With this rendition of the crafting system, PCs or even NPCs crafting items becomes a lot more believable and the use of common sense is priceless. That means that if you want to craft a really complex device, set of armor or anything else, it WILL take quite a bit more time than crafting something simple even if both items are the same price. Excellent work to those who created this great variant!

As others have noted, the rules for the Craft skill are more than a little broken in Pathfinder (a legacy from old d20). Making Craft Work fixes this smoothly without making things more complicated. Small, bite-sized and cheap, it's invaluable if the Craft skill sees much use in your game.

Perfect.

Crafting is insane in pathfinder. There is no other way to put it. When my character looted some bulette hide and found out it would take something like 60+ years to craft it into bullete full plate armour (15000gp).. well, I rebelled and just started looking for a fix.

This is it. This is the fix. Every game that uses crafting rules NEEDS this PDF. Don't hesitate. Its good.

This document takes the crafting rules for Pathfinder and reworks them to make a bit more sense. It insightfully elucidates several edge cases that illustrate major drawbacks to the current system, and then fixes those problems in a way that preserves both a reasonably amount of realism and the practical truth that your adventurer simply isn't going to spend six months making a thing; she's going to be off adventuring!

It is worth noting that this applies to basic crafting (armor, weapons, etc.) only, and does not include or rework any of the framework for crafting magical items (a system which, as a side note, is also confusing and self-contradictory at times). So if you want a simple system that replaces the current crafting rules for making mundane and masterwork items, this is absolutely worth it to pick up.

I have read several attempts to fix Craft. This one is spot on. I compliment Mark on his ingenuity and simplicity. Keep it up!

Crafting items is one of those things that just hasn't worked correctly according to the rules, since the advent of the d20 system. Easy crafting tasks, that in game should take a day or two could stretch on for weeks or months of in game time and hard tasks, well, some of them could be completed in a week. Don't even talk to me about crafting plate armor. Who want's to take nearly half a year away from their adventuring to craft some plate? Finally, Spes Magna Games have come along an introduced sane rules for crafting, making us all feel a lot better about making armor, shiny things and alchemical inventions.

What was wrong with crafting? To quote Making Craft Work, "Erlic wants to Craft a one-pound silver ball. His brother Rynook wants to Craft a one-pound gold ball. A one-pound ball of silver is worth one tenth as much as a pound of gold. Even though Erlic and Rynook work on pretty much the same project -- melting metal and pouring it into a mold -- Rynook must spend much longer on his one-pound ball simply because it's made of gold." So the same task, which should take the same amount of time, takes longer simply because of the cost of the material.

Mark L. Chance has come up with a sane system for crafting items based not on cost but difficulty, which simply works much better within the gaming framework. Sure, in real life it may take half a year (or longer) to put together a nice, fitted bit of plate armor. But in game time, who wants to postpone an adventure for that long? Chance's system reduces the time for crafting plate from 28 weeks or so, to one week. Realistic? No, but then neither are dragons or spell chucking. Works well within the frame of the game? Absolutely.

I'd highly recommend this document to any GMs and players who like to craft in game and are looking for a sane and usable system of crafting.