That aside I think that we will need to agree to disagree about whether it is good for the game that you need to be either incredibly dedicated or high level to make stuff your character wants, rather than buying it at the shops. This does not just apply to the very high skill requirements for blackpowder weapons. If I was a 1st level scout I would expect to be able to make arrows for my bow if I had maxed out one of my limited starting skill choices in crafting.
If you have a +5 Crafting, that is at least a +1 from Int and 4 ranks in crafting, you
can make arrows at level 1.
Crude Arrows (30) is Comp 5D and has a Cost of 7.5s.
With one day of downtime, he'd be making either 1s (on a d20 roll of 10 or less) or 3s (on a d20 roll of 11 or more), which would generate either 4 or 12 arrows respectively.
As your crafting skills improved, the arrows you can create also improve. Add in a couple of crafting feats and they improve
really quickly.
Thanks for the help again.
This is not a big thing. However I do think that the complexity levels appear to be rather high. To reply to Krensky if you can teach a child to fletch in a day it should be DC 5 or less (unless you know some high level children). I'm afraid I don't know how to fletch an arrow but I can make gunpowder. I did it as a kid trying to make fire works. Unfortunately the first time I made it I did not know you had to keep the mixture wet when grinding and so it combusted and I lost half my eyebrows...
To be frank gunpowder is a fairly simple mixture. Making a good custard is much more difficult. I don't know that it would add a lot to the game though if you have to be about 5th level and pick appropriate feats to make custard ...
Doing something like burning off your own eyebrows strikes me as a good reason why making gunpowder isn't such a simple thing to make. I can't say I have ever heard of custard doing that. Also, custard recipes are going to likely be easier to find (more about that below).
Gunpowder is Blackpowder - in Europe at least. In America gunpowder tends to be more of a catch all term and includes propellants made from cordite rather than saltpetre. The "making the paste" is simply the bit where you add water and grind the ingredients together (the bit I managed to mess up when I was 11 or 12). You leave this to dry and then break up the cake into either fine or long grains. Long grains are for cannons and fine grains for muskets et al.
That's good to know, but not really common knowledge, I certainly didn't know any of it. Unfortunately, what we know and what our PCs know are 2
entirely different things. I would love to have a character capable of building an electric generator out of a waterwheel to power my lights at night. None of that technology is
difficult, it just isn't known.
If you consider that even at the latest era in the game, black powder weapons are the cutting edge in technology, making them shouldn't be easy. Very few characters are going to have access to the list of ingredients needed and they can't just punch it up on google to find it, either. They are going to either need to learn from a Master, who may not be keen on giving up one of his most treasured formulas to a potential future rival, or do their own experimentation to learn the proper ingredients, both of which can easily be represented by having a higher Crafting bonus.
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