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Adjusting item costs

C

celanian

Member
Is there any way to adjust item costs in hero labs? In my campaign, I don't use treasure. I give everyone a budget based on pathfinder's WBL guidelines. So a 4th level character has a budget of 6000 for example. This budget increases each level.

What I want to do with crafting feats is to make the item cost half if they have the crafting feat. So someone with craft weapons would have a cost of 1000 instead of 2000 for adding +1 to a weapon. Also, I want to double the cost of consumables such as potions and scrolls since the player gets his money back each level.

The players can do this by hand, but it would be much nicer if the program tracks all of this for them.
 
There isn't a way that I know of. You can "remove" the item from the "gear value" via adjustment now (it doesn't add to the total gear value). Only other option is to create custom items via editor.

But ask for it anyway, the "remove" adjustment wasn't there before and they got it in really quick, maybe this could be a quick hit as well. (Really, if they just change the "Remove" adjustment to a "Adjust" adjustment and let us set a 0gp - xgp on it, it would work for both...)
 
I can't remember the thread, but one of the Devs mentioned recently that they were looking into a way of including crafting in the purchasing system, but it's going to take a while as it will involve something of a rewrite of the systemic.
 
There is already an adjustment for making a gear item count as crafted for the purposes of character wealth, it's called Equipment Crafted. One of my big projects this last month has been an overhaul of the purchasing mechanics so that you can buy something at a lower price for being crafted, as well as some other enhancements to the process.
 
Ideally I'd like to be able to setup custom costs for items. As an example of what I'm thinking:

1) Crafted items by the crafter count as 1/2 cost

2) Items that are purchased if the character doesn't have the craft feat but another party member does count as 3/4 cost (the craft feat gives full benefit to the character who has it, but half benefit to other party members)

3) Consumables cost double or possibly more

4) Plot items that may be free or have a discounted value for a PC

5) Special materials such as mithral and adamantite as well as the masterwork property might have a discount if the PC has ranks in the craft weapons/armor skill. The discount scales as the number of ranks increases.
 
I think you'll need to look at scripting and adjustment for each version.

However, as Aaron has said that there's an adjustment to make something count as 50% value as crafted, you should be able to base your scripting adjustments on that, just with different values for each.
 
I found the adjustment for equipment crafted and equipment don't count in gear value. It helps, but it's not completely what I want.

It looks like right now the only multipliers you can have is 0% or 50% based on these options. Would it be possible to set this up so that the default multiplier is 50% of cost, but the user can change the multiplier to something else?
 
Using the editor you could create versions of the adjustment for each of the options you have listed, or you could create a version that uses the counter value as the percentage cost set individually each time.

The former option would seem good for points 1-3, whilst the latter would give you the versatility for points 4-5.

It's also quite a good project to start playing with the editor with, as it's fairly simple and based largely on modifying something that already exists. If you really don't want to, give a shout out for volunteers (give it a week or two and I might be able to do it myself, but I'm having some license issues atm that aren't letting me get the recent bug fix, so HL is crashing on me lots - probably my fault for opening hordes of HL files at the same time and doing lots of editor work over the weekend).


On a side note that is more game-related rather than HL-based, just in case you haven't considered it (and I have no idea what timescale your campaign runs on IC) - if you're looking at it with the base crafting rules, weapons/armour made of special materials takes insane quantities of time to craft.

As an example, an adamantine longsword is worth 3315gp. In silver, that's 33150. DC to craft is 20, and amount crafted each week is DC * Craft roll, so divide by 20 to get the total rolled sum you require in order to make the item, which is 1657.5 - i.e. you need to get a total of that from your weekly craft checks. So, if you're averaging 25 or so on your roll (i.e. skill ~ 15, fairly respectable but not maxed out for a mid-level character), that's 66.3 weeks, so somewhat over a year to make the item... even increasing average roll to 40 (30 skill, so pretty respectable even for a level 20) only drops it to around 41 and a half weeks.
 
Portilis said:
Using the editor you could create versions of the adjustment for each of the options you have listed, or you could create a version that uses the counter value as the percentage cost set individually each time.

The former option would seem good for points 1-3, whilst the latter would give you the versatility for points 4-5.

It's also quite a good project to start playing with the editor with, as it's fairly simple and based largely on modifying something that already exists. If you really don't want to, give a shout out for volunteers (give it a week or two and I might be able to do it myself, but I'm having some license issues atm that aren't letting me get the recent bug fix, so HL is crashing on me lots - probably my fault for opening hordes of HL files at the same time and doing lots of editor work over the weekend).


On a side note that is more game-related rather than HL-based, just in case you haven't considered it (and I have no idea what timescale your campaign runs on IC) - if you're looking at it with the base crafting rules, weapons/armour made of special materials takes insane quantities of time to craft.

As an example, an adamantine longsword is worth 3315gp. In silver, that's 33150. DC to craft is 20, and amount crafted each week is DC * Craft roll, so divide by 20 to get the total rolled sum you require in order to make the item, which is 1657.5 - i.e. you need to get a total of that from your weekly craft checks. So, if you're averaging 25 or so on your roll (i.e. skill ~ 15, fairly respectable but not maxed out for a mid-level character), that's 66.3 weeks, so somewhat over a year to make the item... even increasing average roll to 40 (30 skill, so pretty respectable even for a level 20) only drops it to around 41 and a half weeks.
Click to expand...

Yeah, mundane crafting was completely broken in 3.5, and paizo didnt' touch it - so it's still completely broken. I strongly suggest picking up 'Making Craft Work' - it's not the best solution, but it is FAR better than what's in the core rules.
 
The timescales required are actually largely what they should be. Most things cap out at about a month or two for more expensive items such as armour or masterworked, which is pretty realistic for time taken. The extreme cases are mostly either items that are at the limits of the existing technology (guns, spyglasses, etc), or are made of materials that are hard to work with, both of which cause a massive increase to the time taken.
 
Spending a year crafting a sword made of a rare material makes sense to me, personally. Explains why such swords are so expensive, because they represent a large amount of work and why they are so rare, because who wants to spend a year meticulously making a single blade (and rarity means they are even more expensive)?
 
well, the problem is the construction time is directly coupled to the final price. This breaks down when dealing with precious materials, as material costs increase disproportionately with labor. That's the key thing the Making Craft Work book does, is separate construction time from final price.
 
Actually, it's not really disproportionate - the special materials of fantasy legend are all supposed to be difficult to work, due to processes required, fragility or hardness of the material, etc.

Even with modern processes, the best materials take longer to work with - I do quite a lot of work with composites myself, and I know that whilst the core procedure of laying up an item into a mould doesn't really change, both the preparation and finishing of the items will vary dependant on whether I'm using fibreglass, carbon weave, kevlar, or a blend - the best finished materials take a lot more time to prepare the templates, cut the excess, smooth off the edges, clean, finish, etc, as the tools can more easily sand/cut/drill/etc the less resilient materials. The same applies to pretty much every craft, as one of the big factors in the value of a material in demand is the difficulty of working with it.

In-game, it basically means that if you want to get something made in a special material, you need to go to a master of the craft to get a decent job done of it in a reasonable time. Not something I have any issue with at all.
 
Of course they take longer to work. But a factor of 1000 times longer to make a adamantine sword than a steel one? Like I said, take a look at Making Craft Work. I think (from memory) adamantine is more a factor of double time of steel.

Regarding in-game, even a master of the craft isn't going to get it done considerably faster. I played a soul forger, which is pretty much the best base for a crafter available, and it would still have taken over a year to make a mundane adamantine sword. that's a sign of a broken system. Paizo KNOWS its a broken system, but it keeps going to the back burner, because PFS doesn't allow crafting, so crafting isn't important to their bottom line.
 
Um, it's a factor of 10 (adamantine is automatically MW and it at +3000 where a normal MW is at +300) - which isn't utterly unrealistic given how hard it should be to work.

I'm aware that you're generally looking at long periods to craft it - if you note, I actually used the timescales for adamantine in my example above.
 
I think I figured out how to do most of what I want.

For free plot items and 50% crafted items, the adjustment tab handles it already.

For double cost consumables, I can just have the player purchase twice as many as they want and mark off 2 uses each time they use the scroll/potion.

The 3/4 cost version will be difficult to apply. I may just allow everyone 1/2 price even though it would be incredibly unbalancing to have 4 players get full benefit from a single player's craft feat.
 
You could always have the players work out the extra 25% themselves; why any character would spend all day for weeks or months building an item for someone else for no benefit is beyond me (altruism only goes so far), especially considering the other players are out doing their own thing too during that downtime
The other players could pay that 25% to the crafter for their time (the crafter, creating his own, would comp his time, thus the 50% that)
Then, if the crater didn't like the person they were crafting for, they could charge more than 25%, or less if they liked them
 
When I've been a crafting focused character, that's exactly what I did. Party members paid me 25% commission on the items crafted for them, plus the 50% item cost. This gave them the item for 75% base price, cheaper than the 'market', and I got some capital to spend on my own items to offset my time and feat/skill expense.
 
In my campaign, I'm abstracting it. I don't force rolls and I assume any significant amount of non-adventuring time allows for obtaining your magic items.

I allow any craft feats to any character regardless of level, skills, caster level, etc. If you're a caster, you're probably crafting your own items. If you're someone like a fighter or barbarian, the craft feat is explained as you having a good contact who will obtain the items for you at a huge discount. The contact will give you your personal items at half cost, but he's not as friendly toward the other party members and will charge 3/4 cost to them.
 
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