What happens if you fail a fabricate craft check

[Warior4356]

Pretty much the title and I would like rules as written to show my GM if possible. We were talking about using fabricate for making weapons and armor for enchanting, or sculptures for constructs. The point of disagreement was what happens on failure. Say you need a 3000 sculpture for a construct. This will take 1000 in materials. If the craft check fails what happens to the materials?

Thanks for your time!

[Geddy2112]

The same as any other craft check-if you fail by 4 or less you just fail. If you fail by 5 or more you ruin half of the raw materials needed for the spell.

[Warior4356]

The same as any other craft check-if you fail by 4 or less you just fail. If you fail by 5 or more you ruin half of the raw materials needed for the spell.

Is this rules as written my gm thinks they are consumed like the components in a normal spell if you pass or fail.

[Geddy2112]

The material would not be gone, it would not disappear. It would still be there, but if you fail the craft check it is an unusable version of whatever you were trying to make. It could be fabricated again to make it what it should be.

If you fail by 4 or less, to make a specific item, you simply fail to make it.

[Warior4356]

The material would not be gone, it would not disappear. It would still be there, but if you fail the craft check it is an unusable version of whatever you were trying to make. It could be fabricated again to make it what it should be.

If you fail by 4 or less, to make a specific item, you simply fail to make it.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/craft

Is this the RAW you are quoting for that ruling?

[Geddy2112]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/craft

Is this the RAW you are quoting for that ruling?

Yes, because it is a craft check and that is how craft checks work.

[Sagetim]

The material in question is not a material component of the spell in a traditional sense, it is the target of the spell. You target, say, a pile of wood to fabricate it into a bridge (or wall to a house). You target a loose pile of rocks and dust to transform it into a pile of pristine bricks from your mastery of the masonry arts (At least, when I read that spell I don't see anything that says I can't use it to fuse bits together to make a greater whole, or ignore the rotted parts of wood to get the good parts out of a pile of detritus).

Fabricate is a pretty sweet spell, but I'm not seeing anything in it that says you can't take 10 on your craft checks, or can't benefit from your related masterwork tools. As a Wizard (Or Psion), for example, it should be pretty easy to ace the int based skill checks involved. In Pathfinder especially, since a single rank nets you 1 + 3 class skill + int mod +2 masterwork tools as a baseline from which to operate. Instead of grabbing one skill at max rank, you could just keep putting one rank into a growing list of crafts (and then use spells to buff out your craft checks a bit more).

I'm pretty sure pathfinder has a spell for +5 to craft checks as a level 1 spell on the arcane list, and if you have a cleric buddy, you can benefit from, I think, Guidance for a +2 more? Not sure if those stack, but I assume one is a competence bonus and the other insight.

So if you're an average hero wizard who started with, say, 15 in your int and got a +1 at 4, then you have 16 int for a +3 int bonus. Let's plug that in and see where we're at: 1 rank + 3 class skill + 3 int mod + 2 masterwork tool = +9 modifier right there. With a +5 from a first level spell, that gets up to a +14. With a cleric buddy, a +2 from guidance and youcan possibly eek in a +2 more from someone using aid another before resorting to anything else. That brings you to a +18 total, with 1 skill point investment. With just 1 more skill rank you can roll a 1 and still get a result of 20 (skills do not auto fail on a 1), meaning you could pump out masterwork weapons and armor using fabricate. If you can take 10, then you just need 3 ranks total and you could get up to a +20 without too much hassle, and take 10 to hit dc 30, which, as far as I know, is as high as most craft checks ever get baseline, be it for building houses, art, furniture, or whatever.

Don't forget that 16 int at level 7 is kind of modest for a wizard, as you could probably secure a headband for +2 more int pretty easily by then, and if you had a racial bonus that you could apply to int, your starting baseline may well have been 17 without too much hassle, instead of 15. And since int is pretty key to the whole arcane magic thing anyway, having it as high as you can manage tends to be a pretty good plan for wizards anyway.

Now, your main problem is going to be trying to figure out what your gm is willing to accept when it comes to how the volume measurement works for the spell. Does he count the literally pointless empty space that's not actually involved in the item itself, you know, count the actual volume of the item to a reasonable degree, or are they going to claim that you have to fit it within some kind of squares determined by what they think fabricate is describing and cheat you out of a lot of your area of effect by counting, possibly very large, amounts of empty space? This matters more if you're using fabricate for things like construction or armor crafting, as you don't want to get blocked when you're trying to convert the wall of stone you used stone shape on to make rough pillars into finished pillars because the gm is insisting that you have to count the entire five foot square the pillar is in because they don't get how volume works.

Do remember that fabricate specifies a target of one material and an end result of that same material. So you can't use fabricate to turn iron you got from a wall of iron into steel, but you could turn a wall of iron into discreet bars held together by flimsy links, then break those down and smelt the iron normally, then take the resulting steel and fabricate that into whatever steel product you wanted. And if your DM is willing to be utterly silly an swing it, fabricate carbon (such as soot) into diamonds with a craft (alchemy) check or something to stand in for an understanding of chemistry. As mentioned, that's silly, but it might be worth asking if you need to rez some companions on a budget.

[icefractal]

Technically, the GM is correct. The raw materials are a material component, so they are always consumed. I'm going to suggest to your GM that they should rule it as being a target instead, because making it a material component causes Fabricate to be disfunctional in several broken ways:

* What a Staff with Fabricate should do: Fabricate the things you aim it at into the desired forms.
* What a Staff with Fabricate does RAW: Make a single object (whatever it was built with) appear from thin air.

* What getting Fabricate as a spell-like ability should do: Let you build things as an SLA.
* What getting Fabricate as a spell-like ability does RAW: Let you create any possible object up to the given size, including a pile of diamonds, for free.
* Shadow Miracle -> Fabricate also does this.

Some other oddities, like Contingent Fabricate making something appear from nowhere, are more amusing than unbalanced.

So show the GM this, and I think they'll agree it's better as a target.

[Warior4356]

Technically, the GM is correct. The raw materials are a material component, so they are always consumed. I'm going to suggest to your GM that they should rule it as being a target instead, because making it a material component causes Fabricate to be disfunctional in several broken ways:

* What a Staff with Fabricate should do: Fabricate the things you aim it at into the desired forms.
* What a Staff with Fabricate does RAW: Make a single object (whatever it was built with) appear from thin air.

* What getting Fabricate as a spell-like ability should do: Let you build things as an SLA.
* What getting Fabricate as a spell-like ability does RAW: Let you create any possible object up to the given size, including a pile of diamonds, for free.
* Shadow Miracle -> Fabricate also does this.

Some other oddities, like Contingent Fabricate making something appear from nowhere, are more amusing than unbalanced.

So show the GM this, and I think they'll agree it's better as a target.

So how do you price a ring of fabricate? Since it has a variable component cost.

[Sagetim]

So how do you price a ring of fabricate? Since it has a variable component cost.

You go with the more reasonable Rules As Interpreted where the materials are a target instead of a consumed component. Thus your item costs as regular for a 5th level spell:
9 (caster level) x 5 (spell level) x 1800 for a command word item or 2000 for a continuous/whatever item.
This brings you out to about 81k or 90k. Which is really damn expensive, and doesn't need to be a ring, it could be a feather duster or something as long as it takes up an item slot. The cost to build it then, is 40500 or 45k, again depending on the nature of the resulting item.

Edit: Alternatively, you go with a super hardcore reading of the rules that winds up with a really terrible item for it's cost, where you set a value for the material components when you craft the item and it can either a) target materials up to that value when the spell is used from it or b) can ONLY target materials of That Exact value when the spell is used. This seems like a walk down the path of pedantry and cleaving entirely too close to the rules as written. Because remember, whatever value you set has to be multiplied by 50 when you craft a multi-use or unlimited use version of an item with a material components cost on the spell.

[Warior4356]

I asked more of if I need to prove the point of why the material component way is really bad.

[Sagetim]

I asked more of if I need to prove the point of why the material component way is really bad.

Oh, yeah, I edited the end of my post with an answer for how that would work when I thought about it for a few more minutes.

[icefractal]

Edit: Alternatively, you go with a super hardcore reading of the rules that winds up with a really terrible item for it's cost, where you set a value for the material components when you craft the item and it can either a) target materials up to that value when the spell is used from it or b) can ONLY target materials of That Exact value when the spell is used. This seems like a walk down the path of pedantry and cleaving entirely too close to the rules as written. Because remember, whatever value you set has to be multiplied by 50 when you craft a multi-use or unlimited use version of an item with a material components cost on the spell.

I've heard the "it's a material component and a target" interpretation, but I don't think it's the case. Only the material component line specifies a value, the target is either:
* A volume of space
* The same type of material, of the same quality. But no amount specified, so you could fabricate a single gold piece into a big block of gold (assuming you provided the material components for said block).

Although again, not recommending anyone should use that version.

[Crake]

So how do you price a ring of fabricate? Since it has a variable component cost.

Fabricate is not the only spell with a variable component, spells like animate dead or permanency come with variable costs as well. You decide the limit of each use of the ability upon creation of the item, and keep record of it. For example, if you make a scroll of animate dead with only 100gp of onyx gems, then you can only make 2HD of undead with that scroll. If you're using a limited times/day item, then you multiply the component cost by 50, and if it's an unlimited version, then you multiply it by 100. So if you wanted to make an infinite use ring of fabricate that could make, say, a 50gp bar of gold (or a 1lb bar of gold), you would first divide the gp value of the final product by 1/3, so 16.67gp, then multiply it by 100, so 1,666.67gp for the material cost, then add in the standard item creation costs, 1800 (command word) * 5(spell level) *9(caster level) = 81,000gp. Add on the material components (they're added on last) and you have a ring of fabricate that can create 50gp gold bars every round, that costs 82,666.67gp and would take 81 days to make. If you were crafting it yourself, it would be 42,166.67gp to craft (the material component cost is not reduced by the crafting process), and require 3,240 xp, but by the end of it you are making 50gp bars of gold each round. It would take 1654 rounds (and bars of gold) to make up the cost of the ring, which sounds like a long time, but really it's a little under 3 hours of firing off the ring every round.

I mean, now, if your DM is okay with that, then hells yeah, when your wizard gets to level 9, have him pick up craft wondrous (and make it a wondrous item, like gloves or something, because craft ring randomly requires 12th level), pool together your cash, you can easily hit 42k as a party, and spend the next 2-3 months lounging about as you wait for your infinite gold device to be finished crafting. Then retire, crash the gold market after investing in another stable currency (souls, you want souls, they're the only real stable currency) and live the rest of your life in luxury.

[Sagetim]

Fabricate is not the only spell with a variable component, spells like animate dead or permanency come with variable costs as well. You decide the limit of each use of the ability upon creation of the item, and keep record of it. For example, if you make a scroll of animate dead with only 100gp of onyx gems, then you can only make 2HD of undead with that scroll. If you're using a limited times/day item, then you multiply the component cost by 50, and if it's an unlimited version, then you multiply it by 100. So if you wanted to make an infinite use ring of fabricate that could make, say, a 50gp bar of gold (or a 1lb bar of gold), you would first divide the gp value of the final product by 1/3, so 16.67gp, then multiply it by 100, so 1,666.67gp for the material cost, then add in the standard item creation costs, 1800 (command word) * 5(spell level) *9(caster level) = 81,000gp. Add on the material components (they're added on last) and you have a ring of fabricate that can create 50gp gold bars every round, that costs 82,666.67gp and would take 81 days to make. If you were crafting it yourself, it would be 42,166.67gp to craft (the material component cost is not reduced by the crafting process), and require 3,240 xp, but by the end of it you are making 50gp bars of gold each round. It would take 1654 rounds (and bars of gold) to make up the cost of the ring, which sounds like a long time, but really it's a little under 3 hours of firing off the ring every round.

I mean, now, if your DM is okay with that, then hells yeah, when your wizard gets to level 9, have him pick up craft wondrous (and make it a wondrous item, like gloves or something, because craft ring randomly requires 12th level), pool together your cash, you can easily hit 42k as a party, and spend the next 2-3 months lounging about as you wait for your infinite gold device to be finished crafting. Then retire, crash the gold market after investing in another stable currency (souls, you want souls, they're the only real stable currency) and live the rest of your life in luxury.

oh, yeah, see, there we go. I thought it was 50, but I'm pretty sure crake is right on the money when he says x100 on that material components thing. I'm pretty sure this example though, is the reason that a GM would want to rule that fabricate a) doesn't have to account for materials cost in it's creation because b) you would want the resulting item to target something to transform it into a finished product instead of create something from nothing to avoid exactly what Crake just described.