Hello
I was pouring over the rules for making foci with Artificing skill. Now, if you have to buy a Focus formula, the cost is 1/4 of the final focus, which I think is fair considering the time and karma invested in actually making it, although the D&D equivalent is 1/2 of market price. The issue is instead when you use the Arcana skill to make your own. Making a force 3 formula takes a 4-5 days if your dice pool is around 10, and cost absolutely nothing. A force 3 Power Focus is over 50k nuyen, so that's more than 10k nuyen for only a few days of completely safe work. Aside from the original karma investment in the skill, thats a great way to save money.
The cost is only 18 drams of reagens, which is 360 nuyen, a pittance. So for 360 nuyen worth of drams (assuming you did not collect them yourself) and a couple of weeks of crafting, you get an item worth 50k+ nuyen which is pretty powerful for a starting character. The main cost is the 3 karma to craft it, and then 18 karma to bond it.
Am I right so far? It seem to me that in a low-power street level campaign investing in these skills is an obvious choice as getting the money for the foci is tough, and even in a normal game the main cost of Bonding is still necessary for those with hundreds of thousands of nuyen to spend on gear. For comparison, Binding a Spirit costs 25 drams times Force while crafting costs 2-6 drams times
Force.
So why is so cheap to craft foci? The main cost is the karma and risk involved, but you would think that in a campaign with good gear paying even 10 times the amount of drams is a pittance.
Tbe main issue is Arcana really, as the difficulty is only based of Force, while the result is more valuable depending on the type of focus (Power being pricier than Spell). If the Arcana test was exceedingly more difficult depending on type of object, I can understand formulae being priced differently, but right now it takes the same time and effort to create a Force 6 Power focus as a Force 6 Spell focus, while the former is 3 times more expensive.
Possible fix: Arcana test is Force*X extended test rather than Force*Force, with X being 3 for Qi, Spell, Enchanting and Spirit foci; 4 for Weapon and Metamagic foci, and 6 for Power foci. That means you need a reasonably skilled guy to make Force 2 Power focus formula, while higher forces requires really skilled and specialized Arcana makers. High skill together with time consumed makes a very valuable item in Shadowrun.