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The crafting system provides two sets of rules, one for crafting mundane items, and one for crafting artifacts. Together with the artificially imposed crafting minimums the system does not offer much in the way of interaction or cooperation to crafters.
This page presents an alternative system. Unless otherwise noted, no part of the original crafting system is maintained.
Crafting projects are executed in five stages. Each stage is necessary, but need not always be a challenge. The five stages are:
Cooperation is an intrinsic part of the crafting process. Several crafters and experts can work together on a project. During each stage, one of the collaborators takes the lead and makes the relevant check, the other collaboratores can add dice to this check through the normal cooperation rules. The Insight and Calibration stage are of particular interest for non-crafter collaborators, since these checks are best made by domain experts.
A progress roll is a variant of the extended roll. A normal extended roll features three factors: difficulty, required successes and interval. A progress roll adds minimum duration and correction interval.
A progress roll is made by roll against the given difficulty once in each interval. A cumulative progress score is maintained by adding all treshhold successes and subtracting all treshhold failures (that is, subtract the difference between the difficulty and the rolled number of successes).
If, at the end of the minimum duration, the number of required successes has been accumulated, the project is finished on time. If the required successes have not yet been accumulated, a new roll is made after each correction interval.
For example Alice wants makes a progress roll of difficulty 2, requiring 4 successes over 3 intervals of a week. Her player starts of strong with (7,6) netting 1 success, followed by (8,0) for another 3 successes, but the final roll is (4,1) setting back the project with -2 successes, giving her a accumulated 2 successes. Alice knows that the project is delayed a little, but due to the correction interval being a day, she can quickly correct the small mistakes during construction and finish after two days with rolls of rolling (7,3) and (9,6).
The different aspects of a progress roll represent the following things:
Difficulty: the complicatedness of the project (that is, the level of needed expertise). For example, building firewand requires a high level of expertise, but is not necessarily complex or a lot of work.
Required successes: the complexity of the project (that is, the amount of different components or 'moving objects') For example, making the riggings for putting a mule in front of a cart requires many different parts to be made.
Interval + Minimum duration: the amount of time needed by virtue of materials requiring cooling, paints that needs to dry and dumb effort that needs to be exerted. For example: building a simple hut requires wooden planks to be cut, and foundation to be put in place, both of which take time.
Correction Interval: The amount of time roughly needed to adjust for unforeseen circumstances. This is usually one order of magnitude lower than the normal interval, because making corrections is easier than building from scratch.
During the design of this new set of rules, we kept the following in mind: