Crafting, some clarifications

This post is meant as a follow up to http://will-gamedesign.blogspot.com/2008/11/crafting-alternative-system.html and is basically in reponse to some comments.

First, you talk of gaining Materia in terms of points, but in using it you talk in terms of Gold Piece Equivalent (GPE). In addition to this inconsistency, you do not provide a conversion factor or guidelines for creating a campaign specific conversion factor. I think converting adds an unnecessary complication to this system and would advise sticking to one or the other, preferably GPE.

Yeah, I wasn't clear on this. The idea is that Materia would always be measured in terms of gold piece equivalents, but I used the term "Materia point" that was confusing. It was my thought that Materia would always be measured in terms of gold value, although it is possible that Materia might be very marked up in some cases. So you could spend 2 gp for 1 gp worth of Materia.

You may also want to limit which enemies provide Materia, or you will likely get a ghoulish campaign where the party spends every after-battle stringing their opponents up to harvest their body parts.

One thing I had though of in the past was that certain foes would provide more Materia such as Dragons or Demons while Humanoids would provide less. I thought that was a complication I wouldn't want to introduce until it was more playtested. I do see the potential for weirdness when the characters are collecting Materia from everything, but unless the players get gruesome, which would be a role-playing choice they made, it can be as simple as collecting a few drops of blood.

Indeed, your idea of Materia appearing in places might actually work better for this than harvesting body parts. Places with great elemental affinity (ex. a red dragon's den, a beach by a great ocean, the middle of an untamed wilderness, the site of a great tragedy, etc.) could develop small amounts of very valuable Materia over time. It would explain why, for instance, a tribe of Kobolds living on the edges of a great forest might have a small supply of wood-aligned Materia in their village, having found it or traded for it with those deeper into the woods.

This idea was actually stolen from Ars Magica. In Ars Magica it is assumed the wizards can easily turn lead into gold so they replace money treasure with magical essence treasure. But Materia can show up as naturally generated by a magical place or as just included in normal treasure. I wanted to include harvesting Materia from monsters because this gives players treasure from monsters that they might not normally be able to get treasures from. It also gives the Materia more flavor since the encounters tend to be vivid in characters minds. For example, your +2 sword is much more exciting when you know the blade was quenched in the blood of a giant you once slew.

On the topic of harvesting Materia, I think that if you are going to let it be used as an alternative to spell components, limiting who can harvest it is a bad idea. It forces people who have no intention of crafting to take crafting feats just to make sure they can get access to these materials. You can see some of this dynamic in our current game where nobody has identify on their spell lists and the amount of annoyance this has caused us at times. I would say make a slightly higher level difficulty search check.

I guess I am assuming that most parties will probably have an item crafter. One affect of this is making item crafting much better so it is very advantageous to have such a feat. Remeber that wizards start with Scribe Scroll, or in this case Craft Minor Magic Item. I imagine the process as a mystical one so I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to do it. I would say that Materia would not be easily sold so you wouldn't get that much value from it.

I see your point about Identify, that a party can be severely hampered by lack of certain abilities, but this ability can be obtained by any caster easily, unlike a spell like Identify that is only on certain spell lists. Also, the players made specific choices about their characters to abandon utility classes to order to have more focussed characters. So in part dealing with the consequences isn't necessarily horrible. But it does point to a shift from 3rd to 4th edition where any kind of required class or power is no longer actually required in 4th.

Also, I think that limiting 'reclaiming' Materia from an item to a GPE of 25% of the item's cost will not create as much value as you seem to think from your post. Let's say you have a 1000 GP item. Assuming general market availability of Materia, which makes more sense: getting 250 GP of Materia by reclaiming it and destroying the item, or selling the item for 500 GP and buying 500 GP of Materia?

Okay, here is the bad news. As part of this gaining all sorts of new Materia treasure, I would enforce more limits of what Materia could be bought and what magic items could be sold. So I would probably say the magic items could only be sold for 20% of their value. You could also limit the amount of Materia available for purchase. This would encouage players to disenchant items in order to not consume all the Materia that is for sale.

One thing this system allows is easier creation and if you allowed magic items to be sold at 50% their value that 50% would also be the cost to create the item. That would allow players to very easily turn one item into another of equal value. I think that when items are destroyed and remade something should be lost so that you can't easily reconfigure your items on a day by day basis.

Thanks for the input Wayne.