Dungeons and Dragons 5e doesn’t want you to build things. If you want to build things up, you’ll progress in 5 gold piece increments during your downtime. An example that the 2014 Player’s Handbook provides is crafting a suit of plate armor. Its market value is 1,500 gold. This means it will take 300 days to produce it by itself.

Give me a break, D&D. Ain’t nobody got time for that. It’s hard enough to rest eight hours long to regain your spells and abilities. Where are you going to find 300 Days in the Forgotten Realms? You need crafting tools, unrestricted access to the forge, 43 workweeks (maybe not in a row, but still), and you’ll need half of the 1,500 gold to pay for the parts. You’re telling me that a player is going to work from New Year’s Day to Halloween in-game, and barely end up with a product that’s worth maybe an hour of adventure?

No wonder no one likes crafting in a tabletop role-playing game. At least in video games, as long as you have stuff in your inventory, you can whip out crafted items as fast as you can press the X button.

Click Helmet, cA lick chest plate, click Gauntlets cA lick shoes. In Skyrim, I just made a full suit of armor in the time it took you to read this sentence. Forty-three work weeks. Get the heck out of here, D&D.

So the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook changes that. Now you’ll take things out with toolkits (ie, the armorer’s tools). There will now be a list of specific items for each toolkit that you can craft, presumably without working at a forge from sun up to sun down. Healing potions and spell scrolls are along for the ride. My players just chewed me out for an hour today because, as their dungeon master, was greedy for healing potions. “Why are there only two minor healing potions in this supposed apothecary?” They started saying. “Why did that rude shop lady hide after the Thanoi walruses kicked down the door of a hunting party of men and impressed her into the service of the Dragon Queen?” Hey, things happen in D&D, right?

But if my party had these potion-making tools, they certainly wouldn’t have been brow-beaten by Weihan of Weihan’s Apothecary in the ancient port city of Kalman, I’ll tell you that much.

They are also adding items to the inventory that they are just realizing are missing. They had cartographer’s tools you could buy—but they didn’t. Map. So, now there’s a map you can build or buy that will benefit the game.

Designer Jeremy Crawford did not mention how long the items will take to produce. Except when he says, “…assuming the adventurers will have enough time to spend on crafting.” Which leads me to assume that the 43 week plate armor you are working on? It will still take 43 weeks.

Hopefully things like maps and potions won’t take months to develop. Otherwise D&D wasted even more space in the 2024 Player’s Handbook that my players won’t be chasing. They’ll just continue to walk into the Magic Walmart and yell at me if I don’t have a full menu of perfectly balanced items to buy at self-checkout with their hard-earned coins.

Everything I’ve said here today is speculation because Crawford doesn’t give a single example of how the new craft will actually work. Enjoy your teaser.