Crafting items

By DSalazar, in Rules Questions

Has anyone here found the rules for crafting items problematic or just me? Never mind the TN reduction for using a village blacksmith or the the state of the art Kakita forges (which I think a 4 TN reduction is too low).

Forging a extremely poor version of a "Kakita Blade" is TN 11 (7 if created at the marvelous Kakita forges), which, according to the rules is as difficult as outwrestiling a troll. I am considering actually taking the rarity of the weapon divided by 2 (rounded up) and making it so that forging at a state of the art forge counts as having a skilled assistance (so another white dice and keeping an extra dice). Have anyone thought of different ways?

I'm pretty sure you're missing a bunch of TN reductions there, and while I've found the rules to be very barebones and poor for creating multiples, they seemed to work for other stuff, at least on reading.

Don't forget that rarity is affected by where you are etc. So in a bigger city you also get TN reduced, not just from the facilities.

I'm about to go to bed, so I can't look up the specifics, but I seem to remember it working out fine.

11 minutes ago, Myrion said:

Don't forget that rarity is affected by where you are etc. So in a bigger city you also get TN reduced, not just from the facilities.

This TN adjustment you mention is to buy an item, not to craft one. If you want to say that part of the TN is to acquire the raw materials in the first place, then why not make a different roll just for that.

I did double check now and you're right about that.

However, I'm pretty sure that the rarity increase for a pattern only applies to buying and requisitioning in, not to crafting.

The intro paragraph specifically mentions first crafting it and then, as "the other method" buying it, which doesn't increase the price, but the rarity. It doesn't mention that for crafting at all.

So you're still looking at unmodded TN 7 for a patterned katana, and forges will bring that down to 4-5. Get yourself an assistant or two, acquire materials and use that check to possibly reduce the TN further and that seems doable.

I'm OK with the difficulty. If anything, it's too easy.

4 hours ago, Myrion said:

Get yourself an assistant or two, acquire materials and use that check to possibly reduce the TN further and that seems doable.

TN 4-5 is entirely doable. You're going to make sure you have an assistant, and spend Void, right? So... 5 kept dice or more, if you have any business doing ambitious crafting projects.

And this is a roll that should fail, regularly. Why? Because it's just a downtime activity, meaning it takes a day or two. Looking at p. 248 of the core book, that's a downtime. A full month is described as "an extremely long time-skip" - but it's a pretty reasonable time frame for forging a katana. So yeah, let the check fail a few times.

6 hours ago, Myrion said:

I did double check now and you're right about that.

However, I'm pretty sure that the rarity increase for a pattern only applies to buying and requisitioning in, not to crafting.

The intro paragraph specifically mentions first crafting it and then, as "the other method" buying it, which doesn't increase the price, but the rarity. It doesn't mention that for crafting at all.

So you're still looking at unmodded TN 7 for a patterned katana, and forges will bring that down to 4-5. Get yourself an assistant or two, acquire materials and use that check to possibly reduce the TN further and that seems doable.

You are correct about the difficulty being the same if applying a pattern. That really helps actually with the roll not being prohibitively difficult.

1 hour ago, Tenebrae said:

I'm OK with the difficulty. If anything, it's too easy.

TN 4-5 is entirely doable. You're going to make sure you have an assistant, and spend Void, right? So... 5 kept dice or more, if you have any business doing ambitious crafting projects.

And this is a roll that should fail, regularly. Why? Because it's just a downtime activity, meaning it takes a day or two. Looking at p. 248 of the core book, that's a downtime. A full month is described as "an extremely long time-skip" - but it's a pretty reasonable time frame for forging a katana. So yeah, let the check fail a few times.

I understand the necessity of the craft not being too easy so the players won’t spend all their downtime activities either arming themselves for oni or enriching themselves. My problem was with the extra rarity of patterns but as @Myrion pointed out. It doesn’t increase the TN to craft.