to playing D&D.

If I were in a game and another PC were to be wanting to play out pit fights taking up a lot of table time for something only they were involved in, then I would feel that it was inappropriate. Likewise if an individual wanted to plan and execute a heist. If the whole group is doing it, then that is different but not all downtime activities are appropriate for groups to take part in.

I think that skipping over some detail is needed but this UA captures some of the ways in which downtime activity can enhance the plot, develop the world and build interest. The actual balance an probabilities of each thing should be left to the tables and reflect individual settlements and circumstances - but as an example it does help a structured thought process for new DMs.

[TentacleSurpris]

I wish there was a category of activity for "gathering". I don't want the game to feel like an MMO, but I also don't want my Druid to have to buy the herbs necessary to brew a potion of healing with 25 gp. I have proficiency with the herbalist kit and the Nature skill, how about I just go for a walk in the woods and find the ingredients! Somebody, somewhere is doing this. I guess it could count as "working" but how many herbs are produced? Enough for one potion? Enough for 5?

I get that this would be a pretty narrow activity but maybe some other things could fall under the "gathering" umbrella.

[MeeposFire]

This is all I did.

Dead Eye
-Light weapons with the Thrown property may be drawn as ammunition as part of a ranged weapon attack.
-Being within 5 feet of a hostile creature doesn't impose disadvantage on your ranged attack rolls
-The short and long ranges for weapons with the thrown property increase by 10 feet

Not sure if it's perfectly balanced by I would expect something of that nature if they made a feat for it.

Screw feat taxes lol I just changed how the rues work (as I do not use feats in every game so feats that give very basic capability for a fairly standard thing really bother me).

My change was that you get one object interaction per attack you can make when you use the attack action on your turn. This means that for the most part the characters that tend to use mundane items get better (wel can use them more often in a round) at using them. This also allows a 20th level fighter to get all his attacks with thrown weapons.

As an additional rule you can draw your off hand weapon at the same time as your main hand weapon using the same object interaction. This means you no longer need to be forced to take a feat just to do the basic thing of drawing your weapons on the first round reasonably.

[TentacleSurpris]

have you seen their feats article? they'd almost certainly put a +1 to hit in there somewhere. apparently the part of the team that gave a crap about limiting the number of finnicky bonuses is the part of the team that was let go.

Yeah I was pretty annoyed at Mike Mearls' attempt to make feats a while ago that included +1 hit bonuses in certain circumstances. As a recovering 3.5e minmaxer, I broke out in a rash when I read it.

[Camman1984]

they missed out poisons which makes me sad, although spending 6 months to make a vial that lasts 60 seconds seems a poor trade

[Anderlith]

I wish there was a category of activity for "gathering". I don't want the game to feel like an MMO, but I also don't want my Druid to have to buy the herbs necessary to brew a potion of healing with 25 gp. I have proficiency with the herbalist kit and the Nature skill, how about I just go for a walk in the woods and find the ingredients! Somebody, somewhere is doing this. I guess it could count as "working" but how many herbs are produced? Enough for one potion? Enough for 5?

I get that this would be a pretty narrow activity but maybe some other things could fall under the "gathering" umbrella.

Use the rules for working to generate gold. This represents the value of herbs you found. Then use the crafting rules.

[Temperjoke]

A couple of thoughts:

1. I think people are reading too much into the "Foil" idea, treating this NPC like a new or existing BBEG. I think this should be more thought as like a background NPC to help flesh out some of the downtime, sort of like the Cabbage guy from Avatar the Last Airbender. I mean, yeah, he's the enemy of the gang, because they keep destroying his stuff incidentally, but he has no real impact on the story. Everyone's got people like this in their life, whether they know it or not. Hell, you might be that person in someone else's life, ala Timmy's Dad to Dinkleburg (from Fairly Odd Parents).

2. Players can use this UA too. For them, this helps them think about options when the DM asks "Okay, your characters have a week before the caravan you've been hired to protect leaves. What do they want to do during this time?" Is it useful for every single game? Of course not, but for games that get into the Roleplay/Social aspect of things, this UA provides useful filler. "My character is a habitual gambler" or "My character is a mild alcoholic" now you have better options to mix up what might happen to that character during the downtime.

[Sabeta]

To start things off, I'd just like to remind everyone of something.


The material here is presented for play-testing and to spark your imagination
It is not atypical for Unearthed Arcana to be far from perfect, or incomplete in execution. So let's remove those knees from your faces before carrying on.

By introducing downtime activities that take weeks, months, or even years of effort, you can give your campaign a longer timeline that allows events in the world to play out over the course of years. Wars begin and end, tyrants come and go, and royal lines rise and fall over the course of an entire lifetime of adventure.

...

"A character must spend 8 hours of each day engaged in the downtime activity for that day to count toward the activity's completion. The days don't need to be consecutive."

Already we're off to a brilliant start. Most adventures have periods of 2-3 days down time where not a whole lot happens. Hell, in the campaign I'm a part of a character died and we had to waste a week waiting for his Exhaustion to recover enough to be a functional party member. I would have loved spending that time cranking out a potion or building contacts, rather than letting my characters twiddle their thumbs as we roleplayed each monotonous day. This also makes big ticket items more palatable since you can spread things out over an entire adventure and have it ready for the final confrontation.

"Each activity includes complications you can throw at the characters...They might spawn entire adventures ...In general there is a 10 percent chance that a given activity has a complication. You can use them more or less often, depending on what you feel is best for your campaign."

So right away Whisper's complaints are either completely unfounded or completely intentional. On top of that, I see a lot of vitriol towards what is ultimately OPTIONAL consequences. You know what I see when I look at Complications and Foils? I see Session 0s having new and exciting ways to get off the ground. I see ways to bridge the gap between one campaign and another by allowing a Foil to drag the players back into the adventuring life. I see tons of completely optional potential here that has probably already happened in one of your campaigns. I see it happen all the time. A totally inconsequential NPC spawns an entire adventure because your players are crazy. This seems like a way to control or guide that experience, without necessarily railroading them. (Hell, one of the PCs in a campaign I'm in got swindled by a merchant, and now he's on a quest to track the man down and get a refund (or kill him). It's completely taken over whatever other objectives we might have had before. Boom, Foil.)

I don't know. I feel like there's an excessive amount of knee-jerking and hate being slung around for something I personally see a lot of great uses for. It's kind of like the Mystic Quirks. People seemed to really lash out against those specifically, despite the fact that they were totally optional. Do people just hate roleplaying on this forum? Just gotta number crunch a min/max build and then complain about how OP it is?

~edit~
Thought I would add, I certainly agree that Tool Proficiency should be factored into this equation. At a minimum, they should grant Advantage on the check, or be allowed to substitute the ability check.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I was kind of hoping for rules on managing business enterprises, contracting labor, building castles, etc. Something like the monthly wages of various tradesmen of various skill level, and the cost of manufacturing machinery and transportation of various quality, the amount of money one can expect to make from a storefront, the costs of raising and equipping an army, the amount one's holdings generate through taxation, etc.

This weeks stuff is the sort of stuff that comprises most of a campaign.

Not that this stuff is bad, it's just that committing crimes, carousing with nobles, etc. are the sort of things we do in session proper, and rules to handwave that sort of stuff isn't really what I was looking for in downtime rules.

[Temperjoke]

I was kind of hoping for rules on managing business enterprises, contracting labor, building castles, etc. Something like the monthly wages of various tradesmen of various skill level, and the cost of manufacturing machinery and transportation of various quality, the amount of money one can expect to make from a storefront, the costs of raising and equipping an army, the amount one's holdings generate through taxation, etc.

This weeks stuff is the sort of stuff that comprises most of a campaign.

Not that this stuff is bad, it's just that committing crimes, carousing with nobles, etc. are the sort of things we do in session proper, and rules to handwave that sort of stuff isn't really what I was looking for in downtime rules.

Well, they do say that these are geared more for players at levels 1-10, the stuff you're talking about is more of a higher level thing. The DMG does have some guidelines to help with this sort of stuff, starting at page 126.

[LudicSavant]

The new UA is out, and it's got downtime activities! I for one would love to have some good material on that front and am excited to see this subject tackled... but the question is, do the rules hold any water? Does the math check out? Does it play well? And if not, where did it go wrong and what might be done to improve it?

First, we've got foils. The section seems decent enough. But I'm going to focus on reviewing the actual downtime activities, here are my initial impressions on each:


First is Buying a Magic Item. Unless I'm missing something, this one has a really glaring and severe flaw: If your roll is high, you're stuck finding super rare offerings, and cannot find more common ones. That doesn't make any sense at all. Your well-connected smooth-talking bard won't have any trouble finding manuals of bodily health or +3 swords, but can't find a plain old driftglobe?

Other than that, it seems alright. It just really needs to allow for high rolls to find more common items as well as rarer ones. It's also worth noting that magic items are pretty affordable under this system (a bit moreso than the DMG guidelines for players with the right social skills. This is especially noticeable for higher rarities).

Second is Carousing, which essentially lets you buy contacts. But they're really more like favors than contacts; you get to ask them for aid once and then need to carouse again to get back into their good graces.

It seems like it might be a good idea to add some variety here. For example, instead of a higher check result only ever producing a greater number of contacts, perhaps it could list alternative options such as getting a single higher quality contact or the like.

One nitpick is that some of the complications here (particularly in the "lower class carousing" section) seem to be a bit too willing to take control of the PC away from the PC in ways that might be completely out of character. And leans heavily on variants of "you got drunk and did something insane." Did they just run out of ideas beyond drunkenness depriving PCs of agency for this category?

Third up is Crafting a Magic Item! Perhaps we will finally get some decent rules for this?

At low levels, it seems to work out okay. You spend a few weeks, grab some reagents, and pop out a magic item for a modest price. The problems come in when looking at the time scaling for higher level magic items.

First thing that jumps out is that the crafting times for higher level items are... immense. Crafting a legendary item not only requires you to go on a quest, kill a specific high CR beast, come home, and quite possibly spend more money than if you just shopped around a bit with the Buying a Magic Item rules... it also requires about ten years of working on it. This is further emphasized by the fact that in every regard other than crafting, mid-high level PCs tend to be able to advance events much faster than lower level ones.

Frankly there's no reason for crafting times to have this exponential time cost expansion, especially given other factors like quest requirements, monetary costs, level requirements, complications, and the fact that simply buying the item at a shop is faster and quite possibly cheaper.

Next up is Crime. This is the first of a few entries that make use of a formula I find deeply flawed: Make three skill checks, count the successes, don't account for any abilities beyond that. It just seems a bit insulting to the depth and variety of character tools available in D&D. The fact that a thief can case a place with divinations, go invisible, teleport in, manipulate objects from afar with telekinesis, brainwash the guards, or use any of a thousand other methods just has no influence at all. Ugh.

Anyways, the skill check itself boils down to a solvable mathematical risk/reward equation, wherein you get a certain monetary payout based on your skill ranks. So the gameplay boils down to doing a boring math equation to determine your optimal bet and not making use of most of the abilities which would normally seem to be relevant to the task.

Next is Gambling, which is basically the same as Crime: You make 3 skill checks and don't account for all the of abilities you'd generally think would be relevant to the task (such as, say, proficiency in gambling), and solve a boring math problem to determine your optimal bet.

Next is Pit Fighting, which is another variant on the unsatisfying Crime formula. You make 3 skill checks and no none of your actual combat abilities that would be relevant to pit fighting matter. Forget your Barbarian optimized for grappling, a real pit fighter is a skill-check boosting Bard! Ugh.

After these three-checks entries we could use some Relaxation, which lets you actually get rid of Brain Devourer penalties. Seems like a decent patch.

Then there's Religious Service, which lets you accrue favors similar to carousing, but without spending any money. Instead you make a check, and get 1-2 favors. You can only have 1+cha favors though, which means that anyone who doesn't have an unusually high cha (like, say, a Cleric with a high knowledge religion check) can't actually benefit from a high result. Cha-based classes can basically rack up the favors while Clerics or Religion specialists get left behind.

We've also got Research, which is one of the most frustrating and disappointing entries on the entire list. Basically you make an intelligence check (no mention of applying skills like Arcana, Religion, or History), invest some time and money (potentially a fairly hefty sum, especially for the level 1-10 characters this UA is supposedly aimed at), and get 0-3 "pieces of useful lore." Now here's the real headbanger: A piece of useful lore is "one true statement about a person, place, or thing." An example given is getting a statement about a creature's resistances.

I imagine the process goes like this:
"Oh great sage, tell me, what is a Duergar?"
"After spending a small fortune marshaling all my academic resources and searching through the greatest library in the land, I have determined that a duergar is amongst the many creatures with resistance to poison damage."
"Wow, #$%@ you, great sage."

Seriously, I would expect more than this from a straight int check, on the spot, that doesn't require any time or money. Someone going through a week of library research and come away with one narrow statement is just... utterly incompetent. Two to three statements is little better ("Taking advantage of your genius level intelligence, you learn after weeks of study and considerable investment what *three* of their resistances are! What, you wanted to know something about their culture or even what one looked like? Pfft"). This isn't even taking up session time, so the DM could probably take some time to craft a thoughtful, informative answer... but the guidelines seem to be discouraging that.

I mean, I'm sure a decent DM wouldn't run it in such a way, but that's exactly my point. The guidelines should be way better than this.

Creating a Spell Scroll suffers similar issues to the general crafting rules: The crafting times for higher level spells are insane, and the prices are often higher than simply going out and buying the things at a shop. In fact, crafting a single consumable scroll can get more expensive than an almighty Holy Avenger. Why?.

Selling a Magic Item only serves to make the crafting rules appear even more ridiculous. We're apparently supposed to believe that one can spend 250,000 gp and almost 2 years of incredibly highly skilled labor crafting a spell scroll, and then sell it for 12,500-32,500 gp? The logistics of it is absurd enough to be potentially immersion-breaking. They also seem to have forgotten to note price differences for consumables.

Training: Training in a language or tool takes at least (10-int mod) workweeks and... that's all we know. It come be 10, or it could be 10,000... and the cost is determined by the (apparently arbitrary) number of workweeks. I like that Intelligence matters, at least.

Work: Seems like a pretty poor way to make money, all said, but then I guess it doesn't really need to be. Also apparently the only skills relevant to professions are Athletics, Performance, or Intelligence (tools). Really? They couldn't think of any professions that would use other skills or abilities? Oof.

This should just straight up say that it requires a check appropriate to the demands of the profession. It would also be nice to see work that takes advantage of adventurers' talents, considering just how massive the benefits of spellcasting and rituals and the like can be for a community.

Summary:

People with higher persuasion checks, against all reason, have a harder time finding common magic items than super rare ones.
Buying things is frequently cheaper than crafting them, and the crafting rules math flies totally off the rails at higher levels. Time requirements can get pretty off the wall.
The "3 checks" system is used for several things here, and just plain seems like a deeply limited and flawed system which can't even begin to handle the variety of abilities that 5e D&D PCs have access to, even at level 1 (let alone 10).
If you're a scholar going through a library, you deserve more than a single narrow statement for anything but the most enigmatic of topics.
Things like running a business, building castles, or managing holdings are simply not covered. Why are we getting heists (which seems like it might be better suited to sessions anyways) rather than stuff like that? Oh well. Will take what we can get I guess :smallsmile:

[TurboGhast]

A couple of thoughts:

1. I think people are reading too much into the "Foil" idea, treating this NPC like a new or existing BBEG. I think this should be more thought as like a background NPC to help flesh out some of the downtime, sort of like the Cabbage guy from Avatar the Last Airbender. I mean, yeah, he's the enemy of the gang, because they keep destroying his stuff incidentally, but he has no real impact on the story. Everyone's got people like this in their life, whether they know it or not. Hell, you might be that person in someone else's life, ala Timmy's Dad to Dinkleburg (from Fairly Odd Parents).

2. Players can use this UA too. For them, this helps them think about options when the DM asks "Okay, your characters have a week before the caravan you've been hired to protect leaves. What do they want to do during this time?" Is it useful for every single game? Of course not, but for games that get into the Roleplay/Social aspect of things, this UA provides useful filler. "My character is a habitual gambler" or "My character is a mild alcoholic" now you have better options to mix up what might happen to that character during the downtime.

People who are reading too much into the foil idea might be caught up on the literary definition: A character that highlights the qualities of another character by having the opposite traits. Someone within this character archetype likely to be more than an incidental enemy that doesn't impact the story.

In addition, both of the example downtime opponents have plots whose endgame should be handled outside downtime because they seriously threaten the PCs. Setting up a new enemy via downtime events is perfectly valid, but this article makes it look like the primary option when it should be secondary. Without an example harmless downtime enemy, it looks like all of the downtime foes should eventually become BBEGs to face outside downtime.

It's definitely better for gameplay to have the foes faced in downtime not be a serious threat to the PC's livelihood during the downtime, but the article never mentions that, and is weaker for it. The PCs don't have to be in constant danger.

[Coidzor]

I'm glad they at least took a stab at working with crafting and making it so you can swap out magical items that have no relevance to the party in favor of magic items that actually are worth having and that making a basic healing potion is now only one day's worth of effort instead of 5 or 10 days depending upon how your DM felt.

It always felt strange that they decided to make Forgotten Realms the default setting and also try to have trade in magic items be inaccessible to the players.

I'm disappointed by the execution of a lot of this.


2. The concept that it costs 100G at least to LOOK for a magic item is completely stupid. That is a Persuasion roll, or you spend 5 gold and employ some grunts to look for a proper seller for you.

4. Crafting Magic Items: Wow, so I can spend ALMOST TWO YEARS of hard work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week to make that +3 weapon... Nobody will EVER do that because nobody ever has that much down time.

8. Scribe Scroll: 1/4 MILLION gold, and almost 2 years to make a 9th level scroll... well, I guess those have never once existed anywhere cause nobody will ever do that. for 1/100 the price just get someone to cast it for you, or for even 1/10th the price hire someone to come with you who can cast it and have them cast it where you need it if it is not the right location.

Yeah, those do reek of disingenuousness on the part of the devs.

[Callin]

These were not the rules I was looking for. Meh. What do they have against crafting in 5th?

[Grod_The_Giant]

Why are we getting heists (which seems like it might be better suited to sessions anyways) rather than stuff like that?[/list]
So that when the Rogue says "I go steal stuff!" the DM can roll a few quick checks and move on, instead of having to play out an entire solo adventure? Ditto for stuff like carousing and pit fighting-- the idea seems to be that when the party splits off to do their own stuff, you can resolve it quickly, easily, and flavorfully. Complications seem like a decent way to introduce a wrinkle into things, so the exchange is something like:
Bob: "I want to rob the count!"
DM: "Okay, that'll be a Hard DC... roll your checks."
Bob: "Uhh... pass, pass, fail."
DM: "Okay, you get away with a hundred gold worth of loot, but... <rolls> a Paladin swears vengeance on the thief."
Bob: "Crap! Can I lay a false trail? I'll pass off a distinctive item to a local thief and see what they do with it."
DM: "Charisma (Deception)?"
Bob: "18."
DM: "Cool. The Paladin drags Timmy the Fish away in chains, and you get away clean. Sarah, what do you want to do?"

As for the long magic item crafting times... so? Taking 10 years to craft a legendary item seems entirely friggin reasonable. If anything, it seems too short-- these are supposed to be, like, someone's life's work. Scrolls? Two years to make a scroll of one of the most powerful spells in existence seems, again, like the kind of timing you'd expect. How long do you think it should take to craft a scroll of wish? They're not practical for fast-past adventures, sure, but they make a certain amount of in-setting sense, which 5e rules sometimes ignore, and which seems particularly important for downtime rules. They shouldn't be as easy or accessible as they were in 3.5-- this is 5th edition, magic items are supposed to be rare and special and are not assumed at all by the rules. Easy crafting rules would screw up everything.

[Sigreid]

My take:

1. Better than what we had.
2. Weird that none of the down time activities actually seem to depend on the tools you would expect to be used to do them and just default to largely social skills.
3. Rogues and bards can win at downtime activities, particularly rogues due to expertise and reliable talent.
4. IMO foil is just another word for plot hook leading to an adventure to deal with the @#$%.

It's a start that needs work, but at least it's a start.

[DanyBallon]

stuff

You know this is UA and is guidelines for the DM to use. They are not hard coded rules that you must follow to the letter.

As for buying a magic item, it is written black on white that "[DM] have final say in determining which items are for sale and their final price, no matter what the tables say" so high Persuasion character have the same chance of finding more common magic item. Also it is suggest to the DM to add any item the player might be looking for in the results if appropriate.

[Kane0]

Neat.

My group pretty much never plays book adventures, always brewing up open world campaigns. Downtime options are damn useful for us.

[LudicSavant]

So that when the Rogue says "I go steal stuff!" the DM can roll a few quick checks and move on, instead of having to play out an entire solo adventure? Ditto for stuff like carousing and pit fighting-- the idea seems to be that when the party splits off to do their own stuff, you can resolve it quickly, easily, and flavorfully.

I agree with all of that being a nice thing to have, and retract my comment about getting it instead of something else. The goal is just fine and I support it.

I am, however, skeptical that these rules accomplish that goal of letting us resolve it quickly, easily, and flavorfully.

Unfortunately, the rules given in this UA simply don't support the flavor of many D&D criminals, because of the clunky "roll 3 specific skills" system. Basically, the UA system takes one of the key driving principles of what makes tabletop RPGs great--the ability to approach a task from a variety of angles--and completely disregards it. It sets up a bizarre situation where characters who could quite easily commit a crime during a session with no risks whatsoever cannot commit the same crime out of a session. Not only is this system limited enough that a thief cannot apply their ability to charm the guards, turn invisible, or teleport into a vault... it can't even support a gambler applying their proficiency in gambling tools. The UA rules are set up in such a rigid and narrow way that they prevent people specifically designed to do certain tasks from doing those tasks, which undermines the flavor and gameplay of those characters.

You can bet that PCs are going to notice this dissonance when, say, their character who invested in a bunch of abilities specifically to make their character good at gambling or pit fighting or crime realizes that none of them apply to the downtime activity. Plenty of the people in this thread already have.



As for the long magic item crafting times... so? Taking 10 years to craft a legendary item seems entirely friggin reasonable. If anything, it seems too short-- these are supposed to be, like, someone's life's work. Scrolls? Two years to make a scroll of one of the most powerful spells in existence seems, again, like the kind of timing you'd expect. How long do you think it should take to craft a scroll of wish? They're not practical for fast-past adventures, sure, but they make a certain amount of in-setting sense, which 5e rules sometimes ignore, and which seems particularly important for downtime rules. They shouldn't be as easy or accessible as they were in 3.5-- this is 5th edition, magic items are supposed to be rare and special and are not assumed at all by the rules. Easy crafting rules would screw up everything.

It frankly makes no sense to pay 250,000gp and 2 years of incredibly skilled labor to create a one-use item that could be acquired in a week for a tiny fraction of the price from a store (and, likewise, sells for a similar price).

This isn't about "easy crafting rules." It's about having ones that make any sense in the context of other mechanics. As is they're basically non-options.

[Kane0]

Or just go adventuring for three days and become richer than many kings.

Context is important.

[DanyBallon]

It frankly makes no sense to pay 250,000gp and 2 years of incredibly skilled labor to create a one-use item that could be acquired in a week for a tiny fraction of the price from a store (and, likewise, sells for a similar price).

This isn't about "easy crafting rules." It's about having ones that make any sense in the context of other mechanics. As is they're basically non-options.

How can you be sure you'll be able to buy it? It's up to the DM to decide if it's available or not. If the DM allow buying magic items to be common, then the crafting rules are less useful and meaningful, but in a game where buying rare or legendary items is not possible, spending 250k gp and 2 1/2 years is not that excessive.

Also, crafting rules are for adventurers, they are an incentive toward adventuring over spending time doing mundane task. Nowhere it is written that a legendary dwarven blacksmith can't forge a +3 mithril battleaxe in a few weeks.

[Coidzor]

These were not the rules I was looking for. Meh. What do they have against crafting in 5th?

Maybe D&D is cursed so that decent crafting rules are just impossible to make.

[LudicSavant]

How can you be sure you'll be able to buy it? It's up to the DM to decide if it's available or not. If the DM allow buying magic items to be common, then the crafting rules are less useful and meaningful, but in a game where buying rare or legendary items is not possible, spending 250k gp and 2 1/2 years is not that excessive.

If the DM is making their own call rather than using the UA tables / mechanics, that's all well and good, but that is irrelevant to an evaluation of whether the UA tables and mechanics are good tables and mechanics.

[DanyBallon]

If the DM is making their own call rather than using the UA tables / mechanics, that's all well and good, but that is irrelevant to an evaluation of whether the UA tables and mechanics are good tables and mechanics.

they are only guidelines, not hard rules. What you can evaluate is: "are those guidelines useful to my table or not?"

[SharkForce]

there's a difference between "the rules don't assume the PCs have magic items" and "the rules assume the PCs don't have magic items".

scrolls don't need to be stupidly expensive to make, nor do they need to take years to craft, because the game doesn't revolve around making sure that the party don't have magic items, it simply is designed to function without the PCs absolutely needing to have magic items. personally, i'd much prefer if they simply gated the creation of scrolls and potions by requiring that you obtain special equipment (a writing table made from a CR-appropriate creature that you have petrified to craft a flesh to stone scroll, or a wooden bowl given freely to you by a dryad and from her home tree to brew a philtre of love, for example).

[Coidzor]

Does anyone else think it is odd that the gambling section includes a Charisma(Intimidate) check, but no option for a check using proficency in gaming equipment (cards, dice, etc)?

Yeah, that is pretty weird.


I think that for a number of those "make 3 check to see how you do" options instead of just giving a set three checks they should give a selection of 4 or 5 checks that could be appropriate and tell the DM to choose which are appropriate. For example maybe the crime I want to engage in is Pickpocketing, so Slight of Hand might be a more appropriate choice for my check series than Thieves Tools.

I would also say that, with what I said above taken into consideration, I like the way Crime and Pit Fighting are presented. It allows for a thief or thug type character to engage some archtype appropriate behavior without necessitating a whole side quest mini-adventure of planning/carrying out a heist or fighting through a street brawl. Unless of course the players choose to take up a story hook presented by any complications. I think that sounds like it could be useful to keep thing rolling smoothly in a more sandbox type adventure.

Yeah, making them more proper solo skill challenges with a wider array of potential options to be pursued and room to come up with an argument for how an unlisted check could be employed could be good.


And -super- useful for games that rely on the "Gritty Realism" variant when it comes to healing/recovery. You get -tons- of downtime in those.

Do you really? :smallconfused:

I thought you spent all of your downtime recovering from being hacked to bits and thus not able to actually engage in any downtime activities except recuperating due to the limitations on what you can do in order to actually benefit from a short or long rest.


And that's during 'downtime'. Not time to go to work, sleep, etc.

Eh? :smallconfused:

You do most Downtime activities in lieu of working. Except for the ones that actually deal with working.


Most of this article boils down to the concept that: Hey look GM's want a way to screw your players over while doing simple downtime activities that should take 10 mins, now you can use complications and foils to be able to cheat them and not have their actual skills, role playing, or class abilities mean anything. Yay.

Yeah, could have done with less standardization of being screwed and more presentation of complications and things that aren't just bad as ways to flesh out and make side stories out of Downtime activities all on its own.

Although waking up married is pretty lulzy.


a +3 weapon isn't the type of magic item you should get with downtime activities at all. Two years is nothing.

It's either nothing or it's more downtime than a person will see over the course of several games.

Which, admittedly, can make it hard for them to set a balance point.

But to say that PCs should always be too incompetent to make anything actually of note is also silly.


It got made because many people have been badgering the game creators for this for the past couple years.

I don't think there's really that vocal a group of people asking for more ways to be screwed over by the DM. Sensible crafting rules, on the other hand...


Basically half items value in materials, access to needed equipment, and a number of workweeks equal to the items value divided by 50. Items sell for listed price. For regular items Magic Items have more complex rules.

It kind of makes sense since it means items that take longer to make are more expensive.

And since it's 50 gp of progress for 5 days of work, that conveniently gives us 10 gp per diem to make it 70 gp of progress per week for those who don't have weekends.


there's a difference between "the rules don't assume the PCs have magic items" and "the rules assume the PCs don't have magic items".

scrolls don't need to be stupidly expensive to make, nor do they need to take years to craft, because the game doesn't revolve around making sure that the party don't have magic items, it simply is designed to function without the PCs absolutely needing to have magic items. personally, i'd much prefer if they simply gated the creation of scrolls and potions by requiring that you obtain special equipment (a writing table made from a CR-appropriate creature that you have petrified to craft a flesh to stone scroll, or a wooden bowl given freely to you by a dryad and from her home tree to brew a philtre of love, for example).

Well said.

As far as ways of playing gatekeeper, that seems more honest and more conducive to having fun with it.

[LudicSavant]

there's a difference between "the rules don't assume the PCs have magic items" and "the rules assume the PCs don't have magic items".

scrolls don't need to be stupidly expensive to make, nor do they need to take years to craft, because the game doesn't revolve around making sure that the party don't have magic items, it simply is designed to function without the PCs absolutely needing to have magic items. personally, i'd much prefer if they simply gated the creation of scrolls and potions by requiring that you obtain special equipment (a writing table made from a CR-appropriate creature that you have petrified to craft a flesh to stone scroll, or a wooden bowl given freely to you by a dryad and from her home tree to brew a philtre of love, for example).

I like that. Special equipment, schemas, monster parts and other quest requirements, and the like are all great IMHO.


Does anyone else think it is odd that the gambling section includes a Charisma(Intimidate) check, but no option for a check using proficency in gaming equipment (cards, dice, etc)?

The "three specific checks" systems (used for crime, gambling, and pit fighting) seems to leave out a lot of options of this sort, unfortunately.

[pwykersotz]

there's a difference between "the rules don't assume the PCs have magic items" and "the rules assume the PCs don't have magic items".

scrolls don't need to be stupidly expensive to make, nor do they need to take years to craft, because the game doesn't revolve around making sure that the party don't have magic items, it simply is designed to function without the PCs absolutely needing to have magic items. personally, i'd much prefer if they simply gated the creation of scrolls and potions by requiring that you obtain special equipment (a writing table made from a CR-appropriate creature that you have petrified to craft a flesh to stone scroll, or a wooden bowl given freely to you by a dryad and from her home tree to brew a philtre of love, for example).

Or something like Teleportation Circle where it requires a baking time.

Make creating a scroll take X cost and the loss of a spell slot. Have the scroll lose its power in 1 day unless another spell slot is spent to refresh it. After X time (probably a week or a month, maybe longer for the top level stuff) if you have kept it refreshed the entire time, the scroll becomes fully powered and autonomous from the caster.

Giving it a cost helps offset the power to hand out your spells to others. If this isn't enough, another type of cost could probably be imagined. The loss of a spell slot means minimal unbalancing of combat options for a party, but the eventual autonomy makes it possible to actually have a stash of scrolls and get some benefit from downtime.

And of course, if you don't want all players having Find Familiar and Find Steed then just blacklist those spells or set up criteria for scrolls like a casting time limit, or maybe say that after X time, ALL the effects of a scroll fade.

[Lonely Tylenol]

So right away Whisper's complaints are either completely unfounded or completely intentional. On top of that, I see a lot of vitriol towards what is ultimately OPTIONAL consequences. You know what I see when I look at Complications and Foils? I see Session 0s having new and exciting ways to get off the ground. I see ways to bridge the gap between one campaign and another by allowing a Foil to drag the players back into the adventuring life. I see tons of completely optional potential here that has probably already happened in one of your campaigns. I see it happen all the time. A totally inconsequential NPC spawns an entire adventure because your players are crazy. This seems like a way to control or guide that experience, without necessarily railroading them. (Hell, one of the PCs in a campaign I'm in got swindled by a merchant, and now he's on a quest to track the man down and get a refund (or kill him). It's completely taken over whatever other objectives we might have had before. Boom, Foil.)

Exactly. My new campaign has a character who moonlights as a contract killer. Working on each individual hit, with the scope and direction that a hit can go, would take a lot of time, which leaves the other five players just sort of twiddling their thumbs. I can use the "Crime" options to shorten the process considerably at the table, to create an abstraction that simplifies the event at the table and allows me to expound on it with him in private, without the rest of the group waiting on him.

But on top of that, his very first hit is a lady of noble birth who owns an inn... And leaves behind an adult son. The party leaves town the next day. This man's the son of an innkeeper—not exactly "main villain" material, although he will likely obsess over bringing his mother's killer to justice regardless—but he's perfect foil material, and having a structure for creating foils, and a range of in-built options for a way that such a character might act against the party's interests through a range of minor transgressions.


I don't know. I feel like there's an excessive amount of knee-jerking and hate being slung around for something I personally see a lot of great uses for. It's kind of like the Mystic Quirks. People seemed to really lash out against those specifically, despite the fact that they were totally optional. Do people just hate roleplaying on this forum? Just gotta number crunch a min/max build and then complain about how OP it is?

Holy Hell, the quirks are the best part of the class for me. The Mystic in my group can never get a player's name right, so he mispronounces the names of all the NPCs, which is easy enough, but he's also made it a point not to repeat the PC's mispronunciations, so he's made up a list of fake names that he calls every single PC. It's great.


Thought I would add, I certainly agree that Tool Proficiency should be factored into this equation. At a minimum, they should grant Advantage on the check, or be allowed to substitute the ability check.

Agreed; this is the one thing that sticks with me. A gambler should use their proficiency with a gaming kit, and people with expertise in tool kits should somehow be able to work faster than those with normal proficiency, to reflect the quick work of a polished routine. &c, &c. On the whole, though, this represents a very diverse list of options, some of which aren't mathematically perfect or structurally sound in their choices, but act as a great compass for people who don't know what to do with their spare time in a fantasy setting (which, if past history of gaming groups is any indicator, is "most of them").

[LordCdrMilitant]

Well, they do say that these are geared more for players at levels 1-10, the stuff you're talking about is more of a higher level thing. The DMG does have some guidelines to help with this sort of stuff, starting at page 126.

Not really. I've GM'ed for a noble who managed his estate during downtime, and had to track serfs and agricultural production and establish export contracts and purchase equipment from starting level, I've been in campaigns where the party rules a minor nation at high level, and I'm currently playing as a level 6 wizard noblewoman who serves as the master of finances for the party's trading vessel and deals with the contracting of crew, the provisioning of the ship, the arranging of shipping contracts, the purchasing of goods for speculative trading, the processing of docking paperwork and customs, etc.

It really just strikes me as a set to rules to handwave non-stabby bits of campaigns, not actually facilitate downtime activities. In the current campaign in which I play, we spent 3 sessions carousing at the noble's party, 2 sessions committing a robbery, and at least 1 session at a gambling hall, and an uncountable number of portions of session talking to dockmasters, partying in taverns, meeting trade contacts, talking to warehouse lords, committing petty crime, etc.

It would be nice to have numbers so I could work out how much I have to pay the sailors aboard the ship, and how many tons of cloth I can buy for 30000GP under a variety of market conditions, how much I can sell a few dozen tons of furniture for under given conditions, how many laborers I need to work the fields, how much money a storefront can make, etc. The stuff provided just provides a way to handwave the results of events where the party wasn't murdering their way through a random-monster infested underground maze like grave-robbing hobos.

My current party spend 3 sessions at a noble's party being social, 2 sessions committing a robbery, at least 1 session strategizing with insurrectionist leaders, an uncountable number of parts of sessions hanging out in taverns gambling, meeting with gang lords, drinking with the middle class, talking to dockmasters, recruiting employees, negotiating with businessmen, preaching to the populace, etc. I feel like the rules presented in this UA exist to handwave away such activities from the session, when they form the bulk of the campaign [at least for us].

[DragonSorcererX]

I was going to ignore this UA, but them I saw buying/crafting MAGIC ITEMS! YES! HIGH MAGIC INTENSIFIES!

[Bahamut7]

This is the unearthed arcana I have been waiting for most. One of my DMs tends to not like to give out items as much as others which leads me to creating characters that are self reliant as possible. In the recent campaign, we need a healer, I volunteered to take up potion brewing assuming he would allow my character to pick up the herbalism kit, gain proficiency, and if the potion brewing rules aren't too unviable. While not horrible, I feel that they lack a compromise for batch brewing. Sure, I can spend one day for 50 GP creating one potion...what if I have a cauldron, gained the appropriate amount of ingredients, and went to brewing? Would Is till only be able to pump out 1 potion a day? Makes no sense. I'm find with the limitations of the herb kit to be 1 potion a day typically, but being able to produce enough to help the party before a raid would be more feasible. Also, does it require the whole day of me stirring the pot so to say or more of a shake and bake for 24 hrs?

The only other thing that stood out in this arcana was the locator fee for getting magic items. You have to pay a small fee to find a dealer and then pay for the item?

[Spellbreaker26]

I love how there is now a table for creating a sitcom arch-nemesis for the various party members.

[Jerrykhor]

I'm not very happy with this UA. After so long, they can't even come up with proper alchemy and potion making rules. I don't like the fact that all non-healing potions are lumped together with magic items by the same rarity and cost. Potions are one-time use only, so they should be cheaper and faster to make than permanent magic items.

[LudicSavant]

How long do you think it should take to craft a scroll of wish?

I would think that the primary time components would be:
- Achieving the level necessary to cast Wish in the first place (17+).
- Gathering the necessary reagents, which could involve all sorts of high level quest requirements.
- Learning how to make the item in the first place.
- Going through a number of procedural steps to advance the crafting of the magic item (maybe even think something almost like... hmm... legacy rites? Or see the link below)
- Acquiring a massive pile of money (though probably not so massive that it's almost 3 times as much as a Luck Blade or Ring of Three Wishes. Actually the Luck Blade / Ring of Three Wishes are even cheaper than that if store-bought rather than crafted, by the UA guidelines... somehow)

After all that? I think it wouldn't have to be all that long in terms of raw man-hours. I mean generally the wizard would be far better off just, you know, casting the spell themselves. And we're talking about a person who can spend her hours defeating actual gods or personally powering city-states. It seems rather preposterous that these folks are popping up and creating magic items which are then sold for less than the cost of materials (let alone the labor cost of such a powerful mage).


Easy crafting rules would screw up everything.

Who said anything about easy crafting? It should totally be like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_9fqucbEV4

[ad_hoc]

It really just strikes me as a set to rules to handwave non-stabby bits of campaigns, not actually facilitate downtime activities. In the current campaign in which I play, we spent 3 sessions carousing at the noble's party, 2 sessions committing a robbery, and at least 1 session at a gambling hall, and an uncountable number of portions of session talking to dockmasters, partying in taverns, meeting trade contacts, talking to warehouse lords, committing petty crime, etc.


The game isn't designed for this kind of play.

If you're having fun then by all means continue, you just shouldn't expect rules support for it. I mean, the game isn't designed with this in mind, why would you think it would be supported by rules supplements?

[LordCdrMilitant]

The game isn't designed for this kind of play.

If you're having fun then by all means continue, you just shouldn't expect rules support for it. I mean, the game isn't designed with this in mind, why would you think it would be supported by rules supplements?

And why exactly isn't it designed for this kind of play. That's why there's skill checks for Deception, Charm, Intimidate, and Diplomacy. That's why there's Slight of Hand, History, Religion, Stealth, etc. That's why backgrounds give you things like criminal contacts and noble retainers. A roleplay game without roleplay is a bad tactical fighting game.

[skaddix]

What I want:

A new warlock pact or 2, or even better, Warlock 2.0 like they did with the ranger rebuild.
A fixed Kensai Monk v2.
Magic items or feats for classes that do not fit the normal mold.
ex. Where are the magic holy symbols, or magical +1, +2, +3 instruments or other foci for Bards, Clerics, or Paladins?
There is sharpshooter and Great weapon master for pushing those fighting styles through the roof on damage, where is the ones for other fighting styles.
I really, really, want a duelist subclass for fighter or even monk. I miss my unarmored fencer.
New weapons and actual weapon traits.

What I expect:

More spells, or caster specialties.
Subclasses that make full casters take the place of martials.

I say the problem with Warlocks is pretty extreme. But its different from Ranger...in that Warlocks are screwed due to Short Rest Mechanics.

Short Rest is currently too long to expect the 2-3 times a day that the PHB suggest. Granted this makes sense too short of a short rest and Warlocks would be super broken. If a short rest was 5 mins it be insanely OP. I am curious to see how broken it be at 10, 15, 20 or 30 mins.

Beyond that invocation tax is heavy especially for Bladelocks. Not fighting style, have to pay for extra attack, weapon +1-3 and improved smite? Either boost the number of invocations or give bladelock some stuff for free.

No versatility in shaping Eldritich Blast.

Course, they can start with the same place they should for sorcerers....Bonus Spell List for free no selection required.

Simple Fixes:
1) 3.5X Spells, No More Short Rest or Standardize it for all classes no class should be balanced using that alone, all full casters get Arcane Recovery Equivalent
2) Bonus Spell List Added for Free
3) Toss the Warlock some More Invocations, 2-3 maybe require it be pact specific ala the Mystic?
4) Bonus: Give Me The ability to shape Eldritch Blast Again. This requires some work though I suppose, the other 3 are Simple.

As for the actual UA...meh they decided to balance 5e as a low magic setting hence the absurd brewing, crafting and scribing times. I prefer a middle magic balance. Not so low its like this but not so common even the Baker is using magic to bake bread.

Simple Fix
1) I divide all workweeks by 10 and convert that to work hours.

[ad_hoc]

And why exactly isn't it designed for this kind of play. That's why there's skill checks for Deception, Charm, Intimidate, and Diplomacy. That's why there's Slight of Hand, History, Religion, Stealth, etc. That's why backgrounds give you things like criminal contacts and noble retainers. A roleplay game without roleplay is a bad tactical fighting game.

It's designed for 3 pillars of play, Combat, Social Interaction, and Exploration. All of which contain role playing.

The skill system is very simple and bare bones. It succeeds very well at allowing characters to perform a variety of tasks with tension.

What it isn't, is nuanced.

The game isn't designed to be played where you talk to nobles at fancy parties for hours at a time. It just isn't. It's Dungeons and Dragons. It's designed to reduce that to a few minutes of real time talking, and possibly a roll. It isn't designed for the kind of game you play because doing so would make it a different game. It's like asking why a computer game involves a computer. Someone decided that's the kind of game they were making.

Having a criminal contact doesn't mean that you need to spend hours of real time talking to that contact. You can meaningfully resolve what you want to do with your contact within seconds or minutes.

[LordCdrMilitant]

It's designed for 3 pillars of play, Combat, Social Interaction, and Exploration. All of which contain role playing.

The skill system is very simple and bare bones. It succeeds very well at allowing characters to perform a variety of tasks with tension.

What it isn't, is nuanced.

The game isn't designed to be played where you talk to nobles at fancy parties for hours at a time. It just isn't. It's Dungeons and Dragons. It's designed to reduce that to a few minutes of real time talking, and possibly a roll. It isn't designed for the kind of game you play because doing so would make it a different game. It's like asking why a computer game involves a computer. Someone decided that's the kind of game they were making.

Having a criminal contact doesn't mean that you need to spend hours of real time talking to that contact. You can meaningfully resolve what you want to do with your contact within seconds or minutes.

I will agree that 5e has a disappointing skill set compared to previous editions. However, they also added more social interaction mechanical features through backgrounds, so social interaction isn't dead. And social interaction, exploration, and combat are all equal elements of a roleplay game, so I can't really say I'm particularly infatuated with the idea of reducing everything that isn't "I STAB RANDOM MONSTER X IN THE FACE" to a single roll or roll set without any sort of anything on the player's part whatsoever. Robbing a bank is a combat situation anyway, and is certainly something that should be done as a part of a session. Same for carousing with the nobility, or meeting with gang lords in a tavern.

[SharkForce]

I will agree that 5e has a disappointing skill set compared to previous editions. However, they also added more social interaction mechanical features through backgrounds, so social interaction isn't dead. And social interaction, exploration, and combat are all equal elements of a roleplay game, so I can't really say I'm particularly infatuated with the idea of reducing everything that isn't "I STAB RANDOM MONSTER X IN THE FACE" to a single roll or roll set without any sort of anything on the player's part whatsoever. Robbing a bank is a combat situation anyway, and is certainly something that should be done as a part of a session. Same for carousing with the nobility, or meeting with gang lords in a tavern.

you're not wrong to enjoy that, or to include it in your game...

but you're just setting yourself up for disappointment if you expect material to be written for you. the stuff you're doing is not something people associate with D&D. certainly, you can do those sorts of things while playing D&D... but it isn't really the focus of the game. as a result, that isn't where a lot of design effort is going.

if you want a game that supports those elements more firmly and has a more robust set of rules for that, there are probably better systems for it.

(but, if you have your heart set on this kind of thing in D&D, i might suggest that you try and track down some birthright fans and ask them if they've come up with anything useful).

[Kane0]

Proficiency in a relevant tool allows either advantage on one check or using the tool check instead of a skill check doing the appropriate downtime acticity. That should help.

[LordCdrMilitant]

you're not wrong to enjoy that, or to include it in your game...

but you're just setting yourself up for disappointment if you expect material to be written for you. the stuff you're doing is not something people associate with D&D. certainly, you can do those sorts of things while playing D&D... but it isn't really the focus of the game. as a result, that isn't where a lot of design effort is going.

if you want a game that supports those elements more firmly and has a more robust set of rules for that, there are probably better systems for it.

(but, if you have your heart set on this kind of thing in D&D, i might suggest that you try and track down some birthright fans and ask them if they've come up with anything useful).

Oh, there are. But D&D's an introductory system. I'm not expecting rules for the nitty-gritty details of assigns overseers and serfs to manage the planting, harvesting, and exportation of grain by the day for a noble estate, but I think the mechanisms for "downtime" presented here reduce the entirety of the social interaction pillar of roleplay to "roll a die, you make 1000 gp from your bank robbery attempt, the end", and "roll a die, you make 2 friends in the local nobility, the end".

And I'd certainly disagree with the sentiment that social interaction isn't focus of the game [at least, without this UA. This UA definitely takes the stance that social interaction doesn't matter and is just what you do when you're prepping for your next grave-robbing expedition into a maze full of random monsters]. So I sort of expect that playtest material would support all three elements of an RPG.

[SharkForce]

Oh, there are. But D&D's an introductory system. I'm not expecting rules for the nitty-gritty details of assigns overseers and serfs to manage the planting, harvesting, and exportation of grain by the day for a noble estate, but I think the mechanisms for "downtime" presented here reduce the entirety of the social interaction pillar of roleplay to "roll a die, you make 1000 gp from your bank robbery attempt, the end", and "roll a die, you make 2 friends in the local nobility, the end".

And I'd certainly disagree with the sentiment that social interaction isn't focus of the game [at least, without this UA. This UA definitely takes the stance that social interaction doesn't matter and is just what you do when you're prepping for your next grave-robbing expedition into a maze full of random monsters]. So I sort of expect that playtest material would support all three elements of an RPG.

it isn't that social interaction isn't a focus of the game. it's that it isn't a focus of the rules, and it never has been in any edition of D&D that i'm aware of.

[McNinja]

I know that UA's are supposed to be more of a "beta" test than anything, but recently some of these UA's have been kind of... bad. First was the UA with the theurge, which was absurd for obvious reasons, then the starter spells (some were good, some were weird, and sorcerers got shafted), the trio of subclasses seemed adequate, but the new Oath was weird and would be very hard to play in any group or setting, and now these downtime activities that don't take into account the proper skill checks, tool checks, or combat abilities and crafting rules that would either cost an excessive amount of gold or take an absurd amount of time to complete. If I wanted to spend ten years doing something, I'd hire a ton of mercenaries to help me track down and clear out ruins/dungeons to obtain/sell magic items. I mean, if you have to get reagents from powerful creatures anyway, then just kill it and take all of its stuff in addition to its kidney or whatever you need.

I'll be glad when UA's start getting published twice a month instead of weekly, maybe they'll be able to put more than an ounce of thought into these.

[ad_hoc]

Oh, there are. But D&D's an introductory system. I'm not expecting rules for the nitty-gritty details of assigns overseers and serfs to manage the planting, harvesting, and exportation of grain by the day for a noble estate, but I think the mechanisms for "downtime" presented here reduce the entirety of the social interaction pillar of roleplay to "roll a die, you make 1000 gp from your bank robbery attempt, the end", and "roll a die, you make 2 friends in the local nobility, the end".

They really don't. They allow individual characters to do things specific to those characters.

D&D is a game set up around a party of characters. These are nice rules that allow characters to do their own thing in a timely fashion.



And I'd certainly disagree with the sentiment that social interaction isn't focus of the game [at least, without this UA. This UA definitely takes the stance that social interaction doesn't matter and is just what you do when you're prepping for your next grave-robbing expedition into a maze full of random monsters]. So I sort of expect that playtest material would support all three elements of an RPG.

Social interaction is 1/3 of the game, but it isn't all of the game and it is handled differently in D&D than how you handle it.

There is plenty of social interaction in the published adventures without spending multiple sessions talking to nobles. This UA does nothing to diminish that.

The way you play D&D is far from the norm. That doesn't make it bad, but you really should realize that rules aren't going to be written for you because catering to your sort of game isn't part of the design goals.

[Mhl7]

Oh, there are. But D&D's an introductory system. I'm not expecting rules for the nitty-gritty details of assigns overseers and serfs to manage the planting, harvesting, and exportation of grain by the day for a noble estate, but I think the mechanisms for "downtime" presented here reduce the entirety of the social interaction pillar of roleplay to "roll a die, you make 1000 gp from your bank robbery attempt, the end", and "roll a die, you make 2 friends in the local nobility, the end".

And I'd certainly disagree with the sentiment that social interaction isn't focus of the game [at least, without this UA. This UA definitely takes the stance that social interaction doesn't matter and is just what you do when you're prepping for your next grave-robbing expedition into a maze full of random monsters]. So I sort of expect that playtest material would support all three elements of an RPG.

Social interaction is still a focus of the game. These rules are meant to handle downtime activity, this is NOT the focus of the game.

So, there are the three pillars which we all know and love, but what these rules are trying to achieve is something different. It is another kind of distinction: main time and downtime.
You can have all of the three pillars in Main time and in Downtime. However, they are treated differently according to how relevant they are.
So for example, let's talk social interaction:
-Main time: You want to make friend with the goblin minion that serve the evil necromancer to convince him lay down the map of his master liar. Go ahead and do your convincing talk to the goblin, we can gladly spend one hour in real time to do it if you so like.
-Downtime: your character wants to set up trading company in the frontier town, but needs to have friends in the council. Well, do a check and see what happens: don't bother the other players with it. If you succeed you make friend with two nobles. (I am using your example here)

Now, for combat:
-Main time: well, you already know this. Roll initiative, character turn ecc..
-Downtime: "I want to rob a bank so that I can boast it with my friend." "Roll stealth" "4" "You spend a month in jail. Next one"*

Well, you can come up for your own examples for exploration, you got the idea.

*Your example again. You used this example as social interaction, I would rather say that it is combat or exploration. Which, by the way, goes against your thesis as you are providing examples of situation in which also combat is waved in D&D and not only social activity. (In case you want to argue: No, you cannot tell me that a bank robbery is social interaction more than it is combat or exploration!)

[Strill]

These threads are always garbage because some moron makes them before the UA is up, so you have to go through four pages of crap to get to the actual discussion. The least the OP could do is post a link to where the bull**** stops.

[mephnick]

These threads are always garbage because some moron makes them before the UA is up, so you have to go through four pages of crap to get to the actual discussion. The least the OP could do is post a link to where the bull**** stops.

Agreed. It's like a Special Olympics race to be the first person to set up the thread. Do we need a UA PREDICTION thread every single time these things come out? Just wait a damn day and post the real article.

At least the stupid mystic and downtime ones are over with so people can stop begging for them.

[Unoriginal]

So, sport fighting like boxing and wrestling are under Athletics... well, that's pretty obvious, in retrospect.



Also, I'm pretty surprised that people are complaining that crafting high-level magic items, even scrolls, take a very long time.

I mean, it was pretty much spelled out in all the published content on the question of magic items since day 1.

[DanyBallon]

Agreed. It's like a Special Olympics race to be the first person to set up the thread. Do we need a UA PREDICTION thread every single time these things come out? Just wait a damn day and post the real article.

At least the stupid mystic and downtime ones are over with so people can stop begging for them.

You realize that the thread was created about an hour prior to the usual release time and the OP was asking if there was to be a UA today or not as in the last UA they said that they will go back to a monthly release in april. So he was wondering if that meant that last week UA was the only one for the month or if it will revert to monthly release after the end of april. Only afterward people started speculating on this UA release content.

[zeek0]

it isn't that social interaction isn't a focus of the game. it's that it isn't a focus of the rules, and it never has been in any edition of D&D that i'm aware of.

I'd like to echo this. Rules aren't necessary to have meaningful roleplaying conversations, only quality DMs and players.

Some game like Fiasco are entirely based off of machinations an social interactions, but have few rules on how to adjudicate this.

I'd like to finally note that, if published, this would still be *optional*.

[Theodoxus]

I see their crafting potions and scrolls and counter with my own:

Potions:
Crafting potions normally requires an Alchemy Formula. Casters can attempt to brew potions by passing an Intelligence check, DC = 10 + the spell’s level. Having the Alchemist Kit tool provides proficiency for the check. The caster must have the spell to be brewed prepared.
Material Cost: 50 gp per slot level (minimum 50 gp), representing the alchemical supplies and specialized vials required for brewing potions. Doubling the material cost allows for the chance to create three or four times the volume. Roll a separate Alchemy (Int) check with the same DC to brew the potion. If you succeed, you brew enough for three vials. If you pass the check by twice or more, you brew enough for 4 vials. If you fail the check, you manage to salvage enough to make a single vial.
Magical Cost: The spell slot (or spell points) for which the spell being brewed. The slot (points) is considered expended for 1 week, as long as the potion isn’t used. The slot (points) returns on the next long rest once the potion is used. The slot (points) also returns on the first long rest after 7 days from the creation of the potion. Note: in case of cantrips, the caster loses access to the cantrip while the potion is brewing.
Time: 24 hours to brew a batch, regardless of size. However, you can have different potions brewing (unique spells, you can’t concentrate on two batches of the same potion at the same time) equal to your highest spell level. For instance, if you’re 5th level, your highest spell level is 3. You could brew a potion of Expeditious Retreat, a potion of Protection from Evil and Good and a potion of Fog Cloud simultaneously, provided you paid the material and magical costs for all three.
Types of potions
Elixirs – consumed to gain the benefit of a spell. Normal max duration, does not require concentration.
Oils – poured, possibly smashed against armor or a shield. Provides a benefit to equipment. Does not require concentration.
Grenade – thrown vials, using a ranged strength attack vs the target AC. A miss causes the grenade to fall short by a number of feet equal to the difference. For instance, if you’re throwing a grenade at a creature with AC 17 and roll a total of 8 to hit, the grenade lands 9 feet short of the target – possibly affecting creatures and players you didn’t intend. Grenades typically create an effect at the target location and 5’ around it (9 total squares). Some specific grenades have a larger radius, mentioned in the effect. Does not require concentration for durations longer than instantaneous.


Spell
Level
School
Potion Type
Effect


Absorb Elements
1
Abjuration
Elixir
As spell


Acid Splash
0
Conjuration
Grenade
As spell


Aid
2
Abjuration
Elixir
As spell, only affects imbiber.



Alarm
1
Abjuration
Oil
As spell



Alter Self
2
Transmutation
Elixir
As spell



Animate Dead
3
Necromancy
Oil
As spell, undead created are free roaming.



Arcane Lock
2
Abjuration
Oil
As spell



Armor of Agathys
1
Abjuration
Oil
As spell






Scrolls:
Crafting scrolls normally requires an Inscription Formula. Casters can attempt to scribe scrolls by passing a Dexterity check, DC = 10 + the spell’s level. Having the Calligrapher’s Supplies tool provides proficiency for the check. The caster must have the spell to be inscribed prepared. A wizard can’t scribe a scroll by copying it from his spellbook, even as a ritual.
Material Cost: 25 gp per slot level, representing the specialized vellum and inks. Any material component cost necessary to cast the spell must be included when scribing the scroll.
Magical Cost: The spell slot (or spell points) for which the spell being inscribed is being cast. The slot (points) is considered expended for 1 week, as long as the scroll isn’t used. The slot (points) returns on the next long rest once the scroll is used. The slot (points) also returns on the first long rest after 7 days from the creation of the scroll.
Time: 1 hour per spell level. (See below)
Note: Wizards scribe scrolls at half the cost and time for their specialization. Sorcerers can scribe known metamagics onto their scrolls at no additional cost.
Rituals can be scribed, however, the scribing time is increased to 4 hours per spell level. No slot or points are expended, per normal use of rituals. Note: casting from a scroll is an Action, even if a ritual was inscribed.
Cantrips cannot be scribed.

[Beelzebubba]

^^^ seems way too cheap to me. Any mid level party will have dozens of scrolls and potions to burn every adventure.

Overall, I like it. The non-combat parts of D&D have always been weak, and at the very least, this gives a lot of ideas to GMs on how to make a rich, involving world to put the players into.

I love the idea of having to bail the Rogue out of jail. Didn't any of you have 'that' friend in college, that needed help like that? Not someone you want to know as an adult, but when you're young, they can make life a lot more interesting.

[EvilAnagram]

I think we have to acknowledge something here: the D&D writers do not understand what a foil is, and they are now publicly misusing the term. I feel kind of embarrassed on their behalf, and it's actually causing me some anxiety.

[Malifice]

I love these rules.

Haven't had a chance yet to see exactly how balanced they are and would love a skill check to be used to perhaps reduce the time spent crafting.

Now at the end of the session I can indicate to the players that they will be a few weeks down time between now and the next adventure (the next session). They can then go away during the week and have a think about what they want to do during their downtime.

[TentacleSurpris]

I see their crafting potions and scrolls and counter with my own:

Potions:
Crafting potions normally requires an Alchemy Formula. Casters can attempt to brew potions by passing an Intelligence check, DC = 10 + the spell’s level. Having the Alchemist Kit tool provides proficiency for the check. The caster must have the spell to be brewed prepared.

Nice, but I would add that a Herbalist's kit should be able to make potions as well. Woods witches were brewing potions for thousands of years before educated alchemists.

[McNinja]

So, sport fighting like boxing and wrestling are under Athletics... well, that's pretty obvious, in retrospect.



Also, I'm pretty surprised that people are complaining that crafting high-level magic items, even scrolls, take a very long time.

I mean, it was pretty much spelled out in all the published content on the question of magic items since day 1. it can cost more to make a single use high level scroll than a holy ****ing avenger. That's absurd.

And yes, sports require Athletics... But fighting should use the rules for fighting.

[Spellbreaker26]

it can cost more to make a single use high level scroll than a holy ****ing avenger. That's absurd.



That scroll could potentially be a wish spell...

[LudicSavant]

That scroll could potentially be a wish spell...

And the item it costs considerably more than could be a ring of three wishes or a luckblade.

[Spellbreaker26]

And the item it costs considerably more than could be a ring of three wishes or a luckblade.

True. Personally if I was GMing I would never let players get their hands on either of those, either by crafting or other means. There's just too much chaos that they can cause.

[Biggstick]

So that when the Rogue says "I go steal stuff!" the DM can roll a few quick checks and move on, instead of having to play out an entire solo adventure? Ditto for stuff like carousing and pit fighting-- the idea seems to be that when the party splits off to do their own stuff, you can resolve it quickly, easily, and flavorfully. Complications seem like a decent way to introduce a wrinkle into things, so the exchange is something like:

Bob: "I want to rob the count!"
DM: "Okay, that'll be a Hard DC... roll your checks."
Bob: "Uhh... pass, pass, fail."
DM: "Okay, you get away with a hundred gold worth of loot, but... <rolls> a Paladin swears vengeance on the thief."
Bob: "Crap! Can I lay a false trail? I'll pass off a distinctive item to a local thief and see what they do with it."
DM: "Charisma (Deception)?"
Bob: "18."
DM: "Cool. The Paladin drags Timmy the Fish away in chains, and you get away clean. Sarah, what do you want to do?"

As for the long magic item crafting times... so? Taking 10 years to craft a legendary item seems entirely friggin reasonable. If anything, it seems too short-- these are supposed to be, like, someone's life's work. Scrolls? Two years to make a scroll of one of the most powerful spells in existence seems, again, like the kind of timing you'd expect. How long do you think it should take to craft a scroll of wish? They're not practical for fast-past adventures, sure, but they make a certain amount of in-setting sense, which 5e rules sometimes ignore, and which seems particularly important for downtime rules. They shouldn't be as easy or accessible as they were in 3.5-- this is 5th edition, magic items are supposed to be rare and special and are not assumed at all by the rules. Easy crafting rules would screw up everything.

Literally everything in this post is what this week's UA is all about. I, as a new DM utilizing Faerun and a lot of the Sword Coast, absolutely love everything presented this week.

As Grod stated, this week is for Players to still have their own identity while not sucking up an hour and a half planning their heist or gambling venture. This allows for PCs who's story isn't the focus of what the campaign is about still further their own story in a way that doesn't hurt the game.

DM: "Alright, everyone has made it to town successfully. The caravan is safe and sound, and the caravan master has dispersed your payment for escort services (100g, plus a bonus of 50g, for 150g total). You'll have a week of downtime upon arriving, and we'll pick up next session after that week of downtime. Shoot me a text or message (on applicable media) as to what you'd like to do during this downtime."

Rogue Criminal: Two days later. Hey DM, I'd like to find someone to steal from and make some money while in town.
DM: Alright, what kind of person are you looking to steal from?
Rogue Criminal: A merchant who can afford to lose it.
DM: Medium checks. Make your rolls.
-Proceeds with RP that doesn't necessarily get the party wrangled up in this PC's vocational choices.

Cleric Acolyte: Three days later. Hey DM, I'd really like to find a temple to perform some service at during my week of downtime.
DM: Mmk. Go ahead and make either a Religion or Persuasion check.
Cleric Acolyte: 14.
-Proceeds with RP that doesn't necessarily get the party wrangled up in this PC's vocational choices.

Etc. Etc.

DM: One week later at the start of the next session. Has either already explained the outcomes of each PC's downtime or takes the first 15-30 minutes resolving it at the start of the session. "Alright everyone, so after successfully escorting the caravan to town, each of you has spent a week or so in town. Everyone has done their own thing and come back to a pre-designated tavern to discuss what to do next. Describes tavern and a couple notable folks in said tavern. What now?"

I could go on about the awesomness of these tables in what they provide, but that won't really change the opinions of the posters who dislike the UA. I think most people are latching onto the long crafting times for magic items more then anything. As Grod said, a legendary item should be a life's work. It should take a while to craft (read: years) a Holy Avenger. For those who cite traditional weapons and armor as taking a certain amount of time irl, that's all well and good. How many real life Holy Avengers have been crafted? None, that's right. So the amount of time to pour this amount of magic or power into the weapon/armor/item isn't something that we have a real life equivalent for. The time required to actually craft magic items that the UA has presented makes sense for a world where magic items aren't supposed to be very common.

[Unoriginal]

Those are "Did my character manage to do X during the timeskip, DM?" rules. They seem to fulfill this function pretty well.


On another topic, does anyone else think that the Foil description rules seems to be a great way to quickly write down who a bad guy is and what their plot is, for even outside downtime?

[Beleriphon]

Summary:

People with higher persuasion checks, against all reason, have a harder time finding common magic items than super rare ones.
Buying things is frequently cheaper than crafting them, and the crafting rules math flies totally off the rails at higher levels. Time requirements can get pretty off the wall.
The "3 checks" system is used for several things here, and just plain seems like a deeply limited and flawed system which can't even begin to handle the variety of abilities that 5e D&D PCs have access to, even at level 1 (let alone 10).
If you're a scholar going through a library, you deserve more than a single narrow statement for anything but the most enigmatic of topics.
Things like running a business, building castles, or managing holdings are simply not covered. Why are we getting heists (which seems like it might be better suited to sessions anyways) rather than stuff like that? Oh well. Will take what we can get I guess :smallsmile:

The persuasion check for finding items seems appropriate, the thing about not being able to get more common items is strange. I'd honestly suggest that a quick fix is the check is that chart and previous options, and the player can pick which one they want to see. So there's still a random element in that they can't pick anything from any chart with a good roll, but that they can at least control what kinds of items they get access to.

Buying often is cheaper than crafting. Ever tried to make a couch? I can guarantee you can get one cheaper at IKEA. It's the crazy high levels where it starts to fall apart the most. Mundane items aren't that bad though.

As for the checks, it's a bit wonky but for a number of things like pit fighting (ie. gladiatorial fights) actual fighting ability isn't as important as being able to entertain the crowd. If you can get them cheering for you then you stand to gain a bigger share, since you showing up means more money for the organizer. Other stuff, I can take it or leave it but at least there is something in place for doing things other than major adventures. I look at the heists as the quests for the Thieves' Guild in Skyrim: a bunch of simple stuff designed as a minor time sink to get you the feeling of being a thief without making them a major part of the game.

The scholar thing should be one specific fact, from a monster stat block, in addition to information about what you're looking for. Want to know about duergar? They're underground dwarves that take slaves, and they are highly resistant to poison.

[Chaosmancer]

As for the long magic item crafting times... so? Taking 10 years to craft a legendary item seems entirely friggin reasonable. If anything, it seems too short-- these are supposed to be, like, someone's life's work. Scrolls? Two years to make a scroll of one of the most powerful spells in existence seems, again, like the kind of timing you'd expect. How long do you think it should take to craft a scroll of wish? They're not practical for fast-past adventures, sure, but they make a certain amount of in-setting sense, which 5e rules sometimes ignore, and which seems particularly important for downtime rules. They shouldn't be as easy or accessible as they were in 3.5-- this is 5th edition, magic items are supposed to be rare and special and are not assumed at all by the rules. Easy crafting rules would screw up everything.

See, I see where you are coming from with this, but to give a counter proposal.

What is a scroll? It is a piece of parchment with the magical formula written upon it. That makes it very similar to a spellbook does it not?

When the wizard hits level 17 after 3 months of adventuring through the ruins of the mega-dungeon and adds wish to his spellbook it takes... minutes? After all, the hard part was the theory that led him to understanding the nature of the spell. Then, after that boop of writing it down and they finally leave the dungeon he wants to craft a scroll to give to a party member.

It takes two years to copy the nine pages in his book which the spell was written on and costs him hundreds of thousands of gold during the process. Which is more than he earned in the dungeon, so actually impossible.

One of these things is not like the other.


There is also a larger issue at work here. As much as I agree the forging of a mystic item should be a thing of literary weight, time, and effort... the game doesn't support it.

Given the same materials, the apprentice and the master take the same amount of time, and high level items take years. How often do DMs say "we skip forward ten years with none of the villains having acted or been defeated"? Most of us want to keep the action and pacing, so we end up with worlds where people become very powerful very quickly, and then when we want them to create things in the world.... it takes longer to do that than it did to earn 15 levels and kill 3 dragons.

Also, crafting rules are for adventurers, they are an incentive toward adventuring over spending time doing mundane task. Nowhere it is written that a legendary dwarven blacksmith can't forge a +3 mithril battleaxe in a few weeks.

And this is just kind of insulting.

If the rules are designed to make it a better deal to adventure than to have downtime, then just have the downtime rules read "Why do you want to make things, go kill dragons, you aren't a merchant". Rules that de-incentivize you from using them are worse than useless.

And by the way, what would you call a level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge who is the Right hand of Moradin if not a Legendary Dwarven Blacksmith? However, if that person is a PC it takes them years to craft that axe instead of weeks.



you're not wrong to enjoy that, or to include it in your game...

but you're just setting yourself up for disappointment if you expect material to be written for you. the stuff you're doing is not something people associate with D&D. certainly, you can do those sorts of things while playing D&D... but it isn't really the focus of the game. as a result, that isn't where a lot of design effort is going.

if you want a game that supports those elements more firmly and has a more robust set of rules for that, there are probably better systems for it.

(but, if you have your heart set on this kind of thing in D&D, i might suggest that you try and track down some birthright fans and ask them if they've come up with anything useful).


I’m pulling your quote because it is at the end of the page, but I’m replying to both you and ad_hoc.

What are you people even talking about?!?!

Edit: Reading further, I’m going to soften my stance, but I’m keeping the original text because it was ranty and I don’t do that often

/Original
By the logic Ad_hoc is proposing if the three pillars are to be equal than combat should be:

“Roll melee against a DC 25, if you succeed you have slain the dragon and taken all its loot.”

Followed by: “Then I need you to roll Persuasion of DC 15 (modified due to your massive treasure) to convince the King to adopt you and marry the princess.”

At no point did I read LordCdrMilitant’s post and think they were talking out every second of a nobleman’s conversation, but DnD is clearly built to allow for nuanced interactions that could span the length of an entire party. It’s just like TV. I doubt anyone believe that they are shown every second of every hour of the character’s lives or interactions, it just cuts to the points of drama and tension and zooms in.

My group spent an entire session talking to a mysterious being that calls itself a god. I’ve had other games where we spent the entire session buying stuff. /original


And, I know for a fact, DnD used to give Fighter’s who reached a certain level Strongholds and titles, armies of men to follow them. That sort of stuff comes part and parcel with rules that talk about how to handle building such a structure, what sort of investments are required, and how much money you make from the local lands.

I would really like more rules that allow me to do this in DnD, perhaps faster than seems reasonable so my character can actually accomplish things if he’s got the money and power to do so without retiring the character and rolling a new one to continue the adventure, but trying to suggest the game can’t handle it seems a little absurd to me. It can and has in the past, maybe not successfully, but it has done it.


Social interaction is still a focus of the game. These rules are meant to handle downtime activity, this is NOT the focus of the game.

So, there are the three pillars which we all know and love, but what these rules are trying to achieve is something different. It is another kind of distinction: main time and downtime.
You can have all of the three pillars in Main time and in Downtime. However, they are treated differently according to how relevant they are.
So for example, let's talk social interaction:
-Main time: You want to make friend with the goblin minion that serve the evil necromancer to convince him lay down the map of his master liar. Go ahead and do your convincing talk to the goblin, we can gladly spend one hour in real time to do it if you so like.
-Downtime: your character wants to set up trading company in the frontier town, but needs to have friends in the council. Well, do a check and see what happens: don't bother the other players with it. If you succeed you make friend with two nobles. (I am using your example here)

Now, for combat:
-Main time: well, you already know this. Roll initiative, character turn ecc..
-Downtime: "I want to rob a bank so that I can boast it with my friend." "Roll stealth" "4" "You spend a month in jail. Next one"*

Well, you can come up for your own examples for exploration, you got the idea.

*Your example again. You used this example as social interaction, I would rather say that it is combat or exploration. Which, by the way, goes against your thesis as you are providing examples of situation in which also combat is waved in D&D and not only social activity. (In case you want to argue: No, you cannot tell me that a bank robbery is social interaction more than it is combat or exploration!)


I find this interesting, except, there are no Main time options for things like Crafting an item. What if my soldier character wants to go gambling with the local guards in an attempt to get information? Using the rules here get weird, but we don’t have other rules for gambling, these are the gambling rules.

That is part of the problem, some of these activities can be important for the story, but the rules limit the types of interactions and just seem utterly absurd in a few instances.


And the problem I remember from my last encounter with the crafting rules is still here.

I take a 5000 gold gem I found and make a necklace using it and gold wire. It will take me 100 weeks to complete because of the cost of the item.

The blacksmith can make an entire suite of Splint Armor in 4 weeks.

The Brewer can make 10 gallons of good beer in a week.

And none of it relies on skill, you can never get any better at it.

[DanyBallon]

If the rules are designed to make it a better deal to adventure than to have downtime, then just have the downtime rules read "Why do you want to make things, go kill dragons, you aren't a merchant". Rules that de-incentivize you from using them are worse than useless.

And by the way, what would you call a level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge who is the Right hand of Moradin if not a Legendary Dwarven Blacksmith? However, if that person is a PC it takes them years to craft that axe instead of weeks.




A level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge, is 20th level Dwarven Cleric of the Forge, he's an servant of Moradin, and make sure to spread is word and defend it's clergy, he has renown skills as a blacksmith, but his adventuring takes so much time that he ain't as good a a legendary blacksmith that might have mechanically the stats of a commoner. NPCs and PCs don't follow the same rules. PCs are meant for adventuring and downtime activities are there to help flesh out what they do outside of adventuring. They can be an excuse for a leave of many years (i.e. crafting a set of full plate, or a 9th level spell scroll). But they are not the main purpose of adventuring. You could not use them at all and just verbally explain what your character did between his adventures, or use the downtime rule.

[Biggstick]

See, I see where you are coming from with this, but to give a counter proposal.

What is a scroll? It is a piece of parchment with the magical formula written upon it. That makes it very similar to a spellbook does it not?

When the wizard hits level 17 after 3 months of adventuring through the ruins of the mega-dungeon and adds wish to his spellbook it takes... minutes? After all, the hard part was the theory that led him to understanding the nature of the spell. Then, after that boop of writing it down and they finally leave the dungeon he wants to craft a scroll to give to a party member.

It takes two years to copy the nine pages in his book which the spell was written on and costs him hundreds of thousands of gold during the process. Which is more than he earned in the dungeon, so actually impossible.

A scroll is not similar to a spellbook. A spellbook has the formula/hand movements/arcane requirements/magical incantations/everything else I haven't covered written in a way that the Wizard can understand. The Wizard now has to take one of the most complex spells in the entirety of the D&D universe and transcribe it to a single piece of parchment. The standard Wish spell takes up 9 pages of a Wizard's spellbook, and that's when the Wizard is probably using a shorthand s/he's extremely familiar with. Could you imagine trying to describe literally the most complex thing in the universe on a scroll and making it easy for anyone to use? That could take...years to figure out how to do. And then once you figure out how to do it, you might make it a tiny bit shorter to complete the next time.

Translating this theory in a way that the standard layman could use it is going to take quite a while. To translate it all to something the size of a standard spell scroll will also take time.


Given the same materials, the apprentice and the master take the same amount of time, and high level items take years. How often do DMs say "we skip forward ten years with none of the villains having acted or been defeated"? Most of us want to keep the action and pacing, so we end up with worlds where people become very powerful very quickly, and then when we want them to create things in the world.... it takes longer to do that than it did to earn 15 levels and kill 3 dragons.

I mean, I'd love to have a DM that allows for amounts of time to pass. I wouldn't want necessarily 10 years to pass in the lower levels of the game, but once I'm in the third/fourth tier, yeah, of course. It'd be awesome as you get to spend time influencing some of the smaller parts of the world.

As soon as one threat goes down, another always pops right back into it's place? To me that sounds boring. As soon as you kill the bad guy, another is going to show up. It makes you even wonder why you'd go about bringing the bad guy to justice as another one is going to pop up to take it's place. It might be better to just negotiate some sort of treaty with the bad guy in question, as it'd be an easier way to prevent another from arising.

Campaigns where the action and pacing are nonstop are boring to me. I think most players want to see their actions have some sort of effect on the world they're a part of. Killing a dragon that's threatening a kingdom should bring about a period of peace. Even if it's only a year or so in game time, the players should feel this reward in character and out of character.


And by the way, what would you call a level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge who is the Right hand of Moradin if not a Legendary Dwarven Blacksmith? However, if that person is a PC it takes them years to craft that axe instead of weeks.

I would personally say that a Forge Cleric is the Left hand of Moradin, as crafting the perfect weapon or suit of armor would be considered art imo. That's neither here nor there though. A level 20 PC can pretty much do what they want within certain guidelines imo. I don't think I've even seen a game where PC's are level 20, so I wouldn't really have too much of an idea on what can/can't be done.

I'd ask this question though. Once you're a level 20 PC, you probably don't have many adventures left. This type of character should be thinking about retirement pretty soon, thus granting the level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge "NPC status" in the world, allowing the DM to do what they wish with them.


At no point did I read LordCdrMilitant’s post and think they were talking out every second of a nobleman’s conversation, but DnD is clearly built to allow for nuanced interactions that could span the length of an entire party. It’s just like TV. I doubt anyone believe that they are shown every second of every hour of the character’s lives or interactions, it just cuts to the points of drama and tension and zooms in.

My group spent an entire session talking to a mysterious being that calls itself a god. I’ve had other games where we spent the entire session buying stuff.

Yeah, but not everyone wants to participate in the Criminal's stealing of silverware from the Noble person's house. Nor does everyone want to participate in the drunken antics of the Bard. Nor does everyone want to participate in the...etc etc.

It's up to the DM to know when these types of rules are going to be useful for their party. There will be times when it's beneficial for the entire party to be at the negotiation table to buy or sell a magic item. There will be times when it's beneficial for everyone to go to that important Noble's party. And...there will be times that it's not important, but the DM still wants the PC's to feel like they're playing their character without detracting too much from the primary story line.

These downtime activities allow for the DM and PC's to cut to the point of drama by breaking it down to a single (or few) sets of rolls based on the called for activity.


I would really like more rules that allow me to do this in DnD, perhaps faster than seems reasonable so my character can actually accomplish things if he’s got the money and power to do so without retiring the character and rolling a new one to continue the adventure, but trying to suggest the game can’t handle it seems a little absurd to me. It can and has in the past, maybe not successfully, but it has done it.

What things are you trying to accomplish with your money and power? The rules have built in suggestions for lowering the time involved in the crafting of something. Who's to say that you don't find people who can work round the clock on this item you want crafted? There are 24 hours in a day, and I'm assuming the crafting rules are based on the 8 hour working day rather then a full 24 hour day. Who's to say you can't purchase the spell casting of a local temple to cast Enhance Ability and other ability enhancing spells on those crafting said item? If you as the Player present these sorts of arguments to the DM, I think they'd be more then likely to help you get to the place you want to be.


I find this interesting, except, there are no Main time options for things like Crafting an item. What if my soldier character wants to go gambling with the local guards in an attempt to get information? Using the rules here get weird, but we don’t have other rules for gambling, these are the gambling rules.

That is part of the problem, some of these activities can be important for the story, but the rules limit the types of interactions and just seem utterly absurd in a few instances.

And the problem I remember from my last encounter with the crafting rules is still here.

I take a 5000 gold gem I found and make a necklace using it and gold wire. It will take me 100 weeks to complete because of the cost of the item.

The blacksmith can make an entire suite of Splint Armor in 4 weeks.

The Brewer can make 10 gallons of good beer in a week.

And none of it relies on skill, you can never get any better at it.

If your soldier character wants to go gambling with the local guards in an attempt to get information, does your party want to go as well? Is it something everyone wants to participate in? If so, then you have yourself something fun to do during a live session! If you're the only one that wants to do this though, then you're in a bit of a situation in which your party has to decide what they want to do. Would they like to do that dreaded thing and, split the party for the day/night? If so, then you as players will need to be fine with standing by and twiddling your thumbs for 30-90 minutes while each player does their own thing with the DM right there at the table. OR, you and the party can decide that gambling with the guards isn't the best idea to do together and find something else to do together. This downtime UA has presented a third option, in that it creates a table in which the DM can present new choices for the Players in how they go about dealing with activities in civilization.

The blacksmith has probably made dozens of suits of Splint Armor. The brewer has made hundreds of gallons of beer. How many 5k gold gems have you made a necklace out of?

If the DM sees a reason to decrease what's required for crafting, they can go for it. Is your character so amazing at crafting Splint Armor that they've figured out a new technique that requires only 2-3 weeks crafting Splint Armor instead of the normal 4? If so that's awesome! Hopefully there is a good story behind it. Hopefully it stays a guarded secret too, or other people are going to get in on your business of crafting Splint faster then normal. Otherwise, you're a crafter just like everyone else in the world.

The real problem I'm seeing on this thread is Players thinking their PC's story is the most important one in the group. Be willing to share the light with your party; sometimes that means your personal activities aren't a major focus of the game. These downtime activities create amazing opportunities for Players to still have their own identity that has an influence on the world without completely changing the focus of the campaign.

[Malifice]

Literally everything in this post is what this week's UA is all about. I, as a new DM utilizing Faerun and a lot of the Sword Coast, absolutely love everything presented this week.

As Grod stated, this week is for Players to still have their own identity while not sucking up an hour and a half planning their heist or gambling venture. This allows for PCs who's story isn't the focus of what the campaign is about still further their own story in a way that doesn't hurt the game.

DM: "Alright, everyone has made it to town successfully. The caravan is safe and sound, and the caravan master has dispersed your payment for escort services (100g, plus a bonus of 50g, for 150g total). You'll have a week of downtime upon arriving, and we'll pick up next session after that week of downtime. Shoot me a text or message (on applicable media) as to what you'd like to do during this downtime."

Rogue Criminal: Two days later. Hey DM, I'd like to find someone to steal from and make some money while in town.
DM: Alright, what kind of person are you looking to steal from?
Rogue Criminal: A merchant who can afford to lose it.
DM: Medium checks. Make your rolls.
-Proceeds with RP that doesn't necessarily get the party wrangled up in this PC's vocational choices.

Cleric Acolyte: Three days later. Hey DM, I'd really like to find a temple to perform some service at during my week of downtime.
DM: Mmk. Go ahead and make either a Religion or Persuasion check.
Cleric Acolyte: 14.
-Proceeds with RP that doesn't necessarily get the party wrangled up in this PC's vocational choices.

Etc. Etc.

DM: One week later at the start of the next session. Has either already explained the outcomes of each PC's downtime or takes the first 15-30 minutes resolving it at the start of the session. "Alright everyone, so after successfully escorting the caravan to town, each of you has spent a week or so in town. Everyone has done their own thing and come back to a pre-designated tavern to discuss what to do next. Describes tavern and a couple notable folks in said tavern. What now?"

I could go on about the awesomness of these tables in what they provide, but that won't really change the opinions of the posters who dislike the UA. I think most people are latching onto the long crafting times for magic items more then anything. As Grod said, a legendary item should be a life's work. It should take a while to craft (read: years) a Holy Avenger. For those who cite traditional weapons and armor as taking a certain amount of time irl, that's all well and good. How many real life Holy Avengers have been crafted? None, that's right. So the amount of time to pour this amount of magic or power into the weapon/armor/item isn't something that we have a real life equivalent for. The time required to actually craft magic items that the UA has presented makes sense for a world where magic items aren't supposed to be very common.

This.

I love this stuff. In fact Ive already started on tweaking it for my own campaign:

1) When buying a magic item, common items cost 1d6+1 x 50gp, uncommon items cost 1d6+1 x 500gp, rare items cost 1d6+1 x 2500gp.

2) Carousing requires both a Charisma (persuasion) and Wisdom (Insight) check. Use the lower of the two rolls to determine success.

3) When crafting items, you work at 100gp per workweek. A successful DC 15 skill or tool check relevant to the item you are crafting lets you craft at the rate of 200gp for that work week. A successful DC 20 Check increases this to 500pg for that week. Common magic items cost 100gp, uncommon cost 1000, and rare 5000.

3) A Character can craft 1d4+1 potions of healing in a work week (at 40gp each). Potions of greater healing cost 200 to make (and sell for 250). Potions of Superior healing cost 1,500 to make (and sell for 2,000) and potions of supreme healing and potions of vitality cost 4,000 to make and sell for 5,000. A character must succeed in a DC 5 (healing) 10 (greater) 15 (superior) or 20 (supreme or vitality) Wisdom (herbalism) check or the potions created are spoilt and useless.

4) Failing one check on a crime spree leads to a complication. Failing two leads to you being wanted for your crimes, and a complication. Failing three lands you in jail.

5) Gambling involves Wisdom (insight), Intelligence (gaming set) and Charisma (deception) checks.

6) Pit fighting uses your choice of one of Strength (athletics) or Dexterity (acrobatics). In addition, you must also succeed in a Charisma (intimidate) and Wisdom (insight) check. Finally, you must also make successful melee weapon attack roll against an AC of 2d10+5. A PC with the extra attack class feature can retry the last check as many times as he can make extra attacks with that feature. Success in all 4 checks earns a PC 1000gp.

A character that fails all checks loses half his HP and HD at the conclusion of the week and receives a lingering injury.

7) Religious service uses the lower roll out of Intelligence (religion) or Charisma (Persuasion).

8) It takes 5 days and 50gp to scribe a 1st level scroll. It costs 25 for a cantrip. Scrolls sell for 110 percent of the creation price. A 3rd level scroll takes 3 weeks. A 4th level scroll costs 1,000 and takes 4 weeks. A 5th level scroll costs 2,000 and takes 5 weeks, a 6th level scroll costs 5,000 and takes 6 weeks, a 7th level scroll costs 10,000 and takes 8 weeks, an 8th level scroll costs 20,000 and takes 10 weeks and a 9th level scroll costs 50,000 and takes 20 weeks.

9) When selling an item, common items sell for a base price of 200gp. Uncommon items sell for a base price of 500gp.

10) Training lets a PC learn a new tool, language or weapon proficiency. In addition, a PC can swap a skill proficiency for a different one, or make a similar change to his abilities (swapping one fighting style for another, swapping a feat for a different feat, swapping expertise in a skill for a expertise in a different skill, converting to a different deity and swapping domains, swapping a spell known for a different one, or even changing his bardic college, primal path, wizard school, pact boon, ranger conclave, druid circle, martial archetype etc for a different one).

For the record some of the changes above are due to longer workweeks I intend to use (I use the Faerun ten day week as the standard) and the fact I use the gritty rest variant. 10 days of relaxation in town is a long rest.

[Kane0]

Nice changes, mind if I copy them?

[Theodoxus]

^^^ seems way too cheap to me. Any mid level party will have dozens of scrolls and potions to burn every adventure.

Only if they've been saving up for a few weeks... or they don't want their spell slots to use any actual spells for.

The material cost is massively reduced because the additional component is your own spell slots.

[Chaosmancer]

A level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge, is 20th level Dwarven Cleric of the Forge, he's an servant of Moradin, and make sure to spread is word and defend it's clergy, he has renown skills as a blacksmith, but his adventuring takes so much time that he ain't as good a a legendary blacksmith that might have mechanically the stats of a commoner. NPCs and PCs don't follow the same rules. PCs are meant for adventuring and downtime activities are there to help flesh out what they do outside of adventuring. They can be an excuse for a leave of many years (i.e. crafting a set of full plate, or a 9th level spell scroll). But they are not the main purpose of adventuring. You could not use them at all and just verbally explain what your character did between his adventures, or use the downtime rule.

Yes and No.

Barring homebrewing, NPCs resolve actions just like PCs do. If that NPC commoner legendary blacksmith decided to cudgel me with his hammer, he'd roll a d20+prof+str

You can say "This guy is so good he ignores the rules" but the players are mighty heroes who rock the multiverse with their actions. At what point are they good enough to ignore the rules? Never? My cleric who worships at the forge, whose prayers are the sound of bellows and whose rosary is the clang of hammer on steel is no better at forging a weapon than the smith's apprentice son? Proficiency allowing them to make normal quality gear at the cost of 10 gold a day? That's as good as I can possibly get? There are people who can't do it and people who have the skill and masters but only NPCs can be masters? Even when the PCs are nearly godlike in stature and ability?


A scroll is not similar to a spellbook. A spellbook has the formula/hand movements/arcane requirements/magical incantations/everything else I haven't covered written in a way that the Wizard can understand. The Wizard now has to take one of the most complex spells in the entirety of the D&D universe and transcribe it to a single piece of parchment. The standard Wish spell takes up 9 pages of a Wizard's spellbook, and that's when the Wizard is probably using a shorthand s/he's extremely familiar with. Could you imagine trying to describe literally the most complex thing in the universe on a scroll and making it easy for anyone to use? That could take...years to figure out how to do. And then once you figure out how to do it, you might make it a tiny bit shorter to complete the next time.

Translating this theory in a way that the standard layman could use it is going to take quite a while. To translate it all to something the size of a standard spell scroll will also take time.

You’d have a point except for two things
1) Scrolls are not necessarily smaller, they are simply rolled parchment. You could write an entire book on a scroll and people have, so there is no need to shorten the spell below its normal length

2) Not everyone can use spell scrolls. The DMG is very clear. If the spell does not appear on your spell list, the spell in unreadable. If it does, but you can’t cast the proper level spell, then you roll a DC based on spell level (19 in this case) and if you fail, the scroll is uselessly expended. So… you write out the formula in such a way that only true masters like yourself can reliably use it and everyone else runs a high risk of botching the whole thing. That is vastly different than figuring out how to phrase it for Laymen.




I'd ask this question though. Once you're a level 20 PC, you probably don't have many adventures left. This type of character should be thinking about retirement pretty soon, thus granting the level 20 Dwarven Cleric of the Forge "NPC status" in the world, allowing the DM to do what they wish with them.

NPC status as in “break the rules” or NPC status as in the DM now controls the character?

Because if it is the second… that doesn’t solve the players problem now does it? If the only way my master craftsman can do something epic in less than 10 years work is to retire the character, then I can’t do it, and that shuts down the possibility of say forging a personal masterpiece before the final confrontation prophesied in 2 years time.

We’re talking niche situations here, I grant, but if the players hitting the highest possible skill as craftsmen is only determined by if they can kill a big enough monster to get the materials… then it kind of defeats the purpose of making a character who is a craftsman doesn’t it? The Guild Artisan background might as well be “Hire a lawyer on retainer” because you can’t actually be an Artisan, unless you’re content making the same standard or sub-standard works you made as a penniless drifter while being a big enough deal to dine with kings and call upon the angels for assistance.


These downtime activities allow for the DM and PC's to cut to the point of drama by breaking it down to a single (or few) sets of rolls based on the called for activity.
That particular quote was more aimed at the discussion that DnD isn’t built for parties to go to nobleman’s parties, that all that should be resolved with a skill roll of two. Not really about the Downtime rules.


What things are you trying to accomplish with your money and power? The rules have built in suggestions for lowering the time involved in the crafting of something. Who's to say that you don't find people who can work round the clock on this item you want crafted? There are 24 hours in a day, and I'm assuming the crafting rules are based on the 8 hour working day rather then a full 24 hour day. Who's to say you can't purchase the spell casting of a local temple to cast Enhance Ability and other ability enhancing spells on those crafting said item? If you as the Player present these sorts of arguments to the DM, I think they'd be more then likely to help you get to the place you want to be.

This is all true, and if it came to it I would talk to my DM, but if my character has to go and hire a task force enhanced with Divine Magic just to make a Crown for the newly forged kingdom then I’m a taskmaster not an artisan.

I played a jeweler once, and the DM worked with me, we homebrewed some rules that honestly didn’t work too well, but it let me feel like I really was a maker of fine jewelry. My goal, that got realized more through DM fiat to wrap up plot points, was to make a necklace worthy of the Goddess Waukeen. I think the finally total on just the materials was reaching into half a million gold (we’d been killing a lot of dragons) and I’d have been happy spending massive amounts of time on it, it was his life’s work, but per these rules it would have taken him almost 200 years to craft it. Again, mostly because of the price of the gemstones, that’s what is weird about these rules. The value of the material tells you how long it takes, not the skill of the design or anything else. Making a cloak from copper wires is easier and takes less time than making it from silk thread…the only thing that matters is the price. Nothing else.



If your soldier character wants to go gambling with the local guards in an attempt to get information, does your party want to go as well? Is it something everyone wants to participate in? If so, then you have yourself something fun to do during a live session! If you're the only one that wants to do this though, then you're in a bit of a situation in which your party has to decide what they want to do. Would they like to do that dreaded thing and, split the party for the day/night? If so, then you as players will need to be fine with standing by and twiddling your thumbs for 30-90 minutes while each player does their own thing with the DM right there at the table. OR, you and the party can decide that gambling with the guards isn't the best idea to do together and find something else to do together. This downtime UA has presented a third option, in that it creates a table in which the DM can present new choices for the Players in how they go about dealing with activities in civilization.

But I propose this gambling as part of the adventure, maybe to distract the guards so we can get the McGuffin, or whatever reason makes sense for this scene. Now, the player wants to actually make money off this, and the DM needs rules for Gambling. Now the only Gambling rules we have are these downtime rules.

Same with crafting, research, religious devotions, a lot of DMs are going to hear an action they haven’t adjudicated very often, and then reach for these rules to cover them. These are not only the rules for the game while no one is at the table, they are the only rules we have for some of these interactions with the game world, and that can lead to some incredibly strange situations if they are used as written.


The blacksmith has probably made dozens of suits of Splint Armor. The brewer has made hundreds of gallons of beer. How many 5k gold gems have you made a necklace out of?

Hundreds, Thousands, it doesn’t matter. Skill does not apply to these rules. Only the cost of the item being made.

With the character I mentioned above, he literally turned every gemstone we ran across, over the course of 5 or 6 dragons into jewelry. There got to be a point where he really didn’t work with things less than 100 gold per gem, because I had so many of them I really didn’t have time for lesser work.


If the DM sees a reason to decrease what's required for crafting, they can go for it. Is your character so amazing at crafting Splint Armor that they've figured out a new technique that requires only 2-3 weeks crafting Splint Armor instead of the normal 4? If so that's awesome! Hopefully there is a good story behind it. Hopefully it stays a guarded secret too, or other people are going to get in on your business of crafting Splint faster then normal. Otherwise, you're a crafter just like everyone else in the world.

Yes, the DM is and should be able to ignore the rules. But, wouldn’t it be better if the rules just worked in the first place? If proficiency actually mattered? I get better at lying by leveling up, why not in crafting?

I’ll admit, the game isn’t meant to portray an incredibly granular system for crafting, but it also could handle something basic. After all, if a player is willing to spend resources, does it matter all that much? If they could just ask the church to send them on a quest after a Holy Avenger, or if the DM is just willing to give one to them, do we need to say that making one is the work of 10 years on top of getting three seraph feathers and anointing them in tears of a newborn unicorn before casting them in a blade made of starmetal guarded by a dragon.

Which by the way, that sort of questline is often encouraged when we talk about crafting, and it all sounds cool, but doesn’t that take away a lot of table time? I mean I can agree with some of this below


The real problem I'm seeing on this thread is Players thinking their PC's story is the most important one in the group. Be willing to share the light with your party; sometimes that means your personal activities aren't a major focus of the game. These downtime activities create amazing opportunities for Players to still have their own identity that has an influence on the world without completely changing the focus of the campaign.

But the rules we have still can do exactly that. The Rogue steals from a nobleman, and a paladin declares he will catch him and the next few sessions, maybe an entire adventure is devoted to getting the paladin and his order off the parties back so they can continue with the story.

I just want characters (not just mine, though mine was the one that truly highlighted how poor the previous crafting system was) to be able to make mundane, and then eventually magical, items at a rate that doesn’t have them asking the DM for multiple months of downtime so they can actually explore that aspect of their character.

If no one’s personal activities are ever part of the game… then why doesn’t the party start sharing that light with that character?

The length of time these crafting rules take actually works against your call for shared spotlights, because it takes the armorsmith character almost a year to make that full plate the fighter asked for, so they are determining the pace of the adventure. Either they do not get their time to shine and use their skills, or the rest of the party is required to hold fast for 10 months while they slowly… do nothing interesting that has very little mechanical impact, but is exactly what the RAW of this article says crafting does.

I doubt very many people take Blacksmithing as a background with the intention of making scale mail to sell to local merchants, they take it so they can craft high quality gear for the party (or perhaps for tragic backstory purposes). Let them shine, without making the party spend a year in downtime which earns them half a dozen enemies, 8 favors between them, and an unexpected marriage. While the blacksmith just toils away in his shop missing all the fun.

[SharkForce]

I doubt very many people take Blacksmithing as a background with the intention of making scale mail to sell to local merchants, they take it so they can craft high quality gear for the party (or perhaps for tragic backstory purposes). Let them shine, without making the party spend a year in downtime which earns them half a dozen enemies, 8 favors between them, and an unexpected marriage. While the blacksmith just toils away in his shop missing all the fun.

oh, he doesn't miss *all* the fun. at a 10% chance per week, he'll be getting complications aplenty.

[Sabeta]

I don't see what the problem is. If you as a DM don't want to worry about subplots entering in just remove anything involving a foil and just allow that 10% complication chance to be a failure to craft the set. Either through broken tools, broken equipment, or just poor workmanship. If your player has proficiency perhaps soften it to 5% chance. These rules are very explicit about reminding you that you have ultimate control over what happens here. It's all malleable to fit the needs of your campaign.

[LordCdrMilitant]

The real problem I'm seeing on this thread is Players thinking their PC's story is the most important one in the group. Be willing to share the light with your party; sometimes that means your personal activities aren't a major focus of the game. These downtime activities create amazing opportunities for Players to still have their own identity that has an influence on the world without completely changing the focus of the campaign.

I feel participating in "each party member's" activity is important to developing the relationships between the characters.

We all went to party with some nobles, we all went to hire some crewmen, we all went to rob a tower, and all went to gamble, and all went to support a rebellion, etc.

What we need in downtime rules is more along the lines to crunch the numbers for storefronts and agricultural properties, for hired crew, etc., that would otherwise take time away from playing.

[DanyBallon]

To Chaosmancer, about PC vs NPC (sorry I couldn't quote, I'm on my tablet and I have hard time editing a quote to keep the relevant part with it :smallbiggrin:)

PC and NPC follow different rules for crafting, as while your PC is spending years adventuring, and getting crafting skills on the side, the NPC is spending all his time learning and practicing his trade. Sure as a 20th level cleric of the forge, you may have developed skills in blacksmithing that goes beyond what the local blacksmith can do in term of quality, but you are far from being a legendary craftsman. Your main trade is adventuring, not crafting.

[Unoriginal]

I think that some people have troubles getting that the downtime rules are for *downtime*.


If a jeweler PC wants to create a necklace fit for a goddess, it's worth doing an adventure about it. Gather the material, find the right design, interact with the goddess's servants, etc.

If a blacksmith PC wants to create legendary armor for their teammates, it's worth doing an adventure about it. Go kill a dragon for their scales, or bargain with the lords of the Elemental Plane of Earth, or research the techniques used to forge the armor of Warlord Kirush, who died 1000 years ago.

Downtime is downtime. The PCs aren't going to do campaign-shaking things during their hobby, unless they decide to invest a lot of time and gold in it.

I mean, imagine the situation like this:

DM: "Alright, guys, last session you decided you all went your separate ways for three months. What did you do during that time?"

Player 1: "I spent time with my family, in my hometown."

Player 2: "I robbed the castle of that jerk who insulted us when we were level 1"

Player 3: "I forged a +2 sword."

[LudicSavant]

I think that some people have troubles getting that the downtime rules are for *downtime*.

If a jeweler PC wants to create a necklace fit for a goddess, it's worth doing an adventure about it. Gather the material, find the right design, interact with the goddess's servants, etc.

If a blacksmith PC wants to create legendary armor for their teammates, it's worth doing an adventure about it. Go kill a dragon for their scales, or bargain with the lords of the Elemental Plane of Earth, or research the techniques used to forge the armor of Warlord Kirush, who died 1000 years ago.

Downtime is downtime. The PCs aren't going to do campaign-shaking things during their hobby, unless they decide to invest a lot of time and gold in it.

Uhm, do you realize that the UA downtime rules already totally requires you to go out on an adventure, kill monsters, gather the unique materials, etc?


To start with, a character needs a formula for a magic item in order to create it. The formula is like a recipe. It lists the materials needed and steps required to make the item. An item invariably requires an exotic material to complete it. This material can range from the skin of a yeti to a vial of water taken from a whirlpool in the Elemental Plane of Water. Finding that material should take place as part of an adventure.

The Magic Item Ingredients table suggests the challenge rating of a creature that the characters need to face to acquire the materials for an item. Note that facing a creature does not necessarily mean that the characters must collect items from its corpse. The creature might guard a place or resource that the characters need

For example, mariner’s armor might require the essence of a water weird. A staff of charming might need the cooperation of a specific arcanaloth, who will help only if the characters complete a task for it. Creating a staff of power might rely on finding a piece of an ancient stone that was once touched by the god of magic—a stone guarded by a suspicious androsphinx.

I mean, imagine the situation like this:

DM: "Alright, guys, last session you decided you all went your separate ways for three months. What did you do during that time?"

Player 1: "I spent time with my family, in my hometown."

Player 2: "I robbed the castle of that jerk who insulted us when we were level 1"

Player 3: "I forged a +2 sword."

Unfortunately, the UA downtime rules do not work in the manner you imagined. They totally want you to go do adventures of the sort you described earlier, such as "Creating a staff of power might rely on finding a piece of an ancient stone that was once touched by the god of magic—a stone guarded by a suspicious androsphinx."

And then, after doing the adventure, throw the reagents, 20,000gp, and your crafter character into the slow cooker for 2 years while your friends go on dozens of little misadventures without you, which can potentially include "raising the money to buy a staff of power, finding a guy who sells the staff of power, and buying it from them."

[Chaosmancer]

I don't see what the problem is. If you as a DM don't want to worry about subplots entering in just remove anything involving a foil and just allow that 10% complication chance to be a failure to craft the set. Either through broken tools, broken equipment, or just poor workmanship. If your player has proficiency perhaps soften it to 5% chance. These rules are very explicit about reminding you that you have ultimate control over what happens here. It's all malleable to fit the needs of your campaign.

You can’t craft at all without proficiency. Are you saying 10% complication for other activities and 5% for crafting?


To Chaosmancer, about PC vs NPC (sorry I couldn't quote, I'm on my tablet and I have hard time editing a quote to keep the relevant part with it :smallbiggrin:)

Totally understand, I usually post from my phone. I only start using the computer when I get into conversations like these


PC and NPC follow different rules for crafting, as while your PC is spending years adventuring, and getting crafting skills on the side, the NPC is spending all his time learning and practicing his trade. Sure as a 20th level cleric of the forge, you may have developed skills in blacksmithing that goes beyond what the local blacksmith can do in term of quality, but you are far from being a legendary craftsman. Your main trade is adventuring, not crafting.

That bolded part, that never happens according to the rules. Your skills never improve, nothing you can do can every make you a better blacksmith past getting proficiency.

And I see the argument, the dwarven smith who has done nothing but forge for 800 years should be better than my character. But, killing goblins made the Bard a master wordsmith who can sing songs that make men weep and women swoon (expertise performance giving a +12 by high levels) but my blacksmith is too busy killing things to ever improve his craft? Despite being as powerful and skilled a figure as a level 20 character can be, I am still unable to actually create things of great value without taking years out of the game?


I mean, imagine the situation like this:

DM: "Alright, guys, last session you decided you all went your separate ways for three months. What did you do during that time?"

Player 1: "I spent time with my family, in my hometown."

Player 2: "I robbed the castle of that jerk who insulted us when we were level 1"

Player 3: "I forged a +2 sword."



At higher levels, why not?




I think that some people have troubles getting that the downtime rules are for *downtime*.


If a jeweler PC wants to create a necklace fit for a goddess, it's worth doing an adventure about it. Gather the material, find the right design, interact with the goddess's servants, etc.

If a blacksmith PC wants to create legendary armor for their teammates, it's worth doing an adventure about it. Go kill a dragon for their scales, or bargain with the lords of the Elemental Plane of Earth, or research the techniques used to forge the armor of Warlord Kirush, who died 1000 years ago.

Downtime is downtime. The PCs aren't going to do campaign-shaking things during their hobby, unless they decide to invest a lot of time and gold in it.

But again, these are the only crafting rules we are getting. There is no crafting rules for when the spotlight is on. That adventure to get all those components and meet all those people is followed by multiple years of actually doing the work, according to the only rules we have on the subject.



Also, that all sounds great and thematic. How excited is the rogue going to be while you are off on a two year globe-trekking quest while the Cleric gets what he needs to make the fighter some magic armor? People are claiming these rules are meant so that characters can do their own thing without disrupting the party, because they party should be adventuring together, not sitting around while one person does something important only to them. How is this not exactly that? How is sending them on a quest to recover special materials not leaving the characters who don't care about the end result and want to go back to dealing with that cult they have been tracking for the last few months out in the cold?

If some of the players spend a year of downtime making 1 thing, things like carousing and crime sprees are on a weekly basis. The barbarian who goes carousing for that entire year is a) broke as a joke (even poor carousing costs 1300 for a year) and b) has hundreds of favors and enemies and suddenly a lot of plot significance because detangling the mess he's made is going to take multiple adventures. Or, he'll do it for a week and then just twiddle his thumbs for the rest of the year

It isn't balanced, it's just kind of all over the place

[Biggstick]

Also, that all sounds great and thematic. How excited is the rogue going to be while you are off on a two year globe-trekking quest while the Cleric gets what he needs to make the fighter some magic armor? People are claiming these rules are meant so that characters can do their own thing without disrupting the party, because they party should be adventuring together, not sitting around while one person does something important only to them. How is this not exactly that? How is sending them on a quest to recover special materials not leaving the characters who don't care about the end result and want to go back to dealing with that cult they have been tracking for the last few months out in the cold?

Sounds like you didn't build a PC who goals or methods line up with the party. While this crafter PC goes into downtime to create said item, it might be time to bring in a new PC who's active goals currently line up with the party's active goals. If your PC is truly the master craftsman you say they are, it shouldn't be a problem for them to spend the time needed at the forge to craft this legendary item.

"Oh, the threat will be here in 3 months and I couldn't possibly craft a insert legendary item here in time, so I should go adventure for the fabled insert #2 legendary item here. The reason I'm out adventuring for the item rather then crafting it is I don't have the time if I want to save the kingdom!"

If you've built a PC who is going to want to craft his/her legendary magic weapons and magic armor, expect to pay the downtime required. During that downtime, feel free to bring in a new PC that can allow you as a Player to continue participating in the party. This new PC can be something of a Mercenary, who is working for the party directly, or their completely own PC with their own motivations and desires.

If you're a PC who wants to craft a magic item in this way, hopefully you've talked about it with the DM prior to the game. They may or may not have told you what kind of downtime to expect in their game so you can plan out whether crafting legendary items is something you'll have time for.

[Coidzor]

Sounds like you didn't build a PC who goals or methods line up with the party.

No, it's just an inherent problem with the paradigm of requiring huge chunks of time that don't fit in with a narrative of month or few of lull and requiring separate quests instead of trying gathering those reagents into the adventuring one was already doing.

Really, there should be a few different scales of Downtime given the disparity between people who get a few weeks here and there and the people playing generational games, or at least some suggestions for adapting time scales even if no actual guidelines.

[Biggstick]

No, it's just an inherent problem with the paradigm of requiring huge chunks of time that don't fit in with a narrative of month or few of lull and requiring separate quests instead of trying gathering those reagents into the adventuring one was already doing.

When did the PC, in character, try to learn what was required to craft said item? Are they doing it after the group just went on an adventure and they're flush with gold or before the adventure begins? In my experience the PC starts looking for this sort of stuff after they've gone on the quest or adventure and returned. They decide that now they're insert level here, they need to have a very particular weapon and they'd like to craft it. Upon doing a bit of research, they discover they need a particularly rare ingredient from a difficult to-get-to place.

If this happens before the PC's have their next quest thread, a good DM can easily integrate one or two other threads alongside this one.

Most Players in my experience don't actually expend the time in game to seek out a knowledgable smith who can pass on this sort of information before a quest is undertaken. It always happens upon their victorious return.


Really, there should be a few different scales of Downtime given the disparity between people who get a few weeks here and there and the people playing generational games, or at least some suggestions for adapting time scales even if no actual guidelines.

Why should there be different scales for downtime? Just because your campaign is one that has a ticking clock on it doesn't reduce the number of times you need to swing the hammer when forging that armor or weapon.

If your DM decides to put this sort of hurry-up-and-go on his/her campaign, it should be something that is worked out with everyone involved. Knowing that you're not going to have enough downtime to craft a Holy Avenger would be good to know when you're initially building your character.

[Steampunkette]

Fyndhal: DO NOT READ THE SPOILER. You, either, Micah or Anthony though I don't know your GitP usernames or whether you even post here... Also anyone who doesn't want Tyranny of Dragons spoilers.

So... downtime came up in my ToD game...

One of the characters in the game is a Noblewoman Aasimar Dragon Sorceress (Both grandparents on both sides of the family were adventuring Bards, 'nuff said). In her backstory, she was a sheltered child because of her aasimar heritage, but she was given the finest available tutors. One of her tutors, on Draconic Knowledge, was a young woman named Talis Kasterel. She had been employed in the Temple of Bahamut (More a shrine, really, but with some nice scrolls on dragons) and befriended the young Aasimar Ylnd. She'd sneak the girl out under pretense of teaching her about dragons and take her to see the ships coming in, or watch acrobats in the streets, or some other fun activity. Unbeknownst to Ylnd, Talis was a member of the Cult of the Dragon, and when they came to extract her, one fateful night, people assumed Talis had been kidnapped.

That's Ylnd's whooooole reason for going after the Cult of the Dragon: To rescue her friend. She initially worried that Talis might be a member of the Cult, but when Leosin Erlanther, another scholar of dragon stuff who wore the symbol of Bahamut, was captured she figured that the Cult was kidnapping people who knew too much about dragons to be allowed to oppose them. It seemed perfectly logical, after all, these people would have deep knowledge of Dragons and their homes, as well, which would only empower the cult.

On reaching the Cult Camp in the box canyon, the group disguised themselves and Ylnd asked a -few-
questions around the camp about Talis. Through persuasion and deception she came to learn that Talis had been taken to "The Lodge". A meeting place of various high ranking cult leaders. Ylnd immediately assumed she had been taken there for questioning and torture.

Later, on reaching Baldur's Gate this past Monday, we used the Downtime Rules to handle everyone's activities. Ylnd spent her time researching, learning about the Cult, and specifically seeking information about the lodge... She learned that it's in the Graypeak Mountains and that there's a permanent portal in a ruined castle that connects to it.

Once she gets there, of course, the truth of Talis's betrayal will be laid bare. But until then the Downtime Rules have been an amazing boon to expanding the player's knowledge and feeding them clues to hype up later encounters and locations. I imagine the instant Ylnd finds the portal she's going to dive through it without finishing exploring Castle Naerytar, possibly forcing her compatriots into a compromised position. It's going to be a blast!

So I definitely appreciate these new rules. And, particularly, their timing.

[Chaosmancer]

Sounds like you didn't build a PC who goals or methods line up with the party. While this crafter PC goes into downtime to create said item, it might be time to bring in a new PC who's active goals currently line up with the party's active goals. If your PC is truly the master craftsman you say they are, it shouldn't be a problem for them to spend the time needed at the forge to craft this legendary item.

Why is the solution to lose my PC?

Seriously, I don’t get it.

Hypothetical 1st level. The game opens with our PCs being the only survivors of a town destroyed by some Ancient Dragon. We swear revenge and begin adventuring. I decide my character was the son of the blacksmith and he’s sworn to forge the weapons and armor we’ll use to fight a being so powerful. In fact, he’s so desperate for this revenge he’s made a Warlock Pact with The Lord of the Wild Hunt.

Fast Forward to level 15 or 18 or whatever. We’ve gathered the materials, we’ve got the formulas, my character begins to craft the items we’ll need as I swore and everyone in the party agreed to so many years ago.

Now, I retire my character, stat up a completely rando person who is also level 18 and we adventure for 20 more years while my actual character is busy? Or we simply fast forward, allow the rest of the party to roll over a hundred week by week adventurers? Or we ignore these rules as utterly unable to help our table because crafting takes so long.

My goals are the party’s goals. I don’t want this to take so long, none of us do. But that is how these rules are written.

And, you know, maybe my jeweler or painter or carpenter is doing something just for my character. I picked the background Guild Artisan after all, I’ve been paying 10 gold a month to stay a member of the guild. Shouldn’t, at some point, I be able to move beyond making cheap items every few days and start being able to make highly sought after and valuable pieces? Everyone else has progressed in skill, resources, titles, why can’t I be more than a journeyman smith whose never fully understood his craft if the Bard is renowned across the planes for his music and the Barbarian is now King of 3 different countries and has an army.

From level 1 to level 20, there is no increase in skill, no increase in ability, no progress. A level 1 character could take a few years and craft magic items before even starting his adventuring career. Why not, he’s already as good as he’s going to get. Or, he can never craft anything.

In fact, that’s the worst part. The entirety of Tool Proficiencies is useless if you have to retire a character to use them for something more than making 5 gold a day.


When did the PC, in character, try to learn what was required to craft said item? Are they doing it after the group just went on an adventure and they're flush with gold or before the adventure begins? In my experience the PC starts looking for this sort of stuff after they've gone on the quest or adventure and returned. They decide that now they're insert level here, they need to have a very particular weapon and they'd like to craft it. Upon doing a bit of research, they discover they need a particularly rare ingredient from a difficult to-get-to place.

If this happens before the PC's have their next quest thread, a good DM can easily integrate one or two other threads alongside this one.

Most Players in my experience don't actually expend the time in game to seek out a knowledgable smith who can pass on this sort of information before a quest is undertaken. It always happens upon their victorious return.

Sure, let’s say I look into it after a quest when I have some gold and resources. After all, a penniless nobody isn’t going to be able to find anything and you don’t stop killing cultists to ask them if they want to swap notes.

I find the information I need. The DM crafts a quest so I get the materials I need and gives us a month of downtime.

Then we go on an adventure, and we get another month.
Then another adventure followed by another month
And again
And again

Finally a fellow player asks whatever happened to that Item I was crafting, and I tell him the great news At this rate I’ll be down after another 15 adventures.

By the way, 20 months is 80 weeks is 4,000 gold of work. That makes it Rare, so 20 adventures to get a Flame Tongue or a Dagger of Venom.

If you figure players level up once an adventure at least, we’ve been adventuring as 20th level characters at least once in the time it takes me to finish. We’ve already found items of much greater power and worth than what I’ve been spending the entire game and all of my downtime and 2,000 gold in materials making.

Or we don’t adventure for 2 years so my character is allowed to finish making this item and doesn’t feel like a complete waste of everyone’s time.

[Blue Duke]

my group theorized that the massive amount of time involved was their way of saying 'you have rules.....but we dont want you actually doing things like crafting magic items so lets put a huge timer on it to put off most people.

[Spellbreaker26]

Look, the crafting rules have to make sense for the world. If you want +2 swords to be common enough for any ordinary soldier to wield, then more power to you, but these are designed for the 5e basic expectations.

There might be worlds with only one Holy Avenger. Perhaps you might have to track down a special meteoric ore or kill a thousand demons with it to create it or both but a single person might not be able to create more than one in a lifetime. Legendary Magic items can be the culmination of entire cultures, even. In settings with more magic item availability there will be more of them and crafting will be shorter than these rules, in others crafting magic items might not be possible.

[Bahamut7]

I have been following this thread and see two sides going at it. Here's the solution I offer:

If you are fine with the DMG's rules on crafting and such or the UA, then use it.

If you are not, then homebrew it.

I am in agreement that the rules are better than what we got originally, but lack any realism in regard to the game. I get without modern technology, blacksmithing is a more time consuming process. Mix in the idea of infusing magic into the process and you got a potential mess.

How about instead for those who are not happy with the rules, talk with your DM on what is a fair agreement for the armor, weapons, scrolls, potions, etc that you seek? In my current campaign, I am going to talk with the DM about what will be a fair route for my character to craft his own Braces of Defense. I am already proficient in Leather tools, so now it comes down to materials. I am also going to try and come up with a compromise on the potion brewing rules in the UA (healing potions) as we are only level 2 and really need them.

Anyone with good homebrew rules, please any links would be appreciated.

[Biggstick]

Why is the solution to lose my PC?

Seriously, I don’t get it.

Hypothetical 1st level. The game opens with our PCs being the only survivors of a town destroyed by some Ancient Dragon. We swear revenge and begin adventuring. I decide my character was the son of the blacksmith and he’s sworn to forge the weapons and armor we’ll use to fight a being so powerful. In fact, he’s so desperate for this revenge he’s made a Warlock Pact with The Lord of the Wild Hunt.

Fast Forward to level 15 or 18 or whatever. We’ve gathered the materials, we’ve got the formulas, my character begins to craft the items we’ll need as I swore and everyone in the party agreed to so many years ago.

Now, I retire my character, stat up a completely rando person who is also level 18 and we adventure for 20 more years while my actual character is busy? Or we simply fast forward, allow the rest of the party to roll over a hundred week by week adventurers? Or we ignore these rules as utterly unable to help our table because crafting takes so long.

My goals are the party’s goals. I don’t want this to take so long, none of us do. But that is how these rules are written.

You've obviously been around the block as a level 15-18 PC. You've probably run into another great Blacksmith, or two, or three. If you want to decrease time required, enlist assistance.

"I swore I would do it myself! I even made a Pact with the Lord of the Wild Hunt!"

Making a Pact means you're not afraid to ask for help when your need is great. Ask your Patron for some Fey-appropriate smiths who can assist you with this task.


And, you know, maybe my jeweler or painter or carpenter is doing something just for my character. I picked the background Guild Artisan after all, I’ve been paying 10 gold a month to stay a member of the guild. Shouldn’t, at some point, I be able to move beyond making cheap items every few days and start being able to make highly sought after and valuable pieces? Everyone else has progressed in skill, resources, titles, why can’t I be more than a journeyman smith whose never fully understood his craft if the Bard is renowned across the planes for his music and the Barbarian is now King of 3 different countries and has an army.

From level 1 to level 20, there is no increase in skill, no increase in ability, no progress. A level 1 character could take a few years and craft magic items before even starting his adventuring career. Why not, he’s already as good as he’s going to get. Or, he can never craft anything.

In fact, that’s the worst part. The entirety of Tool Proficiencies is useless if you have to retire a character to use them for something more than making 5 gold a day.

The only way you know the Bard has mechanically gotten better at their singing of the same old songs (or new songs, who knows) is if they have Expertise in Performance.

The only way the Barbarian became King of 3 different countries is by...wait a minute, a Barbarian is the King of 3 different countries? To me that sounds like s/he is either really getting involved in the politics of the world or simply conquering kingdoms and taking over themselves. I would assume that the other members of the party were offered an opportunity to be a King or Queen? To me this sounds more like the Barbarian has the most ambition in your party, hence the reward of becoming King of 3 different countries.

Your Bard being recognized across the land is a simple little thing called Branding. They've established a brand and have fed off of your adventures by singing tales of your group's accomplishments. It doesn't require anywhere near the amount of time as Blacksmithing does to do the things a Bard can do pretty naturally.

Becoming a King? That Barbarian probably conquered the region, killed the person in charge, and took the mantle of King. Does s/he regularly check up on the attendants left in control of the kingdom when they're away? Do they trust the folks left in charge? I would assume they're trusting the folks left in charge. This would be called....delegation of duties and responsibilities. The Barbarian probably goes back and checks on things once in a while (or has a message sent to them by the attendants), but for the most parts lets the kingdoms run on their own.

As a Guild Artisan, what do you want to achieve? Do you want other people to recognize you for your work? Hire skilled workers to churn out armor and weapons that you would put your stamp of approval on (or brand). What's nice about hiring the workers is that you don't actually have to be there for nearly any of the forging process, just at times you deem appropriate to ensure the standard of quality is maintained. Paying into this Guild is supposed to net you support from your Guild. If you ask for them to supply you skilled workers, they should be able to provide said workers (and dare I say, at a discount since they'll get to Apprentice under a name such as yours). You spend a little while, "teach" them a few things (a week or so), and then head off on an adventure. Come back, check their progress (compare it to time away, number of workers, and what you're trying to craft), and stamp your brand on it.

"I want to Smith the party's weapons and armor for the final boss! I swore that I would do this and the party supported me in acquiring everything I would need to do this!"

Well looks like you're going to need help completing this task then. If you choose to do it by yourself, it's going to take years. Request assistance from your Guild, from talented Blacksmiths you've met, or from your Fey Patron.

Your fellow PC's aren't "better" at what they do. They're simply playing up their branding different then you are. You actually want to craft the gear. That's great! The problem comes in that to create something of this power and magnitude, it takes quite a long time to do. Your friends chose things that are, in comparison, much easier to accomplish in a short amount of time. You've chosen the hard road as a Blacksmith.


Finally a fellow player asks whatever happened to that Item I was crafting, and I tell him the great news At this rate I’ll be down after another 15 adventures.

If you figure players level up once an adventure at least, we’ve been adventuring as 20th level characters at least once in the time it takes me to finish. We’ve already found items of much greater power and worth than what I’ve been spending the entire game and all of my downtime and 2,000 gold in materials making.

Or we don’t adventure for 2 years so my character is allowed to finish making this item and doesn’t feel like a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Risk vs Reward. An adventurer risks life and limb to collect a reward.

A Blacksmith, while performing a dangerous job, isn't doing something nearly as perilous as an adventurer is.

As you've stated, you're a Guild Artisan. Let me just pull some text from the Guild Artisan background (PHB 133). As a member of your guild, you know the skills needed to create finished items from raw materials (reflected in your proficiency with a certain kind of artisan's tools), as well as the principles of trade and good business practices. The question now is whether you abandon your trade for adventure, or take on the extra effort to weave adventuring and trade together.
You were/still are a master artisan who knows how to create finished items with certain kinds of tools. You've now become an adventurer though, and the thing you bring with you is your principles of trade and good business practices. Nowhere in the Guild Artisan background say that you're going to continue crafting while adventuring. Even the Guild Artisan Feature doesn't involve anything regarding your ability to craft. It simply gives you access to a different type of political party that you'll be able to pull favors from. If you're high enough level, or have attempted to advance through said Guild's hierarchy, you might even be the one in charge of said Guild!

Now if you were in charge of said Guild, you petition those in the Guild to assist you with the crafting of your legendary items. Something as important as the crafting of these demands the entire Guild's attention to insure they're created as fast as possible.

The UA provides options for decreasing crafting time, as well as the DMG (or PHB, I can't remember which) provides options for hiring on skilled workers (who should be just as capable under your instruction) in crafting these items.

The Guild Artisan is someone who either still is a master of their craft or used to be. The aspect of the background that gets brought into the D&D adventure is knowledge on the tools and what can be made with them, the backing of a political organization (your guild), negotiating skills, knowledge of standard business practices, and general knowledge of the mercantile world. There are plenty of things in there that aren't crafting of a legendary set of armor and weapons. If you want to craft such a thing though, the opportunity is available in a manner that doesn't allow for people to cheese the rules.

[Biggstick]

Look, the crafting rules have to make sense for the world. If you want +2 swords to be common enough for any ordinary soldier to wield, then more power to you, but these are designed for the 5e basic expectations.

My thoughts exactly.


If you are fine with the DMG's rules on crafting and such or the UA, then use it.

How about instead for those who are not happy with the rules, talk with your DM on what is a fair agreement for the armor, weapons, scrolls, potions, etc that you seek?

Well said Bahamut. I think this will probably be the best compromise reached. Personally, I really like these rules and will be using them in my games and asking for them to be used in games I play in.

[Bahamut7]

My thoughts exactly.



Well said Bahamut. I think this will probably be the best compromise reached. Personally, I really like these rules and will be using them in my games and asking for them to be used in games I play in.

Exactly, I see some of it being very usable but some of it doesn't fit with the flow of most campaigns. I also, don't want these to be released in a way that can allow an artificer to break the game...again.

I fully support the idea that a blacksmith character should be able to create or upgrade armor and weapons for the party within a reasonable amount of time. If a DM is worried about them pumping out +3 Holy Avengers...then make a key ingredient part of the main quest. Meaning that while you can easily in a few weeks create 90 - 99% of that item...there is a special piece that turns it from a sword to a Holy Avenger. This could require some time that could help make great plot hooks.

This kind of approach doesn't punish the players for roleplaying but doesn't allow them to break the game. Same goes for Scrolls. Make high level scrolls like a Wish Scroll cost something else. Let's say your wizard can make this scroll in a day...but due to the process of infusing that spell into the scroll they are literally drained for a month or so. No magic, barely the strength to move around.

Potion Brewing. If the party locates ingredients during their adventures, then forgo the GP of making the potion and allow them to create how many potions they have enough ingredients for...assuming they have vials to hold the potions. Sure John may have found enough herbs to create 50 Healing potions...but he only has enough vials to create 10 at a time.

[Tanarii]

I love these rules.

Haven't had a chance yet to see exactly how balanced they are and would love a skill check to be used to perhaps reduce the time spent crafting.

Now at the end of the session I can indicate to the players that they will be a few weeks down time between now and the next adventure (the next session). They can then go away during the week and have a think about what they want to do during their downtime.Same here. I standard give 10 days of downtime under the current DT rules between each session. Of course, many players/characters don't come to every session, so they need to pay the living cost for multiples of that downtime, and decide what they were doing during the interval.

I may have to adapt this a bit, since it's far more complicated that I can realistically use for multiple sessions worth of players and characters who don't all attend every session. It's definitely geared towards a single group of players, but the DM/party not wanting to have a 'constantly adventuring, no downtime' type of game, and instead something that's a little more paced out. But overall, this is one of the most useful UAs I've seen so far.

[Kane0]

So I took the time to cut down the PDF and make some changes for my group. I'll put it in here just in case anybody else might want to use or adapt it:
Note: This version incorporates more use for tools and I tried to make time and GP costs more even between options. There should be some sense of progression for most activities too, so a professional should average out better results than a novice.

Requires minimum 100gp and one week. Every extra week or 100gp gives +1 to maximum of +5.
Make a Persuasion or Investigation check, result determines what is available to purchase:
1-5: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table A
6-10: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table B
11-15: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table C
16-20: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table D
21-25: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table E
26-30: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table F
31-35: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table G
36+: 1d4 times on Magic Item Table H

Common Items cost 2d4 x 20gp
Uncommon Items cost 2d4 x 200gp
Rare Items cost 2d4 x 2,000gp
Very Rare Items cost 2d4 x 20,000gp
The cost of consumables is halved.

Purchasing any item of uncommon rarity or higher incurs a complication (fake or stolen, interest of third party, etc)



Requires one week and 25gp for lower class, 100gp for middle class or 500gp for upper class carousing. Each additional week or gp bundle spent adds +1 to the check, to a maximum of +5.
Make an Insight or Persuasion check, result determines the contacts made:
1-5: Make a hostile contact
2-10: No effect
11-15: Make a friendly contact with a complication (social faux pas, lose some gold, etc)
16-20: Make two friendly contacts
21+: Make three friendly contacts



Requires appropriate tools and proficiency in order to make an item, plus access to materials worth half the price of the item to be created. Make a check using your tools each week to determine how much progress is made:
1-5: 25gp that week
6-10: 50gp that week
11-15: 100gp that week
16-20: 200gp that week
21+: 500gp that week

Common magic item: DC 10 Arcana & 100gp
Uncommon magic item: DC 15 Arcana & 1,000gp
Rare magic item: DC 20 Arcana & 10,000gp
Very Rare magic item: DC 25 Arcana & 100,000gp
Scrolls cost 2/3 and require scribing tool proficiency
Potions cost 1/3 and may use an alchemy or herbalism kit instead of arcana

Failing an Arcana check incurs a complication for that week (reagents lost, rumors arise, etc)



Requires at least one week
Make two checks of your choice from the following and an attack roll against random DCs (5 +2d10): Athletics, Acrobatics, Insight, Intimidation. If you have the extra attack feature you can reroll one check or attack.
No failures: Gain winnings of 1d12 x 1,000gp
One failure: Gain winnins of 1d12 x 100gp with a complication (rival swears vengeance, accidentally nearly kill opponent, etc)
Two failures: Win 1d12 x 10gp
Three failures: Win nothing and receive a lingering injury



Requires 25gp and one week.
Make three checks of your choice from the following against DC 10, 15, 20 or 25: Insight, Investigation, Deception, Stealth, Thievery. The DC chosen and number of successes determines the results.
DC 10: 2d6 x10gp payout
DC 15: 2d6 x25gp payout
DC 20: 2d6 x100gp payout
DC 25: 2d6 x500gp payout
No failures: Goes off without a hitch, collect payout without notice
One failure: Goes off with a complication (eg friendly contact implicated, you are spotted/identified, etc)
Two Failures: You are forced to abandon your crime before completion
Three failures: Caught and jailed, must pay fine equal to max potential payout and spend one week in jail per 100gp



Requires one week plus a bet of at least 100gp
Make three checks of your choice from the following against random DCs (5 +2d10): Insight, Deception, Intimidation, Gaming set.
No failures: Win money equal to three times your bet
One failure: Win your bet and a half with a complication (accused of cheating, crime lord’s attention, etc)
Two failures: Lose half your bet
Three failures: Lose all of your bet and incur a debt equal to that you bet


Requires at least one week and at least 50gp
You gain advantage on checks and saves to recover from poison, disease and other ailments. At the end of the week you may end one effect that prevents you from regaining HP or reduces an ability score. Particularly powerful spells and effects may not be able to be rested off.



Requires at least one week.
Make two checks of your choice from the following: Insight, Religion, Persuasion. The total determines the result:
1-15: No effect, no lasting impression
16-30: You earn one favour with a complication (minor blasphemy, rival sect, etc)
31+: You earn two favors



Requires one week and 100gp. Every extra week or 100gp gives +1 to maximum of +5.
Make two checks of your choice from the following: Arcana, Investigation, Persuasion. The total determines the result:
1-15: No new information is learned
16-30: You learn one piece of useful lore with a complication (offend a sage, cursed book, etc)
31+: You learn two pieces of useful lore



Requires at least one week, 100gp and an item to sell
Make two checks of your choice from the following: Investigation, Insight, Persuasion. The total determines the result:
1-15: You cannot find a buyer
16-30: You sell the item at 3/4 price with a complication (sold to enemy, buyer is killed, etc)
31+: You sell the item at full price

Common: 50gp
Uncommon: 500gp
Rare: 5,000gp
Very Rare: 50,000gp
Consumables are worth half



Requires a trainer plus 100gp per week. Length of training determines result:
2 Weeks: Swap a known skill or tool proficiency, spell known or class ability (fighting style, expertise, etc) for another
4 Weeks: Learn a new tool, language or weapon proficiency
8 Weeks: Swap Feat or Subclass for another
A successful DC 20 Intelligence check reduces the training required by 1 week (minimum 1 week). Failure results in a complication (trainer disappears, unconventional teachings, etc)



Requires at least one week.
Make a check from the following list: Athletics, Performance, Tool kit. Multiply the result by 1d4 and that is your earnings for the week.

[Tanarii]

Interesting. They considerably reduced the time, but increased the cost, of training a new tool or language. I wonder why? Maybe because they don't expect that many campaigns to have 50 work-weeks of downtime? (edit: or just didn't feel it was balanced with the other options?)
PHB: 250 days, 250gp
UA: 50 days, 1000gp

[Chaosmancer]

Look, the crafting rules have to make sense for the world. If you want +2 swords to be common enough for any ordinary soldier to wield, then more power to you, but these are designed for the 5e basic expectations.

The only part of these rules that prevents +2 weapons wielded by the Kingdom's soldiers isn't the time and money spent on them. It's the special components, the quest items that take a truly exceptional person to obtain. Otherwise a rich enough kingdom probably wouldn't mind spending 2,500 gold a pop to make some of the most powerful swords in existence.

An empire which earns hundreds of thousands of gold in taxes would leap at the chance, and once you make a magic item, it is good for essentially forever. Swords that don't rust, don't dull, don't break, over time that's a money saver no matter how expensive the initial cost.

So... reagents and special materials prevent items from being too common, not also requiring a few years and a couple thousand gold.


Snipping to save space

Yes, we can always try and get other people to do the work for us. To bring 10 years down to 1 year requires 10 extra people, to make it a month requires 130 smiths.

Sure, let’s get a 130 smiths to make the stuff for us. In fact, let’s make it 131 so I can just not do anything.

At some point you’ve got too many people working, and the rules don’t cover this eventuality either.

But let’s look at the other point. How does my character become better at making things?

By hiring people to make things for him… that’s the only actual way to become better than I was at level 1. By hiring other people to share the work. Other than that nothing in the rules allows you to become better at crafting than you started with. How does the bard become a better singer? Proficiency increases with level, they can gain expertise, they can increase their charisma, mechanically they grow, improve their skills.

Anyone who makes things for a living as a DnD character, even if they just finished 10 weeks of training to gain proficiency is a master who can never improve their craft. Unless they need plot powers, and then they can do whatever plot says they can do, and you can’t because you are an adventurer, not an artisan.

Well the Barbarian isn’t a king and the Bard isn’t a singer. They are adventurers as well. That didn’t stop them from improving, from doing other things, from mastering certain skills. A person with proficiency, heck even expertise which I think the Artificer got, in artisan tools never improves. They can never maker any item better than standard quality and they can never make it faster than the most wet-behind the ears apprentice.

Full Plate takes 7.5 months to make. Everytime, unless you hire more people. No one is better than anyone else, no one does it faster, cheaper, or with better quality.

Where else in the game is every single character limited to being just as good at level 20 as they were at level 1?

[Kane0]

But let’s look at the other point. How does my character become better at making things?

By hiring people to make things for him… that’s the only actual way to become better than I was at level 1. By hiring other people to share the work. Other than that nothing in the rules allows you to become better at crafting than you started with. How does the bard become a better singer? Proficiency increases with level, they can gain expertise, they can increase their charisma, mechanically they grow, improve their skills.

Full Plate takes 7.5 months to make. Everytime, unless you hire more people. No one is better than anyone else, no one does it faster, cheaper, or with better quality.

Where else in the game is every single character limited to being just as good at level 20 as they were at level 1?

Perhaps mine above would help? The better you are the faster you progress.
But there are other things that never progress, notably everything you aren't proficient in like skills and saves.

[Coidzor]

Look, the crafting rules have to make sense for the world. If you want +2 swords to be common enough for any ordinary soldier to wield, then more power to you, but these are designed for the 5e basic expectations.

In case you're not just straight-up strawmanning, you should know that is not what is being asked for, nor what would be accomplished by being able to make magic items in a more timely manner.


In settings with more magic item availability there will be more of them and crafting will be shorter than these rules, in others crafting magic items might not be possible.

That reminds me, it's very peculiar to me that Forgotten Realms is now THE default setting for D&D in this edition, but these rules weren't made with that in mind.


Interesting. They considerably reduced the time, but increased the cost, of training a new tool or language. I wonder why? Maybe because they don't expect that many campaigns to have 50 work-weeks of downtime? (edit: or just didn't feel it was balanced with the other options?)
PHB: 250 days, 250gp
UA: 50 days, 1000gp

I think they just had a philosophy of not being able to throw someone a bone without taking something away from them. :smallyuk:

So that what once took too much time to do until it no longer mattered because your party was high enough level to readily take care of language issues now just costs too much money to do until you're high enough level that it no longer matters.

[DanyBallon]

Where else in the game is every single character limited to being just as good at level 20 as they were at level 1?

Maybe it's because the rules are for making adventurers, not commoners that will make a living of their trade. You don't need NPCs to progress from level 1 to level 20. That was a thing in 3.P but isn't anymore in 5e.
If as a DM I need Bob Blackforge to be a better smith than Joe Hellfire, I don't need to know that Bob is having a +10 with smith tools, I just say that Bob can provide better goods and voila!

As far as your character getting better, first you start non-proficient, then you get proficient, and if you're in class that allow it you get expertise. As far as I know, that's a progression. It's not the same as the progression in 3.P, I agree, but it's a progression none the less, and it his how it works in 5e.

And concerning the crafting rules not considering that your are proficient or expert with the required tools, it's because they are downtime rules, which means they are there to flesh up the gap between adventuring. Your skills are meant to be used principally when adventuring.

[Biggstick]

-Snip-

But let’s look at the other point. How does my character become better at making things?

By hiring people to make things for him… that’s the only actual way to become better craft things faster than I did at level 1. By hiring other people to share the work. Other than that nothing in the rules allows you to become better at crafting than you started with. How does the bard become a better singer? Proficiency increases with level, they can gain expertise, they can increase their charisma, mechanically they grow, improve their skills. The only way to become better at a skill or tool set is to gain levels or increase the relevant stat for the thing you want to be good at

Leveling up increases your proficiency bonus, thus making you better should a DM ever call for a Blacksmithing check.

Increasing the relevant stat for Blacksmithing (which I think could be argued as Intelligence, Wisdom, Strength, or Dexterity given someone who's persuasive enough), will also increase your mechanical ability in Blacksmithing checks.

It's literally the same exact way every other class gets better at doing the things they do. It's right in front of you and you either aren't seeing it or looking right past it!


-Snip-
No one is better than anyone else, no one does it faster, cheaper, or with better quality.

Where else in the game is every single character limited to being just as good at level 20 as they were at level?

Anyone that crafts anything simply lowers the chance of failure by leveling up. D&D 5E doesn't have standard Plate and better Plate, and best Plate, they simply have Plate. If your DM has introduced such a thing into your game, then you can absolutely attempt to craft such things yourself. Otherwise, if no such thing exists in your DM's world, then you can't craft better Plate. What you can do, is create a quality brand that everyone values higher then the standard Plate. That is totally doable in the standard D&D 5E world.

As for lowering craft time, it's built into the UA rule set already. If you don't think it's fast enough, and the ways around increasing crafting speed don't work for you, talk to your DM. See if you can work something out.


Perhaps mine above would help? The better you are the faster you progress.
But there are other things that never progress, notably everything you aren't proficient in like skills and saves.

Thank you Kane lol. Someone else seeing that yes, there are things you don't grow in.

[Coidzor]

Maybe it's because the rules are for making adventurers, not commoners that will make a living of their trade.

No, that is almost certainly not why that is the case, and if it is the reason why they did it that way, they've egregiously wasted everyone's time.

[DanyBallon]

No, that is almost certainly not why that is the case, and if it is the reason why they did it that way, they've egregiously wasted everyone's time.

I'm not sure I understand, are you saying that the devs wasted everyones time because they decided that the rules are for creating PCs, which will have the spotlight, and not for NPCs?

Because if it is the case, then you've totally missed the intent of this edition. The Monstrous Manual is the best example that the devs didn't want the NPCs and the PCs to follow the same rules...

If not, then sorry for misunderstanding what you were saying.

[Luccan]

I feel like each activity needs alternate rules for how you want to run your game. If it seems appropriate that a magic item be your life's work, that's fine. But if you want players to be able to churn out a wand of water walk a week, then there needs to be some suggested guidelines for that. I was happy to read you don't have to be a caster to create magic items (at least, if I read that section right).

[Kane0]

Reduce the rarity of magic items by 1-2 steps?

[Temperjoke]

Maybe people should stop looking at crafting in D&D like it's crafting in a MMORPG?

[JackPhoenix]

For the 5k gp gem and necklace: No, you don't have to spend 100 weeks of work, you already got the 100 weeks worth of work in the form of the gem itself, weeks you don't have to spend by searching for the uncut gem of sufficient size and quality, carefully cutting it into the desired shape, polishing and possibly transport in between. All you need is to craft the setting, which may be as intricate or simple as you want, with appropriate addition to the final price of the necklace and resulting crafting time. Want something simple? The necklace is now worth 5050 gp and you've spent one week and 25 gp working with the golden wire. Want real masterwork? Sure, the result is worth 10 000 gold pieces, and only half of those is the gem itself... good luck with getting the other half done.

[Kane0]

Maybe people should stop looking at crafting in D&D like it's crafting in a MMORPG?

There aren't enough rat whiskers in the world if that were the case :smalltongue:

Edit: Though now you have me pondering...

[Chaosmancer]

As far as your character getting better, first you start non-proficient, then you get proficient, and if you're in class that allow it you get expertise. As far as I know, that's a progression. It's not the same as the progression in 3.P, I agree, but it's a progression none the less, and it his how it works in 5e.

And concerning the crafting rules not considering that your are proficient or expert with the required tools, it's because they are downtime rules, which means they are there to flesh up the gap between adventuring. Your skills are meant to be used principally when adventuring.

There is no way to gain expertise in Tools other than Thieves Tools, except the UA Artificer. So, for 90% of the characters, they either have Proficiency or they do not. Unless they use the Training rules or take the Skilled feat, there is no way to gain new tool proficiencies on a permanent basis. So, for 90% of characters, they gain their proficiency in character creation at level 1. And then never grow beyond that point.

Before I get to your last sentence I’m going to throw up this quote, because they are essentially the same discussion



Leveling up increases your proficiency bonus, thus making you better should a DM ever call for a Blacksmithing check.

Increasing the relevant stat for Blacksmithing (which I think could be argued as Intelligence, Wisdom, Strength, or Dexterity given someone who's persuasive enough), will also increase your mechanical ability in Blacksmithing checks.

It's literally the same exact way every other class gets better at doing the things they do. It's right in front of you and you either aren't seeing it or looking right past it!

What is a Blacksmith check?

This is something that has bugged me about the tools section since the beginning. You have proficiency in using your tools, but the tools are never used for anything. The biggest thing Carpenters tools, blacksmiths tools, painters tools, all of them would logically be used for is crafting. But crafting never involves a skill check in the RAW game. Every set of crafting rules reads “If you have proficiency, you make X progress per day, once you’ve gotten the total price you are done”.

So, what rolls do you make? I have Blacksmith Tools I’m proficient in, when does that leads to a roll? Using a hammer to break something? Generally athletics or an attack versus an hp threshold. Talking to another Blacksmith? Persuasion. Recognizing the work of a master? History. That is if it isn’t just given because there is no way a Blacksmith wouldn’t be able to do it, and even if you don’t have proficiency and the DM gives it to you, that’s because you are a Blacksmith, not because you are using the tools.

We have 17 unique sets of Aritsan’s Tools in the PHB, given through backgrounds and racial bonuses, and they do absolutely nothing beyond giving you the opportunity to craft, which never utilizes your skills because it is never a roll.

So, to this,


Thank you Kane lol. Someone else seeing that yes, there are things you don't grow in.

I will remind you, an unproficient skill or save improves whenever your ability scores improve, which you can do with an ASI. You can also gain proficiency, and then that skill or save will increase with level as you gain proficiency.

Actually, the only roll a character makes that never improves is a Death Save (just realized this one) because there is no modifier. Anything with a modifier can be improved and grows a s the character levels. Since crafting never involves a roll, it is the only other thing that never gets better.




Anyone that crafts anything simply lowers the chance of failure by leveling up. D&D 5E doesn't have standard Plate and better Plate, and best Plate, they simply have Plate. If your DM has introduced such a thing into your game, then you can absolutely attempt to craft such things yourself. Otherwise, if no such thing exists in your DM's world, then you can't craft better Plate. What you can do, is create a quality brand that everyone values higher then the standard Plate. That is totally doable in the standard D&D 5E world.

As for lowering craft time, it's built into the UA rule set already. If you don't think it's fast enough, and the ways around increasing crafting speed don't work for you, talk to your DM. See if you can work something out.

How do you create a quality brand? If something it better quality than something else, then it is in some way better. If you were to buy two different cars, and they were identical in every single fashion, they worked the same, would break down at the same time, they are essentially quantum twin cars. But one was from Chrysler and one from Jim Bob, which one is quality? They are literally the same so it doesn’t matter.

Now, I grant, I could make prettier armor, aesthetic design probably doesn’t cost more. But functionally I cannot improve the quality. So how do I make a brand? I go and advertise, I go street to street and tell everyone how my armor is…. Exactly the same as my competitors but superior, just trust me?


And yeah, I can work something out, I’ve been looking for good crafting rules for a while, but as a DM I’d really appreciate if the official rules made some logical sense in this regard. I have a character who makes things, where that is as important to them as dressing up and lying to people is to the con artist rogue, but the rules give me no support in making that mean something in game, unless the entire party is willing to wait around for months at a time.




And @Kane, that does look like a good system for the crafting. A lot easier to implement than some of the other things I’ve found, and I like the progression of the DCs.



No, that is almost certainly not why that is the case, and if it is the reason why they did it that way, they've egregiously wasted everyone's time.

Quoted for Truth




For the 5k gp gem and necklace: No, you don't have to spend 100 weeks of work, you already got the 100 weeks worth of work in the form of the gem itself, weeks you don't have to spend by searching for the uncut gem of sufficient size and quality, carefully cutting it into the desired shape, polishing and possibly transport in between. All you need is to craft the setting, which may be as intricate or simple as you want, with appropriate addition to the final price of the necklace and resulting crafting time. Want something simple? The necklace is now worth 5050 gp and you've spent one week and 25 gp working with the golden wire. Want real masterwork? Sure, the result is worth 10 000 gold pieces, and only half of those is the gem itself... good luck with getting the other half done.


I like and agree with this, but that isn’t how I see RAW working. The gem is part of the materials used to make the necklace, and by RAW crafting time is determined by how expensive the final product is.

Though, I do like the idea of endrunning the system by crafting the pieces of a thing which are super cheap and easy to do, and then just combining them.

And this is one of those few times I think the RAW is important to get straight and recognize as flawed, because we can fix it at each individual table, or with 3rd party supplements, but it is a pretty glaringly broken system and I’d like the Devs to at least be aware of how little it actually serves the needs of sections of the community. If you care about crafting, the rules suck, if you don’t care… then you don’t care and that’s fine, but the rules still suck

[DanyBallon]

@Chaosmancer:

I think that as long as you'll be looking for crafting rules that emulate MMO "crafting in a night" or as a mean to power up you'll be disapointed. The rules are focusing on the party adventuring, fighting monsters, defeating bad guys, exploring and finding treasure. The intent of 5e is that you don't need any magical item to be effective, and if you get by one, then it will be through adventuring. Downtimes are to fluff up gap between adventures, not to be a mechanically signifiant contribution to the character power level.

I can understand what you are looking for, but it's not part of this edition design intent.

[Tanarii]

I think they just had a philosophy of not being able to throw someone a bone without taking something away from them. :smallyuk:

So that what once took too much time to do until it no longer mattered because your party was high enough level to readily take care of language issues now just costs too much money to do until you're high enough level that it no longer matters.On reflection, I think it's more likely that they realized in the typical campaign, downtime will almost never be available in that huge an amount. Whereas money flows like water from level 5 onwards. So reducing downtime and increasing cost is still a net more accessible.

Also in my experience players want new tool proficiency more than new languages. Not really relevant to the point, just noting it.


No, that is almost certainly not why that is the case, and if it is the reason why they did it that way, they've egregiously wasted everyone's time.
You appear to have missed a huge chunk of 5e design philosphy:
1) PCs follow the PC rules. NPCs, as a general rule, don't.
2) PCs do adventuring things, and know how to do adventuring things. The ability checks, skills and most other rules are there to support that. The rules for Tool Proficiency are also designed to work within this philosophy.
3) Therefore PCs doing non-adventuring things require some DM fiat, development, or house-ruling.

This UA fits all three of those, but adds a nice little sub-system supporting #3 and making the DMs life a little easier. But it's still predicated on the first two ... things like carousing, working, crafting, etc are all minor aspects of an adventurers in terms of 'on-screen' time, and don't need major sub-systems nor attention to detail given to them.

[SharkForce]

a simple rule like you complete 25 gp worth of work *per point of proficiency bonus* per unit time would've incorporated the fact that PCs get to be better at what they're doing. it isn't hard, it's pretty danged unlikely to break anything, and now the blacksmith gets better at being a blacksmith just like everyone else gets better at everything else they do that's based on proficiency.

it wasn't hard to design that, it didn't take a long time, and i can't imagine it breaking anything, so why not?

[Sigreid]

I've been thinking about it and I think I see where their principals jump the shark. Basically it's that their formula assumes all labor is equal value.

[Beleriphon]

I've been thinking about it and I think I see where their principals jump the shark. Basically it's that their formula assumes all labor is equal value.

It isn't a bad way to handle the issue of a mundane job. Basically all it does give the character a way to pay for their chosen lifestyle without spending adventuring loot. That is after all what most people do with the money they earn from their daily work.

[Sigreid]

It isn't a bad way to handle the issue of a mundane job. Basically all it does give the character a way to pay for their chosen lifestyle without spending adventuring loot. That is after all what most people do with the money they earn from their daily work.

I don't dispute that's their thinking. Merely pointing out that it's the source of the difficulty for people who want to use their crafting skills.

[Chaosmancer]

@Chaosmancer:

I think that as long as you'll be looking for crafting rules that emulate MMO "crafting in a night" or as a mean to power up you'll be disapointed. The rules are focusing on the party adventuring, fighting monsters, defeating bad guys, exploring and finding treasure. The intent of 5e is that you don't need any magical item to be effective, and if you get by one, then it will be through adventuring. Downtimes are to fluff up gap between adventures, not to be a mechanically signifiant contribution to the character power level.

I can understand what you are looking for, but it's not part of this edition design intent.


.
2) PCs do adventuring things, and know how to do adventuring things. The ability checks, skills and most other rules are there to support that. The rules for Tool Proficiency are also designed to work within this philosophy.



How are they designed to work within the adventure? This is one thing I have never seen, is someone finding a way to use their tool proficiency in the course of raiding a goblin camp or breaking up a cult or fighting a dragon. Where have you seen Blacksmith's Tools, Weaver's Tools, Carpenter's Tools, or any of these others actually used in the game? Other than crafting I've never even seen someone attempt to use them.

And yet the game gives us a background with 17 sets of tools, and a few races with them as well, implying that they have equal value to skills. Then, when complaints surface that using these tools to make things like they were intended, it's dismissed largely on the basis that you are adventurers and not craftsmen, despite clearly being craftsmen as well as adventurers.

Many classic fantasy characters are something else before they are "adventurers" be it priests, princes, spies, craftsmen, or entertainers. There is no reason to assume the game should not and cannot help us depict those types of roles.

And it isn’t about power, its all about time and achievability. If a group is only concerned with ramping up their power with no concern to story or character development, then these rules pose no obstacle for them. They will declare themselves taking a break for however long it takes, no matter the consequences. I’ve had a group literally decide to sleep outside of an ogre cave, after attacking some ogres who retreated inside, because they wanted to be fully rested before going in. They were obviously attacked in the middle of the night, but concerns of what made sense didn’t matter to them.



a simple rule like you complete 25 gp worth of work *per point of proficiency bonus* per unit time would've incorporated the fact that PCs get to be better at what they're doing. it isn't hard, it's pretty danged unlikely to break anything, and now the blacksmith gets better at being a blacksmith just like everyone else gets better at everything else they do that's based on proficiency.

it wasn't hard to design that, it didn't take a long time, and i can't imagine it breaking anything, so why not?

That’s an awesome idea, and frankly I’m a little shocked I never thought of it before. Thank you very much.

[DanyBallon]

How are they designed to work within the adventure? This is one thing I have never seen, is someone finding a way to use their tool proficiency in the course of raiding a goblin camp or breaking up a cult or fighting a dragon. Where have you seen Blacksmith's Tools, Weaver's Tools, Carpenter's Tools, or any of these others actually used in the game? Other than crafting I've never even seen someone attempt to use them.

And yet the game gives us a background with 17 sets of tools, and a few races with them as well, implying that they have equal value to skills. Then, when complaints surface that using these tools to make things like they were intended, it's dismissed largely on the basis that you are adventurers and not craftsmen, despite clearly being craftsmen as well as adventurers.

Many classic fantasy characters are something else before they are "adventurers" be it priests, princes, spies, craftsmen, or entertainers. There is no reason to assume the game should not and cannot help us depict those types of roles.

You nailed it, they are background tools (no pun intent). And they are options for the DM to use. Maybe in one adventure, they have to forge a missing part for a mechanism that would allow the group to open the door to the treasure room. The DM may decide to use the downtime rules, or simply ask for a Blacksmith tool check as the item is simple and of no real value. You may decide that not picking a skill in order to pick an artisan tool for fluff reason is not worth it, and you have all the rights to do so.


And it isn’t about power, its all about time and achievability. If a group is only concerned with ramping up their power with no concern to story or character development, then these rules pose no obstacle for them. They will declare themselves taking a break for however long it takes, no matter the consequences. I’ve had a group literally decide to sleep outside of an ogre cave, after attacking some ogres who retreated inside, because they wanted to be fully rested before going in. They were obviously attacked in the middle of the night, but concerns of what made sense didn’t matter to them.


If it's about time, then you have all your character lifespan to craft. If you are under time constraint, then it means that what you are crafting is in order to be more powerful. In which case you'd be more effective trying to find or buy the item.

[Beleriphon]

And yet the game gives us a background with 17 sets of tools, and a few races with them as well, implying that they have equal value to skills. Then, when complaints surface that using these tools to make things like they were intended, it's dismissed largely on the basis that you are adventurers and not craftsmen, despite clearly being craftsmen as well as adventurers

Crafting tools in the context of adventuring tends to work on the basis of setting traps, and sabotage rather than actively crafting a new sword in the middle of a dungeon. If nothing else the mundane crafting work reasonable well. I enjoy Forged in Fire, and the smiths create a knife in six hours under some pretty crazy conditions... using modern power tools, gas furnaces, and a very specific set of instructions. Even then they can fail to produce a functional knife, for any of a variety reasons. The next challenge of producing a different weapons (usually a sword of some kind) takes 5 days, although I suspect some of them could have finished in less time. Still the idea that most crafting mundane equipment takes between one day and a week isn't unreasonable. If you happen to mean that the length of time to create something like a Hammer of Dwarven Lords or a Holy Avenger that is different ball of wax.

[JackPhoenix]

And yet the game gives us a background with 17 sets of tools, and a few races with them as well, implying that they have equal value to skills. Then, when complaints surface that using these tools to make things like they were intended, it's dismissed largely on the basis that you are adventurers and not craftsmen, despite clearly being craftsmen as well as adventurers.

Tool proficiencies explicitly DON'T have equal value to skill proficiencies: note that backgrounds give 2 skill proficiencies and 2 "other" proficiencies: tools, musical instruments, languages.

Same with training, you can spend gold and downtime to learn tool proficiency or language, but not skills.

Those "lesser" proficiencies are basically fluff, which may find some use in the game in some specific circumstances (honestly, thieves tools should get proper skill proficiency: as it was mentioned, it's also only tool that can be taken for Expertise). They help to flesh out character's background and personality,


How do you create a quality brand? If something it better quality than something else, then it is in some way better. If you were to buy two different cars, and they were identical in every single fashion, they worked the same, would break down at the same time, they are essentially quantum twin cars. But one was from Chrysler and one from Jim Bob, which one is quality? They are literally the same so it doesn’t matter.

Now, I grant, I could make prettier armor, aesthetic design probably doesn’t cost more. But functionally I cannot improve the quality. So how do I make a brand? I go and advertise, I go street to street and tell everyone how my armor is…. Exactly the same as my competitors but superior, just trust me?


Does the difference have to be represented in the intentionaly abstract rules, though? Say, one armor is made better than other, it fits the wearer better and it's more comfortable, perhaps it's somewhat more durable, and it may certainly look different... but does that really deserve mechanical representation in the game where items with very different designs and uses like viking centergrip shield, renaissance buckler, roman scutum and medieval horseman kite shield use the same rule of "Shield, +2 to AC"?

The items are not identical in every fashion, but the differences are fluff and have no bearing on the actual rules concerning that type of item.


I like and agree with this, but that isn’t how I see RAW working. The gem is part of the materials used to make the necklace, and by RAW crafting time is determined by how expensive the final product is.

Though, I do like the idea of endrunning the system by crafting the pieces of a thing which are super cheap and easy to do, and then just combining them.

Is the gem part of the materials, though, or is it an unfinished part of the end result? The rules don't say what the "half price in material" represents. You don't turn 5000 gp gem into 10 000 gp gem by wrapping it in golden wire for 2 years, and the gem itself is propably the major part of the necklace's price. The cut gem is obviously already a finished object in itself: to get the cut gem, someone first had to take a raw gem (worth 2500 gp per rules) and then work and polish it until it ends up as a much more valuable jewel.



People who want realistic, functional economy and crafting system forget that even the thing the game is focused on, invading someone's (or something's) home, murdering it and stealing its stuff, is also handled in a very abstract way. It's easy to say "crafting rules in D&D suck!", but there's really no good way to represent all the possibilities without releasing a whole new game, with a lot of thick rulebooks, called, I dunno, Workshops & Craftsmen, or something. 5e in particular is based on the assumption that if there's no rule for something, GM should think what to do, and if he doesn't like how some rule works, he may freely change it. The present crafting rules are a compromise (compromise meaning both sides are equaly unsatisfied) between saying "you're on your own, this is not what the game is about" and not including crafting rules at all like some other games, and creating detailed (and boring) rules that majority of players won't have any use for in the intended playstyle, that take room in the books, perhaps displacing some other rules and subsystems, and that would STILL be flawed.

Just look at this thread, how many people have different ideas how crafting rules should work.

[McNinja]

The common theme being that tool proficiencies should matter.

[DanyBallon]

The common theme being that tool proficiencies should matter.

Why?
The possible publication of "tool" feats and the requirement for some of the new Downtime rules have more than enough mechanical implication for something that is purely fluff gained through your background. (except for thieves' tools)

[Bahamut7]

Why?
The possible publication of "tool" feats and the requirement for some of the new Downtime rules have more than enough mechanical implication for something that is purely fluff gained through your background. (except for thieves' tools)

And that is the problem, the only real set of tools that are supported by the rules are the Thieves Tools. With so many possible choices, the system should provide an equally appealing reason to have those other tools. Crafting armor and weapons should be in the system (balanced rules mind you) to alleviate the need to find items or have to travel back to town to hopefully find an artisan or merchant who has what you want.

What sounds better?

1.) We got some gold at the ruins of the temple in the mountains, traveled all the way back to town, bought some new equipment, and then hiked back up to take on the boss.

2.) We found some really good gear that has not eroded or fallen into disrepair in the ruins of the mountain temple.

3.) Bob, the fighter who use to be a black smith, found an old forge in the mountain temple with some materials and was able to upgrade the party's armor while we were preparing for our assault against the sky boss.

[Chaosmancer]

You nailed it, they are background tools (no pun intent). And they are options for the DM to use. Maybe in one adventure, they have to forge a missing part for a mechanism that would allow the group to open the door to the treasure room. The DM may decide to use the downtime rules, or simply ask for a Blacksmith tool check as the item is simple and of no real value. You may decide that not picking a skill in order to pick an artisan tool for fluff reason is not worth it, and you have all the rights to do so.
Tools are not DM options. They are player options.

I don’t consider them fluff, because there is no indication in the rules it is supposed to be treated like fluff, barring the fact that the rules are bad enough to discourage us from using them.


If it's about time, then you have all your character lifespan to craft. If you are under time constraint, then it means that what you are crafting is in order to be more powerful. In which case you'd be more effective trying to find or buy the item.

As a DM, if my players indicate to me that there is an aspect of their character they would like to explore, and it isn’t some “I’m the prophesied One King meant to slay the Dark Lord and bring Peace to all Lands” type of BS, it is imperative to me that I find some way to include that for them, without impeding the other players too much.

I don’t tell them that if they want to kill the man who killed their father “You have your character’s entire lifespan to do that. If you’re under a time constraint just hire 1,000 assassins with the money you got to do it for you instead of trying to ruin everyone else’s good fun”

It seems entirely backwards to me, to actively discourage a player from trying to use their abilities in the game to affect the state of the game. And as much as we are calling these “Downtime” rules, they apply equally well when it isn’t “Downtime” and the players are simply going into town and doing things as part of their adventures.


Crafting tools in the context of adventuring tends to work on the basis of setting traps, and sabotage rather than actively crafting a new sword in the middle of a dungeon. If nothing else the mundane crafting work reasonable well. I enjoy Forged in Fire, and the smiths create a knife in six hours under some pretty crazy conditions... using modern power tools, gas furnaces, and a very specific set of instructions. Even then they can fail to produce a functional knife, for any of a variety reasons. The next challenge of producing a different weapons (usually a sword of some kind) takes 5 days, although I suspect some of them could have finished in less time. Still the idea that most crafting mundane equipment takes between one day and a week isn't unreasonable. If you happen to mean that the length of time to create something like a Hammer of Dwarven Lords or a Holy Avenger that is different ball of wax.

I’ve never seen them used to create traps or commit any sabotage, though those are interesting ideas to keep in mind.

And you’re right, anything below 50 gold works perfectly fine with the current rules. Though with the current rules you could make 3 Longswords in a week, since each only take 1.5 days to craft. But then anything more expensive starts getting into crazy amounts of time, time that is unreasonable to expect for a party. This does show up more with magic items, but even Full Plate armor just seems unreasonable.

See, I know people who do Chainmail items. It is a difficult process that takes a really long time IRL. With these rules a smith can take raw metal and make a suit of chainmail armor in a week and a half. However, to make Full Plate takes 30 weeks, that’s 7 and a half months. And sure, perhaps full plate truly is that difficult to make, it is a lot of metal to shape after all, but somehow I don’t think it is 30 times more difficult and time consuming than making thousands of tiny rings and linking them together piece by piece.

A painting needs to be made with materials worth half it’s cost, so lets break all the ideas of artistry to make a painting with paint and canvas worth 1,500 gold. It will take our painter over a year to complete this piece, and it is the size of a Daguerreotype (tiny hand held painting). How many of the works of great artists in our world took them time equivalent to their value? Most of the artists did their work in the span of a few months and made works we consider priceless, or a couple million dollars if you translate that.

And again, by making these items which are expensive, you are going to run into the problem of the party not wanting to wait around for you. Which causes tension which could be avoided by allowing faster crafting.

And nothing is going to break. IF you are willing to give players a magic weapon for going to the tomb of an ancient hero, then why not be willing to give them the ability to quickly craft a magic item by getting metal from a meteorite guarded by a guardian naga who is under attack by cultists. Both are adventures, both end up with players getting a magic weapon. One is just an item that could be randomly handed to them while another is an item they worked to obtain.

Which one gets valued more? Not that there is anything wrong with finding magic items, in fact if discovering the weapon of an ancestor or ancient hero is something a character is after, that is amazing and can carry a lot of weight, but that weight can be equaled by letting them make something as well.


Tool proficiencies explicitly DON'T have equal value to skill proficiencies: note that backgrounds give 2 skill proficiencies and 2 "other" proficiencies: tools, musical instruments, languages.

Same with training, you can spend gold and downtime to learn tool proficiency or language, but not skills.

Those "lesser" proficiencies are basically fluff, which may find some use in the game in some specific circumstances (honestly, thieves tools should get proper skill proficiency: as it was mentioned, it's also only tool that can be taken for Expertise). They help to flesh out character's background and personality

I had missed that Training did not allow skills, that means the only way to gain new skills is the skilled feat. Which explicitly gives you 3 skills or 3 tools, making them equal value. I guess they didn’t want people loading up with skills, but that does seem odd to me.

And Languages and Musical Instruments are given quite a bit of weight between the game world (Not being able to understand enemies is a big enough deal that there are two spells specifically meant to solve that problem, and a handful of other abilities that can be used to get around it) and the performance rules, plus bard spellcasting.

So out of your three “lesser” proficiencies, one is actually important, the other is middle ground and crafting tools are fluff meant to flesh out your personality. Despite the fact that you are allowed to make things.

I’m sure my confusion is clear. Why are these rules being delegated to “personality fluff” when it is just as easy and more engaging, to make them a viable option to utilize.


Does the difference have to be represented in the intentionaly abstract rules, though? Say, one armor is made better than other, it fits the wearer better and it's more comfortable, perhaps it's somewhat more durable, and it may certainly look different... but does that really deserve mechanical representation in the game where items with very different designs and uses like viking centergrip shield, renaissance buckler, roman scutum and medieval horseman kite shield use the same rule of "Shield, +2 to AC"?

The items are not identical in every fashion, but the differences are fluff and have no bearing on the actual rules concerning that type of item.


But doesn’t it ring hollow to go up to someone and say that you’ve made something of high-quality when it is explicitly normal? It is literally the player saying “And it’s awesome” when they are done describing it.

This line of discussion wasn’t my idea by the way. Someone else said the solution to my issue about not being able to improve crafting skills and actually make the things I wanted was to make a “quality brand” made by NPCs and approved by my character.

The rules are abstract, I get that, but if the problem is the character never seems to improve at something even if they do it for 20 levels the solution shouldn’t be “Just call it quality and have other people do it for you, after all you’re too important for that work”. That doesn’t solve the big issues at hand.


Is the gem part of the materials, though, or is it an unfinished part of the end result? The rules don't say what the "half price in material" represents. You don't turn 5000 gp gem into 10 000 gp gem by wrapping it in golden wire for 2 years, and the gem itself is propably the major part of the necklace's price. The cut gem is obviously already a finished object in itself: to get the cut gem, someone first had to take a raw gem (worth 2500 gp per rules) and then work and polish it until it ends up as a much more valuable jewel.



People who want realistic, functional economy and crafting system forget that even the thing the game is focused on, invading someone's (or something's) home, murdering it and stealing its stuff, is also handled in a very abstract way. It's easy to say "crafting rules in D&D suck!", but there's really no good way to represent all the possibilities without releasing a whole new game, with a lot of thick rulebooks, called, I dunno, Workshops & Craftsmen, or something. 5e in particular is based on the assumption that if there's no rule for something, GM should think what to do, and if he doesn't like how some rule works, he may freely change it. The present crafting rules are a compromise (compromise meaning both sides are equaly unsatisfied) between saying "you're on your own, this is not what the game is about" and not including crafting rules at all like some other games, and creating detailed (and boring) rules that majority of players won't have any use for in the intended playstyle, that take room in the books, perhaps displacing some other rules and subsystems, and that would STILL be flawed.

Just look at this thread, how many people have different ideas how crafting rules should work.

I look at the thread and see quite a few people agreeing that tool proficiency should matter for crafting, and other people saying that crafting isn’t part of the game, and a few who seem to imply that if you want to do crafting in the game you are either trying to powergame and break the world or should retire your character as a NPC and make someone who is better suited for the party.

And, frankly, Sharkforces very quick paragraph which is significantly shorter than the rules we have, are a better compromise in just about every respect.

I don’t expect a fully statted out economy with all the bells and whistles, but I’ve been frustrated with the crafting rules in the PHB being meaningless since 2014, and this was their chance to fix it. And their solution was simply to do the exact same thing only make it 10 gold a day instead of 5. It still doesn’t fix the problem. I’m looked into other crafting system homebrews, a few look potentially good, and there have been some great ideas in this thread for making it work, but I still feel like this is one section of the rules that needs overhauled, and I’m being told that I’m mistaken. That these rules are for fluff, for when people aren’t playing the game and are away from the table, that players shouldn’t even want to do stuff like this. I find this frankly bizarre, and when I’ve talked about it to my players this week, they found it bizarre. Why limit our options when we could get something closer to a good compromise without needing much more space?

[Zalabim]

I think the basic principle stopping legendary items from being made quickly is that they don't want to print rules that say a PC can make thousands of GP (in value) a day by not adventuring. That defeats the purpose of adventuring.

If making a Holy Avenger is to be your life's work, maybe that's what you do with all your down time and spare gold until finally, years later, you just need the one last thing to finish it off.


a simple rule like you complete 25 gp worth of work *per point of proficiency bonus* per unit time would've incorporated the fact that PCs get to be better at what they're doing. it isn't hard, it's pretty danged unlikely to break anything, and now the blacksmith gets better at being a blacksmith just like everyone else gets better at everything else they do that's based on proficiency.

it wasn't hard to design that, it didn't take a long time, and i can't imagine it breaking anything, so why not?
Something like this seems safe enough though.

[Cybren]

How are they designed to work within the adventure? This is one thing I have never seen, is someone finding a way to use their tool proficiency in the course of raiding a goblin camp or breaking up a cult or fighting a dragon. Where have you seen Blacksmith's Tools, Weaver's Tools, Carpenter's Tools, or any of these others actually used in the game? Other than crafting I've never even seen someone attempt to use them.


The UA is about downtime activity, so it's not supposed to work within the adventure, it's supposed to be between adventures.


And yet the game gives us a background with 17 sets of tools, and a few races with them as well, implying that they have equal value to skills. Then, when complaints surface that using these tools to make things like they were intended, it's dismissed largely on the basis that you are adventurers and not craftsmen, despite clearly being craftsmen as well as adventurers. It is not implied that they are equal to skills anywhere in the game. Because they are not equal to skills. They're so you can.... hold on, let me quote something on this subject:


Many classic fantasy characters are something else before they are "adventurers" be it priests, princes, spies, craftsmen, or entertainers. There is no reason to assume the game should not and cannot help us depict those types of roles.


True! and fair! that's why there's things like artisans tools or musical instruments. They show that the character is more than just a sack of HP and some weapon proficiency's. They're using the language of game design to communicate things to the player and frame their expectations. Notice that you can't generally sub out your class skills for more tools, or tools for more languages, or languages for more skills. Because they're not equal. They're doing what every good GURPS GM does and making sure that the PCs are 1) competent in the areas relevant to the campaigns genre and 2) spreading a small amount of their characters ability to things that aren't JUST related to that, but that reflect their existence and experience within a world of having to live and eat and poop like everyone else.

[xanderh]

7 months sounds about right for creating a full suit of plate armour. That's right around the time quoted in historical documents on the subject.
Can't say much about chain. It might be possible to create a mail hauberk in a week or two if you spend 8 hours per day and you really know what you're doing, but it's also very much possible that that is not a feasible time frame. All that means is that chainmail should have a higher price.

[Cybren]

7 months sounds about right for creating a full suit of plate armour. That's right around the time quoted in historical documents on the subject.
Can't say much about chain. It might be possible to create a mail hauberk in a week or two if you spend 8 hours per day and you really know what you're doing, but it's also very much possible that that is not a feasible time frame. All that means is that chainmail should have a higher price.

i know dan howard has wrote about mail on MyArmoury.com, but as my work filter makes my browser assume 40% of websites are unsecured i can't pull it up, but i was given to understand the nature of making mail armor was actually more involved than plate (given it's a giant suit of tiny interlocking rings)

[xanderh]

i know dan howard has wrote about mail on MyArmoury.com, but as my work filter makes my browser assume 40% of websites are unsecured i can't pull it up, but i was given to understand the nature of making mail armor was actually more involved than plate (given it's a giant suit of tiny interlocking rings)

I don't buy that. Anything I can find gives estimates of around 3 man-weeks for butted, and a realistic estimate of 12 weeks for riveted mail.

[Cybren]

I don't buy that. Anything I can find gives estimates of around 3 man-weeks for butted, and a realistic estimate of 12 weeks for riveted mail.

My cursory research seems to bring up an r/askhistorians thread (that i can only view on my phone for a similar reason as above) that claims on the quicker side it would take ~750-1000 man hours, but also looking at that dan howard article on my phone he mentions that armorsmiths would prefabricate some of the links to expedite manufacturing

[DanyBallon]

Tools are not DM options. They are player options.

I don’t consider them fluff, because there is no indication in the rules it is supposed to be treated like fluff, barring the fact that the rules are bad enough to discourage us from using them.

There no indication either that they should be used in game. They are aspect of the character background that may be used by the DM if need so, the same as if your character have seen his whole family being murdered can be use by the DM as a plot.


As a DM, if my players indicate to me that there is an aspect of their character they would like to explore, and it isn’t some “I’m the prophesied One King meant to slay the Dark Lord and bring Peace to all Lands” type of BS, it is imperative to me that I find some way to include that for them, without impeding the other players too much.

I don’t tell them that if they want to kill the man who killed their father “You have your character’s entire lifespan to do that. If you’re under a time constraint just hire 1,000 assassins with the money you got to do it for you instead of trying to ruin everyone else’s good fun”

It seems entirely backwards to me, to actively discourage a player from trying to use their abilities in the game to affect the state of the game. And as much as we are calling these “Downtime” rules, they apply equally well when it isn’t “Downtime” and the players are simply going into town and doing things as part of their adventures.

In a game revolving around crafting items, having a character that want to spend some times go on adventure to avenge his family, suggesting they have their lifespan to do so would be right.

But in the case of D&D, the objective of the game is not crafting, it's all about adventuring.



And that is the problem, the only real set of tools that are supported by the rules are the Thieves Tools. With so many possible choices, the system should provide an equally appealing reason to have those other tools. Crafting armor and weapons should be in the system (balanced rules mind you) to alleviate the need to find items or have to travel back to town to hopefully find an artisan or merchant who has what you want.

You point out that there's many tools out there, but want only crafting arms and armors to matter. What about the character that was a cartwright, or a jeweller, or a scribe?

Also, I don't see what gain you'll have from crafting, most of the time it is faster to go into town and buy for an item that trying to craft one. If it was the other way around, shops and the like wouldn't even exist as everybody would be self-sufficient.


What sounds better?

1.) We got some gold at the ruins of the temple in the mountains, traveled all the way back to town, bought some new equipment, and then hiked back up to take on the boss.

2.) We found some really good gear that has not eroded or fallen into disrepair in the ruins of the mountain temple.

3.) Bob, the fighter who use to be a black smith, found an old forge in the mountain temple with some materials and was able to upgrade the party's armor while we were preparing for our assault against the sky boss.

I fail to see your point as #1 and #3 are downtime activities. You won't be able to upgrade the party's armor over night, unless you have a game style emulating CRPG and MMO crafting. Usually D&D assumes that crafting takes time.


edit:
In my opinion, when some are asking for crafting rules, it's just because they want a (cheap) way to get exactly what they want, and they want it now. Treasure hoard do not have the specific item they are looking for, or the local shop don't have that expensive magic item? DM is screwing their character. Crafting rules do not allow you to craft over night? The devs are dumbs... It's player entitlement to the extreme.

[xanderh]

My cursory research seems to bring up an r/askhistorians thread (that i can only view on my phone for a similar reason as above) that claims on the quicker side it would take ~750-1000 man hours, but also looking at that dan howard article on my phone he mentions that armorsmiths would prefabricate some of the links to expedite manufacturing

That sounds plausible. But when comparing to plate, the simplest (and fastest) plate armour was a mail hauberk with a breastplate and arm and leg harness. There's no way this would be faster than the mail armour.

The more complicated armours didn't use mail at all, but required extensive fitting, and would take many months. Half a year is not unreasonable, but might even be a little short.

[Tanarii]

And yet the game gives us a background with 17 sets of tools, and a few races with them as well, implying that they have equal value to skills. Then, when complaints surface that using these tools to make things like they were intended, it's dismissed largely on the basis that you are adventurers and not craftsmen, despite clearly being craftsmen as well as adventurers.Ah. See, the problem is your perception. Tools don't have equal value to skills. Nor do Languages. This is an intentional design choice based on the traditional D&D adventuring game. ie Wilderness / Dungeon exploration and combat, with some social interactions in the process.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying you must play D&D that way, or that it's badwrongfun to play some other way. I'm saying ... the game designers made intentional design choices to support a 'traditional' kind of D&D when they were designing 5e. It shows all over the book, from it's simplicity, to the philosophy of rulings not rules, from it's focus on actually playing the game instead of complex character creation rules, to the focus of the more detailed rules on dungeon & wilderness exploration & combat.

If you want to use the game system to do something it's not really designed to do you can do that. You're just going to need to put in some design time to modify it to suit your tastes.

And when the Devs release sub-systems designed to do a little more of what you want, take it, hijack it, and run with it. That's what I'm going to do with this. I use downtime extensively since I want campaign time to pass whether or not players/characters attend sessions. But I have a large player base that rotates in and out of multiple sessions. So this is too complex for what I need, but gives me a good basis to introduce expanded (and useful) downtime activities for players.

[JackPhoenix]

And you’re right, anything below 50 gold works perfectly fine with the current rules. Though with the current rules you could make 3 Longswords in a week, since each only take 1.5 days to craft. But then anything more expensive starts getting into crazy amounts of time, time that is unreasonable to expect for a party. This does show up more with magic items, but even Full Plate armor just seems unreasonable.

See, I know people who do Chainmail items. It is a difficult process that takes a really long time IRL. With these rules a smith can take raw metal and make a suit of chainmail armor in a week and a half. However, to make Full Plate takes 30 weeks, that’s 7 and a half months. And sure, perhaps full plate truly is that difficult to make, it is a lot of metal to shape after all, but somehow I don’t think it is 30 times more difficult and time consuming than making thousands of tiny rings and linking them together piece by piece.

And here you hit one problem with creating simple crafting rules: all work is not equal. Some items are expensive because they require expensive materials (jewelry), some things are expensive because they need much more skill to make (plate harness) and some things don't require much skill or expensive materials, but are very labor-intensive (mail). And there are various combinations of all categories. There's no reason why you couldn't realisticaly brew a whole batch of potions (or something) at the same time (although I can think of few reasons, but they mostly boil to "because it's magic"), but while they can be mass-produced, their creation takes expensive materials and special training. Creating a plate armor is not one-man job, one armorer worked on the main breastplate, another prepared mail used to reinforce weaker spot, yet another worked on his own specialty, and all of them had assistants. Not all items have the same profit margins, which is something that would have to be aknowledged for the crafting rules to not provide strange results.


A painting needs to be made with materials worth half it’s cost, so lets break all the ideas of artistry to make a painting with paint and canvas worth 1,500 gold. It will take our painter over a year to complete this piece, and it is the size of a Daguerreotype (tiny hand held painting). How many of the works of great artists in our world took them time equivalent to their value? Most of the artists did their work in the span of a few months and made works we consider priceless, or a couple million dollars if you translate that.

Works of art work more like magic items: they don't have set price (you said yourself that we consider some things priceless). They are ultimately worth as much as someone is willing to pay... all things are, really, that's how real life economy works, but it's not as apparent in non-unique items.


And nothing is going to break. IF you are willing to give players a magic weapon for going to the tomb of an ancient hero, then why not be willing to give them the ability to quickly craft a magic item by getting metal from a meteorite guarded by a guardian naga who is under attack by cultists. Both are adventures, both end up with players getting a magic weapon. One is just an item that could be randomly handed to them while another is an item they worked to obtain.

Which one gets valued more? Not that there is anything wrong with finding magic items, in fact if discovering the weapon of an ancestor or ancient hero is something a character is after, that is amazing and can carry a lot of weight, but that weight can be equaled by letting them make something as well.

When the player find magic weapon, it may not be exactly that he wants, there may be complications (curses, descendants of the hero who don't agree with the desecration of the tomb), and it will keep the weapon rare. If they can craft anything, sooner or later some smart player will think "Hell, why the hell am I risking my life for a better gear? Let's use one of the available methods to generate ton of cash, buy the material or hire some schmucks to get the material from dangerous location, and create exactly the gear I want. And not just the weapon, also armor, magic rings, wagonload of potions and scrolls..."


I had missed that Training did not allow skills, that means the only way to gain new skills is the skilled feat. Which explicitly gives you 3 skills or 3 tools, making them equal value. I guess they didn’t want people loading up with skills, but that does seem odd to me.

And Languages and Musical Instruments are given quite a bit of weight between the game world (Not being able to understand enemies is a big enough deal that there are two spells specifically meant to solve that problem, and a handful of other abilities that can be used to get around it) and the performance rules, plus bard spellcasting.

So out of your three “lesser” proficiencies, one is actually important, the other is middle ground and crafting tools are fluff meant to flesh out your personality. Despite the fact that you are allowed to make things.

The fact that Comprehend Languages exist, and as a level 1 ritual to boot, suggests that languages aren't as important as you think. Performance rules are about equal with crafting rules (except you need Performance skill, not instrument proficiency), and bard doesn't need proficiency with musical instrument to use it as a focus, making the proficiency just about meaningless. So out of the lesser proficiencies, languages are marginally more useful than tools and musical instruments are even more useless than tools.


I’m sure my confusion is clear. Why are these rules being delegated to “personality fluff” when it is just as easy and more engaging, to make them a viable option to utilize.

Because it's not easy, and what's "engaging" is personal preference that differs between different people


But doesn’t it ring hollow to go up to someone and say that you’ve made something of high-quality when it is explicitly normal? It is literally the player saying “And it’s awesome” when they are done describing it.

This line of discussion wasn’t my idea by the way. Someone else said the solution to my issue about not being able to improve crafting skills and actually make the things I wanted was to make a “quality brand” made by NPCs and approved by my character.

The rules are abstract, I get that, but if the problem is the character never seems to improve at something even if they do it for 20 levels the solution shouldn’t be “Just call it quality and have other people do it for you, after all you’re too important for that work”. That doesn’t solve the big issues at hand.

It's not "explicitly normal". It doesn't make mechanical difference. My father is a carpenter, say he creates a chair. I have no carpentry training, but nailing few planks together to make a chair isn't that hard to do (although I wouldn't be able to do that in D&D rules, as I lack proficiency with carpentry tools). Both would be chairs, both would have "mechanical rules" of "this is a chair, you can sit on it". However, I have no doubt his chair would be of a much better quality, more confortable to sit on, will last longer under the stress of people sitting on it, and it will look much better.


And, frankly, Sharkforces very quick paragraph which is significantly shorter than the rules we have, are a better compromise in just about every respect.

I disagree. It's not shorter than the rules we have, because it needs some of those rules to work, it only replaces part of those rules. All it does is increasing the crafting speed at higher levels... which bring us to a problem of "well, I'm supposed to be an awesome blacksmith, but despite working on my craft for a decade, this guy is actually better despite not touching his hammer for 10 years because he spent that time by murdering monsters in dark holes and got more XP that way", i.e. 3e problem that to be an awesome blacksmith, a character also needed to have more fighting skill and resilience than a whole squad of town guardsmen put together.

[N810]

Perhaps a set of rules for hireling blacksmiths/craftsman to do the work for you is called for.
Perhaps even shorten crafting time/money by providing materials yourself,
or better materials to improve quality.

[Beleriphon]

I have a different question about down time, and crafting more specifically.

If this were a game other than D&D would these even be concerns? Like if I'm playing Mutants and Masterminds and highschool student Mark Matherson, the Astounding Bugboy, do I need to worry if I have rules to making sure my science project is well made? Or if my hobby of producing highly detailed miniature dioramas of black and white movies needs crafting rules?

What if my character is billionaire inventor Mike Anders? Do I need highly detailed rules to work out the construction of new inventions his company sells, or is background trait that justifies why a guy without any super powers can hang out with The Human Sponge and Aloha, the Hawaiian Hammer?

[Unoriginal]

I have a different question about down time, and crafting more specifically.

If this were a game other than D&D would these even be concerns? Like if I'm playing Mutants and Masterminds and highschool student Mark Matherson, the Astounding Bugboy, do I need to worry if I have rules to making sure my science project is well made? Or if my hobby of producing highly detailed miniature dioramas of black and white movies needs crafting rules?

What if my character is billionaire inventor Mike Anders? Do I need highly detailed rules to work out the construction of new inventions his company sells, or is background trait that justifies why a guy without any super powers can hang out with The Human Sponge and Aloha, the Hawaiian Hammer?

Depends the game in question. I've seen games who had some pretty heavy rules on how to handle super-technology.

[Beleriphon]

Depends the game in question. I've seen games who had some pretty heavy rules on how to handle super-technology.

My question is more along the lines of do we need additional rules, or are they background traits necessary to justify why we're playing this particular game?

D&D at its heart is an adventurer simulator. While it can be applied with varying levels of difficultly to other scenarios, it ultimately works best when doing adventurers in a fantasy land. D&D is essentially a game about playing a group in a Conan the Barbarian story. The downtime rules are effectively the stuff that happens between the events of The God in the Bowl and The Tower of the Elephant. Not all D&D games are going to go that way, specifically the APs aren't structured in such a way and many groups don't do that. But the downtime rules very much have the feel of what incidental stuff happens between episodic adventures that helps explain how our intrepid heroes start the next adventure.

[Chaosmancer]

I think the basic principle stopping legendary items from being made quickly is that they don't want to print rules that say a PC can make thousands of GP (in value) a day by not adventuring. That defeats the purpose of adventuring.

But only if the entire purpose of adventuring is to make money. How often is that really the case?

Looking at official APs for 5e, none of them revolve around "The players want money so they go tomb raiding" they are all about how things have gone horribly wrong and the PCs want to or are forced to fix it.

And players aren't going to stop going on adventures even if they have tons of cash, instead when the Merchant offers them 100 gold to stop the bandit raids they'll ask for something else instead, exclusive trading rights or maybe use of the merchants network for finding some McGuffin. In fact, I have an entire campaign that started with the idea of the players doing bounties and other jobs, in which they have never done a job for cash since the first session, they just keep getting favors, items and information as they seek out answers to questions they found on the first job.

Characters may start adventuring because they are poor, but 100 gold and the current crafting rules is enough to live comfortably for the rest of your life (you make a minimum of 50 gold a week, and it costs 15 gold a week to live comfortably). So the only way you could continually make money the main motivator is if you keep them poor their entire careers. Otherwise, you need other hooks.


The UA is about downtime activity, so it's not supposed to work within the adventure, it's supposed to be between adventures.

Yes it is downtime, however A) that quote was talking about tool proficiencies and B) a lot of people on this thread seem to have a very strict sense of what Downtime means.


Let us say the party needs to go to the Capital to deliver the McGuffin. They stop in a small town to resupply, and the caravan they are traveling with stops for the week. The adventure “Deliver the goods” is still going, but they can interact with the town. They may decide to press on and leave the safety of the caravan, or switch to something that is leaving today, or maybe they want to check out the local library and pray in the church. Once they have chosen a course of action, it needs to be resolved. You could roleplay all of it, or use these rules. But, we haven’t gone between adventures, we’ve just paused because the logic of the world demanded it.

Maybe you’ve got an elf, they only need 4 hours of unconsciousness during a long rest, 2 hour watch and they’ve got a free 2 hours a night that they decide to spend painting because they are an artist. How do you determine the progress they make? Logically, it would fall under crafting rules, and you can break these rules done into a by hour resource (50 gold per work week is 10 gold per day 8 hour day is 1 gold and 25 silver per hour of progress) but if they are a high level character who is well renowned and their painting is going to sell for a lot of money, then it takes longer than seems reasonable for all but the most perfectionist of artists. I’ve seen people paint beautiful works in 20 minutes (Bob Ross) and watched professional artists complete multiple works in 2 hours via twitch streams. Spending over 1,000 hours on a single piece seems excessive. And yet, we don’t have any other rules for this activity. There is no rules for crafting other than these rules, no rules for gambling other than these rules, no rules for researching other than these rules. So if these activities come up in any context, these are the only rules we have to go off of. Even if we aren’t “between adventures” whatever that may mean to your group.


True! and fair! that's why there's things like artisans tools or musical instruments. They show that the character is more than just a sack of HP and some weapon proficiency's. They're using the language of game design to communicate things to the player and frame their expectations. Notice that you can't generally sub out your class skills for more tools, or tools for more languages, or languages for more skills. Because they're not equal. They're doing what every good GURPS GM does and making sure that the PCs are 1) competent in the areas relevant to the campaigns genre and 2) spreading a small amount of their characters ability to things that aren't JUST related to that, but that reflect their existence and experience within a world of having to live and eat and poop like everyone else.

But this communication is coming across as two-faced.

“We’ve given you tool proficiencies, a feat that gives you more tool proficiencies, a class that gains expertise in tool proficiencies, and a cleric subclass that can gain proficiency in tools as part of their daily abilities, we’ve also included crafting rules” All of this makes it seem like you should be able to use these abilities within the context of the game, that at some point these tools matter in an important way to the game world.

Then you read the crafting rules and get “You need to spend so much time to do anything of any value that you might as well either retire the character or not bother in the first place.”

So they lead us to expect we shall be capable of making items in the world, and then give us a system that tells us we are not supposed to make items in the world unless there is a year long break in the game.


edit:
In my opinion, when some are asking for crafting rules, it's just because they want a (cheap) way to get exactly what they want, and they want it now. Treasure hoard do not have the specific item they are looking for, or the local shop don't have that expensive magic item? DM is screwing their character. Crafting rules do not allow you to craft over night? The devs are dumbs... It's player entitlement to the extreme.

And how does this apply to any other set of crafting rules?

If you’re upset with the idea of players making things instead of you as the DM handing them out from down on high, that’s on you, just making the necessary components they need to gather so difficult and impossible that they will never do it.

Now, I’ll admit, the end goal of any player activity is to make their character better off than they were before, in some long term plan. A merchant who can actually craft items and sell them is going to be able to make a lot of money, maybe set up a trading company, get political influence and start affecting the tax laws or policies of the government. And he may not need to kill a single dragon or demon to do it. But is that really a problem? Do we have to have it so that the only way players get power and influence and money is by killing things?



There no indication either that they should be used in game. They are aspect of the character background that may be used by the DM if need so, the same as if your character have seen his whole family being murdered can be use by the DM as a plot.

They are not to be used by the DM, they are to be used by the Player.

The DM may feel the need to craft a puzzle that requires the player to use their skills, but that is beside the point.

Let us take that “entire family killed” scenario

The DM may tie that into a larger plot. The player might also act upon it. Maybe they charge into a situation without proper planning, to save some child who reminds them of themselves. Maybe they seek out orphanages to patron. Maybe any number of situations occur because the player pulls upon their own backstory. But at no point should the DM tell the player they cannot use an aspect of their skills, because it is supposed to be a background element for DM use only. That’s just DM entitlement.


In a game revolving around crafting items, having a character that want to spend some times go on adventure to avenge his family, suggesting they have their lifespan to do so would be right.

But in the case of D&D, the objective of the game is not crafting, it's all about adventuring.

1) Are you in a game where none of the players have unique goals, ideas, or desires? Does everyone’s goal revolve around killing some thing? None of them ever want political or religious power? They never interact with any NPC group outside of the PC-approved ones?

If all of that sounds ridiculous, then I’m confused how you can justify telling a player their goal is unimportant because the party is focused on something else.

2) What is an adventure to you? It seems like you are just going to dismiss everything that isn’t “adventurous” as not worth doing, because the game is about adventuring. But, if you don’t think crafting and dealing with economics can be part of an adventure, then I can only assume going to parties and other fancy events aren’t part of adventuring, nor is researching ancient secrets part of adventuring. Is then the only acceptable way to interact with the game to go someplace dangerous, kill or sneak in and take a bunch of valuable stuff, before making all that money disappear so you have a reason to go and do it again. It’s a way to play the game, it can even be really fun I’ve found, but DnD and adventuring can be so much more than that.


You point out that there's many tools out there, but want only crafting arms and armors to matter. What about the character that was a cartwright, or a jeweller, or a scribe?

Also, I don't see what gain you'll have from crafting, most of the time it is faster to go into town and buy for an item that trying to craft one. If it was the other way around, shops and the like wouldn't even exist as everybody would be self-sufficient.


I fail to see your point as #1 and #3 are downtime activities. You won't be able to upgrade the party's armor over night, unless you have a game style emulating CRPG and MMO crafting. Usually D&D assumes that crafting takes time.

They can benefit from better crafting rules too, and in fact, people who make luxury items are the ones hit the hardest by these rules, because luxury items are expensive, so they take forever to make with these rules.

If you don’t see any value in making items yourself, of being a traveling merchant, then that’s fine. Some players that is what their character is and it can be really fun if the game supports it. And Crafting taking some time is fine, but currently it can take so much time for high level items or ideas that the DM either must extend the break to accommodate the single player (thus inconveniencing ever other player) or deny the player from improving his skills and making something cool. I find both to be bad options.


And here you hit one problem with creating simple crafting rules: all work is not equal.

You’re right, and I can adapt these rules, and combine them with ideas I’ve seen here and another set of rules I found by Mr. Numbers some time ago, but realistic isn’t as important as something that can actually see use during the length of the campaign. These don’t provide that, and that don’t let a character feel like they improve.


When the player find magic weapon, it may not be exactly that he wants, there may be complications (curses, descendants of the hero who don't agree with the desecration of the tomb), and it will keep the weapon rare. If they can craft anything, sooner or later some smart player will think "Hell, why the hell am I risking my life for a better gear? Let's use one of the available methods to generate ton of cash, buy the material or hire some schmucks to get the material from dangerous location, and create exactly the gear I want. And not just the weapon, also armor, magic rings, wagonload of potions and scrolls..."

If the players have enough money to do this, these rules don’t stop that.

If you’re players aren’t willing to adventure then you can’t make them. If all they care about is money and better gear, then yes, a smart set of players with enough cash is going hire people to adventure for them and just spend their time making things. The game is then over, and you restart. Or you disrupt their operations, and fixing their network is how they end up on adventures.

But, this hasn’t happened with crafting rules yet, because players don’t sit down to “win DnD” by getting the best stuff and money. They sit down to interact with the game world and have fun with friends.

Seriously, if decent crafting rules are all it takes to get your players to stop adventuring, then you need to find new motivations for the group or threaten what they have built after some time.


The fact that Comprehend Languages exist, and as a level 1 ritual to boot, suggests that languages aren't as important as you think. Performance rules are about equal with crafting rules (except you need Performance skill, not instrument proficiency), and bard doesn't need proficiency with musical instrument to use it as a focus, making the proficiency just about meaningless. So out of the lesser proficiencies, languages are marginally more useful than tools and musical instruments are even more useless than tools.

The fact that a spell exists to overcome a problem means it isn’t an important enough factor in the game to be a problem? I won’t deny that performance can replace instruments (but I was certain it was an instrument they were proficient in for Bards AFB at the moment so I can’t confirm that) but that just seems to heighten my confusion. Why bother having tools if the purpose of tools is to be ignored? Why bother giving the Assassin a Poisoner’s Kit, if the ability to make poison is meant to be ignored and instead they are supposed to go and buy poison. It makes no sense.


I disagree. It's not shorter than the rules we have, because it needs some of those rules to work, it only replaces part of those rules. All it does is increasing the crafting speed at higher levels... which bring us to a problem of "well, I'm supposed to be an awesome blacksmith, but despite working on my craft for a decade, this guy is actually better despite not touching his hammer for 10 years because he spent that time by murdering monsters in dark holes and got more XP that way", i.e. 3e problem that to be an awesome blacksmith, a character also needed to have more fighting skill and resilience than a whole squad of town guardsmen put together.

I refer you to what I was told repeatedly

NPCs just follow different rules than PCs.

And, if it really bugs you, give them a higher proficiency and expertise with blacksmithing if you want the NPC blacksmith to be better. Is the only possible way to earn XP in your game through killing things? Social interactions can also give XP, as can disabling traps, or simply sneaking around a guarded town.

Personally, I use milestones, because I don’t want to figure out how much XP the party should get for convincing the Prince to fund their expedition to the mountains to look for the lost city of gold. It was a major achievement, we’re 4 sessions since the last level up. I’ll give a level, even if we haven’t rolled initiative for months.



And, none of this is supposed to be unimportant to the story. Carousing gives you favors with people in town and potential plots hooks. Heck, every single thing except crafting can give you a plot hook for another adventure. So, the party is going to go on 7 months downtime for the blacksmith, and end up with a stock of 50 favors, and 21 different plot hooks to follow up on.

[N810]

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/7b/dc/98/7bdc987a821d96d51208a57f334c9675.jpg

[Beelzebubba]

you can’t because you are an adventurer, not an artisan.


I found this little gem in there, you obviously wrote it so quickly you missed it.

D&D is an adventure game.

Not an economic game.
Not a crafting game.
Not a simulation.
Not realistic.

3.x (and IIRC, also 4.x to some degree) went in whole hog on easy, sensible crafting and it made a huge mess - a magic-saturated arms race, monstrous system mastery abuse, and min-maxing galore.

These rules are not here to make sense.
They are here to create a better version of D&D.

You know, the game where adventurers have to go somewhere else to have adventures and to find cool stuff because there's not enough of it around here to go around.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I found this little gem in there, you obviously wrote it so quickly you missed it.

D&D is an adventure game.

Not an economic game.
Not a crafting game.
Not a simulation.
Not realistic.

3.x (and IIRC, also 4.x to some degree) went in whole hog on easy, sensible crafting and it made a huge mess - a magic-saturated arms race, monstrous system mastery abuse, and min-maxing galore.

These rules are not here to make sense.
They are here to create a better version of D&D.

You know, the game where adventurers have to go somewhere else to have adventures and to find cool stuff because there's not enough of it around here to go around.

I guess so. But committing home invasion in search of gold coins to pay the bills each month on isn't nearly as satisfying as becoming the head of D&D's equivalent of Standard Oil through negotiation, intimidation, underground connections, and optimized usage of your starting gold.

[Vogonjeltz]

Next up is Crime. This is the first of a few entries that make use of a formula I find deeply flawed: Make three skill checks, count the successes, don't account for any abilities beyond that. It just seems a bit insulting to the depth and variety of character tools available in D&D. The fact that a thief can case a place with divinations, go invisible, teleport in, manipulate objects from afar with telekinesis, brainwash the guards, or use any of a thousand other methods just has no influence at all. Ugh.

Anyways, the skill check itself boils down to a solvable mathematical risk/reward equation, wherein you get a certain monetary payout based on your skill ranks. So the gameplay boils down to doing a boring math equation to determine your optimal bet and not making use of most of the abilities which would normally seem to be relevant to the task.

Ludic, I'm not sure that you understand that these are meant to be quickly summarized events of what happens to our characters between adventures. They are not games/gameplay unto themselves.

If you want to run a campaign of heists, that's fine! But it's not what this is. Treating it as such is a mistake bound to leave you unhappy.


Then there's Religious Service, which lets you accrue favors similar to carousing, but without spending any money. Instead you make a check, and get 1-2 favors. You can only have 1+cha favors though, which means that anyone who doesn't have an unusually high cha (like, say, a Cleric with a high knowledge religion check) can't actually benefit from a high result. Cha-based classes can basically rack up the favors while Clerics or Religion specialists get left behind.

On the other hand, the Cleric in your example would be able to cycle through favors much faster.


which is one of the most frustrating and disappointing entries on the entire list. Basically you make an intelligence check (no mention of applying skills like Arcana, Religion, or History), invest some time and money (potentially a fairly hefty sum, especially for the level 1-10 characters this UA is supposedly aimed at), and get 0-3 "pieces of useful lore." Now here's the real headbanger: A piece of useful lore is "one true statement about a person, place, or thing." An example given is getting a statement about a creature's resistances.

The ability check system already allows you to add proficiency bonus where a proficiency applies.

Technically nowhere in the game do they need to say anything at all about a skill proficiency being applicable, yet it would still be applicable. I noticed you made this error in the evaluation of the Gambling section as well.


What is a scroll? It is a piece of parchment with the magical formula written upon it. That makes it very similar to a spellbook does it not?

When the wizard hits level 17 after 3 months of adventuring through the ruins of the mega-dungeon and adds wish to his spellbook it takes... minutes?

It takes 18 hours to transcribe a level 9 spell. So, entirely rewriting that spell from your own personal notation so that 'any' Wizard can cast it? Yeah, 2 years sounds like the kind of OP gift UA is known for.

Edit: also note that most of the complaints listed so far are addressed on the very first page of the document.

[mgshamster]

It takes 18 hours to transcribe a level 9 spell. So, entirely rewriting that spell from your own personal notation so that 'any' Wizard can cast it? Yeah, 2 years sounds like the kind of OP gift UA is known for.[/b]

What would be a modern equivalent for writing a 9th level spell scroll so that any wizard can cast it?

Maybe trying to write down instructions on how to build a nuclear power plant so a general chemistry and general physics college freshman can replicate it, given the supplies.

2 years might not be nearly enough time.

But a nuclear physicist who has spent their life studying and practicing nuclear power may not need more than a few days to understand a new type of reactor. 18 hours seems kind of reasonable. Might even be short than that.

[Sigreid]

I've been thinking about the magic item creation all day, and I think I've hit on a modification that I like. Take the work weeks shown and convert them to spell slot level weeks consumed.

For example, a 20th level wizard decides he wants to make his own personal Staff of the Magi. After getting hold of a recipe and materials, which likely required massive expense and and adventure or two in it's own right. Settling down to work it will take 500 spell level weeks, but being a level 20 wizard, our hero has 22 spell levels in his slots, so can do 22 spell level weeks per week if he expends all of his magical power every day. This means if he is willing to spend all of his power every day he can accomplish his goal in 22.7 work weeks, rounded up to 23 or just under 6 months.

The catch is he's devoting all of his considerable power to this task meaning if the DM decides to interrupt his "down time" he will only have access to his cantrips, spell mastery spells and whatever magic items he already has, putting him at considerable risk when his enemies show up. He could choose to expend less of his power daily and take longer to create the item, but have more resources should he need to defend himself.

Granted this is rough and dirty, but I'm kind of liking it.

[DanyBallon]

They are not to be used by the DM, they are to be used by the Player.

The DM may feel the need to craft a puzzle that requires the player to use their skills, but that is beside the point.

Let us take that “entire family killed” scenario

The DM may tie that into a larger plot. The player might also act upon it. Maybe they charge into a situation without proper planning, to save some child who reminds them of themselves. Maybe they seek out orphanages to patron. Maybe any number of situations occur because the player pulls upon their own backstory. But at no point should the DM tell the player they cannot use an aspect of their skills, because it is supposed to be a background element for DM use only. That’s just DM entitlement.

They can use that aspect, hence the downtime rules. But if the character wants to invest time into crafting, they are aware that they'll put aside their adventuring career for a while.



1) Are you in a game where none of the players have unique goals, ideas, or desires? Does everyone’s goal revolve around killing some thing? None of them ever want political or religious power? They never interact with any NPC group outside of the PC-approved ones?

If all of that sounds ridiculous, then I’m confused how you can justify telling a player their goal is unimportant because the party is focused on something else.

Character do have goals, and when their goal differ or is in conflict with their adventuring career, they retire, unless all the players agree to shif the game play toward a more social base campaing.



2) What is an adventure to you? It seems like you are just going to dismiss everything that isn’t “adventurous” as not worth doing, because the game is about adventuring. But, if you don’t think crafting and dealing with economics can be part of an adventure, then I can only assume going to parties and other fancy events aren’t part of adventuring, nor is researching ancient secrets part of adventuring. Is then the only acceptable way to interact with the game to go someplace dangerous, kill or sneak in and take a bunch of valuable stuff, before making all that money disappear so you have a reason to go and do it again. It’s a way to play the game, it can even be really fun I’ve found, but DnD and adventuring can be so much more than that.

When an activity involved the whole group whether it is researching, doing social stuff, etc., it is part of the adventure, but when one character, wants to craft a set of armor, another research an obscure topic, and a third wants to make contact within high society, then it's best resolve through downtime, otherwise it is boring for the other players at the table to sit and wait until you've done each character solo stuff.

[Cybren]

That's kinda similar to GURPS Enchanting, where each enchantment has a cost in fatigue points (which are used to cast spells in GURPS), and you can enchant slowly, or if you don't mind risk of failure, quickly where you dump in as many points as you can.

[Sigreid]

That's kinda similar to GURPS Enchanting, where each enchantment has a cost in fatigue points (which are used to cast spells in GURPS), and you can enchant slowly, or if you don't mind risk of failure, quickly where you dump in as many points as you can.

I didn't remember that but I may or may not have been subconsciously influenced by GURPS.

[Beelzebubba]

I have a different question about down time, and crafting more specifically.

If this were a game other than D&D would these even be concerns? Like if I'm playing Mutants and Masterminds and highschool student Mark Matherson, the Astounding Bugboy, do I need to worry if I have rules to making sure my science project is well made? Or if my hobby of producing highly detailed miniature dioramas of black and white movies needs crafting rules?

What if my character is billionaire inventor Mike Anders? Do I need highly detailed rules to work out the construction of new inventions his company sells, or is background trait that justifies why a guy without any super powers can hang out with The Human Sponge and Aloha, the Hawaiian Hammer?

Well, in superhero games, crafting is usually defined as 'you have 300 points to spend, define how many you have in your 'gadgets' pool that allow you to change powers on the fly'.

Those points lead to a well-defined set of abilities and effects that are handled within the context of your other powers. So, if you, say, have a '300 point' game, a '50 point' gadget pool is like Daredevil's billy club, and '150 point' is like Batman's utility belt and costume load-out, and '250 point' is Forge who just builds stuff. As opposed to, say, The Hulk which is just 300 points purely in his body.

The only way to 'craft' 'more' in those rulesets is to get more experience points and purchase more powers. You don't ever 'obtain stuff' like you do in D&D.

So, yeah - those rules treat crafting as a special effect within a completely different approach to game balance. Since there is no acquisitiveness of items per se, it's a much more conceptual way to use crafting as a character trait.

[Beelzebubba]

I guess so. But committing home invasion in search of gold coins to pay the bills each month on isn't nearly as satisfying as becoming the head of D&D's equivalent of Standard Oil through negotiation, intimidation, underground connections, and optimized usage of your starting gold.

OD&D used to do that, sorta. In Gygax's groups, characters at 9th+ levels 'graduated' to become the lords of armies, which then went on to fight the armies of other high level characters in table-top Chain Mail war-games. It became very War of the Roses.

I've also seen players do what you are trying to do in AD&D, but it was all home-brew since there was next to nothing in the rules. I think the best system I saw was pulled from the rules of a Mafia role playing game, and adapted to AD&D math.

I mean, I think that kind of game is rad, don't get me wrong, but it's never been D&D's forte. And I think due to it being mostly a tactical combat game with enough social 'glue' to engineer satisfying reasons to be wandering murder hobos, easy crafting will always have unwanted effects.

[Chaosmancer]

I found this little gem in there, you obviously wrote it so quickly you missed it.

D&D is an adventure game.

Not an economic game.
Not a crafting game.
Not a simulation.
Not realistic.

3.x (and IIRC, also 4.x to some degree) went in whole hog on easy, sensible crafting and it made a huge mess - a magic-saturated arms race, monstrous system mastery abuse, and min-maxing galore.

These rules are not here to make sense.
They are here to create a better version of D&D.

You know, the game where adventurers have to go somewhere else to have adventures and to find cool stuff because there's not enough of it around here to go around.


I’m unfamiliar with any messes that might have been made by 3.X and 4e, but I’ll try and rephrase, because I’ve been trying to make this point a few different times.

I’m a huge anime fan, I love it, and one of my favorite anime of all time is One Piece. I think it is one of the best stories I’ve had the pleasure to experience.

One Piece is at its heart, an adventure story. A ragtag group of people bounce from place to place, causing trouble, getting into messes, and fighting bad guys.

What truly motivates them? What drives their stories?

The Captain wants to be the King of the Pirates, and to do so he has to find the previous king’s treasure, The One Piece from the title.

The First Mate wants to be the best swordsman in the world, and so has to defeat the current best.

The Navigator wants to make a true map of the world

The Cook wants to find a mystical part of the ocean where all sea life from all corners of the globe can be found.

They have a character who wants to discover a missing segment of history, someone who wants to find an old friend, someone who simply wants to be a brave pirate warrior.

Drop 100,000,000 gold on them, and they will still be going on the same adventures. The adventure is driven by more than greed or a desire for power. They want prestige, specific things that money cannot buy them.

This applies because at certain points in time, the gunner will just hand out something he made. Like the Navigator’s weapon, he made it, it really is never explained how he made it or when, but he gives it to her. Another character built the boat they are currently using, along with all of the smaller boats, and a lot of other things. There was downtime involved with the creation of the boat, but it explicitly was not much time, certainly not enough time for even this master shipbuilder, his old friend/rival and two companies of people to make it.

And that doesn’t matter, it is still a story of people on an adventure, of people who have interests they excel at beyond what they need for adventuring, and I don’t see how it is possible to say that by providing the ability to make items at a pace that doesn’t interfere with the game you’ll suddenly stop having adventures because they won’t need money or special gear. People can have other motives to go adventuring, and maybe they decide to make a character who can’t craft, in fact no one chooses that path, then it’s not even an issue, but saying access to money and items ruins all hope for future adventures is just silly. If you find that to be true, your players need better motivations.



I've been thinking about the magic item creation all day, and I think I've hit on a modification that I like. Take the work weeks shown and convert them to spell slot level weeks consumed.

For example, a 20th level wizard decides he wants to make his own personal Staff of the Magi. After getting hold of a recipe and materials, which likely required massive expense and and adventure or two in it's own right. Settling down to work it will take 500 spell level weeks, but being a level 20 wizard, our hero has 22 spell levels in his slots, so can do 22 spell level weeks per week if he expends all of his magical power every day. This means if he is willing to spend all of his power every day he can accomplish his goal in 22.7 work weeks, rounded up to 23 or just under 6 months.

The catch is he's devoting all of his considerable power to this task meaning if the DM decides to interrupt his "down time" he will only have access to his cantrips, spell mastery spells and whatever magic items he already has, putting him at considerable risk when his enemies show up. He could choose to expend less of his power daily and take longer to create the item, but have more resources should he need to defend himself.

Granted this is rough and dirty, but I'm kind of liking it.

That is super cool. I’m loving this idea.

I’m really going to need to comb back thru this thread and copy down all the awesome ideas people have come up with so that I can end up making a homebrew I’m happy with. There is a lot of gold in this thread.



They can use that aspect, hence the downtime rules. But if the character wants to invest time into crafting, they are aware that they'll put aside their adventuring career for a while.


Character do have goals, and when their goal differ or is in conflict with their adventuring career, they retire, unless all the players agree to shif the game play toward a more social base campaing.


When an activity involved the whole group whether it is researching, doing social stuff, etc., it is part of the adventure, but when one character, wants to craft a set of armor, another research an obscure topic, and a third wants to make contact within high society, then it's best resolve through downtime, otherwise it is boring for the other players at the table to sit and wait until you've done each character solo stuff.

You really just run a completely different style than I have ever seen. If I’m understanding you correctly my groups would end up cycling through 3 or 4 different characters a campaign, because every time they wanted to do something that didn’t explicitly involve the other characters for a while, they’d either not do it or would end up temporarily retired and some random dude would come in. We’d actually need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all and figure out which characters had met whom and where we last left them.

It’s such a weird looking game in my head.

[Cybren]

I’m unfamiliar with any messes that might have been made by 3.X and 4e, but I’ll try and rephrase, because I’ve been trying to make this point a few different times.

I’m a huge anime fan, I love it, and one of my favorite anime of all time is One Piece. I think it is one of the best stories I’ve had the pleasure to experience.

One Piece is at its heart, an adventure story. A ragtag group of people bounce from place to place, causing trouble, getting into messes, and fighting bad guys.

What truly motivates them? What drives their stories?

The Captain wants to be the King of the Pirates, and to do so he has to find the previous king’s treasure, The One Piece from the title.

The First Mate wants to be the best swordsman in the world, and so has to defeat the current best.

The Navigator wants to make a true map of the world

The Cook wants to find a mystical part of the ocean where all sea life from all corners of the globe can be found.

They have a character who wants to discover a missing segment of history, someone who wants to find an old friend, someone who simply wants to be a brave pirate warrior.

Drop 100,000,000 gold on them, and they will still be going on the same adventures. The adventure is driven by more than greed or a desire for power. They want prestige, specific things that money cannot buy them.

This applies because at certain points in time, the gunner will just hand out something he made. Like the Navigator’s weapon, he made it, it really is never explained how he made it or when, but he gives it to her. Another character built the boat they are currently using, along with all of the smaller boats, and a lot of other things. There was downtime involved with the creation of the boat, but it explicitly was not much time, certainly not enough time for even this master shipbuilder, his old friend/rival and two companies of people to make it.

And that doesn’t matter, it is still a story of people on an adventure, of people who have interests they excel at beyond what they need for adventuring, and I don’t see how it is possible to say that by providing the ability to make items at a pace that doesn’t interfere with the game you’ll suddenly stop having adventures because they won’t need money or special gear. People can have other motives to go adventuring, and maybe they decide to make a character who can’t craft, in fact no one chooses that path, then it’s not even an issue, but saying access to money and items ruins all hope for future adventures is just silly. If you find that to be true, your players need better motivations.


Given that pretty much all of Usopps inventions, from the Clima-Tact to the various kinds of ammunition & dials he uses are made during downtime, as are all of Franky's cyborg inventions and the Thousand Sunny, your analogy falls flat.

[Tanarii]

You really just run a completely different style than I have ever seen. If I’m understanding you correctly my groups would end up cycling through 3 or 4 different characters a campaign, because every time they wanted to do something that didn’t explicitly involve the other characters for a while, they’d either not do it or would end up temporarily retired and some random dude would come in. We’d actually need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all and figure out which characters had met whom and where we last left them. At one time, this was the definition of a 'campaign'. The campaign continuity didn't depend on any one group of PCs, or even players.

I've done my damnedest to make an old-school campaign work with 5e ... and found to my surprise and delight that the 5e rules are very clearly designed to allow it to work, if that's how you want to play. It's almost like the 5e designers made this edition a back-to-oldschool edition on purpose.

[DanyBallon]

You really just run a completely different style than I have ever seen. If I’m understanding you correctly my groups would end up cycling through 3 or 4 different characters a campaign, because every time they wanted to do something that didn’t explicitly involve the other characters for a while, they’d either not do it or would end up temporarily retired and some random dude would come in. We’d actually need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all and figure out which characters had met whom and where we last left them.

It’s such a weird looking game in my head.

How do you manage individual player doing his solo stuff?

To use the One Piece analogy. When Usopp is developing a new Climat-Tac for Nami, are you roleplaying what he does? If so what are doing the players of Zoro, Nami, Franky in the mean time? Looking at their phones?

In my game, we are using downtime for such situation. So we can focus on what is happening to the whole group instead.

[LordCdrMilitant]

OD&D used to do that, sorta. In Gygax's groups, characters at 9th+ levels 'graduated' to become the lords of armies, which then went on to fight the armies of other high level characters in table-top Chain Mail war-games. It became very War of the Roses.

I've also seen players do what you are trying to do in AD&D, but it was all home-brew since there was next to nothing in the rules. I think the best system I saw was pulled from the rules of a Mafia role playing game, and adapted to AD&D math.

I mean, I think that kind of game is rad, don't get me wrong, but it's never been D&D's forte. And I think due to it being mostly a tactical combat game with enough social 'glue' to engineer satisfying reasons to be wandering murder hobos, easy crafting will always have unwanted effects.

I've been a fan of Pathfinder's Ultimate Downtime and Kingmaker. It is, unfortunately, also simple enough that we managed to optimize it in one night, but what have you, trade offs have to be made somewhere.


How do you manage individual player doing his solo stuff?

To use the One Piece analogy. When Usopp is developing a new Climat-Tac for Nami, are you roleplaying what he does? If so what are doing the players of Zoro, Nami, Franky in the mean time? Looking at their phones?

In my game, we are using downtime for such situation. So we can focus on what is happening to the whole group instead.

In our group, everyone goes together, and the characters have to convince/deceive the other characters into helping them. Or at least, they go with whomever they can convince, and the remainder do something else, and the DM cuts between us. It builds party unity.

[DanyBallon]

In our group, everyone goes together, and the characters have to convince/deceive the other characters into helping them. Or at least, they go with whomever they can convince, and the remainder do something else, and the DM cuts between us. It builds party unity.

Ok, I understand better now!

In our group, we try to avoid splitting the party unless it is set in advance and the next session focus to one group and another session for the other group. But since we like playing the whole group together, we use downtime to resolve such scenario.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Ok, I understand better now!

In our group, we try to avoid splitting the party unless it is set in advance and the next session focus to one group and another session for the other group. But since we like playing the whole group together, we use downtime to resolve such scenario.

In general, we don't split the party, but every once in a while, one person doesn't go along intentionally, or there are two different time-sensitive agendas that need accomplishing.

[Chaosmancer]

Given that pretty much all of Usopps inventions, from the Clima-Tact to the various kinds of ammunition & dials he uses are made during downtime, as are all of Franky's cyborg inventions and the Thousand Sunny, your analogy falls flat.

During “Downtime” yes, but the point was they don’t take very long to make.

How long do you think it should take to make a massive ship like the Sunny, along with a sub, a wave rider, a paddleboat, and whatever is in the final slot.

Months, maybe even years right? But, it very much does not take that long. A few weeks maybe, but nowhere near the amount of time it should.

A weapon as powerful as the Improved Clima-tact Nami uses in Water Seven, a DM would easily call it magic and make it take years to craft from scratch, especially by a non-magic user, but Usopp did it in maybe a month or two?

It happens off-screen, but it doesn’t take them years to make this stuff, and the fact they can do all these things quickly does not prevent them from going on adventures, which was the main point I was trying to make.


How do you manage individual player doing his solo stuff?

To use the One Piece analogy. When Usopp is developing a new Climat-Tac for Nami, are you roleplaying what he does? If so what are doing the players of Zoro, Nami, Franky in the mean time? Looking at their phones?

In my game, we are using downtime for such situation. So we can focus on what is happening to the whole group instead.

Depends on what it is, I end up bouncing between characters a lot. They love splitting the party and doing different things all the time. Sometimes they team up, and three people go to talk to the bartender to see what news there is while the other 2 want to check in at the church to report the job done. I handle one group, pivot at appropriate moments to get to the other people, and handle that until we end up done or back together.

I’m not great at it, sometimes it takes longer than it should, or I get really into one scene and the other group waits to long, but I feel it’s better than just fading to black when they get back to town and picking back up when they leave town.

And, I’m not against Downtime, this back and forth may have not made that clear. Downtime is wonderful and I wish my DMs on Roll20 used more of it. However, for me, downtime is what happens when the players aren’t at the table and we time skip. That isn’t the only time these rules will get used though. We may be in town and the players want to talk to the Duke, but they need to wait 3 days. So they go off and do things and then we can use these same rules in that situation. 90% of what we have here can be used on even a single day of “being around town”.

Alternatively, sometimes my players come back from a big mission, loaded with gold, and they want to do things. They want to look into purchasing a building, or building a shop or getting an item enchanted. They want this to be the next scene in the adventure, and I’m not going to go “You succeed, you didn’t, you’re in jail, and we pick up three months later” because that isn’t what they want. They want to go and find the old wizard, talk to him, convince him to lower the price, and interact with the world. It’s downtime, it’s not an adventure directly, but they see it as the next scene in their story and they want to Role play it, not roll play it.





Ok, I understand better now!

In our group, we try to avoid splitting the party unless it is set in advance and the next session focus to one group and another session for the other group. But since we like playing the whole group together, we use downtime to resolve such scenario.


Yeah, I can't convince my players to stop splitting the party. Even when it ends up with me running 5 different scenarios simultaneously. Again, it isn't pretty, but it is what the people want.

[Biggstick]

It happens off-screen, but it doesn’t take them years to make this stuff, and the fact they can do all these things quickly does not prevent them from going on adventures, which was the main point I was trying to make.

To me it sounds like you're wanting to bring Anime crafting and story into D&D.

Pretty much the last two pages have been you saying that what 5E has put out isn't good enough because you want Anime-speed crafting in D&D.

This whole thing makes way more sense now, as I initially thought you were a 3.5 player, but you also said you don't have that experience to draw on.

As you've said in previous posts, dig through and find what's been brought up or suggested in this thread, and you can probably put together a set of suitable rules for your table. Make sure to fill out the surveys next week and tell WOTC what you think of their Downtime and/or Crafting rules.


Depends on what it is, I end up bouncing between characters a lot. They love splitting the party and doing different things all the time. Sometimes they team up, and three people go to talk to the bartender to see what news there is while the other 2 want to check in at the church to report the job done. I handle one group, pivot at appropriate moments to get to the other people, and handle that until we end up done or back together.

There are absolutely times that this is what a party is going to do. Usually, a town is a "safe" place that PC's can effectively split from one another to accomplish different tasks. It sounds like you're doing this well enough, and Players definitely appreciate having their own time to do their "safer" activities.


Yeah, I can't convince my players to stop splitting the party. Even when it ends up with me running 5 different scenarios simultaneously. Again, it isn't pretty, but it is what the people want.

I mean that's easy enough. There are plenty of ways you can make splitting the party something the party does less of in game. Ambushes on the place the PC is visiting (Give us all your money! This is a robbery!), bounty on a PC's head (the bounty hunter(s) wait until the PC separates from the group, as they're known to do so upon arriving in town), or really just conflict that most likely leads to a combative situation in which the PC (that is alone) is outmatched.

[Phoenix042]

What would be a modern equivalent for writing a 9th level spell scroll so that any wizard can cast it?

Maybe trying to write down instructions on how to build a nuclear power plant so a general chemistry and general physics college freshman can replicate it, given the supplies.

2 years might not be nearly enough time.

But a nuclear physicist who has spent their life studying and practicing nuclear power may not need more than a few days to understand a new type of reactor. 18 hours seems kind of reasonable. Might even be short than that.

I am deeply in love with your analogy.

This.

This.

[Beleriphon]

I guess so. But committing home invasion in search of gold coins to pay the bills each month on isn't nearly as satisfying as becoming the head of D&D's equivalent of Standard Oil through negotiation, intimidation, underground connections, and optimized usage of your starting gold.

Okay, fair enough. But if you want to become the head of Standard Oil of Etherealness that isn't a downtime activity as such. It sounds like its more of an active adventure you want to go on. Downtime in such a game might be what your character is doing between meetings. So carousing is probably a good one, and give a way to generate complications without playing the specific details out.

Remember, the contacts in the downtime are contacts, not friends. They are somebody you've chatted up enough to get to know them a bit and become acquainted. Its like somebody giving you a business card at a meet and greet and inviting you call them if you need something they do. So you meet a real estate agent IRL at a party, so you give them a call when its time to sell your house. That's the kind of thing the downtime is meant to represent, at least as far the carousing goes.

[SharkForce]

I am deeply in love with your analogy.

This.

This.

except you're not creating instructions on how to build a nuclear power plant. you're creating a spell, stored in an item (in this case a scroll), which someone else can attempt to activate.

writing down instructions for how to cast the spell takes all of 9 hours, and 90 gold. it isn't actually even all that hard.

[mgshamster]

except you're not creating instructions on how to build a nuclear power plant. you're creating a spell, stored in an item (in this case a scroll), which someone else can attempt to activate.

writing down instructions for how to cast the spell takes all of 9 hours, and 90 gold. it isn't actually even all that hard.

Where are you getting your numbers?

A 9th level spell scroll is a legendary magic item. According to the DMG, a 9th level spell scroll requires a level 17 caster, 500,000 gp, and takes roughly 56 years to craft.

Reducing that down to 96 weeks is a significant improvement.

Edit: DMG 129 for crafting rules, DMG 200 for spell scroll rarity

[PhoenixPhyre]

except you're not creating instructions on how to build a nuclear power plant. you're creating a spell, stored in an item (in this case a scroll), which someone else can attempt to activate.

writing down instructions for how to cast the spell takes all of 9 hours, and 90 gold. it isn't actually even all that hard.

I think that the major distinction between scribing a spell into a spellbook (cheap and easy) and crafting a scroll (hard and expensive) is that in one case, you're simply transcribing the instructions and rephrasing things into your own code. Creating a scroll includes imbuing a piece of parchment with the magical energy held in an incomplete state so that someone of the appropriate class can actually cast the spell without spending a spell slot. That's the hard bit. In your spellbook it's inert and must be studied, prepared, and cast from a spell slot. On a scroll, it's an independent magical item usable by almost anyone.

Note: I'm not defending the exact numbers as to cost/time from the UA. Just explicating the difference involved from an in-universe perspective. Balance is also a consideration. If scribing a scroll = scribing into a spellbook, then scrolls would be everywhere and casters would reign unchecked. That's the meta-game perspective.

[mgshamster]

Also note that to copy a spell into your spell book, you have to have a spell slot of the appropriate level. So for a 9th level spell, you have to be at least 17th level.

For a scroll, even a 1st level wizard could cast a 9th level spell.

[SharkForce]

to be clear: i am not suggesting that it should be 9 hours and 90 gold to create a scroll of a level 9 spell. i am simply pointing out that the claim of needing 2 years to write down the instructions to cast the spell is silly.

(also, for 250 gold i can craft a matrix for storing spells and releasing them. it's called a glyph of warding. it takes one hour, doesn't require *any* wizard levels to use, doesn't even necessarily require an action, and doesn't have a chance of failure if you don't have enough wizard levels. you will need a way to get a second level 9 spell slot to store a level 9 spell in it, but honestly i wouldn't be surprised if you could go from level 17 to earning an epic boon in the amount of time this article gives for crafting a level 9 spell scroll).

[PhoenixPhyre]

to be clear: i am not suggesting that it should be 9 hours and 90 gold to create a scroll of a level 9 spell. i am simply pointing out that the claim of needing 2 years to write down the instructions to cast the spell is silly.

(also, for 250 gold i can craft a matrix for storing spells and releasing them. it's called a glyph of warding. it takes one hour, doesn't require *any* wizard levels to use, doesn't even necessarily require an action, and doesn't have a chance of failure if you don't have enough wizard levels. you will need a way to get a second level 9 spell slot to store a level 9 spell in it, but honestly i wouldn't be surprised if you could go from level 17 to earning an epic boon in the amount of time this article gives for crafting a level 9 spell scroll).

But that glyph is stationary. It can't move more than 10 feet. When it activates, YOU are the caster. Thus, it serves a completely different purpose than an item that a level 1 caster can use to cast level 9 spells.

Edit: That is, you're not even comparing apples and oranges here. Those, at least, are both fruit. You're comparing apples and penguins.

[mgshamster]

Does anyone in the game get two 9th level spell slots to even be able to put a 9th level spell in a Glyph of Warding?

Part of my job is writing work instructions for highly specialized equipment. Some of the equipment is so complex that it requires specialized training (most commonly obtained by getting a bachelor's degree in chemistry) before you could even begin to understand the instructions. To be able to write those instructions for someone who has no chemistry background would require a lot more work; some of which would likely include trying to explain general chemistry, organic chemistry, and analytical chemistry. Now, it is possible to write the instructions in a way so anyone could do it without any specialized knowledge, but then they wouldn't be able to interpret the results or do any sort of failure analysis - all of which is part of the task.

And the stuff I work with is likely equivalent to a 5th or 6th level spell. Let's see - that's about 2-3 months of dedicated work. I think I might just be able to do that.

[Chaosmancer]

Does anyone in the game get two 9th level spell slots to even be able to put a 9th level spell in a Glyph of Warding?

Part of my job is writing work instructions for highly specialized equipment. Some of the equipment is so complex that it requires specialized training (most commonly obtained by getting a bachelor's degree in chemistry) before you could even begin to understand the instructions. To be able to write those instructions for someone who has no chemistry background would require a lot more work; some of which would likely include trying to explain general chemistry, organic chemistry, and analytical chemistry. Now, it is possible to write the instructions in a way so anyone could do it without any specialized knowledge, but then they wouldn't be able to interpret the results or do any sort of failure analysis - all of which is part of the task.

And the stuff I work with is likely equivalent to a 5th or 6th level spell. Let's see - that's about 2-3 months of dedicated work. I think I might just be able to do that.

There's an epic boon that gives you a second 9th level slot

And to your spoiler.

Scrolls can't be used if you don't have the spell on your class spell list. So the caster has to be a wizard, bard or sorcerer to use a wish scroll. Which makes it equivalent to having a degree in chemistry by my estimation. Maybe be in their senior year if we're talking 1st level characters

[SharkForce]

But that glyph is stationary. It can't move more than 10 feet. When it activates, YOU are the caster. Thus, it serves a completely different purpose than an item that a level 1 caster can use to cast level 9 spells.

Edit: That is, you're not even comparing apples and oranges here. Those, at least, are both fruit. You're comparing apples and penguins.

eh, not really all that different. both are storing spell energy for later use. yes, the glyph can't move (much... sort of... the limitation is when the glyph is on an object, but does not apply when you cast it on a surface. as to precisely what counts as a surface instead of an object, well, your guess is literally as good as mine, since that isn't clearly defined as a D&D term to my awareness, and the english definition would mean that it can't move when you place it on, say, a piece of paper, but *can* move if you place it on the surface of the paper... which i think is pretty clearly not what they intended, so i would rule out the standard english definition as well).

if anything, storing a spell in a glyph should be harder. no training of any form is required to use it, and the resulting spell is arguably superior in that the glyph concentrates on the spell for you and no action is necessarily required to activate the glyph.

they certainly aren't identical. but they're not unrelated either. there are some pretty major similarities.

again, this is not suggesting that a level 9 spell scroll should be dirt cheap and take less than a day to make, but 2 years? that's just silly. who's going to spend 2 years scribing a level 9 scroll? you may as well just state that they don't exist, because anyone competent enough to have the ability to cast level 9 spells and therefore make the scroll knows they're never going to be able to sell it for anywhere near what they would want (nearly 2 years of labour from a level 17+ spellcaster should not come cheap, and the materials cost alone is enough for someone to buy a small fleet of ships and hire sailors to crew them for year or two), and for their own personal use it has to be more valuable as a way to spend their time than doing anything else for 2 years not to mention spending 250,000 gold. heck, if the person can afford to just sit on their butt for that long, odds are they don't move much anyways. the glyph is looking better and better. you could have placed over 600 glyphs in that time, at about half the cost (leaving the other 130k gold to be used on buying a staff of the magi, a robe of the archmagi, and whatever other magic item(s) you might want... i recommend a couple of those spell storing gems from one of the modules WotC published, or maybe an ioun stone that boosts your proficiency bonus).

i'm not saying it should be trivial to make a level 9 scroll. but the times they've listed are silly.

[mgshamster]

Prior to this document, it took 500,000 gold and 56 years to make a 9th level spell scroll.

It's been reduced to less than two years and 250k.

[SharkForce]

Prior to this document, it took 500,000 gold and 56 years to make a 9th level spell scroll.

It's been reduced to less than two years and 250k.

that's nice. but i'm not asking for less unreasonable. i'm asking for reasonable.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Don't you also have to pass a caster level check to use a spell scroll, or am I out of edition on that one?

And as far as balancing crafting times goes, regardless of analogy, the current time renders spell scrolls of high level entirely pointless. If we assume the party is going to use them, 2 years for the wizard to get a bonus spell slot, with its spell already chosen, for one day is fairly unreasonable. But, the current edition is also about never actually doing anything interesting with your high level spells anyway, because you have none of them anyway and WotC wants the wizard to throw an endless number of low-level fireballs at the enemy, instead of an endless stream of planet-cracking munitions.

[Malifice]

Upset the downtime seems to be all about gold.

They went halfway with the 'lore' and 'church favors' and 'contacts' angle.

I'd love to see a 'combat tricks' that give you a one off combat bonus, that you could earn, like you do with lore points, or floating contacts. Limited to (Str or Dex) minimum one. You can spend them to get (say) advantage on a weapon attack roll, to re-roll damage, force an opponent to re-roll an attack against you, or gain a one off +10 to initiative. One use then they're gone.

Church favors would be better off called something like 'grace' (You can earn Wis or Cha mod, minimum one). You earn them doing favors for the church (both in play and in downtime) and spend them for favors from the church or to obtain inspiration for one check.

'Contacts' and 'Lore' can be spent as described, or to obtain advantage on one charisma or intelligence based skill respectively) with an Int and Cha maximum of points (minimum one) respectively

'Health' points could be based on lifestyle (max amount = to Con). A wealthy lifestyle gets you a chance to rack one up. You spend them to obtain max result on all HD over one short rest, or to re-roll a failed Con save.

Basically you can spend downtime racking up:

Grace (max = your choice of Wis or Cha)
Combat tricks (max = your choice of Str or Dex)
Contacts (max = Cha)
Lore (max = Int)
Health (max = Con)

[Cybren]

that's nice. but i'm not asking for less unreasonable. i'm asking for reasonable.

How hard is division?

[EvilAnagram]

that's nice. but i'm not asking for less unreasonable. i'm asking for reasonable.

If the idea is that ninth level scrolls would be exceedingly rare and quite complicated, this is reasonable.