Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in- Marketplace
Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in
RAW or RAI, are raw materials items that are affected by the Crafter Discount? Are they ever an item or are they just a mechanism by which you expend gold to craft?
Does this only apply to final item purchases or does it apply to paying for raw materials as well?
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
In your take, would it apply to the raw materials to craft magic items?
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
I think (or I want to believe) the intent is to apply discounts to nonmagical items from, for example, Chapter 6: Equipment, but...
Sorry wagnarokkr, I didn't mean that, that was just an example of items where I think the feat applies. In general, I think it applies to already crafted items, though I'm not going to argue the opposite.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Frankly, your POV is perfectly valid. I just wanted to share my gut feeling.
It's very open-ended as written the discount is on any nonmagical item so i'd wouldn't see why it would not include raw material since crafters rely on this a lot.
This is my gut feeling as well, they want you to buy objects and raw materials are more of a nebulous concept than an actual item. You don't buy wood; you expend gold to fuel crafting.
This is one of the issues I have with it. Artisans are better at crafting because they are better at clipping coupons? Narratively, it is off.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
I always figured the conceit was that the character "knows people" in the trade community. They do each other favors and whatnot.
I guess it could be that a crafter would be better able to haggle for crafted items because they know better what quality actually is and are able to nitpick the item to the point of getting a discount... but that's less convincing to me because why would an armorsmith know that a jug is made of poor quality.
I don't see why not, and it is probably the most thematically appropriate use of it effectively needing 20% less materials to make the item due to expert crafting skills. That being said maybe not for crafting magical items as some of the materials may be inherently magical. Which while I hate to harp on this feat more, a when crafting non magical items the materials cost .25 instead of the usual .5 the final items cost would fit the feat so much better.
Conceptually, I think “raw materials” when purchased from a vendor would fall under Trade Goods in Chapter 7 of the DMG. It stands to reason that wood is such a common item you could just get it from trees as long as they are nearby. Most of the other things are there.
Magic Item raw materials require the Arcane skill and RAW you simply have a 75% chance of acquiring them in the city and 25% in the country, with a 7 day cool down if they are not. These raw materials should work similarly to Trade Goods conceptually.
To me these are items. However the nature of Arcane magic is such that all of the obscure ingredients required would be too tedious to catalog and list, so they didn’t bother with this. I am glad we get to skip that nonsense.
Literally no one reading Crafter’s discount would exclude items that could be purchased. It isn’t a service, it must exist.
CRAFTER IS THE MOST POWERFUL ORIGIN FEAT IN THE GAME FOR ADVANCED PLAYERS IN A LONG TERM CAMPAIGN.
Period, end of story. Anyone with Arcane skill can craft magic items. Elves can do it when the party sleeps. Fabricate Wizards can break the local game economy.
That would invalidate the discount.
No, they don't.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
To clarify, I’m not saying the “trade” part applies but the cash value of the items in the table. This list provides the cash value of raw goods if they are not traded without cash, and provides a reference for what would be purchased to make items.
This demonstrates that raw materials are items with defined values RAW.
lol this did not post right on my phone
I'm gonna also point out that the feat is called "crafter" so it logically would apply to raw materials required for crafting.
Its not hard to make this connection.
As I stated already, the “trade goods” section proves that these items exist, have a cash value, and could be purchased separately or found and then bartered with.
The magical “raw materials” available in a city at 75% chance is probably left undefined because it is similar to things in a component bag that would be consumed. You might might even House Rule that that these are gems that are consumed by magical crafting using the arcane skill. A legendary item needs to consume 100,000 GP worth of diamonds for instance.
I actually love the idea of it being precious gems that are consumed in the crafting process.
No, those are not raw materials when crafting. When you buy raw materials, you are paying gold for an abstracted collection of materials. If you have a collection of various trade goods, you cannot substitute them. Your DM may allow it, but they are not the same thing.
Because raw materials are abstracted, you might not ever be purchasing an item and the discount might not apply. It might, but it might not.
That is far from definitive and suggests RAI at best. What matters first is the wording of the feature and the interaction with the other rules. If it was representing crafting ability, it would only apply to raw materials and nothing else.
If the raw materials are magical, the Discount definitely does not apply.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
On a side note, Artificer Armorers and Battle Smiths can craft magical items armor and weapons in half the time.
While Legendaries are still stupidly long, it is possible with some clever DMing to allow alot of time to pass at high levels just so certain effects could take place. One of those effects is crafting these high end items, possibly between 2 campaigns that have crossover characters.
But I think the real potential is probably with 1 day items that can be halved by Elf Artificers that can be built at night while the party sleeps. Elf Cartographer Artificers can write a cantrip or level 1 scroll in 4 hours, 1/night basically. The 20% discount makes a cantrip cost 12 and a level 1 cost 20. Retail these are like 30-50.
The real money though is made with Fabricate. Make Plate Armor for 600 and sell for 750 in the time it takes to cast Fabricate and walk down the street. At Wizard 7 you can do this once per long rest. If you cast, meditate, cast, meditate, you can basically do 6 plate armors in 24 hours, netting $900 per day. Once you have all your 4+ spell slots at Wizard 17, you can make 72 plate armors in a 24 hour period, netting 10,800 without leaving your workshop. Sure, the merchant might run out of gold. But then you can just barter. 20 days of crafting plate armor you can buy a legendary item…. probably.**
This is some cheese, sure. I’m just talking about what is mechanically possible here with the Crafter feat. Without it you make no money from crafting unless you can get the raw materials for free. Which you could hypothetically if you are in the wild.
You could probably increase the profits with a more expensive item. The real trick is to twist your DM’s arm for a little downtime between quests.
**NOTE: This is a cheese tray. You get basically get only 1 long rest per day even as an elf.
You can only have one LR per 20 hours as an elf (16 hour cooldown in 2024, even more strict in 2014).
It's a crafter's promo code 20L working like a senior membership card!
More seriously though, i assume it's more fluid and natural than hard haggling, where while discussing with the seller you say you're a crafter to which it react favorably and make you a discount, effortlessly and without any check required.
It depends how you read it.
You might be right though.
But elves do not need to sleep, so IMO their experience of time is simply…. different.
I MIGHT BE HOUSE RULING HERE. lol
By default there are two factors at play with long rests:
This gives you the 24 cycle of long rests.
Elves can finish a long rest in 4 hours, giving you 4 + 16 hours long rest cycle.
There's no real ambiguity there, as mentioned the 2024 long rest rules are much more explicit
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
RAW, availability of non-magical raw materials is DM discretion and must be House Ruled based on location or environment or whatever. (PHB)
RAW, magic item raw materials (rarer) have a 75% chance in big cities and 25% chance in villages or what have you. (DMG)
Ultimately you are paying gold to the DM or the DM rules that materials are available but …. in my opinion the RAI of this is to make them available in shops, but to sort of work like a pre-packaged meal prep with directions or something. I am talking about magic items. The fact that they are more available in the big city implies a retail/merchant origin.
The Trade Goods section I quoted merely points out that there are defined values for raw goods.
But RAW it is unclear what magic item raw materials are.
RAW I think they leave it up to DMs because it is very dependent upon the world creation and the rules need to work in all settings and there simply aren’t crafting rules that work in all D&D settings.
But I think it is pretty obvious that they are purchased in stores before hand and are not consumed gold dust.
But maybe you could make the case it is gold dust for magical items….. hmmmmm …….
I’m gonna have to think about that.
Regardless…. I think the real exploit with Crafter is with Fabricate which can’t make magic items anyway. So I think the trade goods list of items is…. RAW….. the cash value of these things and it is DMs discretion what is available.