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D&D 5e: Alternate Crafting Rules

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For those who know me, or have been reading this blog since its inception, it comes as no surprise that I'm less than satisfied with the crafting rules of 5e. The good side of them is that even magic items don't cost XP (because charging XP turns it into something like an in-character currency, and that's weird), and you don't have to spend character-build currency (skill proficiencies, feat slots, whatever) on improving a downtime action before you know if the DM will give you time to use those abilities. The bad side... well, there's nothing to interact with in the system other than ticking one number down and another number up, for what may be an incredibly long time.

To understand where I'm coming from on this, read this post. Back when I wrote it, I had no idea that 5e was... relatively speaking... just around the corner. Well, okay, almost four years off, but whatever.

Let's look at what's there in the 5e crafting system, understanding that here I'm only interested in magic item crafting.

For this particular idea, I wanted to change as little as possible. Everything in the above breakdown remains true, but also:
The downside of this is that it does add a certain amount of bookkeeping - lists of components you've acquired, notes on what you can do with them, and notes on how where things are in consuming them to make magic items.

This is all a work in progress; the data-generation alone is about 5% complete, to say nothing of ironing out bugs. I'm hoping that when it's done, I can publish a PDF that adds incentives to use the crafting system and gives the players intriguing pieces of treasure along the way - so that DMs can hand out rewards that feel like rewards, but aren't ever-larger piles of currency or new magic items. Comments welcome!

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