Craft Skills

Craft skills work just like regular skills. They are associated with intelligence and dexterity (and thus use the lower of those two ability scores). All craft skills function in basically the same way with regards to their standard effect and challenge percentage.

There are four qualities of items: poor, average, excellent, and masterwork.

Items have a quality, material, a complexity, and a time for completion. Complexity ranges from 1 to 10, and time is measured in days.

The following list describes the number of days required to complete an average item of a given complexity (it is indeed in the fibonacci sequence):

Complexity
1 --> 1 day
2 --> 1 day
3 --> 2 days
4 --> 3 days
5 --> 5 days
6 --> 8 days
7 --> 13 days
8 --> 21 days
9 --> 34 days
10 --> 55 days
(11) --> 89 days
(12) --> 144 days
(13) --> 233 days
(14) --> 377 days

Craft Skills, Standard Effects:

• A craftsman can complete an average quality item of a certain complexity in the above time frame with no chance of failure (assuming they are trained).
• If the craftsman wishes to make an excellent quality item, the time increases by two steps on the above table. Again, there is no risk of failure here.
• If the craftsman wishes to make a poor quality item, the time decreases by one step on the above table. There is no risk of failure. Decreasing below one on the table halves the time with each step.

Craft skills have challenge percentages like any other skill, used for more difficult projects. A project can be made more difficult by increasing quality without increasing time, or by decreasing time without decreasing quality.

Every upward step of time that a craftsman wishes to avoid requires one challenge roll. For example, if a craftsman wishes to make a complexity 5 item of excellent quality, this would ordinarily take 13 days. If he wishes to finish it in 8 days, he must succeed at a challenge roll. If
he wishes to finish it in 5 days (two steps below usual), he must succeed at two challenge rolls, etc.

Creating masterwork items increases the time by four steps, and always requires an additional challenge roll. Thus, attempting a masterwork complexity 7 item takes 89 days and a successful challenge roll to complete. Every step of time decrease requires an additional challenge roll, as usual.

Items cost [base material price] x [days] x [2 ^ number of challenge rolls]. Let's assume iron's base cost is 5 s.p (or .5 g.p).

Thus an average blacksmith's set of horseshoes costs [.5] x [1] x [1] = 5 s.p.
A poor quality set of horseshoes costs [.5] x [.5] x [1] = 2 s.p., 5 c.p.
An excellent set of horseshoes (normal time) costs [.5] x [2] x [1] = 1 g.p.
An excellent set of horseshoes (expedited one step) costs [.5] x [1] x [2] = 1 g.p. (same as above)
A masterwork set of horseshoes (normal time) costs [.5] x [5] x [2] = 5 g.p.
A masterwork set of horseshoes (expedited one step) costs [.5] x [3] x [4] = 6 g.p.

Some items, such as horseshoes or nails or cannonballs, obviously take less than one day to produce. In these cases, group them into sets of items that would take about 1 day to complete, and call that complexity 1. We'll say 50 nails can be made per day from scratch, for example.

This is not the simplest system in the world, but it gives me hard numbers to work with, and is rewarding to players who want to make things themselves.

A partial list of craft skills: woodworking, blacksmithing, whitesmithing, carpentry, instrument-making, metallurgy (more on this later), pottery, textiles, fletching.

I'm working on compiling lists of items and their relative complexities. I'm also working on a system of specializations within craft skills (such as weaponsmithing underneath blacksmithing).