this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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The crafting rules. You spend at least 4 days to make an item for the same price you could have bought it for.
Oh, you can spend additional time to get the cost down to half, with the same rules as earn income? Well, you could also earn income the whole time, just buy the item and still have more money left than if you made it yourself.
I get that the rules are that way to prevent players from taking item balancing completely out of the GMs control with huge discounts. But it just feels bad for a player to invest into crafting only to be "allowed" to waste 4 extra days to essentially buy an item.
It tends to make more sense in mid-to-low magic campaigns where the item you want might not be readily available, but 5e's rules around magic items are notoriously underbaked. The reason they gave is that 5e is built around not needing magic items, but I've never played a game that doesn't use them.
Man, I don't think any system has ever really gotten crafting right. Certainly not any D&D-like system, anyway.
In PF2e, everything you said is correct, but then on top of that, there's also the fact that you can only make something if you have the recipe anyway (which you in many cases might have to buy, or which might take the place of some other more immediately valuable treasure your GM might choose to give you), which essentially restricts you to only being able to make things your GM has specifically decided they want you to be able to make.
The alt crafting rules from Pathfinder Unchained ruled. No one wanted to use them because they were so involved, but they were thematic, allowed different player builds to shine, and had the possibility to be faster and/or cheaper, if you got lucky.
Honestly, I think the crafting times are a bit much, but...
... is just the way that, you know, economies work. It really is often more efficient to buy something than it is to make it.
Not if you're someone specialised in producing that thing. By definition, for a person specialised, it must be more efficient to produce than what they sell it for.
For a player who wants to craft things and has the relevant skill trained, part of the fantasy of the game is that they should be that person specialised in producing things, just like a player trained in thievery expects they should be able to pickpocket.