Deep Dive into the 2024 Crafting Rules
As you may or may not know, I have a thing for crafting. We created a book all about crafting in 5e because of our frustration at the lack of crafting rules. While, yes, there are rules in the 2014 rulebooks about how you make 25 gp worth of progress per day when ‘crafting’ — it’s not interactive, it’s not interesting, and feels like a thrown together last minute idea… and it deserves so much more than that.
So let’s see if they fix that with the newest… edition? update? version? of Dungeons & Dragons and the release of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Crafting Rules 2024
We first begin looking in the Player’s Handbook at the player facing crafting rules. This provides information on how you can make non-magical items, as well as potions of healing, and spell scrolls.
Tools
And right out of the gate, I have a problem with the tools and their uses provided. First up is one of my favorites, Alchemist’s Supplies. It has two uses you could use it for identifying a substance (DC 15) and lighting a fire (DC 15).
First off, why is lighting a fire an alchemist-specific activity? Why do we even need a DC for lighting a fire? How many people are without campfires cause no one took alchemist’s supplies? If your answer is, we don’t talk about it in our games, you are probably in the 99% of all tables. Plus, DC 15 to light a fire? Doesn’t that seem difficult to do to light a fire when you have a bunch of alchemical items in your satchel?
Alright, to be fair, ‘Utilize’ is a specific thing that only requires an Action to do, so maybe all it is saying that only those who are proficient in alchemist’s supplies (and has them on hand) can light a fire with a single Action and succeeding on a DC 15 check, but it’s still just dumb.
But, I’m pushing past that and now looking at what you can craft with such a tool, and it’s Acid, Alchemist’s Fire, Component Pouch, Oil, Paper, and Perfume. One of these things just doesn’t belong here.
Why is a component pouch under the purview of Alchemist’s Supplies? I guess paper kind of makes sense if you squint real hard, but I’m just struggling on a component pouch. It’s a leather satchel (cough-Leatherworker’s Tools-cough) and a bunch of random spell components like grasshopper legs, bat guano, and feathers.
But maybe it’s just Alchemist’s Supplies… until I look over at Brewer’s Supplies which can craft… antitoxins? Why? Cause you drink a lot and can make a mean hair of the dog draft? Or what about Cobbler’s Tools being good for cobbling a Climber’s Kit which contains boot tips (OK, I guess?), gloves, pitons, and rope—wouldn’t that make more sense for Smith’s Tools?
I get you have to come up with basic adventuring equipment and tools to craft them, but some of these choices are just weird—like a Herbalism Kit can be used to make candles… cause of beeswax?
Look—I understand, they were limited to tools they had already created (for whatever reason, I guess they are allergic to making new ones) and just wanted to assign all the equipment they had created to specific tools, but I think some of these choices are just weird. I’m going to stop before I drive myself crazy looking at these. Let’s just move on to the actual crafting rules.
Crafting Equipment
This is a very simple system. You pick what non-magical item you want to craft, have proficiency in the appropriate tool, divide it’s cost by 10 to determine how many days it takes, and provide raw materials equal to half it’s purchase price.
So a heavy crossbow costs 50 gp, which means you need 25 gp in raw materials, it’ll take 5 days to craft, and you need proficiency in Woodcarver’s Tools. Once you are done with the number of days (spending 8 hours each day working on it), you complete your crossbow. You can now use it or sell it for it’s full purchase price (instead of selling the item for half like you normally do).
For a super simple crafting system, it’s fine. It’s not exciting, it’s not interesting, it’s fine. It allows you to say your system has crafting and it not be a lie. Wizards of the Coast is not going to devote more pages than they have to, and I wasn’t expecting them to go all out like we did, but I was kind of expecting more based on how they talked about it.
But that’s only for non-magical equipment. Let’s look at potions of healing and spell scrolls.
Brewing a Potion of Healing
It’s the same thing but it only takes a single day to make it instead of 5. For those who have read through my tools, you’ll know how I feel about the Herbalism Kit being used to make a potion, so let’s just move on.
Scribing Spell Scrolls
Scribing a spell scroll requires you to either be proficient with the Arcana skill or with Calligrapher’s Supplies, you need to have the spell prepared every day you are transcribing, you must have the material components, spend some gold, and spend an ungodly amount of time to transcribe it.
Look, I don’t have a problem with Calligrapher’s Supplies being required for scribing a scroll. If you aren’t going to make a new tool for scribing, then that’s a great choice. What I do have a problem with is that scribing a scroll is basically not a thing you are going to do for 4th-level or higher spells.
The time and cost requirements is just asinine. A 4th-level spell scroll requires 10 days and 1,000 gp to make. Sure, it’s not that much time and that much money (well, depends on your table, some Game Masters need to stop clutching so tightly to their coins)—but at 5th-level is when it starts to get ridiculous and jumps to 25 days and 1,500 gp. The cost is fine, but the time commitment is nearly a month of no adventuring (for an adventurer!).
6th-level spell scrolls are 40 days and 10,000 gp
7th-level is 50 days and 12,500 gp
8th-level is 60 days and 15,000 gp
9th-level is 120 days and 50,000 gp
At what table would it ever make sense (or even be possible) for someone to spend 40 days and 10,000 gp on a single 6th-level spell scroll that is a one-time use consumable, let alone a 9th-level spell scroll and it’s 120 days and 50,000 gp. The timing and costs on these are just so unbelievable that I thought there was a misprint in my book.
For comparison, my rules for Scrollscriber’s Supplies has the cost at 9,000 gp and 10 days for a 9th-level spell scroll. For some people, you may freak out that a scroll could be so cheap or made so quickly, but I want to remind you that it’s for a one-time use scroll, that 9,000 gp is still a lot of money when you price out magic items and give your players something to spend money on, and 10 days is a long time when you have to save the world from a huge threat.
AND IT’S A ONE-TIME CONSUMABLE!
If you’re worried about wish spam, just say some spells can’t be scribed and leave it at that! (All that to say, they could just wish for a thousand wish scrolls and completely bypass even spending the money—especially as you still need to know the spell to begin with!)
If you can’t tell, I think their costs and times are incredibly off the mark and they lack ‘fun’ to them. It reads like they created the crafting system to say that they had one, but they didn’t bother to create something worth doing.
Crafter Feat
As if my disappointment with crafting couldn’t get any lower in the Player’s Handbook. At first, I was excited there was a feat for crafting! And then I read it and I wanted to throw my book across the room.
First up, you gain proficiency with three different Artisan’s Tools - which is great! More tools, always a great time.
Also, you get 20% discount when you buy a non-magical item (time to buy diamonds for the cleric to resurrect you every time you die—sure hope the spell isn’t picky about you getting diamonds at a discount).
And then we get to Fast Crafting which lets you craft one piece of gear from a very limited selection when you finish a Long Rest. At first, that’s fine. You can make extra things and sell them, say hello to your gold exploit. HOWEVER, this item only lasts until you finish another long rest, at which point the item falls apart.
That’s right. Being able to craft a basket at the end of your long rest was far too powerful for you to keep for more than 24 hours and it falls apart. Your basket skills were just too strong for this world.
And if you think I’m being flippant, the things you can make are incredibly limited and just simple adventuring goods like a torch, a jug, scroll case, a black and tackle, caltrops, grappling hook (that one is neat, I’ll give em that), a bell, tinderbox, net, tent, a club, and, of course, a basket.
That’s not everything, but about half of it, and you can really see why your item has to fall apart after 24 hours. Think of the game’s balance if you could make a bucket at the end of every long rest and just cripple the game’s internal economy with your bucket making skills.
It’s a bad feat that does almost nothing. In fact, I’d like it a lot more if it did nothing, at least then it’d be worth talking about.
But hey, that’s only the Player’s Handbook. Let’s move on to the Dungeon Master’s Guide and I’ll try to be less salty.
Crafting Magic Items
Sigh.
It’s the same as before. You pick the item you want, you have to be proficient in Arcana and the tool appropriate for the item you are crafting, and then consult a chart which tells you how many days it takes to create and how much it costs.
Of course, this chart is only broken down into rarity, I’ve reproduced it below:
Common \\ 5 days \\ 50 gp
Uncommon \\ 10 days \\ 200 gp
Rare \\ 50 days \\ 2,000 gp
Very Rare \\ 125 days \\ 20,000 gp
Legendary \\ 250 days \\ 100,000 gp
And there is a small note that consumables (other than spell scrolls) take half the time and half the cost to make.
So, we have more of the same, and it’s a boring system that you can’t interact with. There is no check to speed up the progress (though you can work with an assistant to halve the time to make the item). You do get the information that a city will only have the materials you need 75% of the time, and smaller settlements only have a 25% chance. If you roll and they don’t have it, kiss 7 days goodbye as you have to wait a week in order to roll again and see if they have the raw materials you need.
So instead of letting you interact with the system when you want to craft, you are told to stop playing with the crafting rules and go do something else for a week and, maybe when you come back, you can try and craft (but, oh wait, you ran out of time to craft cause now you have to go on a quest to save the world—too bad you didn’t get to spend your week crafting due to one bad roll).
This also doesn’t even get into the fact that magic items aren’t fixed. A cloak of protection and a ring of protection do the exact same thing, but one is ‘rarer’ than the other so a cloak only costs you 10 days and 200 gp, while a ring costs you 50 days and 2,000 gp. And there are plenty of items that are listed as uncommon, but stronger than rare items, and so on.
I created a pricing system for magic items, I understand more than most how difficult it can be to break a magic item apart into its power and figure out a cost for it. I know it’s difficult, but when we are paying Wizards of the Coast for a book of interesting and thoughtful rules to help Dungeon Masters run fun and exciting games, I expect a lot more from them.
The entire thing reads as if they had a box labeled “Crafting” and they just wanted to tick it. The time and costs make no sense. In what world am I going to spend 2,000 gp and 50 days of downtime to make a rope of entanglement, a rare item that has an easy Dexterity save and it just makes a creature within 20 feet of you Restrained as your Action. It also only has 20 hit points and can be destroyed pretty easily by a creature with a dagger and a multiattack feature, so there goes your precious gold and downtime.
It’s a system that tries to be a one-size-fits-all and, it’s greatest problem, is that it’s just boring. You don’t roll dice, you just say “I build this item, here is my gold” and that’s it. There is no prompt that you can find your raw materials by going on quests and harvesting magical items from creatures. There is no prompt about scouring ancient texts for recipes to craft powerful items.
All you need to do is to stop being an adventurer for a week, a month, or half a year, and have a huge amount of gold that you don’t care about, and you can create whatever you want.
Crafting Rules
So there we have it. After them hyping up we’d have crafting rules and how you could craft by the light of a campfire, we are given rules designed to never be used by adventurers who actually want to go on adventures.
I wanted to go into this revamp of 5e with excitement for crafting, to be excited for a great Dungeon Master’s Guide, but it’s just not going to happen. And I’m not saying this to just sell more Tool Craft books. I created those rules because of how much I wanted crafting to be a part of my games and at my table, and because there was a glaring hole in 5th edition.
I’ve even created a crafting system for making magic items because of how much I like crafting. The goal of the system was to keep it interesting, to keep adventurers from spending half a year on downtime—and pushes for adventurers to be adventurers!
Reading through these rules, it just makes me frustrated that when the community told Wizards that we wanted a crafting system, they threw their first thoughts onto paper and then paraded those rules around like they had actually created something interesting.
It’s anti-adventurer, it’s anti-gameplay, and it’s just not fun.
Game mechanics should push you to play the game, not force you to spend a month not adventuring. Game mechanics should encourage you to interact with the gameplay loop, not just make a tick on a piece of paper. Game mechanics should be something you are excited to do or to create fun at the table, not just a handwave from the Game Master and everyone forgets about it.
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