Talk:Craft Artifice (3.5e Skill)

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	Ghostwheel dislikes this article and rated it 1 of 4.
	This is too open to interpretations, as there's nothing that I can see which defines what a "minor magical item" is--allowing you to theoretically create just about anything except for artifacts.

"You can craft magic items whose caster level is no greater than your ranks in this skill -3."

"Find the item's Craft DC. Normally the DC is equal to the the item's caster level x4, or 10 + the item's caster level (Whichever is higher), but some items have specific DCs." Notably, these.

You can make a magic item whose caster level is equal to your level if you keep this skill maxed, but with a Craft DC of 80 for a CL20 item, you're not likely to make items like that with this skill alone unless you build your entire character around that, at which point it would be more efficient to make an Artificer.

That said, Wizards have a pitiful class skill list and once you grab the essentials, there's very little that's worth spending your extra points on, and extra point you are likely to have since you're an Int-based character. However, being able to dabble in making magic items without spending a feat - Skill investiture rather than feat investiture - saves you some of the trouble. Making potions, scrolls and minor wondrous items like feather tokens would be the majority of this skill's usefulness, as the more powerful items are going to have ridiculous DCs.

As for clarity, setting a soft cap on what you can make via the high DCs was what I was trying to do to some degree; A CL8 item's DC is 32, so while you might be able to attempt making that item is going to be hard. By the time you reach that sort of level, you will most likely be instead reaching for the appropriate item creation feat if you intend to be making magic items often.

I had added the option of reducing the DC by half, but in doing so, you only make 1/10th of the progress you would make at the normal DC. You risk wasting fewer materials, but in doing so you take much longer.

In the end, the skill is meant to allow low-level casters easier access to magical doodads and give the high-level item crafters a way to make magic items faster without spending a million feats. The character must still spend the same amount of XP and while the initial gold cost is less, failure is possible here where it's not normally possible in item creation, so botching the attempt a dozen times is actually going to cost you more than just making the item with the correct feat.

Beyond the caster level and DC entries I mentioned, can you see any other way I should clarify what this skill allows you to make? --Zhenra-Khal (talk) 05:41, 8 July 2017 (MDT)

Au contraire--wizards have tons of skill points once you invest heavily in Intelligence via both level up boosts and tomes. Add on that it is an int-based skill, and with a magic item, you can easily get +65 to your check at high levels without jumping through very many hoops. Get another +5 from somewhere, take 10, and you're golden.

Item creation, at a lower cost than it takes to buy things, breaks the game. Incredibly hard. And this skill makes it worse. If you want to balance it, then you should set some limits; first, it should only be allowed to make consumable items, and second, the highest cost of things you should be able to make is equal to your character level x 25, or something like that. That would go a long way towards stopping characters from trading time for power over other players during downtimes. --Ghostwheel (talk) 06:40, 8 July 2017 (MDT)

You can't really take 10 or 20 on this skill anyway, and what you're saying is that being able to create magic items in the first place is game-breaking. And again, at high levels you could just take the correct item creation feat instead.

I agree that making nonpermanent items only should be the case, and I should likely increase the base raw materials cost to half rather than 1/5 so it's on par with normal item crafting. But beyond that, it's not much more broken than the normal crafting system. And it's certainly more useful than Craft (Alchemy). --Zhenra-Khal (talk) 06:53, 8 July 2017 (MDT)