How are people finding the craft system X months on...?

[Molez]

Just wondered what the current forum thoughts were on the craft basic vs. major debate which seemed to take a lot of heat early on? How is everyone finding it now we've had more time to play around with the game?

The two 3rd ed. games I've been in (ran one, played in one) seemed to use craft fine, but neither game has had very many sessions.

[TheCountAlucard]

It's pretty great.

[norraba]

as the main crafter for my gaming group, i've done crafting with both the regular system and a craft system rewrite that was a mix between bluewinds and sancta's after we made a shift to blue winds rewrite, and i really appreciate both versions of the system. the rewrite speeds things up quite a bit though and makes the system more accessible to people trying to dip into crafting which i highly approve of cause its a lot of fun, but i do miss the reward system in the core book crafting system, but i'm a person who likes to have that kind of tracking system.

in the end they are both really enjoyable and i think that the crafting system works good with both the core book version and the rewrites, although the rewrites are more conducive to non-supernal crafters using it, but the raw can be more enjoyable for people who want to see a reward system for their minor crafts.

[danelsan]

Tried using it with no house-rules in a couple games, solidly confirming it as the single sub-system I dislike in the game. Using house-ruled version.

[Leetsepeak]

I'm very fond of the basic chassis. I think the Crafts Charm Tree could do with a little slimming and I imagine that the rest of the Exalted will probably not have that issue.

[Great Cthulhu]

I'm starting running my first game and really haven't had an opportunity to use the system yet but I like what I've seen. The Crafting XP is unusual but I see its purpose and the rest of the system looks easy enough just being a few standardized rolls. We'll see but for now I'm solidly optimistic.

[Heavy Arms]

I'm very fond of the basic chassis. I think the Crafts Charm Tree could do with a little slimming and I imagine that the rest of the Exalted will probably not have that issue.

This is very much where I am with it.

The basic crafting system is good, though the definitions of the lower two types of projects could use a bit of tweaking. It's external to the Craft system itself, but I'm definitely not convinced there's value in each Craft being bought separately as a full Ability. I can buy the case for Martial Arts since each one translates into a potential for a Charm tree and all that, but all Craft Abilities work the same mechanically.

A lot of the issues come in when you start to get deep into the Solar Craft trees for keeping it fun. It's a huge group of Charms (and deceptively bigger than it looks because there's some insane stackable repurchase Charms in it too). With the basic Craft system already adding a decent amount of bookkeeping (even if I like it), the Solar Charms tend to make this worse not better. Things like the "get free cxp" and "have some more project slots" Charms vary by type way more than they should making tracking them more annoying. The dice tricks in the power tree are needlessly complicated with things like re-rolling of re-rolls. The Charms are also skimpy on options for "do things immediately in the scene" instead of just making you better at the basic Craft system, which kind of ignores the whole point of encouraging people to actively craft as events unfold to help move the plot along.

[The Wizard of Oz]

At the beginning, the Twilight in the game I ran found it frustrating.

In the middle, it was okay. Maybe a little more book-keeping than necessary.

Near the end of the game, when he was Essence 5, it was irrelevant. I mean, not the Power charms, since obviously he needed to roll big numbers, but he could make an artefact in a week. And then another one next week, and the week after. Though probably only a difficult one once a story (because of how often you can use the charm that gives you 5 other power charms). The only real limits were materials and ideas (so while he did loads of big, impressive, non-magical projects, he rarely made artefacts).
He generated 7 gold and 49 silver points every day. And since that's the same as 31.5 gold points every day, once he had a hundred gold points and several hundred silver points we just gave up keeping track of them.
Also, me and another players worked out what he was rolling for him, because it was extremely complex and he found the mechanics, I think, a bit annoyingly complex. I wrote this for him:

Roll 20 dice with re-roll 10s

7s, 8s and 9s are each worth 3 successes, 10s are worth 4

Then roll another 10 dice with re-roll 10s and double 7s
(so they're just worth 2 each this time)

Now add 6 successes

Now take away 4 (because the roll is difficulty 5)

You need 100 total, and can't roll more than 6 times.

That would have been far more complex if he'd had to keep track of points. It's a bunch of charms I've added up together and written in a more simpler way.

So it seemed he'd spent a ton of XP to ignore the Craft system. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it seemed a bit odd.

Oh, and Slots literally never came up, because he never tried making several things at the same time (what would be the point of making two artefacts at the same time? They still need just as much gold xp after all. Maybe if you needed to make two artefacts in the same week, but how often does that happen? I guess it might be useful when making level 5 artefacts, but that's not something he ever did).

So, overall, after the first couple of sessions (where he couldn't make any important projects as he had no silver points), I think we just found the system annoyingly fiddly, rather than terrible. It was nice that he could make an artefact lvl 1-4 in a week, if he had the materials (after spending a ton of XP, of course), which he couldn't do in 2nd ed. But still, very fiddly. And considering how much XP he poured into it, I'd actually rate the Crafter as one of the weaker characters in the game.

I actually suspect some of the issues we had are not because of the Craft system, but because of the Solar craft charms. How complicated the rolling for his power charms was, how he generated ridiculous amounts of gold xp and ignored the system anyway, how much XP it cost, etc. How he wanted to be able to do any Craft roll with a rating of 5 like in 2nd ed, but couldn't (well, he could, because when he bought 7 craft abilities up to 5 I just house-ruled that it could cover every kind of Craft); why not have a charm that does that? Seems fine for Solars.
So I'm interested to see what the DB charms are like. Hoping we see more done with craft objectives, and more balanced charms (rather than the okay-weak-weak-weak-amazing point generation charms that Solars have), and more craft charms that are not just extra dice but interesting effects (like that Solar one in the extra charms book that lets you do a Blue Peter). And not changing your silver points into gold points so easily.

So, I kind of agree with Heavy Arms, basically.


Now, this player was really not very interested in the way the Craft system worked, and stuff like generating bigger points with smaller projects (he just wanted to go and equip 1000 men with weapons, or build giant fortress walls, or whatever), but I suspected I'd find it more interesting, so I gave my new Solar in a different game Craft (Alchemy) 5 and thought I'd do some crafting, get points, and use them to buy up Craft (Artefact). But... actually I've not got round to doing any, so I don't know how it'd work. There hasn't been a need to really make small projects. Though this thread has reminded me to maybe try and look for some way to use it in tomorrow's game. Possibly Alchemy wasn't a good choice.
I would like to try playing a Blacksmith or something, but I don't think that'd be very useful in that game. Also another guy was playing a Twilight crafter/sorcerer, but he ended up just doing sorcerous workings rather than build stuff, and so let the common labourers fix the ruined city we were in while he did sorcery to keep it cool and that kind of thing.
I'm thinking of switching to an Earth Aspect after the book comes out, rather than this Solar, maybe I'd like their Craft charms more. But that's a long way in the future I guess.

[Refhi]

Urmph, I just have one pure-crafter in my players, and haven't done much sessions. Though here are my thoughts on the core system :
- Too expensive (so much normal xp needed...)
- Too complicated (so much types of xp craft and tracking and stuff)

Here's my homebrew :
- craft expertises are specialties
- no xp craft (so also wave ALL charms that rely on that).

For casual playing it seems to run fine. For intensive playing I don't know.

[Lioness]

I'm with the people who say that until we see Dragon-Blooded Craft I just don't know.

[Skeptic Tank]

We've been using it steadily since core book launch, and have been enjoying it greatly. We tried a bunch of different little houserules as we went, discarding most of them as we went "Oh, that's actually in there because of X, we should put that back how we found it."

Our only two issues:
1) With the number of craft points to be gained through other charms, any charms that grant or affect slots are very superfluous, and we've generally removed them.
2) This system has worked great for the character who wants to solve everything via craft, but might not work so well for the person who has a secondary focus in it.

[HighPriest]

When I ran something, the only player who was initially interested in playing a crafter looked at the system, looked at the Charms, and changed their concept. If the mechanics turn people off of playing a concept, I don't think the system is great but I don't have a whole lot of anecdotal evidence to point out specific flaws beyond their report of "dealing with this system is more work than I'm willing to expend on something that is supposed to be fun in my off hours."

[milo v3]

I found it annoying and basically spent my time trying to get enough craft charms to effectively ignore the system.

[Elkovash]

I've had three different experiences with Craft so far.

1) a player who wanted to engage with Craft solely and only to super charge the technological level of creation and be considered a machine God. Most of the system worked fairly well and he ended up picking up charms to generate more points and quicker to spend more time making superior level projects like factories and water distillation plants and so forth. He has some trouble with basic projects as nothing he could think up was 'small' enough but he managed enough to get by until the charms took care of the rest.

2) a character who wanted to be the best chef ever and make spectacular meals that influences his customers in various ways. After a lot of discussion we came to the conclusion that consumable goods were probbly best not modeled as Craft attempts and instead used a few dots in Craft to get craftsman needs not tools to do magic cooking then flavoring (hah!) everything else as stunts involving cooking in performance, medicine and presence.

3) a player who kind of just liked the idea of constantly making stuff and hasn't progressed too far beyond constantly finding things to make to punctuate or enhance scenes, wether it's whipping up some drinks or putting on a feast or carving out an idol to serve as a stage. Not sure where it's going to go, but he pumps out at least 2-3 basic projects and a major project pretty much every session without any slow down (I've started to just award silver points for good stunts involving crafting to speed it up even more as we stream online and I'm more conscious of stopping for rolls to keep the action moving).

Haven't had any disaster stories or real issues so far. I kinda like it, though as a player I'm not huge into crafting stuff myself so I'd probably never interact with it otherwise.

[MoroseMorgan]

"Oh, that's actually in there because of X, we should put that back how we found it."

This piques my curiosity. Would you be able to share these reasonings? I haven't dove too far into the system as it hasn't come up for me, but I'd be interested to know the purposes you found for some of the more common complaints.

If you went over this before in one of the initial threads about Craft I apologize, I had kinda fallen out around that time.