The Many Flaws of the 5e Crafting System

[Foxwarrior]

While I'm certainly more familiar with hoarder-type people (I used to be one myself when my first ten years of contact with consumables was in computer games with saving where retrying the fight instead of spending a consumable was always an option (especially in CRPGs)) so I'm skeptical about having consumables be in your game at all.

If you do want to have consumables in your game, however, I'd prefer if whatever resource you used to purchase them was only good for buying consumables (otherwise players can opt-out by trading their potions for rings of regeneration), and for consumables to not be permanently hoardable so some baseline rate of using consumables is obviously better than just hanging onto all of them for a rainy day.

[deaddmwalking]

At the very least, yeah, making them really cheap and having a really short period of efficacy is way better than current design.

If you can make 12 potions in a day, but they only last for a week, you're only going to make potions you think you'll use in a week. Since they won't last long, make them very inexpensive. If you want to include potions in treasure, make sure someone is in the adventure who can make them (or explain how they got left). Allow someone to identify a potion and how long it is potent with an easy skill check.

[violence in the media]

Does the the magic of the potion have to reside in the liquid, or could you move the magic to the container? If you had a potion of healing, it might be that you keep and reuse the vial each day as opposed to treating it like a soda can. Maybe it has a daily limit, maybe you just have to refill it with spring water after each use.

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah, putting the magic in the container is what I did for Gempunks for the one potion the game has in it, and more prominently what Path of Exile does with all its many potions. Path of Exile is an improvement on Diablo 2 in many ways, including that one.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If you can make 12 potions in a day, but they only last for a week, you're only going to make potions you think you'll use in a week. Since they won't last long, make them very inexpensive. If you want to include potions in treasure, make sure someone is in the adventure who can make them (or explain how they got left). Allow someone to identify a potion and how long it is potent with an easy skill check.

This solution runs up against the other side of the problem, consumable novas, where everyone chugs six different kinds of spinach before every fight. It's really bad for playability because the record-keeping involved is a horror and encounter design becomes very hard. The actual old-school Potion Miscibility table was of course not good, but instituting something in that vein to prevent or discourage stacking consumable buffs would probably be necessary.

[deaddmwalking]

If you can make 12 potions in a day, but they only last for a week, you're only going to make potions you think you'll use in a week. Since they won't last long, make them very inexpensive. If you want to include potions in treasure, make sure someone is in the adventure who can make them (or explain how they got left). Allow someone to identify a potion and how long it is potent with an easy skill check.

This solution runs up against the other side of the problem, consumable novas, where everyone chugs six different kinds of spinach before every fight. It's really bad for playability because the record-keeping involved is a horror and encounter design becomes very hard. The actual old-school Potion Miscibility table was of course not good, but instituting something in that vein to prevent or discourage stacking consumable buffs would probably be necessary.

I don't know that it necessarily does. I mean, it COULD. And generally the 'all items regenerate so nothing is ever really consumed' may address the problem...

But if a potion were good for 1 week, you wouldn't stock up on consumables in town before heading into the Dungeon - they'd expire before you have a chance to use them. If it's something you can make a few of every night, you'll probably have a variety available to use, but you have all the issues of a scroll caddy - you might not have time to use them all before combat in which case it uses an action; you might use them anticipating a fight but find the duration is insufficient. But mostly you'd use them when you know you need to and you'd have it in your mind that it is 'use it or lose it' so you'd be looking for the best time and place, rather than stockpiling them for decades.

[Foxwarrior]

This solution runs up against the other side of the problem, consumable novas, where everyone chugs six different kinds of spinach before every fight.

That sounds more like a buff stacking problem to me, which is indeed a pain but is still a pain if you do it by casting spells instead.

[Mord]

This solution runs up against the other side of the problem, consumable novas, where everyone chugs six different kinds of spinach before every fight.

This specific objection seems like it's addressed by having consumable buffs count against the Eight Item Limit. Of course, the issue that follows after that is that consumables implicitly are less expensive than permanent magic items and don't displace direct offensive power like spell slots used on buffs.

It's all well and good to have your Popeye balanced against your Christmas Tree, but at low levels, Popeye can almost certainly afford to get all six of his buffs on when it comes time for the big fight whereas Christmas Tree has exactly one magic cock piercing for the big fight, the little fight, and all the fights in between.

You could mitigate this by having the Eight Item Limit actually be a Scaling Item Limit Maxed At Eight and balance to the expected rate of acquisition of permanent magic items. That runs into issues balancing the cost of a permanent magic item against the cost of consumables. The Popeye in this case has to gain the ability to create a certain number of buff potions for free every day as level goes up, because otherwise he is spending more money per level on items as levels go up.

The net effect here is supposed to be that the Popeye is always paying for his last buff potion slot, but it's trivial for the Popeye to just cut back slightly on consumable usage in non-critical fights and accumulate a sizable cash advantage over the Christmas Tree, or to accidentally overspend and end up in the hole.

There are movies where a normally weak character uses his last dose of Secret Drugs to fucking tear shit up for one last fight, but often this leaves the character dead (Logan, Scarface) or dead weight for the rest of the movie. Not really a solid concept for a party member there.

Not to mention Popeye has an even worse five-minute workday issue than a regular prepared caster because he can't even just sleep it off and wake up with new mojo; he has to spend more time and/or money to restock his spinach supply after he goes nova.

Yeah, I can see why Frank and K gave up on consumables. Shit sucks.

[Username17]

I don't think it's weird to track ammunition. At low levels you pay a few coppers for food and lodging and you buy some arrows and pitons. There's nothing unreasonable with high level characters eating food that costs platinum and shooting arrows with death runes on them at people.

The issue is that D&D has never really put together a theory of what higher level adventuring parties should be going through as operating costs. In 2nd edition and before, magic arrows weren't things you could buy - each one came in some random Orc lair or something. In 3rd edition and afterwards, you were expected to murder hobo through life, because operating expenses of any kind left you deficient in wealth for your level.

But in theory it's totally reasonable for 7th level characters to be accruing 7th level operating costs. Nothing wrong with that - as long as you define what you expect 7th level operating costs to be and actually support characters doing that.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I don't think it's weird to track ammunition. At low levels you pay a few coppers for food and lodging and you buy some arrows and pitons. There's nothing unreasonable with high level characters eating food that costs platinum and shooting arrows with death runes on them at people.

I can understand tracking special ammo, but regular arrows you're expected to use every fight? Isn't this exactly why people started using Bottomless Quivers and shit?

[Username17]

I don't think it's weird to track ammunition. At low levels you pay a few coppers for food and lodging and you buy some arrows and pitons. There's nothing unreasonable with high level characters eating food that costs platinum and shooting arrows with death runes on them at people.

I can understand tracking special ammo, but regular arrows you're expected to use every fight? Isn't this exactly why people started using Bottomless Quivers and shit?

I've been known to cheat for skill points in Diablo II so that I could max out Magic Arrow on an Amazon and not have to use arrows out of the quiver when dealing with stragglers. I totally get the appeal of streamlining things so that you don't have to track shit that doesn't matter. But on the flip side people seem to be OK with crafting and eating expensive food in MMORPGs.

If an ordinary laborer pays 1 copper for a basic meal and that works out to 1 gold per month, there's a lot of room for adventurers who make adventurer money to pay more than that. It's not necessarily true that you can get golden apples or gummy berry juice or black lotus petals or whatever the fuck wherever you are for any price. But if there's literally any price that you could pay to be eating stuff like that instead of brown bread and cheese you could imagine adventurers getting rich enough that that seemed like a good idea.

It seems to me that setting yourself up a supply chain such that you can increase your maintenance operating costs and perform at a higher level is the kind of thing the game should support. It's a non-trivial problem for a host of reasons. The one that I don't think we've already mentioned on this thread is that the typical Pathfinder adventure path often does not create space for player characters to expend wealth through any reasonable supply chain to get high-end maintenance consumables in any kind of reasonable time increments.

But in abstract it would be kind of cool if the players started going into the wilderness with ten iron rations and latter on they were scaling the doom mount with seven silver pears. Also create interesting dynamics when players find wrath grapes or ambrosia to discuss whether tis better to eat, sell, or save. The correct choice of course is eat, but it's still an interesting question.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I think cooking food has a primal appeal that making a bunch of arrows doesn't have, even if both the food and arrows are imaginary. Personally, I think eating a dragon is way cooler than just making weapons and armor out of it. Ideally, you could do both.

There's a reason this pic is a thing you can buy on a shirt with money:

[Iduno]

I don't think it's weird to track ammunition.

There should be a point where you're buying better ammunition, and just have enough of the lower-quality stuff without tracking it.

[Thaluikhain]

Exile 3 had a magic item called the "Infinity Arrow" or somesuch that came back to you after you fired it (then why can't it fire itself?), meaning you didn't have to keep track of ammo if you had one (per archer). Not as good otherwise as some fancy arrows you could get.

And archery was mostly useless, but that was due to a bug.

[OgreBattle]

I like how PSX Resident Evil does resource management, crafting, ammo


There's no "market downtime" in RE1-3 though, so it's all scavenged materials. More like a spell system and not really a wealth system.

Nioh has a ninja tool stat that gives you sets of consumable items to use every adventuring day.
https://nioh.wiki.fextralife.com/Ninjutsu

----

How about you treat crafting and materials like chakra slots or vancian slots, or clerics waking up with a new set of spells. You spend a day to convert your gold points into stuff, you spend a month to convert stuff into gold points and back into stuff.

"Spend many days crafting a giant bomb" can be on the table if say the gold points are also needed to maintain stuff in a week/monthly basis.

The key thing seems to be putting things on a time limit or schedule. Resident Evil is one long day, Nioh is various days/milestones

[jt]

Aside from the nova/exhaustion problem, there's no way to balance consumable items because there's no challenges on the same resource schedule as them.

You know how good a per-encounter ability should be because D&D has the CR system telling you how tough an encounter should be. You know how good a per-day ability should be, because there's a four encounter per day guideline*. There's no correct balance target for a per-week ability, because there's no guidelines about how many challenges should exist in a week. You could plausibly do a per-level ability**, since the experience system gives you a certain number of fights per level.

Consumable items are a per-forever ability, and there's no per-forever guidelines. Or per-campaign guidelines, practically. And unless you're going to introduce them**, there's nothing to balance consumables against.

(Also the nova/exhaustion problem gets worse the wider the timeframe gets, and these timeframes are less and less likely to be accurate as they get wider and wider. The lack of matching resource schedule is one problem, not every problem.)

* Yeah I know it doesn't work very well, but neither does CR. At least it exists.
** Gross. But you could.

[Username17]

The game assumes you will gain XP and GP during your encounters. Spending XP or GP during or between encounters is no different than gaining XP or GP more slowly. If you would allow players to take on easier enemies with the expectation of taking home less treasure, then it's not a stretch at all to allow the players to spend some of their treasure in order to make their combats easier.

No the history of such things hasn't been great in D&D. And some of that is that even in 3rd edition (the only edition where anyone ever did an integral to determine how much treasure they expected players to get), the consumables never got thought of in terms of how much benefit versus how much treasure loss they represented.

But in theory you could buy potions of heroism and take on bigger enemies with more treasure and have the extra wealth be effectively taxed by the cost of the potions.

-Username17