D&D 5.5E’s New Crafting Rules Give Tools an Upgrade
WotC gave the briefest tease of new crafting rules in the D&D 5.5E Player’s Handbook. Tools get an upgrade reminiscent of Xanathar.
Crafting is an interesting little nook in fantasy stories. They are not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are a lot of folks out there who love the idea of being a baker or forging a masterwork sword which can be used to kill a god. Which one doesn’t necessarily matter, maybe a lesser one, like a demigod or something. This last example, in particular hails back from the early days of D&D when you couldn’t rely on your DM to handout the magic items you’d want, and the game was balanced around you having +1 weapons bby level 4, 2 by level 7, +3, +4, and so on up to +5 by the highest tiers of the game.
So naturally, there was a laundry list of rules you could use to create your own magic items. You’d pay in experience points, gold, and rare components and so on. But then those crafting rules sort of fell by the wayside. Until Xanathar’s Guide to Everything came along and added new things to do with those tool proficiencies you had laying around uselessly on your character sheet.
Now 5.5E is revisiting the idea, and it sounds like the ideas in Xanathar’s Guide will help inform 5.5E’s crafting rules. Let’s take a look!
WotC Unveils 5.5E Crafting Rules
As D&D’s Lead Rules designer Jeremy Crawford spells out in the video, both tools and crafting rules have all sort of been reworked at the same time. Tools all have something you can do with them with the Utilize action” and one of those things is crafting. We’ll get into crafting a little more in just a second, but let’s talk briefly about the other things you can do with that Utilize action.
Because it sounds a lot like the changes made to tool proficiencies in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Xanathar’s Guide made sure those useless tool proficiencies that you didn’t do much with unless you had a very creative DM, like Stonemason’s Tools or whatever, got the rules they need to have an in-game effect for DMs who might say “well the book doesn’t say you can…”
For instance, Brewer’s Tools gave you advantage on some checks (dealing with poison, using alcohol to dull pain, knowing about the history of beers) as well as the ability to purify up to 6 gallons of water as part of a long rest, or 1 gallon as part of a short rest. Or Mason’s Tools which let you be better at finding secret doors as well as deal double damage to stone and brick walls with your weapon attacks.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar in 5.5E, since a lot of the changes from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything are ported pretty directly into the new PHB.
But what about Crafting? Well, Crawford calls out that Artisan’s Tools have a whole list of things that you can craft with them. There are rules for making weapons, armor, adventuring gear (normal items), and even potions of healing and spell scrolls.
Other magic items will have crafting rules as well, but those are in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. So, something else to look forward to, there.
One last point Crawford reveals is that there are rules for every piece of “adventuring gear” in the book. Before this list included things like chalk, candles, an abacus, some iron, an iron pot, and so on. Saying that everything will have game rules makes me think the new list will be a lot shorter, and that we might be saying goodbye to my favorite piece of adventuring gear: 1 piece of chalk. If you’ve ever done weird stuff with mundane items, you may have to flex those credibility-stretching arguments a little.
All this awaits in the new Player’s Handbook due out September 17th!
