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Old 08-13-2015, 05:54 AM   #21
Blind Mapmaker
 
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
I have this image of a Japanese smith who can usually turn out a Fine or better quality sword. I'm sure lots of people would imagine the same thing when they think about this topic.

I guess he has the Masterwork Blade perk. </snip>
I had totally forgotten about this perk. The whole crafting section hasn't received all that much input during playtest, so I just posted my own thoughts about what the intention was. The perk makes that kind of ridiculous. Should have spent more time reading left and right.

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
That seems okay, I guess. The problem I have is that it's the same whether he's making a nodachi taller than himself or a tanto the length of his finger. Or if he's under incredible stress, such as when he's working frantically to produce spears during a siege when enemy arquebusiers and archers are firing in his direction and men are dying all around him. Those seem like things that should adjust the number he's rolling against, but are absent from the rules.
I think the first could be resolved by the fact that the tanto can be made much quicker and thus the doubling of the time uses up far fewer hours than in the case of the nodachi. As LTC3 omits raw material costs for metal, I can't do the numbers, but it should work out.

The latter is a clear case in which nobody sane would bother with using the perk. Heck, most people would try to work in half the time or less, never mind the modifiers. If you still want to use the perk, any modifiers for stress reduce the skill normally, making it much more likely to produce cheap gear instead of fine. Yes, the lack of a middle ground is annoying, but you can easily fix it by stating that success or failure by up to 1 produces a good quality weapon -neither cheap, nor fine.
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Old 08-13-2015, 04:03 PM   #22
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
I think the important thing here to keep in mind is that the prices for fine and balanced weapons make you assume they are much more common than they generally are. This is especially true for weapons with low base cost like knives.
Either the prices are wrong or this system is. I hadn't had any problems with the prices so far, especially in light of the implicit assumption that sword blades were made from better materials than ordinary knives, arrowheads, spearpoints or axeheads.

The prices supported the idea that Fine (Materials) axes, spears or knives were made when a smith skilled enough to make swords used sword-grade steel to make such weapons.

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Even if we assume that they are more common, a master craftsman that produces one "on accident" would probably try and add to its value with Ornate and thus drive up the price. Why have a very fine sword if nobody can tell by looking at it?
Fine or better weapons are often Ornate, it is true.

On the other hand, GURPS previously priced things so that a sword and a spear or an axe aren't meant to be equivalent weapons, in prestige or price. What's equivalent in terms of price are things like a Fine (Materials) Axe, a Good Thrusting Broadsword or a Very Fine (Materials), Fine (Balance) Short Spear.

I assumed that this meant that a professional warrior from the upper (fighting) classes could choose between any of those according to his inclination and that they were about equally rare and difficult to acquire.

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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
I'm thinking of implementing a house rule in my own campaigns that all low-cost weapons have their base price increased to at least $100 if you want to add anything that has a positive CF. Otherwise labour costs just are too low. With that change the mentioned small knives (fine and balanced) come out at a more appropriate $800.
I'd rather change the crafting rules to match the rest of GURPS equipment rules than change the equipment rules to match crafting rules that I've never been able to use.
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Old 08-13-2015, 08:36 PM   #23
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
The prices supported the idea that Fine (Materials) axes, spears or knives were made when a smith skilled enough to make swords used sword-grade steel to make such weapons.
It's certainly true that any half-edumcated village blacksmith can use even crappy-quality iron to make tools. Tools in the sense that they're items made of primitive steel whose edges or striking surfaces won't routinely be banged against anything hard yet expected to maintain a decent edge.

That's quite easy. The main brake on the production of such tools, to equip the peasantry, as I understand it, is availability of iron or iron ore.

Sufficiently skilled ironsmiths are common, and are almost trivially easy to train. Grab a boy (or if you want to be controversial, grab a girl!) with IQ 11 (not much to ask for, in world demographic terms) and give him a few years of learning-focused apprenticeship (as opposed to the typical medieval guild apprenticeship system which was at best something like 80% about labour exploitation and 20% about actually teaching the apprentice).

No, the problem lies with making weapons, with making the kind of "tool" that is expected to maintain a sharp edge (or point) even after having been banged against hard surfaces hundreds or thousands of times. Arrowheads are AFAIK single use, so we're looking at stuff like swords, war axes, maybe spear points, and of course also pick axes for mining, since hacking the iron ore out of stone decidedly counts as banging your tool repeatedly against a hard surface (unless you get bog iron, but then again that's the crappy kind, not conductive to the making of swords or other well hard tools).



As for fixing GURPS' item crafting system, I have no advice yet. I'm struggling with a similar problem in my own homebrew: How to arrive at the item's final numerical Quality rating, taking into account the skill of the craftsman, the consumable materials he has to use (themselves raited by Quality, and possibly several different kinds of material, not all necessarily being equally important), the grade of his tools and worshop (also rated by Quality), a Tech Level-dependent bonus (since at higher TL craftsmen simply understand more theory), and a random factor that may vary wildly for some processes and not much for others (my Ärth setting is in a transitional state with regards to metallurgy and weaponcrafting, with most smiths still working in an intuitive fashion that is rather random in outcome, and those being in competition against smiths with a more scientific approach to things that tends to produce more consistent quality end product - as inspired by a line or two in GURPS Middle Ages 1 about the availability of Fine/VF sword).

I won't need to include time taken, since Sagatafl has its own rules for how that affects effective skill, and so does GURPS, but for other RPG systems that might be a separate factor to include.

Clearly I'll need to devise some kind of "arithmetical funnel" that weighs in each factor in a way that is appropriate to each type of crafting process (e.g. recognizing that making beer vs making a fighting man's sword are two rather different things) to end up with a single Quality rating. The devil is in the details, though.

Something similar could be done in GURPS. Sagatafl's Quality scale is about twice as fine-grained as GURPs, with Q3 equating Good (I'm inclined to say that Cheap equates Q1.5, since Q2 is too good and Q1 a bit too low), Q5 Fine, Q7 Very Fine, but not stopping there, instead being able to go higher, even up into double digits, and for each Q point above average you get a "pick" to make the weapon better ("balanced"), or sharper ("damage") or stronger (Durability) or looking nicer ("Decorated"), and with a standard pick progression for each item type that can be deviated from.

For GURPS, you could try simply bonusing in consumables and tool quality to craftsman skill, along with time-taken, to arrive at effective skill.

The core of the problem may be the insistence on there being a 3d6 skill roll involved, whereas I grew up - learned to roleplay - via "Drager og Dæmoner Expert", a BRP-licensed system that explicitly treated Crafts skills (and some other types of skills) as being distinct from adventuring type skills, in that there was no roll made to use them. Instead you were simply as good as your skill level (from 1 to 5, zero meaning absence of skill) said you were. So that's perfectly natural to me.

So if you want to drop the roll-for-skill, you can instead make a 3d6 roll on a lookup table, and for a some-variability process you can say that any roll of 8 or more means one quality level less than what effective skill suggests, any roll of 13 or more means one quality level more, and 9-12 means you "land" on the expected quality level, as derived from effective skill.

Or just roll 1d6-3 and add that to effective skill, and then - again - derive final item quality from modified effective skill.
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Old 08-14-2015, 06:27 AM   #24
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
I'd rather change the crafting rules to match the rest of GURPS equipment rules than change the equipment rules to match crafting rules that I've never been able to use.
Fair enough, but you run into the problem of cost factor increases not representing the labour and/or materials needed each time you enhance weapons that are very cheap. Doesn't really matter if you use CF or multiples. Solid silver quarterstaffs anyone? That's $400 apiece. Be sure to melt them down and resell the material for $4000!

At one point any such system will have to address either item weight (for changes in material composition) or crafting time of the additions per se. Making an axe Ornate +3 really should be no cheaper or faster than making a greatsword Ornate +3. It might even be more expensive relatively, because the axe has less "stylishness" to start with.
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Old 08-14-2015, 08:47 AM   #25
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
Fair enough, but you run into the problem of cost factor increases not representing the labour and/or materials needed each time you enhance weapons that are very cheap.
There is a rule that the $5 Light Club, for example, can't be made Balanced and derives very limited benefits from being Fine (Materials).

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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
Doesn't really matter if you use CF or multiples. Solid silver quarterstaffs anyone? That's $400 apiece. Be sure to melt them down and resell the material for $4000!
Apart from the fact that Low-Tech crafting rules do charge you for the raw metal, by weight, it has never been legal to make quarterstaves from metal without changing their stats.

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Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
At one point any such system will have to address either item weight (for changes in material composition) or crafting time of the additions per se. Making an axe Ornate +3 really should be no cheaper or faster than making a greatsword Ornate +3. It might even be more expensive relatively, because the axe has less "stylishness" to start with.
The Low-Tech crafting rules do take account of item weight and the cost of raw materials.

What I don't like about them is how they make margin of success irrelevant at any realistic skill level for the craftsman and demand cinematically high skill for being able to make any Weapons of Quality, even those that from their canonical price did not appear to require legendary skill to make.

From a purely mechanical point of view, there are also several problems that make these rules insufficient. For example, no thought appears to have been given to how Graceful Blade and Masterwork Blade work together, there are no guidelines on whether those Perks are meant to be specialised by weapon type as the names suggest or if they work for all types of weapons and there is no legal way to make a Very Fine (Materials) and Fine (Balanced) weapons, even though these are available for sale.
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Old 08-14-2015, 04:19 PM   #26
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
The rules should work as VariousRen describes, but they currently don't. There is one example where a smith can get a bonus for better materials, but the character must apparently have 20 points in a craft skill and a Craft Secret Perk. That does not really suit my sense of realism.

Presumably any smith should be able to get a bonus toward creating a Fine (Materials) weapon by having access to fine materials. If there is thriving trade in raw materials for weapons, such as picked ash for spearshafts, Italian yew for bow staves, sword-grade steel for axe-heads or spear-points, the weaponsmith should be able to buy these and get a bonus without needing a Craft Secret Perk.
Any smith can gain the bonus from using Crucible Steel. You need the perk to make Crucible Steel.
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Old 08-14-2015, 04:29 PM   #27
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Flameblade View Post
Well, seeing as how LTC3 states a journeyman Armorer has Armoury-14, and that masters have their skill levels being two higher, Armory-16 is the baseline to look at...

...maybe the rules assume you can get +2 from having fine-quality tools, +5 from taking extra time, and +4 from Complementary Skill rolls?
That gives an effective skill of 27. If you have Graceful Blade and Masterwork Blade and are using Crucible Steel (You don't need to make it yourself), that gives

Roll:
17-18: Failure
15-16: Fine, Balanced Weapon
12-14 Fine, Balanced Weapon + Weapon Bond.
3-11 Very Fine, Balanced Weapon + Weapon Bond.

Time = Base time X120
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Old 08-14-2015, 04:35 PM   #28
Lia Valenth
 
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

Out of curiosity, I thought that expert Doctors, Smiths, etc. had skill of 12-14 under the assumption that they normally had a combined +10 for doing work they do daily, suitable equipment, etc.

Am I wrong?

If I am right, they should be getting a +10, thus a skill 12 smith would have an effective skill of 22, and an average a MoS of 12? While the skill 14 master smith would have an average MoS of 14?
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Old 08-14-2015, 05:17 PM   #29
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

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Originally Posted by Lia Valenth View Post
Out of curiosity, I thought that expert Doctors, Smiths, etc. had skill of 12-14 under the assumption that they normally had a combined +10 for doing work they do daily, suitable equipment, etc.

Am I wrong?
I don't think you're right to assume they always have a +10. They will have a +10 for some tasks, such as, perhaps, the doctor diagnosing a broken femur. That doesn't mean he'll have a +10 for diagnosing some rare form of cancer. Likewise, I'm sure there are things our smith can do that will be so simple his bonuses add up to a total of +10 or more, but making that giant nodachi probably isn't one of those things.
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Old 08-14-2015, 05:17 PM   #30
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Default Re: Crafting Masterwork, Fine and Balanced Weapons

I looked at the rules as well when I was smashing together a method for imparting magical enchantments via crafting, and when I looked at it I had the same reaction, what? You need to succeed by more than ELEVEN to turn out a fine weapon? What!? Then when I started doing some digging I found out that it was a pretty fair number, for many many reasons.

I ended up keeping it, even if I found it to be ridiculous at first.
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