Artificing and Dwarf Fortress/Minecraft Rules (Patreon)

For the past several weeks I’ve been working on the Artificer sphere, the Vocation sphere, and how the very concept of creation should work. While that is only two spheres, the decisions made here have lasting impact for Alchemy, Tinker, Trap, and Survival, so getting the details right is important.

I find myself at a bit of a crossroads I would like your opinion on. It is a concept I’m referring to, for lack of a better term, as ‘The Dwarf Fortress Rules’, or ‘The Minecraft Rules’, and if you could please read this all the way to the end, I would love your input on them.

Primary Crafting Rules

In accordance with the ‘three levels detail’ philosophy, gaining equipment exists in three levels: purchasing it, crafting it, and ‘Dwarf Fortress/Minecraft Rules’. 

Purchasing is self-explanatory: you pay market rates, you get the thing. As for crafting it, the rules we’re working with are a simplified version of Pathfinder’s: You buy supplies worth 1/3rd the item’s market price, you spend time (usually between a day or a week) working on it, and then you create it. 

If all you want to do is use these rules, you can purchase materials from any market and make whatever you want. But what if there isn’t a market? What if you want to turn the hide from a recent monster kill into a suit of leather armor, or you personally dug some mythril ore out of a mine and want to turn it into a sword? If you wanted to run a game where the players are literally dropped in the middle of the wilderness and have to build their own fort to survive, what does the process of making equipment look like, and how intricate should it be?

Dwarf Fortress/Minecraft Rules

The heart of the rules we’re currently working with is this: The ‘supply 1/3rd market value in raw materials’ rule is actually divided in two. Half of it is the value of unprocessed materials, the other half is the cost of processing. 

For example, if you needed to supply 100 gp of iron to make an item, you could buy 100 gp of iron from a market, or you could dig up 50 gp of iron ore, then spend 50 gp having someone smelt it. Thus, if you can supply raw ore you only need to pay 1/6th the item’s cost, and if you can smelt it yourself, the cost drops down to 0.

(while we’re discussing basic crafting, for what its worth we’re approaching magic item creation in a similar fashion. An enchantment’s ‘market value’ is comprised of 4 parts: 25% magical components, 25% gems and precious metals, 25% crafter’s fee, and 25% fee for supplying the required magic spells. Thus, if you know how to craft, can supply the required magics, and have harvested the correct components from magical monsters, you could craft magic items for 25% of the market rate, needing only the precious materials component to make it.)

The question we’re dealing with, then, is how far is too far when it comes to creating rules for how materials are processed. 

Refining

While traps, food, inventions, and alchemy are governed by their own spheres, for the purposes of everything else, all equipment is divided into 7 categories governing 10 materials: 

·        Blacksmith tools govern metal

·        Tailor’s tools govern leather and cloth

·        Carpentry tools govern wood

·        Masonry tools govern clay and stone

·        Glassblowing Tools governs glass

·        Scribe’s Tools govern writing/visual art

·        And finally, Etching Tools governs work with bone and gemstones (such as for jewelry), and any other tiny, intricate craftsmanship of any material.

Some of these items have a pretty straight-forward refining process: wood, for example, has no ‘refining process’ that isn’t already covered by carpentry tools. While it takes time to divide a log into usable boards and having big machines like a lumber mill makes it easier, there is no skill, secret knowledge, or anything else in the way; if you can use carpentry tools, you can refine wood.

Leather is more complicated, but not so much so. Tanning requires knowledge of how to use salt, acids, and other processes to turn a hide into leather. Especially if you want to be tanning dragon hides or other mythic materials, it makes sense for there to be a talent involved somewhere.

Other materials, however, are when things get more complicated. If we’re going for realism, glass isn’t just made from sand, it was anciently made from mixing fine sand with lime in a furnace. Mortar (for building with bricks and stone) is made from cement, which if you’re looking at ancient techniques, was made from mixing lime and ash. Even steel was made not just from iron ore, but also involves processes that could include lime.

What Resources Exist

So, should Lime be an ingredient? If a GM wants to map out where resources are and how much is there for players who want to scavenge their own materials, should Lime be one of those resources? 

There’s a lot of implications to that; suddenly if you need 100 gp of metal to make an item, now you’re not just tracking 50 gp of ore and 50 gp to refine it, you’re tracking 25 gp of ore, 25 gp of lime, and 50 gp to refine it, or should it be 50 gp of ore, 25 gp of lime and 25 gp ‘smelter’s fee’?

Cement

In the simplified rules, if you are building a building out of stone or brick, you need 1/3rd the building’s ‘market value’ in stone or brick to build it. If lime is an ingredient, though, then we can include cement (which can be made from lime), which is necessary for building out of either brick or stone. 

Suddenly we can have concrete (cement + gravel) as a building material. On the other hand, building becomes more complicated: if you want to build out of, say, brick, suddenly you need clay to refine into bricks and lime to refine into cement, and building gets more complicated: if you need 100 gp of raw material to build a structure, do you need 50 gp of brick (25 gp of clay, 25 gp refinement) and 50 gp of cement (25 pg lime, 25 gp refinement)? That would mean we’re taking 1/3rd the building’s market price and turning it into 1/6th brick and 1/6th mortar, or 1/12th clay, 1/12th lime, and 1/6th refining each. That’s potentially a lot of math and ingredient-keeping.

Metallurgy

In a similar vein to lime, what about different metal ores? We divided armors into eras (ancient, bronze, iron, medieval, renaissance), should we do the same for weapons, have separate options for bronze swords vs iron swords vs steel? Or perhaps special material rules for making weapons and armor out of copper, bronze, or wrought iron like we do mythril and adamantine?

Point of Abstraction

Obviously we cannot recreate the entire real world of metallurgy in the game; a point of abstraction must be made. But where should it be? At what point is it all too complicated for even the Minecraft/Dwarf Fortress crew?

Option 1, we could try and keep it simpler, and say we have 10 materials (metal, leather, cloth, wood, clay, stone, glass, writing, bone, gemstones), and each one (except bone) has a raw version and a refined version.

Option 2, we could include rules for making equipment with copper, bronze, iron, and steel, and include the ingredient lime as an ingredient for making cement, glass, and steel, and write up a lot more words and math to deal with it.

What do you think? Discussion appreciated in the comments or discord, and Ive attached a poll.