Also gold used to be directly converted to EXP iirc, which is also where the big numbers at high levels come from.

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Also gold used to be directly converted to EXP iirc, which is also where the big numbers at high levels come from.

 
Yes. Gold was XP -- to the point that even today some old edition players will argue that you gained more XP from gold than you did from killing monsters.

And as pointed out slightly earlier, in 5e, the core purpose of gold has mostly been stripped from the game -- which is why so many folks say the economics are just not a workable system.

WHich matters because if you have even a vaguely useful economic system, then suddenly all the assorted bits and pieces about magic having a gold piece equivalent make sense and have real value. 

To drive the point ome, when I shifted things so that a poor person's meal was a copper, I needed to add in an additional coin below that, and I made the silver piece the core/central coin (instead of GP). Converting the equipment tables to SP was fairly easy, but I didn't touch the magic item equivalents -- and suddenly they are something to work towards and money has more meaning throughout the setting as a whole (but, in fairness, coinage is Lore, sooo).

I could have simply used the Electrum as the base coin, and not touched anything more and achieved the same result, but I wanted an 8 in there, lol.

5e doesn't use g as a resource so much as a measure, whereas earlier editions counted it as a resource.

Quote from Xukuri >>

Quote from Quar1on >>

If you have 500,000 gp (worth of stuff), you can craft a +3 sword. That's significantly different, because it means a DM who doesn't want you to have a +3 sword can't really do anything besides starving players or changing the rules.

 
Yurei's response notwithstanding, I nodded pretty hard along with this. Maybe it's just the kind of players I've been exposed to, but as a DM, any easily predicted/formulated crafting system for magic items gives me hives, because I KNOW what I'm going to hear from players when they're wanting to craft a vorpal sword or staff of the magi and I'm not in favor of it.

Tough titties, mostly.  Not for you and your anti-desire for crafting rules, but for players who feel like the existence of magic item crafting means they're entitled to forging legendary gear on a whim.  It's legendary for a reason.  I'd argue - and would print in a book, were I writing it - that Legendary gear cannot be crafted under ordinary circumstances or by ordinary means.  Any given Legendary item is the result of exceptional circumstances, a combination of talent, material, and situation that cannot be replicated at a whim.

I'm going to shout this again because it feels like it's being roundly ignored by this entire thread: the 2014 version of D&D was explicitly designed to function absolutely fine without any magic items, ever, being given to the PCs. This is text, straight from the DMG. What this means is that, supposedly, the entire game design presumes either NO magic items or, at best, a very few handed out to each character over the course of 20 levels. Indeed: if the PCs get magic items, the canon books strongly suggest that 80% of them are minor items only.

Then you're gonna have to figure out ways to reward players for accomplishing objectives, because magic items are very nearly the only 'reward' worth obtaining.  Sure, some tables are fine with their characters doing years of ultralethal dangerous work just because they enjoy it, but other tables hate having to put in the work and never get the swag.  As has been established before in the thread, gold is effectively meaningless past a certain point and that point is usually achieved pretty early in a campaign, it's no good as a reward.  A significant percentage of players couldn't care less about being named Knights of the Realm, granted titles or estate, or any of that other Lordly Heroes social-rewards claptrap. 

Hell, a smaller but still significant percentage of players (which includes myself) actively dislikes that garbage.  I don't want to be a Legendary Hero of the Realm granted half a goddamn kingdom I have to spend all my time managing.  I prefer D&D when the party is relatively unknown, or when their reputations are only known to people whom it'd make sense to know it - y'know, when the party is free and clear to Adventure.  The Skyrim Approach of making you the Thane of Everywhere, the Headmaster of every guild, a landowner in a dozen places, with a dozen different warriors Sworn To Carry Your Burdens?  All that junk?  Sucked in Skyrim, sucks in D&D.

If magic items are banned, social rewards suck, and gold is meaningless much past level 6, what's left?  Why adventure past level 6, if you're never going to get anything for it?  Beyond the whole "the world will end and you live here" deal, which fine - but there's only so many times you can threaten the PCs' stuff that way before they start getting ugly, ne?

ANY crafting system almost requires an entire rebalancing of the game, unless the DM puts firm limits on what can be crafted, how long crafting takes, what's required to do it, and success rate. I.e.: any crafting system that allows for PCs to gain significantly more magic items than prescribed by the books necessitates a large-scale rebalancing of the game itself.

 
No it doesn't.  All people are looking for is a guideline/framework for if people want to use crafting.  The Xanathar's rules - "make your players hunt an Epic Monster, harvest its part, and then make three years of crafting rolls to see if any one single roll fails and completely ruins their craft!" - are hog shit and everybody knows it.  For one, it forces the entire party to waste several sessions chasing the one monster part for one guy's special crafting project - if everybody wants their own Special Crafting project because that's only fair, you're killing half a year of IRL time to get everybody their Monster Parts.  For two, the outlandishly and unreasonably high chance of complete failure and waisting all the time, money, and effort/Monster parts you've already invested is just uncool for something the book expects you to sink multiple months of session time into.  It's just bad.  

People want good, not bad.  Or at least "useable."  And DMs who want to eliminate magic items from their game can just eliminate the crafting rules, too.  Easy as that.

I mean, it's still somewhat of a resource; consumable components and suchlike. But yes, there's not really any good universal money sinks.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

ANY crafting system almost requires an entire rebalancing of the game, unless the DM puts firm limits on what can be crafted, how long crafting takes, what's required to do it, and success rate. I.e.: any crafting system that allows for PCs to gain significantly more magic items than prescribed by the books necessitates a large-scale rebalancing of the game itself.

 
No it doesn't.  All people are looking for is a guideline/framework for if people want to use crafting.  The Xanathar's rules - "make your players hunt an Epic Monster, harvest its part, and then make three years of crafting rolls to see if any one single roll fails and completely ruins their craft!" - are hog shit and everybody knows it.  For one, it forces the entire party to waste several sessions chasing the one monster part for one guy's special crafting project - if everybody wants their own Special Crafting project because that's only fair, you're killing half a year of IRL time to get everybody their Monster Parts.  For two, the outlandishly and unreasonably high chance of complete failure and waisting all the time, money, and effort/Monster parts you've already invested is just uncool for something the book expects you to sink multiple months of session time into.  It's just bad.  

People want good, not bad.  Or at least "useable."  And DMs who want to eliminate magic items from their game can just eliminate the crafting rules, too.  Easy as that.

Yurei, strawmanning the existing system into something that is objectively untrue does not help your argument. There are no provisions for failing a crafting roll in XGtE, it's a straight investment of time, and as I've already outlined it takes a single year at most. The current system is entirely usable. If you're going to argue against it, please at least take the five minutes of checking to get your facts straight rather than inventing nonexistent points to attack.

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Yurei, strawmanning the existing system into something that is objectively untrue does not help your argument. There are no provisions for failing a crafting roll in XGtE, it's a straight investment of time, and as I've already outlined it takes a single year at most. The current system is entirely usable. If you're going to argue against it, please at least take the five minutes of checking to get your facts straight rather than inventing nonexistent points to attack.

 
Downtime - Complications

I'm not "strawmanning" shit.  Xanathar's Guide straight up tells DMs to make rolls to see if whatever the party's doing suffers a Complication, with many complications being "the attempted task fails, is stolen, is bullied away from you, or is otherwise ruined/removed from the player's control."  Let's look at some of the suggested/example "Complications" for crafting:

"A powerful noble offers a hefty price for your work and is not interested in hearing no for an answer."
-An influential figure has decided they're going to own what you're making, and you're not allowed to tell them to sod off.  Either you give up your thing or the weight of law/the local nobility is dropped on your head, generally forcing you to flee the town/city you're using as a base to craft in and either abandon your work, or abandon the ability to pursue your work without a workshop.  And if you do take the partially complete item with you to try and finish elsewhere?  That noble will doubtless hear about it and send agents to retrieve "their" item, after either coercing you to complete the work or sourcing a craftsman themselves to finish what you sweated and bled to start.

"Rumors swirl that what you’re working on is unstable and a threat to the community."
-Again - you're placed into a position of having to abandon your efforts completely or being forcibly driven out of the area you're working in, abandoning anything you can't carry with you from that area.  No workshop, no heavy tools, and also no more connections or services in that area.  Unless you abandon/destroy your attempted crafting.

"A dwarf clan accuses you of stealing its secret lore to fuel your work."
-If your dwarves are anything like typical dwarves, this one will see you attacked and killed unless you either destroy your work and swear a binding oath never to lift a tool again so as to never profit from your 'stolen' knowledge, or the dwarven clan in question will demand control of the thing you're making.  Or, if the dwarves are grudgy enough, they'll just skip straight to constant attacks and attempted murder and will not rest until you are dead, no matter what you do about the thing you're trying to craft or whatever the truth is about your 'stolen' knowledge.

And the DM is supposed to make this roll every.  Single.  God.  Damn.  Week.  Of your project, because let's face it - not one DSM in the history of DMing is going to pay attention to that ridiculous "10% chance per five workweeks" dogshit.  They didn't hand the DM a tableful of "how can I **** over my players and make them sorry they ever wanted to try making their own thing?" results for the DM not to use it.

The Xanathar's rules are trying very, very, very hard to turn basic crafting into An Adventure.  Not everybody WANTS crafting to be "An Adventure."  Maybe I'm playing an artificer and would actually like to do some for-real artifice, one single time, in the character's existence.  Maybe I'm playing a tinkerer of another class that enjoys working on side projects as a character-building exercise.  Maybe I'd just like to know that my odds of finishing what I start without having to become Mordenkainen are higher than half a percent of zero.

You are the one extrapolating these into hard interruptions that ruin the crafting, not the system. Nothing about it says that your work stops and the materials are lost. They're just plot hooks the DM can develop if they so choose down the line.

The hell else are "Complications" of that nature supposed to do/mean?  You explain to me how any of those three don't result in the crafting attempt being forcibly destroyed or abandoned, in any reasonable way.  Or don't, because there is none.  There's no reasonable extrapolation of any of those "Complications" that doesn't effectively end the project.  And those are the 'examples' a DM is supposed to strive for.

Quote from Yurei1453>>

And the DM is supposed to make this roll every.  Single.  God.  Damn.  Week.  Of your project, because let's face it - not one DSM in the history of DMing is going to pay attention to that ridiculous "10% chance per five workweeks" dogshit.  They didn't hand the DM a tableful of "how can I **** over my players and make them sorry they ever wanted to try making their own thing?" results for the DM not to use it.

Because let's face it - the rules work however Yurei says they work to support her argument and to prevent her from admitting she misread the rules.

Genuinely, what the hell is this argument. You're obviously taking a bad experience with a bad DM and saying "well, the rules never say that this mechanic works like this, but they also don't say that WotC will send a task force to hunt down any DMs who change this rule for the worse, so obviously the rule itself is fundamentally flawed and I'm practically shitting my pants out of rage just thinking about it."

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

The hell else are "Complications" of that nature supposed to do/mean?  You explain to me how any of those three don't result in the crafting attempt being forcibly destroyed or abandoned, in any reasonable way.  Or don't, because there is none.  There's no reasonable extrapolation of any of those "Complications" that doesn't effectively end the project.  And those are the 'examples' a DM is supposed to strive for.

You are welcome to treat them that way in your campaigns, but regardless they say absolutely nothing about ending the project. 

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

The hell else are "Complications" of that nature supposed to do/mean?  You explain to me how any of those three don't result in the crafting attempt being forcibly destroyed or abandoned, in any reasonable way.  Or don't, because there is none.  There's no reasonable extrapolation of any of those "Complications" that doesn't effectively end the project.  And those are the 'examples' a DM is supposed to strive for.

I think I found the point of confusion. Sometimes, in Dungeons and Dragons, you have to use your imagination and creatively solve problems.

Noble:

• Pretend to comply, then peace out at the last minute.
• Sell the item, then steal it.
• Expose the abuse of power to courts or a king. It's quite possible that you're already known and respected as an adventurer.

Rumor:

• Sow a rumor in response that paints the item as helpful.
• Get a respected magic guy to publicly verify the safety of the item.
• Pretend to halt the crafting.
• Perform a phony public ritual to purify the item.

Dwarves:

• Fake your death.
• Convince the dwarves that you didn't steal their secrets.
• Get the approval of a high-up dwarf. If your dwarves are anything like typical dwarves, they'll respect the authority of elders.
• If it's tangible, find who actually stole the lore.

Those are just some possibilities from off the top of my head. Other solutions can make themselves available, depending on the specifics of the complication.

Plus instead of demanding your immediate attention, these can set plot hooks for the future. Refuse to sell to the noble, and then he can crop up further down in an adventure either blocking the party from reaching an official or trying to acquire the item by force. Maybe the rumors about your item attract the attention of a particularly zealous and reactionary paladin/cleric/religious order/etc.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

 Its not the PHB, most players have never read it.

This is very untrue.

They could fix a lot of the present issues with the magic item economy by simply rebalancing the rarities. I would argue a few items need a total rework, also, but really, the lazier approach would still go a long way.

I will take a moment to note that Rarity is an aspect of Lore, and is based in (or creates the basis for/of) the Forgotten Realms. Since it is lore, rarity is wholly the province of the DM.

I do agree that it needs to be looked into more heavily -- but I will also note that it should be expanded beyond the current five, and each of the rarities should have a description of what makes something rare. Your example is a good bit of this: what makes a Broom of Flying an uncommon item? How uncommon is it, in relation to Oil of Etherealness? What makes something a rare item? 

This also means they need to decide what they are going to do about Wondrous Items. Their presence makes me twitchy because they don't readily fall into the current (albeit broken) rarity system easily, but that's more a factor of their lack of designation of what a wondrous item is in the core books, and their desire to crete collective traits.

 

 They can demand Epic Quests to gain Items of Power as much as they can demand Epic Quests to gain Materials of Power with which to create Items of Power.  You can't stop some people from wanting to be powerful.  So don't try, and don't punish everyone else who wants to be allowed to be more creative and expressive from doing so in a misguided attempt to stop people who want to be powerful from being powerful.

this is an excellent summation.

A crafting system revision is unlikely to enable PCs to create something that is classified as Rare or greater.Flat out. They screwed the pooch on laying down the lines of what is common, uncommon, rare, et al, but the vague basis of it still makes it pretty clear that if they do expand the crafting system as is expected, that they will not make it so that little Timmy can forge himself a +4 Spear of Lugh. 

Sorry, but it just ain't gonna happen. Crafting, around magical items, will focus exclusively on Common and Uncommon items. Arguments about "but they will make only powerful items" are empty arguments. Unless someone can point to something suggesting they ar suddenly going to change that core aspect of the game about the existence magical items when they are hellbent on making sure they don't break existing Adventures and such.

More importantly, even if they do bring in a more player happy making crafting system, because rarity is an aspect of Lore that varies from world to world, Rarity becomes the factor that determines how useful the crafting system is -- a DM can say that a Broom of Flying is now a Very Rare item, and poof, ain't no one crafting one. Ya'll can complain about how that might be "unfair" -- but ultimately, that's all stuff the DM should be addressing when they prepare for the campaign as a whole.

(I will grant that a lot of folks don't always understand the difference between Lore and Mechanic, but that's a different subject).

The DM will typically manage what items are available for purchase in some way. Which is also why crafting currently has several steps and an extended time factor; it allows the DM to regulate access to magic items.

This is the big key to crafting, and why suggestions that break significantly away from the current paradigm are unlikely to even make an appearance.

The current paradigm is established entirely in a very small bit of rule making (not mechanics): The game assumes that the secrets of creating the most powerful items arose centuries ago and were then gradually lost as a result of wars, cataclysms, and mishaps. Even uncommon items can’t be easily created. Thus, many magic items are well-preserved antiquities.

As I noted above, they aren't going to make anything more than uncommon able to be crafted. No matter how much folks want it, that's not going to be a thing that happens. But at the same time, if they don't get tighter around the way that Rarity is structured and used and, yes, priced (because 50gp for a magic item is flat out damn foolish if you have a world where greater things can no longer be made), then they will break the very system they have for it.

Gwar and I went off on a tangent about Magic as Technology earlier in the thread --but the core rules explicitly kill that entire line of approach, because this is not a system where the sciences of magic is evolving forward, but rather one where the arts of magic are being lost, rapidly, and old amazing things are being lost. And that particular basis has been part of D&D's DNA since its very first iteration.

At some point the designers crashed Vance and Niven together (Magic Goes Away and Dying Earth) and since then, Magic in D&D's main line has been the fading power, and that,my friends, is a Sacred Cow they aren't going to touch -- no matter how many Eberron style worlds they create, until one of them eclipses the popularity of FR.

But that is where a lot of the conflict lies -- the desire to be able to have the players craft their own magic items of rare or greater rarity -- and while that might eventually be possible, it is exceptionally unlikely to happen now, because simply put, the designers don't want to do that.

do you have some evidence to the contrary? that most players have read the dmg?

because numbers looking at sales suggest they have not. 

https://www.enworld.org/threads/5e-lifetime-sales-in-north-american-big-box-stores-revealed.698946/

the ratio of sales here suggest, in comparison of 1.6ish mil phb buyers, and 1 million starter pack buyers, 800 thousand sales of dmg. This means unless you assume 100% of starter pack buyers also bought the phb and dmg, the dmg users are clearly under 50%. And this is just an analysis of sales. Not every player at a table has even read/bought/own the phb. There are tons of players who are using the SRD, or excerpts the DM provides. Anecdotally you may be use to playing with people who are that investsd, but anecdotally, 50% of people I haven't read any complete dnd book. of the 50% who have, only a % of that have read the DMG.

The DMG is literally designed to be a DM facing document, and much of it contains suggestions that aren't used at the average table. This is the equivalent of a how to draw book for DMs/creators, not a required reading for players. 

to be 100% honest most players who own the pHb haven't read half the stuff in there, much less the dmg.

For all this massive debate on the Crafting its probably the main reason why Artificer is not and will never be a core class.

Quote from Agilemind >>

Exactly, gold is historical from when the game was more of a simulation and less of a power fantasy. When things like: food, shelter, and taxes were a significant drain on a PCs gold resources. Players don't want stuff to cost gold (just look what happened when I argued that your Bastion should cost gold not "bastion points"), as a result gold is useless.

The problem with gold doing anything of significance is that it means you need to actually make sure characters get appropriate amounts of it, and Bookkeeping Bad. This is very similar to a lot of groups no longer tracking experience points in favor of waypoints.

I'll also note, for the simple joy of it, that I Cannot use any of the examples given.

A powerful noble offers a hefty price for your work and is not interested in hearing no for an answer."

A noble who did that would be in big trouble -- it literally breaks a law about abuse of authority, and that means they can just go down to the local Agency office and file a complaint.

"Rumors swirl that what you’re working on is unstable and a threat to the community."

Um, the community already thinks magic is unstable and dislikes anyone who is using it openly. Unless it is in Akadia, in which case no one would give a damn, since all magic is legal and mages are essentially the law there. Now, if the crafting effort involved the disappearance of kids, ok, yeah, that might raise a few eyebrows...

A dwarf clan accuses you of stealing its secret lore to fuel your work."

A Clan House is going to talk about "secret lore"? What Lore, and how is it secret? I mean, I could see this if the PCs refused to pay their Guild the token cut or weren't a member of the guild and so didn't have a mar of trade but were still selling stuff -- but that's not a dwarfin Clan Hall in the city getting riled up, that's the Guild doing what the guild exists to do. ANd they would use Envoys for it. THis one is a cheat, lol -- Dwarfin Clan Halls aren't independent kingdoms. They are where the Dwarfin families do their special dwarf only things outside the sight of the rest of humanity, like the Triton Grottoes or the Elfin Communes.

The XGE complication rules intrigued me in theory, but none of the examples they give are of much broad use to me -- they would be if I ran adventures on FR, but that's only ever going to happen if someone pays me enough to live in the way I want to live. Say, 125k a year.

I like the idea of failure, mind you -- nothing should be a given, but it also has to scale so that it is near impossible for lower levels and merely difficult as hell for higher.

Lore is not something you can really effectively ruleset in any way except as optional, because those ideas they are going to present are based in a concept that is common to many (most, even) worlds, but only as long as they operate within the same Tolkienesque crap.

That said, I will again note that the XGE stuff is likely to find its way into the DMG as part of the update. Which means that I won't be using it, but a lot of other folks will. So Yurei's point is still valid and something one can expect to see some variant of if not exactly the same.

Quote from The_Traveling_Cleric >>

For all this massive debate on the Crafting its probably the main reason why Artificer is not and will never be a core class.

Eh, Artificer partly bypasses the crafting issue with their Infusions; gives the crafting flavor, but bounded in the hard limits of a class feature. Plus three of the four classes have their own custom items on top of that (if we're counting the Steel Defender robot buddy as an "item"). It's absence from the PHB is partly based on their having this hypothetical 4-way division between Experts, Warriors, Priests, and Mages, and partly simply because they know lots of people will buy whatever book it's next published in solely for the class.

[insert righteous rage that a business dares to plan out future projects and not place everything the consumers could ever want in a single product that they then sell at or below cost below]

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Quote from The_Traveling_Cleric >>

For all this massive debate on the Crafting its probably the main reason why Artificer is not and will never be a core class.

 

Eh, Artificer partly bypasses the crafting issue with their Infusions; gives the crafting flavor, but bounded in the hard limits of a class feature. Plus three of the four classes have their own custom items on top of that (if we're counting the Steel Defender robot buddy as an "item"). It's absence from the PHB is partly based on their having this hypothetical 4-way division between Experts, Warriors, Priests, and Mages, and partly simply because they know lots of people will buy whatever book it's next published in solely for the class.

[insert righteous rage that a business dares to plan out future projects and not place everything the consumers could ever want in a single product that they then sell at or below cost below]

 Gotta keep in mind that aside from infusion there are quite a few features in the class that are specific to crafting.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

I'll also note, for the simple joy of it, that I Cannot use any of the examples given.

A powerful noble offers a hefty price for your work and is not interested in hearing no for an answer."

A noble who did that would be in big trouble -- it literally breaks a law about abuse of authority, and that means they can just go down to the local Agency office and file a complaint.

"Rumors swirl that what you’re working on is unstable and a threat to the community."

Um, the community already thinks magic is unstable and dislikes anyone who is using it openly. Unless it is in Akadia, in which case no one would give a damn, since all magic is legal and mages are essentially the law there. Now, if the crafting effort involved the disappearance of kids, ok, yeah, that might raise a few eyebrows...

A dwarf clan accuses you of stealing its secret lore to fuel your work."

A Clan House is going to talk about "secret lore"? What Lore, and how is it secret? I mean, I could see this if the PCs refused to pay their Guild the token cut or weren't a member of the guild and so didn't have a mar of trade but were still selling stuff -- but that's not a dwarfin Clan Hall in the city getting riled up, that's the Guild doing what the guild exists to do. ANd they would use Envoys for it. THis one is a cheat, lol -- Dwarfin Clan Halls aren't independent kingdoms. They are where the Dwarfin families do their special dwarf only things outside the sight of the rest of humanity, like the Triton Grottoes or the Elfin Communes.

The XGE complication rules intrigued me in theory, but none of the examples they give are of much broad use to me -- they would be if I ran adventures on FR, but that's only ever going to happen if someone pays me enough to live in the way I want to live. Say, 125k a year.

I like the idea of failure, mind you -- nothing should be a given, but it also has to scale so that it is near impossible for lower levels and merely difficult as hell for higher.

Lore is not something you can really effectively ruleset in any way except as optional, because those ideas they are going to present are based in a concept that is common to many (most, even) worlds, but only as long as they operate within the same Tolkienesque crap.

That said, I will again note that the XGE stuff is likely to find its way into the DMG as part of the update. Which means that I won't be using it, but a lot of other folks will. So Yurei's point is still valid and something one can expect to see some variant of if not exactly the same.

If the "point" is that the hypothetical possibility exists that a DM will choose to interpret loose suggestions on story beats as a reason to kill off player progress, then sure. But that's not an issue of unfair or damaging rules, because these aren't rules. That's an issue of the DM choosing to take the prompt in that direction, and IMO is more a case of a DM botching a situation. Which is an inescapable risk of any system that does not have hard rules for every possible situation, which would defeat the point of D&D. The point of Complications is to set up "yes and" moments for the DM to build the story on, so that the world feels responsive to the players' actions rather than having the Downtime Events simply happening in a vacuum.

Quote from The_Traveling_Cleric >>

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Quote from The_Traveling_Cleric >>

For all this massive debate on the Crafting its probably the main reason why Artificer is not and will never be a core class.

 

Eh, Artificer partly bypasses the crafting issue with their Infusions; gives the crafting flavor, but bounded in the hard limits of a class feature. Plus three of the four classes have their own custom items on top of that (if we're counting the Steel Defender robot buddy as an "item"). It's absence from the PHB is partly based on their having this hypothetical 4-way division between Experts, Warriors, Priests, and Mages, and partly simply because they know lots of people will buy whatever book it's next published in solely for the class.

[insert righteous rage that a business dares to plan out future projects and not place everything the consumers could ever want in a single product that they then sell at or below cost below]

 Gotta keep in mind that aside from infusion there are quite a few features in the class that are specific to crafting.

I see one feature at level 10 that makes crafting common and uncommon items easier, which are also the items people don't really complain about when it comes to crafting. That's all I can find for crafting besides tool proficiencies or making tools themselves magically appear.