Crafting

Crafting is a recurring issue in RPG design, and has been a troublesome subject since the earliest days of the hobby. Basically, there are two ends of the "bad crafting system spectrum".

1. Crafting is so cheap and easy, it takes over the game. Nobody does anything else unless they absolutely have to, because it's safer and easier, even if slower, to just keep making better and better gear. Sometimes the game will restrict what you can craft by level or story completion or somesuch, but this just makes level grinding into a crafting resource!

2. Crafting is so expensive, time consuming, or difficult, that nobody wastes time with that stupid thing. This can be caused by resources being too scarce and valuable (Star Wars The Old Republic), the crafting process disabling a character for days or months on end (EVE), crafting skills which cost a literal fortune (Nearly all MMOs), the crafting process itself costing a literal fortune (Morrowind Enchanting), crafting skill training taking too much level grinding and the practice work makes no profit (Skyrim), or dungeon crawling providing better equipment than you could ever craft thus rendering crafting redundant and inefficient (D&D).

I have been trying very hard to find a way to create a balanced crafting system in an RPG setting for years. Last year I decided it was impossible. If your game is about crafting, fine, include it and let it take over the game. (Minecraft) If your game isn't about crafting, then don't waste your time making a system nobody will use. (Everything else)

The current edition of D&D comes close. Players can only craft mundane items, (magic items don't really have any rules, so there is no practical way to allow players to make them) and spend "downtime" to do it. Downtime is a reward and resource in this edition. Basically, you accumulate downtime and can spend it between adventures as you see fit. The table then retroactively assumes that you have been spending your downtime on that activity all along, kind of like an off-screen retcon. This is brilliant. It makes crafting both practical and functional. The only problem is that there is so very little to craft. Simply put, if a player ever crafts anything, there will only be an item or two that they want to craft. Once they have those items, there's nothing left that they need to purchase or make, so they never craft anything again. Most mundane items in D&D can perfectly satisfy a character's needs straight through level 20, there is no "equipment tiering" or "equipment tree" as is seen in video RPGs. As a result, the most brilliant crafting system ever devised is currently featured in a game that has no need for it.