Hi all,
Played a few sessions of BitD now and i’m really enjoying it. I’ve been toying with the idea of my character making themselves a range of arcane trinkets to help in various situations, but there are a few things in the crafting section of the rulebook that aren’t too clear to me.
1. Downtime activities can get +1d if you have a friend or contact to help you, does this apply to crafting too?
2. What are people’s thoughts on using attune instead of tinker when crafting an arcane item, or giving an item an arcane modification? This feels like a yes from a fiction perspective, but i’d like to know what others think
3. How do you draw the line between a modification and an invention? A lot of the ideas I have involve taking a relatively mundane item and enchanting it with additional properties; this seems like the demon harming dagger given as an example of arcane modification, but how far can you go before it becomes a completely new invention?
4. A slightly more general downtime question as my last one; there are a few ways of increasing your effect during downtime (crafting abilities, pushing yourself), if a player does this and then rolls a crit, do they get rewarded beyond the crit amount (6 ticks to a clock, tier +3 item) or is the crit result a cap on what you can get in a roll?
1) Yes
2) I actually don’t see how that makes sense from a fiction perspective. My understanding is that not everything arcane and otherworldly is tied to the ghost field or electroplasm, etc.
3) Honestly, this could vary from table to table. One method is to start calculating the new functionality of the mod using the magnitude tables; if you’re coming up with something higher than 1-2 magnitude, it’s probably an invention.
4) You increase the result level by spending coin right?
Thanks for the reply 🙂
I’m aware that not all arcane things are tied to the ghost field, but on p58 in the rulebook it describes attune as “You open your mind to the ghost field or other arcane power” so i’ve taken attune to be a general dealing with arcane things skill as well as the main ghost field usage.
The way I see it fictionally is you attune to an arcane power and then channel that power into an object to give it new arcane properties. With tinker i’m guessing you’d have to get an arcane charm/gem/oil and apply that to your item, so you’re transferring the properties rather than creating them.
I figured the definition of a modification would vary, but was interested to see how others had handled it. using magnitude does seem like a good starting point.
You can increase acquire/craft rolls by spending coin, and that does go beyond crit so I guess that’s my question answered for those. Long term projects don’t mention anything like that though, so it’d be good to know how people handle pushing yourself for effect on those; or do you just say you can only push for +1d on LTPs?