I have a player who wants to use the Forge Cleric Channel Divinity option to create plate armor in 15 separate pieces. Is this a stretch or misuse of the ability? It feels like a violation of the spirit of the ability to me.
I have a player who wants to use the Forge Cleric Channel Divinity option to create plate armor in 15 separate pieces. Is this a stretch or misuse of the ability? It feels like a violation of the spirit of the ability to me. That’s a stretch.
— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) November 27, 2017
Let’s break this down from the rules themselves.
“You conduct an hour-long ritual that crafts a nonmagical item that must include some metal: a simple or martial weapon, a suit of armor, ten pieces of ammunition, a set of tools, or another metal Object”
A suit of armor is explicitly permitted, so that’s a start. Here’s where a wrinkle of difficult comes into play, though.
“The thing you create can be something that is worth no more than 100 gp. As part of this ritual, you must lay out metal, which can include coins, with a value equal to the creation”
Plate Armor costs 1500 GP to purchase, but this ability can only produce objects worth 100GP or less each. You can see, now, why the player wants to create 15 different pieces and assemble them.
This is not at all unreasonable. A full suit of plate armor easily contains that many separate pieces. And the rules above do state that aside from a suit of armor, you can create “another metal Object”. Surely creating only -part- of a suit of plate armor counts as creating another metal object?
What is vital to consider is that the player is not asking to accomplish this construction all in one go. They want to spend FIFTEEN separate usages of their Channel Divinity power, and then assemble the results.
If a set of dish for a banquet table consisted of 15 different silver plates, and had a total value of 1500 GP, wouldn’t it be absurd to prohibit someone from creating each plate individually, one by one, until they had all 15 and assembled them into the full set?
How, then, is creating a suit of plate armor piece by piece any different?
As long as the player puts in the work to create each piece of armor separately, there’s no logical reason to deny them the ability to assemble those pieces of armor into a full suit once they’re all complete.
it would still cost them 1500g worth of materials(more than the 750g normally), just cut down the production time a large . might need to buy the padded armor n such separately though.
Artisan’s Blessing magically creates even nonmetal parts of the item.
Not in one sitting it wouldn’t. Since they plan on doing it over 15 separate uses of CD, the cost of materials would be 100gp at each sitting thereby staying within the boundaries. The 1500gp of materials is only cumulative once they have the end product assembled. It’s actually a very clever use of a loophole.
So if this person wants to make all the parts of an aparatus of kewalish that is ok too? The GP limit is designed to prevent people from attempting to circumvent the base value.
Crawford makes it clear we don’t break down the rules. The RAW is RAW.
the breastplate alone costs 400gp you would need that first, then i could see crafting the other pieces
Another way to look a this is that the Channel Divinity ritual acts to save time, so an item worth 100gp for 100gp metal could be the same as 50gp of metal and 20 days work (5gp item/day when crafting). The DM could rule that as long as the ritual is performed consistently (whatever that means to the god, e.g. consecutive days) you can make larger more skilled items over multiple rituals.
The other thing I like about this interpretation is the ability to use it to silver weapons. To silver a weapon adds 100gp to its cost, so you could say that the ritual allows you to silver a weapon in a single act as long as you have the weapon and 100gp worth of metal. This seems entirely in keeping with what a forge cleric should be able to do with this ritual.