Crafting, Part 1: Enchantments

Crafting is always one of the most difficult concepts to approach from pretty much all sides in a tabletop RPG. For the GMs, you have to hope and pray that the subsystem within the game you're playing has some semblance of balance, and it's also a lot of effort on the GM depending on the implementation. For example, if someone comes out with a alchemy crafting system that depends on gathered ingredients, then the GM has to come up with world building elements of where those ingredients come from, how often they are harvestable, how plentiful they are, whether to put the powerful ones early in the story, etc. Then the freeform ones where it's simply a matter of time and money, those come across as inconsequential and heavily unsatisfying (a common criticism for Pathfinder 2e's crafting system). On the player side as well, the amount of bookkeeping can go up immensely with crafting in some games, and if the system is too detailed, it takes away time from the other players who may not be interested in that system. Finally for designers, crafting is such an intractable problem to solve for those very reasons. How can you make a system that is not too "heavy" that it drags the story down, but substantial enough that it is interesting? It's a very fine line, and like many ambitious designers, I am taking my own attempt at it. Here is some information about one of two crafting systems in my game: Enchantments!

While adventurers often make do with what they find in their travels and with purchasing the rest of what they need, some want to take matters into their own hands, literally. A craftsperson may start out working with basic metals, tanning, woodworking, or osmething else entirely, but the pinnacle of creation in Alpithia (the setting of the game) usually involves the Vis Essences: small motes of power and personality that, when used correctly, can be imbued in any kind of crafted work.

There are 8 "core" essences: fire, ice, electric, decay, preservation, light, dark, and metal. Each essence has two complements and an interfering essence. The relationships are shown below.

There are rarer essences as well, but those require special treatment and are typically found and researched individually for their use cases (Think a Scale essence that one might acquire from a Dragon). Essences will be a consistent part of the drop table of creatures as well, as all creatures will have a list of tags, and if they have one of the essence tags, they have a chance to drop a mote of that essence. There also also 3 tiers of essences: Lesser, Greater, and Pure. These determine the kinds of enchantments that are possible to imbued in a piece of equipment. But let's get into Enchanting specifically!

Enchantment crafting is the more powerful and permanent form of Vis imbuement (the other more temporary one is Alchemy, which I will get to in another post!). Each time Enchantment crafting is attempted, the player first rolls a Creation roll against the Target Number (TN) for the essence tier (table below).

Tier of Essence	Target Number
Lesser	10
Greater	17
Pure	25

On a successful roll, the player then rolls on the Essence's corresponding Enchantment table to determine which enchantment is added to the piece of equipment. A piece of equipment can typically only withstand having up to 3 enchantments on it at a time, and in order to overwrite old enchantments, another essence must be used and consumed.

I am currently working on the list of enchantments for all equipment right now; the goal will be to allow players to produce enough combinations that they feel invested in making their own weapon if the more unique pieces of equipment they find on their journey are not to their liking. To sort of reiterate, there will also be "unique" pieces of equipment that will be unable to use the enchantment system but will have very special effects (think legendaries from Diablo or Path of Exile Uniques). Here are some examples of possible enchantments for fire essences on weapons:

• Deal an additional 1 fire Shock damage
• Inflict Burn 1 on a rolled 6
• Gain Reaction (2 AP): Parry incoming fire-tagged attack. Gain fire resistance to the attack equal to half you level.
• Gain Action (2 AP): Point your weapon forward and launch a very small bolt of fire at your target. Range: 5 hexes. Damage: 1 fire Health/1d4 fire Shock per 4 levels. No rolled 6 effect other than ones from other Vis Enchantments on the weapon.
• Gain Action (3 AP): You plant your weapon in the ground and fill your hex with smoke. The smoke lasts until the end of your next turn, and creatures can only be at most aware of your presence while you are in the smoke.

There's a lot of rules that I haven't discussed yet within what I just spoke about, and I hope to start clarifying combat and such in another post soon (most likely the end of this week!) to clarify what some of these terms mean. If there is anyone who would like to see certain kinds of enchantments in their ttrpgs or if you know of anything similar in other games, let me know!

Thanks for reading,

Aaron/Draedis