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Lazy 5e Crafting Guidelines

by Mike on 29 December 2025

This is the third in a series of articles covering the topic of loot, treasure, magic item purchases, and other matters of rewards and economics in 5e RPGs. Other articles include:

Today we're going to look at a simple system for crafting.

Crafting Shouldn't Overtake Typical Treasure

As we discussed in Lazy 5e Magic Item Prices, you likely don't want the crafting of magic items to overtake the acquisition of magic items through traditional adventuring. Going into dungeons, fighting monsters, and finding magic items remains the primary gameplay loop for most fantasy RPGs. The minute you make it easier to craft magic items, the sooner your players care less for adventuring and finding magic items in big piles of loot.

Whatever system you put in place for crafting items, be sure it doesn't remove the value of actual adventuring.

Limit Crafting with Rare Components

You also likely don't want to open up the entire list of magic items for players to craft. For many players, it's far too tempting to optimize their way out of the fun by selecting the perfect magic items for their characters, making them impossible to threaten and their own threat impossible to avoid.

The easiest way to limit crafting is to ensure that specific magic items require specific rare components. You can choose your own thematically appropriate rare components given a particular magic item but Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure (and the awesome A5e System Reference Document) includes ideas for rare components for various magic items if you need them.

The key is to make components rare enough that characters can't just go build any magic item they want. Instead, they go on adventures to find this rare component. This requirement also ensures the core gameplay loop of going on adventures and acquiring treasure remains intact.

Who Decides What's Craftable?

Items available for crafting can come from either players or GMs. In some circumstances, GMs drop rare components in the game and the characters discover a new item they can craft. After defeating a black dragon, the characters might find some black dragon scales and learn they can use them to forge some black dragon scale armor.

Other times characters might have particular items they want to craft. Players and GMs can work together to decide if the item is appropriate and craftable or not. The GM can then decide what the rare component is and either build a quest to retrieve it or add it to an existing adventure. You probably don't want too many subquests involving finding the rare component of a craftable item for just one character, so dropping them into existing adventures might be a better approach.

Crafting Costs

You can use the Lazy 5e Magic Item Prices guide as a rough estimate on the costs to craft an item: 500 GP for uncommon items, 5,000 for rare items, 50,000 for very rare items, and 500,000 for legendary items. You're encouraged to customize the cost based on the value and impact of the item. Even if a cost is considered low, that doesn’t mean the components are common enough to build a lot of items. A wand of magic missiles might only cost 500 GP but you can still only craft one of them.

These costs include gathering the other components to make the item, getting a suitable place to work, any magical components required, and so forth. You can also include the cost of a hireling to make the item if you'd rather not have the characters craft it themselves.

Crafting Time

Many crafting systems include a length of time required to craft the item which can go up to several weeks or months. This time spent crafting gets in the way of that core gameplay loop we talked about, though – going on adventures, fighting monsters, and collecting loot. You can't go on adventures if you're hanging out in town for twelve weeks hammering away on your +2 greatsword.

I propose a simpler system – a single unit of downtime.

Each time the characters are in a suitable location for crafting an item – like a well-furnished town or city or their own home base, they can spend their time working on crafting magic items and roll a suitable check. If they succeed, they make the item. If not, they can try again next time they're back at their home base.

Alternatively, the characters can hire hirelings to do the job instead. You can either include a check to see if they accomplish the task or simply let it succeed. The next time the characters come back to town after an adventure, the item is ready.

This method simplifies the whole process of figuring out how long an item takes to craft and doesn't get in the way of the rest of the characters going on adventures.

One of Many Treasure Options

Crafting magic items sits alongside the purchase of magic items and picking up magic items in treasure hoards. Many GMs enjoy offering alternative methods to acquire treasure, and players generally love them too. We want to be careful that the system we put in place doesn't take away from the core fun of the game we enjoy – going on adventures, fighting monsters, and collecting treasure.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Experiences Running the D&D 2024 Lich and Tower of Horn and Gold – Dragon Empire Prep Session 49.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Think through the eyes of your villains even in combat. What would they do? How would they react?
Monsters don’t always behave rationally in combat.
Let chases happen organically. Don’t pre-suppose the beginning or the end of a chase.
Use waves of combatants to change up a dynamic combat encounter.
Minions are intended to be blown away or hewed down. Don’t overdo their tactics.
Offer choices near the end of a session so you know what to prep next.
Offer hard choices with potential consequences instead of springing betrayal or curses on the characters.

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