Crafting Items Options

[lowendz113]

I looked though the boards but I didn't notice anything regarding this, sorry if I'm re posting.

So my question is this: How much does it cost to craft something? I've read through the armorer skill several times it says nothing about cost. I've looked at the getting gear section and the only thing it references is getting gear from fixers. So I have no idea how to determine pricing.

Assuming that I'm buy parts, do I just pay full price? But that begs the question, "Why would I waist all that time crafting when I could have been doing something that actually makes money?"

Continuing that logic, what if I have spare parts or scrap metal? How much does that reduce the cost by? What if I go to the junkyard and pick out a car with a damaged rear axle, do I pay full price for the car to fix it?

Clearly you can't craft it for free either though.

Is this another one of those situation where the GM just has to make up what he thinks is appropriate?

[Larme]

First, gather your ingredients. Some of them can be harvested, and some drop from mobs. The auction house is a good place to find crafting matierals when you're first starting out, because it will take you forever to level all the way up to 99 in a craft if you farm your own materials! Double click your blacksmith's hammer to bring up the crafting window. Drag the items inside the crafting window and hit "craft." Nothing to it!

...

Just kidding (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) I couldn't resist, since you called it crafting. Yeah, there's no formula, it's up to the GM. SR3's costs for custom building stuff were pretty unfavorable, and could cost up to half of the full price of the item -- of course, this was back in the days of that menace Street Index which multiplied the crap out of every price you paid.

I think the parts cost should depend on what tools you have and how much work you're doing. If you're making a gun piece by piece, all you need to buy is the raw materials, like the metals and composites and whatnot. It will take a long time to make, but it won't be expensive. If you're assembling a customized gun from on-the-market parts, then you might save little if anything. So it's hard to pin down a cost that makes sense -- I'd say it goes between costing 10% of base price, and a 10% discount, depending on what you're making and what you're buying premade. And don't forget that you'll need to find plans if you're actually building something from scratch, you can't just wing it.

[lowendz113]

Sweet thanks for the help.

[Kerenshara]

This is one area I have WISHED to see some concrete guidance from the actual DEVs on... preferably in a dead-tree RAW format. I can't believe it's not in the BBB in the first place.

[Ancient History]

There are elements of building things that might be appropriate for SR. Forging a blade of any size, for example, is a common part of enchanting a mageblade from scratch. We really don't have room for everything everyone would want, though.

You could, for example, be a knitter adept. You could be the niftiest damn knitter adept in the world, you've maxed out your Artisan 7 (Knitting +2) skill, you've got Knit Lore 6, you have a Knitting Kit, a Knitting Shop, a Knitting Facility, and you're trying to talk the GM into letting you have some custom knitter-hand modular cyberarm plugins. You'd be right pissed if the rules stated you couldn't knit more than three sweaters and a funny hat every day (note to self: what is the price/armor of a sweater knit from golden fleece?)

In general, I would suggest you figure out the difficulty and cost of doing something like that today, turn it into nuyen and a reasonable threshold, and use that, with kit/shop/facility as basic guidelines on equipment. Keeping in mind that certain really expensive equipment exists that you might not be able to afford, or at least require a nanoforge to produce.

[Kerenshara]

There are elements of building things that might be appropriate for SR. Forging a blade of any size, for example, is a common part of enchanting a mageblade from scratch. We really don't have room for everything everyone would want, though.

You could, for example, be a knitter adept. You could be the niftiest damn knitter adept in the world, you've maxed out your Artisan 7 (Knitting +2) skill, you've got Knit Lore 6, you have a Knitting Kit, a Knitting Shop, a Knitting Facility, and you're trying to talk the GM into letting you have some custom knitter-hand modular cyberarm plugins. You'd be right pissed if the rules stated you couldn't knit more than three sweaters and a funny hat every day (note to self: what is the price/armor of a sweater knit from golden fleece?)

In general, I would suggest you figure out the difficulty and cost of doing something like that today, turn it into nuyen and a reasonable threshold, and use that, with kit/shop/facility as basic guidelines on equipment. Keeping in mind that certain really expensive equipment exists that you might not be able to afford, or at least require a nanoforge to produce.

I wasn't looking for a comprehensive listing on difficulties, more a question of raw materials prices. The "plastics" of 2070 are certain to be much different than modern day analogues. Are they cheaper? More expensive? The price of the raw materials that go into, say, a Glock pistol are probably well under $50 US, while the item retails for approaching $700 US. That would make any highly skilled Armorer character not only useful but potentially PROFITABLE for any party. Getting small quantities of weapons-grade materials is probably going to add to the price, but the right (fake) licenses should help offset some of that. The Desktop Forge means many smaller parts don't even need to be "machined" any more. And I am pretty sure the total cost of the materials in a 2070 car aren't that high, though the forming and machining of them would be more of a trick. That's where the tooling of the "facility" comes into play. Maybe "plastics", "light metals" and "heavy metals" by the pound/kilo? Raw optical medium for processor/storage? It could be pretty vague, but still give a very good jumping off point. The modification rules already give a good picture of what times and dificulty should look like.
The dreaded DnD cited a simple "50%" materials cost for everything magical and "33%" for mundane items, and while it was nonsense on the face of it, we were able to work with it. I think I could trust the folks at Catalyst to do better than that, at least enough for me to accept right along with some of the other game-mechanics (like ramming).

[MJBurrage]

For materials cost in most games I have always gone with the following (unless there are specific reasonable guidelines stating different amounts).

In real life what a customer pays for something is generally double what it cost the merchant. What the merchant paid is generally double what it cost the distributor. What the distributor paid is generally triple what the raw materials cost the manufacturer. This works out to the raw materials costing ~10% of the full retail price.

The costs of labour and operations, along with a reasonable net profit (usually less than 10%) at all three levels of the manufacturing/distribution chain make up the rest of item's full retail price.

[Writer]

(note to self: what is the price/armor of a sweater knit from golden fleece?)

It probably isn't very high. While dense, gold is a soft metal. AND, it would degrade rapidly as your friends and family pawed it off your body.