I still cant help but feel like crafting isnt worth it a lot of the time. I mean, basically everything after like 5th level is too expensive unless your campaign is allowing a LOOOOOOT of downtime. like you guys just take every other month off. Which sure might be a more realistic way, but i feel is rarely how it is run cause of the need to have a constant source of engagement (Hollywood syndrome, gotta keep it moving). example, an average 10th level alchemical item is 150-200gp ish. lets just take the low end. 75 up front and at best you can get 6 at master skill....and wtv 11th is on a crit (probably 7 or 8gp a day). so for that 1 potion (not batched since you need to sum the gold for batched items). so lets assume normal success. that is 12.5...so round to 13 days. now if you did a full "batch" you would be paying 600 total....so 300 up front and 50 days. since the gold cost is not reduced for batching in any way you really dont save any time in game. it takes forever. sure you could just pay the second half of the cost out of pocket but.....at that point you are just buying it with a day or 2 of labor with the possibility of failure. how is that different than say.......making a persuasion check or a society check to find a merchant and or convince a craftsman to make it for you? oh yea...the difference is you might be invested multiple feats into specifically enabling your ability to craft said item (magic or alchemical). it now feels like you have wasted skill feats to do something for almost no benefit. There really should be more meaningful improvements from investing skill feats. substantial bonuses to the daily crafting gold for working it out, or at least like...idk a 25% discount if you crit succeed or something.......it just feels.....like trying to force a different flavor of buying the same item......and depending on your group and or campaign you might not even GET downtime......much less literal weeks of it. IDK just my thoughts.
Great guide! I'm really looking forward to the next one. I'm playing an Inventor in one game and one of my players has an Alchemist. Both characters will be going all out in crafting Gadgets and Potions etc so this guide was right on time.
Also that formulae are not required for common items at all, merely reducing the setup time to 1 day instead. For those of us with the Inventor skill feat (such as the Inventor class) which lets you invent common formulae, this means the only reason to invent a common formula is to save a day on an item you know you'll make many times.
I have major problems with the crafting rules, my party never has downtime unless were specifically requested to for a quest, then i enjoy crafting in games so i can enjoy my allies doning armour that was smithed by myself or a sword i made, so i dont get to do this because any armour for level 10/11 characters takes a very very long time, armour worth 700 costs me either 700 which we can do immediately in town, or i can try reduce that cost, but thatll cost me more than 35 days of downtime, which in the year weve played the current game weve had a grand total of 8 downtime days. Then to add to that, the cost of half for the materials is ok, it makes sense, i need to pay for materials, alrighty seems a little high but i guess its to block any exploits, but then i have to pay the other half if i want thr item to not take 35 days..... but what and who am i paying there? Where does that gold disapear too? I havent got any real life way of explaining that. All in all as im not looking to craft consumables the whole crafting side play is redundant, as id make a level 10 item to don a charcater now, by the time ive finished as a resonable cost the party wilk be level 15 and item is no longer helpful, then to add to that, i cant make a profit from crafting either as market value would be halfed as im a player. Does anukne else get this impression? I understand you need something to stop the crafting exploits you get on many games, i.e. skyrim but it means it doesnt bring anything to the table for my character :( .
Kind of annoyed they didn't just go with what was in the Treasure Vault, it worked fine. People having issues with set-up time didn't really have an issue with set-up time, they had issues with GMs not giving enough downtime and not restricting what PCs could buy. To be fair, APs are pretty horrible at the former, and most ignore the latter.
I agree totally. As a GM that does give down time and allows for ways to craft while traveling, the new rules are way too much. Making 30 fire ball necklaces over a month long journey? Oh, and you were also born with the knowledge to craft that somehow? Sorry, no. I feel like people forget just how many items are "common" and that reverse engineering is still a thing, making getting the formula a given. Crafting is the strongest skill in the game by a massive margin with these rules.
@@laroast8531 I think the problem is that the system is way too simplistic to accurately model crafting of all the items players are likely to want. By the rules, it takes two days to brew a pot of coffee, and you can spend several more days brewing to, uhh, reduce the amount of beans you used? You can also fail to brew the coffee, but at least the beans are mostly still good if you do.
@@laroast8531 You still need to actually be trained in the skill and have the gold for the items. If you have the gold for crafting 30 fireball necklaces, you have the gold to buy them without needing a feat and skill increases that could have gone to other skills that provide other benefits. Taking 4 days of downtime to craft things instead of buying them felt like a waste, specially in "crafting-specialized" classes like alchemist or inventor unless you did it for fluff. Treasure Vault complex crafting felt like a little step in the right direction, yet not totally there, while this does feel a step too far. Either way, unless you are playing PFS, you are free to use the the old rules if you like them better, or tweak them to your liking, no one is going to set your game on fire over it.
@@juanabreu3619 Treasure Vault rules already made Crafting the most valuable downtime activity when you rushed finishing for double progress. Remaster rules are basically just a cave to the playstyle where no one bothers with one of the three game speeds. Unfortunately, because of the way APs are, a lot of people are going to end their critical thinking at "I can craft during an AP now" without really examining why they couldn't before.
So. How about them rules for crafting while travelling? You only travel for 8 hours a day unless the party is pushing themselves to exhaustion, so what are you doing for those other 16 hours apart from sleeping? It would be a prime opportunity to get crafting progress done outside of boring downtime.
The party is also looking for a camping site and preparing said campsite by collecting wood for the fire and materials to hide the camp from hostile forces not to mention fetching water and spending time getting a fire started as well as cooking.
@@Avatarbee Not everyone in the party has to do that, though? I'm sure the party would love it if the inventor made some talismans or an alchemist worked on brewing potions instead of spending their time gathering sticks. Once you're past the first few levels and get some gold/spells, camping becomes increasingly trivial. You get access to instant fire, instant food and even instant shelter.
@Avatarbee you wouldn't get off your horse snd immediately start crafting. Theres a very good chance you may have to leave within minutes or weather may not be ideal for crafting. Me personally though, I never assume 8 hrs of travel. I always say 12 hrs travel, 12 hours resting. 12 hrs travel is enough time to set camp, forage, break camp, travel 12 hrs is also enough to check your gear, eat, groom yourself, exercise, train, rest, stand watch, eat, reset gear. I dont even see crafting as possible while traveling outside of maybe 1 hour if you choose to neglect something else.
This is just something that simply fails me in pathfinder, i love everything about it, but the philosophy of crafting is just so completely upside down and off putting. I understand putting in some material worth of gold, but why the hell should anyone pay in the rest of the item? That is just stupid. What to do, when the characters have no money, they are out there surviving in the jungle, and they make some spears and arrows, they gotta pay up the gold they don't have? When they have all the tools and materials? I get that it's supposed to discourage the players from selling stuff to "win the economy" but it's a backwards way of handling that balance.
To be honest, you don't need other rules than there are now. If you want your surviving jungle players to craft some weapon or armor, just go check how much it costs. Then just give them equivalent amout of raw materials. For example, after an encounter (or exploration activity, or some downtime of gathering materials) you want to reward them with Leather Armor. It's listed price is 2gp, so you will give your PCs some "raw components worth 2gp". Then they do not need any gold, they can just craft it. And very fast, just in two days! Or they can craft it more days and create two pieces of Leather Armor from this amount of raw materials! If you want your downtime to be more interesting - use some Crafting Downtime Events from Treasure Vault. There is a good basis and you can add your own!
@@dmitrii710 I'd like to add onto this as well that one could potentially require you to spend downtime "earning an income" with something like Survival or with Crafting just to GATHER the raw materials, before you even dedicate the time to crafting it. But instead of earning gp, you earn those raw materials in gp.
Part of me wants to see how a DM would respond to the entire party rejecting any plot hooks and deciding in the first session that they would spend a year of downtime crafting and earning income to get runes ahead of schedule because adventuring is dangerous so they want to be prepared.
Hmmm not sure what really changed besides the lower time requirements. I guess common items are easier. Personally it seems like everyone is in a hurry, the down time my group spent crafting in my last campaign felt like a welcome break, allowing us to get into more trouble between always trying to save the world. I mean one day vs 4 days seems like a hand wave thing anyway....i guess it means I just give less downtime going forward. Strange that people feel so angry over the first rule set.
Question for batch crafting. If you spent addition days to reduce the cost, does that only reduce it that normal reduction amount, or does that apply to all the consumables you're making? IE: if crafting a batch of 4 Invisibility Potions, costing a total of 80gp, at level 5 Trained proficiency, does each day of additional work only shave off 9 sp of the remaining 40 gp, or would it shave 3.6 gp off since its crafting 4 items?
now it's so much better as 2 days instead of 4, this way i could potentially craft 2 items/batches, or a ranged weapon AND ammo, in just 1 week of downtime
I am new here. I love the old things from the old edition. I was hoping you can go over spell casting. I am new to Pathfinder and learning things from the new remaster. Just having issues with trick item feat and knowing if much change from your old video. Love your work. I am working on learning things from the Herbalist and creating potions.
I have a question not really related to the subject of crafting, but the Layout of the book. Is the bolding of words, like hide and sneak in the example you've shown in your questions answered video, only applied to sidebars, or generally to mark "here we mean the relevant action/activity or condition"?
In my opinion, Crafting is fine, people just want to easily break the economy and have all they want for a half price. Though I would prefer that there is some progression from Trained to Legendary through item levels of 0 to 3 (same with Expert to Legendary and Master to Legendary on some levels)
I think what's annoying is that the designers clearly spent a lot of time thinking about all the reasons why you would _want_ to be good at crafting, and then they did their best to eliminate all those reasons. Like, okay, you _can_ make items, but you can't make any money doing it relative to the basic Earn Income activity, and it's normally more difficult than just buying things, and it takes more time, and you still probably can't do it while travelling. Maybe at some point the GM will give you a formula for a cool rare item or raw materials, but you both know they're throwing you a bone and would have given you the item directly if no players had the requisite crafting ability.
@@iang0th crafting is heavily depends on your adventure and GM. For example, I'm running age of ashes right now. Adventurers are going to visit a lot of different places, and how do you think, how many of them has shops with level equivalent to PC? None (except for the start of the adventure). But between books there are can be a lot of downtime, so it's clear that with new rules PCs can craft lots of stuff and give themselves sufficient boost to overall party strength. So there are things that can negate this value of crafting - lots of shops, zero downtime, GM who doesn't give crafting a special spot. And yes, crafting should be special, it shouldn't be a routine to create a batch of major striking runes. If you want to earn income with crafting - don't create The Item, just use earn income table, say that you craft something basic like a common swords and sell them for a common folk. When you crafting The Item - it's for your party, not for selling. Again, in lots of trpg there is an easy way to break economy with crafting and I'm glad that pf2e is trying to avoid this. As I said, I like that crafting is something that GM should develop together with players and I'm not think that giving a formula is like a throwing a bone, if you giving it on top of regular loot
Im a little confused when it comes to crafting in batches. Is the money saved with each additional day spent crafting also multiplied by the number in the batch? To better phrase it, when crafting a batch of 4 potions, am I treating it as 1 item with the total cost being reduced by each additional day according the income table; or is it 4 items whose costs are each being reduced with each day according to the table?
Such a great video! Well informed, well spoken, just good! Will def. link this to my players, and can't wait to watch your other videos on the PF 2e Remaster! 🙏
I was hoping this series would return in remaster!
I crafted this first comment!
And you did it in half the time it used to take!!
Very nice summary!
For part 2 - do discuss runes and transferral of runes - with skill, level, and feat requirements.
I still cant help but feel like crafting isnt worth it a lot of the time. I mean, basically everything after like 5th level is too expensive unless your campaign is allowing a LOOOOOOT of downtime. like you guys just take every other month off. Which sure might be a more realistic way, but i feel is rarely how it is run cause of the need to have a constant source of engagement (Hollywood syndrome, gotta keep it moving).
example, an average 10th level alchemical item is 150-200gp ish. lets just take the low end. 75 up front and at best you can get 6 at master skill....and wtv 11th is on a crit (probably 7 or 8gp a day). so for that 1 potion (not batched since you need to sum the gold for batched items). so lets assume normal success. that is 12.5...so round to 13 days. now if you did a full "batch" you would be paying 600 total....so 300 up front and 50 days. since the gold cost is not reduced for batching in any way you really dont save any time in game. it takes forever. sure you could just pay the second half of the cost out of pocket but.....at that point you are just buying it with a day or 2 of labor with the possibility of failure. how is that different than say.......making a persuasion check or a society check to find a merchant and or convince a craftsman to make it for you? oh yea...the difference is you might be invested multiple feats into specifically enabling your ability to craft said item (magic or alchemical). it now feels like you have wasted skill feats to do something for almost no benefit. There really should be more meaningful improvements from investing skill feats. substantial bonuses to the daily crafting gold for working it out, or at least like...idk a 25% discount if you crit succeed or something.......it just feels.....like trying to force a different flavor of buying the same item......and depending on your group and or campaign you might not even GET downtime......much less literal weeks of it.
IDK just my thoughts.
Great job explaining it, however I'd still say crafting seems very niche/even detrimental to a character in pathfinder 2e.
I want to know how Complex Crafting from Treasure Vault should work in remaster
Thank god they updated this. I was about to completely abandon crafting with my current character
What's new?
Great guide! I'm really looking forward to the next one. I'm playing an Inventor in one game and one of my players has an Alchemist. Both characters will be going all out in crafting Gadgets and Potions etc so this guide was right on time.
This is the first time I can say I confidently understand the crafting system, and I really love it
This seems pretty similar except for the batch thing and lowering the initial time committed from four days to two...
Also that formulae are not required for common items at all, merely reducing the setup time to 1 day instead. For those of us with the Inventor skill feat (such as the Inventor class) which lets you invent common formulae, this means the only reason to invent a common formula is to save a day on an item you know you'll make many times.
I have major problems with the crafting rules, my party never has downtime unless were specifically requested to for a quest, then i enjoy crafting in games so i can enjoy my allies doning armour that was smithed by myself or a sword i made, so i dont get to do this because any armour for level 10/11 characters takes a very very long time, armour worth 700 costs me either 700 which we can do immediately in town, or i can try reduce that cost, but thatll cost me more than 35 days of downtime, which in the year weve played the current game weve had a grand total of 8 downtime days.
Then to add to that, the cost of half for the materials is ok, it makes sense, i need to pay for materials, alrighty seems a little high but i guess its to block any exploits, but then i have to pay the other half if i want thr item to not take 35 days..... but what and who am i paying there? Where does that gold disapear too? I havent got any real life way of explaining that.
All in all as im not looking to craft consumables the whole crafting side play is redundant, as id make a level 10 item to don a charcater now, by the time ive finished as a resonable cost the party wilk be level 15 and item is no longer helpful, then to add to that, i cant make a profit from crafting either as market value would be halfed as im a player.
Does anukne else get this impression? I understand you need something to stop the crafting exploits you get on many games, i.e. skyrim but it means it doesnt bring anything to the table for my character :(
.
Kind of annoyed they didn't just go with what was in the Treasure Vault, it worked fine. People having issues with set-up time didn't really have an issue with set-up time, they had issues with GMs not giving enough downtime and not restricting what PCs could buy. To be fair, APs are pretty horrible at the former, and most ignore the latter.
The Remaster failed in every single thing it proposed to do. I'm not surprised.
I agree totally. As a GM that does give down time and allows for ways to craft while traveling, the new rules are way too much. Making 30 fire ball necklaces over a month long journey? Oh, and you were also born with the knowledge to craft that somehow? Sorry, no.
I feel like people forget just how many items are "common" and that reverse engineering is still a thing, making getting the formula a given. Crafting is the strongest skill in the game by a massive margin with these rules.
@@laroast8531 I think the problem is that the system is way too simplistic to accurately model crafting of all the items players are likely to want. By the rules, it takes two days to brew a pot of coffee, and you can spend several more days brewing to, uhh, reduce the amount of beans you used? You can also fail to brew the coffee, but at least the beans are mostly still good if you do.
@@laroast8531 You still need to actually be trained in the skill and have the gold for the items. If you have the gold for crafting 30 fireball necklaces, you have the gold to buy them without needing a feat and skill increases that could have gone to other skills that provide other benefits.
Taking 4 days of downtime to craft things instead of buying them felt like a waste, specially in "crafting-specialized" classes like alchemist or inventor unless you did it for fluff. Treasure Vault complex crafting felt like a little step in the right direction, yet not totally there, while this does feel a step too far.
Either way, unless you are playing PFS, you are free to use the the old rules if you like them better, or tweak them to your liking, no one is going to set your game on fire over it.
@@juanabreu3619
Treasure Vault rules already made Crafting the most valuable downtime activity when you rushed finishing for double progress. Remaster rules are basically just a cave to the playstyle where no one bothers with one of the three game speeds. Unfortunately, because of the way APs are, a lot of people are going to end their critical thinking at "I can craft during an AP now" without really examining why they couldn't before.
So. How about them rules for crafting while travelling? You only travel for 8 hours a day unless the party is pushing themselves to exhaustion, so what are you doing for those other 16 hours apart from sleeping? It would be a prime opportunity to get crafting progress done outside of boring downtime.
The party is also looking for a camping site and preparing said campsite by collecting wood for the fire and materials to hide the camp from hostile forces not to mention fetching water and spending time getting a fire started as well as cooking.
@@Avatarbee Not everyone in the party has to do that, though? I'm sure the party would love it if the inventor made some talismans or an alchemist worked on brewing potions instead of spending their time gathering sticks.
Once you're past the first few levels and get some gold/spells, camping becomes increasingly trivial. You get access to instant fire, instant food and even instant shelter.
@Avatarbee you wouldn't get off your horse snd immediately start crafting. Theres a very good chance you may have to leave within minutes or weather may not be ideal for crafting.
Me personally though, I never assume 8 hrs of travel. I always say 12 hrs travel, 12 hours resting.
12 hrs travel is enough time to set camp, forage, break camp, travel
12 hrs is also enough to check your gear, eat, groom yourself, exercise, train, rest, stand watch, eat, reset gear.
I dont even see crafting as possible while traveling outside of maybe 1 hour if you choose to neglect something else.
This is just something that simply fails me in pathfinder, i love everything about it, but the philosophy of crafting is just so completely upside down and off putting. I understand putting in some material worth of gold, but why the hell should anyone pay in the rest of the item? That is just stupid. What to do, when the characters have no money, they are out there surviving in the jungle, and they make some spears and arrows, they gotta pay up the gold they don't have? When they have all the tools and materials? I get that it's supposed to discourage the players from selling stuff to "win the economy" but it's a backwards way of handling that balance.
To be honest, you don't need other rules than there are now. If you want your surviving jungle players to craft some weapon or armor, just go check how much it costs. Then just give them equivalent amout of raw materials. For example, after an encounter (or exploration activity, or some downtime of gathering materials) you want to reward them with Leather Armor. It's listed price is 2gp, so you will give your PCs some "raw components worth 2gp". Then they do not need any gold, they can just craft it. And very fast, just in two days! Or they can craft it more days and create two pieces of Leather Armor from this amount of raw materials! If you want your downtime to be more interesting - use some Crafting Downtime Events from Treasure Vault. There is a good basis and you can add your own!
@@dmitrii710 I'd like to add onto this as well that one could potentially require you to spend downtime "earning an income" with something like Survival or with Crafting just to GATHER the raw materials, before you even dedicate the time to crafting it. But instead of earning gp, you earn those raw materials in gp.
Hi algorithm
Part of me wants to see how a DM would respond to the entire party rejecting any plot hooks and deciding in the first session that they would spend a year of downtime crafting and earning income to get runes ahead of schedule because adventuring is dangerous so they want to be prepared.
“The villain wins and conquers the city. You die.”
I wouldn't mind. If the party really has that kind of mindset I wouldn't fight it. Just tell them the consequences for their characters.
This seems way better. Win!
Hmmm not sure what really changed besides the lower time requirements. I guess common items are easier. Personally it seems like everyone is in a hurry, the down time my group spent crafting in my last campaign felt like a welcome break, allowing us to get into more trouble between always trying to save the world. I mean one day vs 4 days seems like a hand wave thing anyway....i guess it means I just give less downtime going forward. Strange that people feel so angry over the first rule set.
It all sounds silly that a batch of arrows takes the exact amount of time as full plate. It all takes four days.
Question for batch crafting. If you spent addition days to reduce the cost, does that only reduce it that normal reduction amount, or does that apply to all the consumables you're making? IE: if crafting a batch of 4 Invisibility Potions, costing a total of 80gp, at level 5 Trained proficiency, does each day of additional work only shave off 9 sp of the remaining 40 gp, or would it shave 3.6 gp off since its crafting 4 items?
now it's so much better as 2 days instead of 4, this way i could potentially craft 2 items/batches, or a ranged weapon AND ammo, in just 1 week of downtime
I am new here. I love the old things from the old edition. I was hoping you can go over spell casting. I am new to Pathfinder and learning things from the new remaster. Just having issues with trick item feat and knowing if much change from your old video.
Love your work. I am working on learning things from the Herbalist and creating potions.
You always do such a GREAT JOB> I am struggling with the new Core.
Good to have you back mate.
Thanks!
Thank you for making these videos! Cheers
I have a question not really related to the subject of crafting, but the Layout of the book.
Is the bolding of words, like hide and sneak in the example you've shown in your questions answered video, only applied to sidebars, or generally to mark "here we mean the relevant action/activity or condition"?
I think the bold is used sparingly just for emphasis.
So I've tried to look it up, does it say anywhere whether you can make an individual consumable instead of doing it in a batch?
I believe it says that you "can" craft consumables in batches, not that you have to.
Would you still need the formulas for common items made with the alchemist's daily infused reagents and similar feats and features?
I suppose we might need to wait until Alchemist is published in Player Core 2, but my guess is they will still need the formulas.
In my opinion, Crafting is fine, people just want to easily break the economy and have all they want for a half price. Though I would prefer that there is some progression from Trained to Legendary through item levels of 0 to 3 (same with Expert to Legendary and Master to Legendary on some levels)
I think what's annoying is that the designers clearly spent a lot of time thinking about all the reasons why you would _want_ to be good at crafting, and then they did their best to eliminate all those reasons. Like, okay, you _can_ make items, but you can't make any money doing it relative to the basic Earn Income activity, and it's normally more difficult than just buying things, and it takes more time, and you still probably can't do it while travelling. Maybe at some point the GM will give you a formula for a cool rare item or raw materials, but you both know they're throwing you a bone and would have given you the item directly if no players had the requisite crafting ability.
@@iang0th crafting is heavily depends on your adventure and GM. For example, I'm running age of ashes right now. Adventurers are going to visit a lot of different places, and how do you think, how many of them has shops with level equivalent to PC? None (except for the start of the adventure). But between books there are can be a lot of downtime, so it's clear that with new rules PCs can craft lots of stuff and give themselves sufficient boost to overall party strength. So there are things that can negate this value of crafting - lots of shops, zero downtime, GM who doesn't give crafting a special spot. And yes, crafting should be special, it shouldn't be a routine to create a batch of major striking runes. If you want to earn income with crafting - don't create The Item, just use earn income table, say that you craft something basic like a common swords and sell them for a common folk. When you crafting The Item - it's for your party, not for selling.
Again, in lots of trpg there is an easy way to break economy with crafting and I'm glad that pf2e is trying to avoid this. As I said, I like that crafting is something that GM should develop together with players and I'm not think that giving a formula is like a throwing a bone, if you giving it on top of regular loot
Im a little confused when it comes to crafting in batches. Is the money saved with each additional day spent crafting also multiplied by the number in the batch?
To better phrase it, when crafting a batch of 4 potions, am I treating it as 1 item with the total cost being reduced by each additional day according the income table; or is it 4 items whose costs are each being reduced with each day according to the table?
No -- the benefit of crafting in batches is to save time, not to get the items cheaper.
@@HowItsPlayed thanks for the clarification
If you take the specialty crafting feat and choose Alchemy as your option, is that same as taking Alchemical Crafting?
No, you still need to take Alchemical Crafting in order to make alchemical items.
@@HowItsPlayed Thanks!
Such a great video! Well informed, well spoken, just good! Will def. link this to my players, and can't wait to watch your other videos on the PF 2e Remaster! 🙏
Thanks!