Crafting Auto-fail

[Twohand]

Rolling a 1 when crafting something means you'll auto-fail its production even if your skill in the trade is 500 and the item's DC you want to create is 5, ruining the crafting materials in the process. This is a system that only promotes salt and grief, why is a thing? Personally, I believe there are better alternatives out there other than simply having your crafting materials destroyed forever in the case of 1 auto-fail like:

> Losing all your crafting points available at the time.

> Temporary debuff to your crafting skill.

> Turning the crafting materials into, let's say, an item called something like "Bundle of Salvageable Items" that would need 200 CP (or some other value) to be repaired on a workstation, which, upon completion, would provide you back the items of the failed craft.

I understand Knowledge and Invention gods are a thing, but that's another problem I have with the system. I'm of the opinion that all characters should have an equal chance at being amazing blacksmiths, alchemists and so on and so forth if they invest the skill points into it, regardless of the god they worship.

[Subutai]

I've expressed my opinion on this before, and it's exactly the same as yours. Losing all of your materials destroyed doesn't make any sense, to me. From an IC perspective, there's very little reason a craftsman would bungle their work so badly that the entire thing were destroyed. OOC, it seems overly harsh to me for difficult to make items that require a lot of different materials, and just tedious with items that are easier to make and require fewer materials.

I also agree with your suggestions, though I'd also add another (not necessarily better) option of losing one of your pieces of materials. That is, if auto-failing on a 1 should even happen at all. In PnP terms, critical failure is generally reserved for attacks and saving throws, not for skill checks.

As for the gods, perhaps instead of an automatic reroll, there's a chance of some of the crafting points a character just used being restored automatically? That would allow characters with Knowledge and Invention deities to occasionally craft more than other characters.

[Aelryn Bloodmoon]

Crafting enchanted gear successfully is supposed to cost you XP (and it used to); it's part of the opportunity cost of making whatever you want to kit your character and make them stronger, since gold is an easy to get unlimited resource that you could, technically, make endless quantities of on coin flips.

The 1 auto-failing on crafting checks is legitimate, and the only argument I could see as being viable to remove it would be if proper XP costs were assessed for all item crafting.

Given the choice between the two, you make out much better on the occasional 1-in-20 destroying your crafting supplies.

(Granted, this only applies to enchanted crafts, but lots of crafted gear builds into end gear with enchantments)

[Subutai]

*snip*

I don't think that enchanting and crafting need to have the same one-size-fits-all mechanics. It's easy enough to explain why failing to enchant an item would destroy it, for whatever magical reason.

The suggestions on the changes, I think, could easily enough just apply to the mundane crafting of the items, and not apply to enchanting them.