Further discussion about Pathfinder 2e crafting

ME:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Eo_eImudEB57J-YCAPHm10DVkHMnx8G17E5n2XZJ6ew/edit?usp=sharing

Here it is, in case anyone's curious.

Comments are welcome (though I may or may not agree with them).

N.B. I don't purport this to be perfect, and I might revise it later on.

Meanwhile, one of the main justifications I've heard for the crafting system as is seems to be "the game isn't designed for characters to become crafters, as opposed to going on adventures", a.k.a. "the game isn't meant to tell that kind of story".  Which just seems to be more reason to houserule stuff.

The other has to do with nerfing/keeping in check the players' ability to make money from crafting.

I actually wonder if this is because of organized play, and needing to balance characters getting downtime in an official setting.

I've seen one YouTube comment say that "GMs don't give enough downtime", presumably referring to non-official campaigns.  (Of course, this would also be reason to homebrew)

PERSON A:

Yeah, crafting needs to be balanced, because if you out earn expected gold per level, it unbalances the game. Pf2e is very carefully balanced and not something you can "fix" with a new system easily.

ME:

I didn't finish what I was going to write before I AFK'd, but here it is:

Like, as I and others have noted, it's not just difficult to make money but downright impossible, if you factor in the monetary equivalent value of labor that's provided.  Pay half the cost of an item, wait 4 days, and then either pay the other half of the cost of the item or work a functionally equivalent time for said cost.  Or you could just pay that same amount for the item from a store and not do the labor at all.

Maybe on the margin it could be advantageous, but also disadvantageous the same way.

From a simulationist perspective, one could justify this on a few different bases:
* Crafting guilds get better prices on raw materials.  This feels like the most plausible explanation, but AFAIK it's not in the official rules, though it also feels like there's the most room in the official rules to claim that this is the case.
* Crafting professionals have their own special features (like classes/archetypes/feats) that make crafting more advantageous.  Such features have not (yet) been documented in the official rules.
* There's economies of scale.  This is also not (yet) documented in the official rules.

But even if we take the most plausible first justification, it still takes an absurdly long time to make certain items, if we presume most NPCs to be at most lowish-level characters with some specialized character features.

From a metagame perspective, I do have a serious hunch that it's balanced around making organized play work.  I've heard of similar issues with D&D 5e's crafting, and I've also heard that PF1e's crafting was considered overpowered and thus largely banned in organized play.

Personally I think the system should be designed around simulationist goals.  But, I'm not the one writing any of these systems, so my opinion is just my opinion.

(For the record, I'm up for discussing and/or arguing over this, though I'm not sure if the mods are up for allowing such a discussion/argument to take place here.)

(For the record I also do feel like opining at the moment.)

Also, for the record, I actually like a lot of PF2e.  I like how the skills got cleaned up and consolidated, how the system handles proficiency stages, how there's a huge volume of character customization options, how there's a rule for everything, how Paizo's more committed to open gaming ideals than WotC, and more.

Crafting, though, is apparently a pretty frequent point of contention among people who play it.

PERSON A:

So I will say that balancing for realism in a TTRPG when it comes to economy at its core is a faulty premise. You can't have a world with an economy that makes sense if you also have a world with sustained Gate spells and Vancian magic. It has to be hand-waived to some extent.

That being said, the problem with unbalanced crafting systems is that if you're able to make infinite money, which is the goal for anyone who fully specs into crafting, you're able to buy the abilities of pretty much any other class.

For reference, the system that my kids Larping camp also had major balance issues, and the only reason that it ended up not breaking the world is because there was exactly one kid who had figured it out, and he was a good sport about not just crashing the economy for everyone.

It was a well known thing among staff and campers that the crafting/merchanting system was broken, and even with how insane the merchant skill was, players still never took them.

Also, you have mentioned that you would expect a laborer to make a single Common item in one day, which to me seems wildly optimistic. Like, a riveted iron pan would easily take days to make from scratch.

Looking at the items in an Adventurers Pack, (linked here https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1)
I don't see any items realistically being able to be made from scratch in one day.
Like anything leather takes at least a full day to cure, anything metal or involving fabric needs to be hand riveted/sewn, anything wooden needs to be felled/shaped.

The one thing in there I could see as being somewhat realistic is if you happened to live next to a massive chalk quarry, the shaping of the 10 pieces wouldn't take that long.

But that assumes you're near a decent vein of chalk. Even just finding a decent vein could take hours if not days.

ME:

I don't expect the system to fully simulate the economy for the simple reason that this just leads to a situation where the GM would have to do a preposterous volume of calculations to simulate the chaotic dynamics of a system that also requires a huge number of parameter assumptions (such as the demand and supply of various goods, the number of participants in the market on each side, etc.).

There's something of an unwritten assumption that the economy is large enough that players' individual actions of buying and selling goods has minimal effect on the overall economy, and at most might have a temporary/localized effect of causing a shortage or glut of something.  That and, of course, items are generally commoditized and functionally equivalent.  This produces the result that prices for items are relatively stable and items are relatively widely available.

As for crafting items in the adventurer's pack: given appropriate raw materials, I could see a variety of them being reasonably craftable in a day or less, depending on the details.  For example, one can cut and sew together a backpack out of a reasonably rugged but also workable material like canvas, or assemble a simple torch (it is worth only 1 cp after all), or prepare various foods to make a set of rations.  Of course, this depends on exactly what's being made and exactly how "raw" the raw materials are -- it's one thing to gather or buy nuts (for the rations, for example); it's another thing to have to grow a tree from which to farm nuts.  For a fuller simulation, sure, it'd be ideal to have different types of items requiring corresponding timeframes if made through nonmagical means, but again, this would greatly complicate things.  (Incidentally, the beauty of houserules is that one can create houserules to intentionally complicate things so as to simulate more details.)

Within typical player expectations in a fantasy RPG though (and already operating with a bunch of other idealizations -- after all, we're already imagining a significantly more prosperous/convenient/well-developed world overall than the actual Middle Ages, to say nothing of magic!), I think it makes sense to build a system that rewards player agency in a way that's internally consistent with what the player is able to experience.  If someone else can create an item and benefit from having put in the labor themselves (compared to just buying it off of someone else at a standard price), then so should the the player-character, given reasonably similar demands on expertise, materials, and tools.  Rather than have that system be both (1) twisted to disadvantage the players (especially if for metagame reasons, though this is a whole 'nother complicated ball game) and (2) be (seemingly) intentionally designed to make players not want to do it.  Sure, we're not simulating everything, but the parts we are simulating should at least be consistent.

You're right that individual crafting processes can take a while, depending on the item.  Ideally everything would have its own crafting details, but for the sake of simplicity, that's why I just went with the level of the item as a guideline.  And you're also right that sourcing the raw materials can be a significant time-consuming process, so that's why I assumed such things would have to be either bought or manually sourced by the players, and that selling to a shop should be at a steep discount (as a shop would not only want to make a profit but also be incentivized to keep a potential rival from popping up).

As for metagame balancing, that's inherently kinda difficult for a system that's meant to be able to tell an infinite variety of stories, but I'd say there's room to make crafting more useful but still have consequences for abuse.  If the players decide to putz off from doing the main quest and go exploit an exploitable system, it's not like a videogame where the story will wait for them; the villain may have made things much worse.  So it makes sense to make crafted items not easily sellable (to reduce exploitability directly), and sourcing materials non-automatic (so that there's still the cost of time), but doing so in a way that makes the actual making-stuff step more reasonably usable as opposed to just a fall-back for niche situations -- especially given the character feature investments needed to make it work.

I'll admit though that this can end up very much in the realm of vague, GM's-discretion checks, and can also run into issues if there's significant downtime for a player-character to do such an activity.  Thus I can understand how it might not be suitable for organized play.  But given a different context for a campaign, it might make more sense.

PERSON A:

I would love to see you assemble a backpack capable of handling the carrying capacity of a Adventurers pack in 1 Day without the use of modern technology.

It feels like all this system is done is moved "hey you wanna make your own special sword? Take a week and rent a forge" to "hope that the DM gives you access to the raw materials, and then take 4 days." The adventurer requiring the raw materials to be avalible makes sense when you want to get a more detailed version of the crafting system, but is at odds with the story the game is usually trying to tell. It's done the 5e thing of making what could be a balanced system, and offloading a whole bunch of that into DM fiat depending on what materials exist in the current location.

ME:

But what if they put in the labor *and* have the expertise and the requisite tools and materials?  Then it's just about the mechanics of the universe be consistent.

Sure, in the longer run, people might stop training themselves in that expertise because other people have it.  But in the short run, people aren't going to stop knowing how to do things.

Besides, this gets into the realm of whole-economy simulation that already runs afoul of multiple other built-in assumptions about the game world inherent in the rules as written.  To presume that the PCs lack specialization that allows for efficient crafting while such is obviously practiced by NPCs means that the NPCs must have something that they don't, which in turn means assuming something that the rules don't cover (the existence of such features).  And that's not getting into stuff like the constancy of prices or the non-crashability of the market or the assumption that the PCs are basically part of a small minority of people with the elite skills to be able to do the things that they do (i.e. most NPCs are low-level) and the market distortions around that.

(And yes, given an adequate supply of canvas, string, and sewing implements, I can even imagine myself designing and creating a sufficiently sturdy backpack, even if it might look kludgey and count as a "shoddy" item in-game.  And I don't even have specialized training in crafting, nor a formula, so I'd be doing this without training in crafting *and* inventing the formula simultaneously.)

re DM fiat: The problem with citing that is that the *entire story* is essentially based on DM fiat.  What seems implicit in this citation is that the DM is trying to tell a certain kind of story, and the system helps to railroad the players (or, at least, to bound their possible palette of actions) such that it's possible to tell that kind of story.

You've raised a point which I've seen used to justify the crafting system -- that a more capable crafting is "at odds with the story the game is usually trying to tell".  The fundamental problem with this idea is that this basically means "you're not having fun the right way".  I understand that the creators of the system can have a certain vision for it, and that a game system that's an abstraction of a world (real or fictional) isn't going to be able to simulate everything to perfect detail so it has to be selective, but acknowledging that also means acknowleging a limitation of the system, and acknowledging a space for people to homebrew content.

Besides, the greater freedom of the players to try various possible paths is part of the beauty of a TTRPG.  While no game can truly offer absolute freedom of possibilities in a fully structured manner, this idea of catering to player agency in interactions seems pretty fundamental to successfully designing/planning an enjoyable game.  Even if the crafting system properly accounts for game balance, designing a subsystem to basically dissuade people from using it -- especially when the PCs can see other people crafting more effectively in-universe -- is fundamentally railroading in a bad and awkward way.