reading the crafting rules in pathfinder 2e and like. yeah i realise the system is not meant to model a functioning economy with supply and demand, but since the thing it does seem meant to do is 'make sure crafting isn't more than marginally useful or it'll break the game' i resent it a little
Honestly the crafting rules in 1e were so much better
at least for magic items they seem strictly worse (at least re: making sense of why anyone spends their time crafting high-level ones for resale). the ordinary crafting ones maybe are better, idk
Well yes, but they're extremely good at their design goals, which is to explain why no one spends their time crafting magic items for resale.
Fairly explicit in the rules that you can't actually buy magic items, and that crafting an item is a quest, and for the most part you're supposed to use whichever things you find.
(3E had a major change when it fairly explicitly allowed purchase of magic items, rather than explicitly forbidding it; this led to great gnashing of teeth. It was a big part of the shift to planned builds, away from most of the your character being determined semi-randomly.)
based on your tags and also the words "3E" you are talking about D&D, and for all I know what you are saying is true in early editions of D&D but this post is about pathfinder, which totally does allow you to buy magic items from merchants. said merchants must be either making them for resale themselves or buying them from someone who is.
Oh yeah, I misread you when I saw 1E, sorry; I forgot there was a pathfinder 2E.
(Pathfinder 1E is essentially D&D 3E, with minor tweaks. And I think you're right there; the rules explicitly let you buy items, and they make it predictable and straightforward to make magic items, but from my memory it's not a very reasonable income source and also you make the same income/day from low-tier items that you do from high-tier items.)
i mean trying to pretend that the mechanics are simulationist or that NPCs all function according to the same rules as PCs has always felt like catastrophically missing the point to me?
In most of the games I'm familiar with (which I know is a specific subset of ttrpgs) you're very much supposed to be treating mechanics that way.
Like "making magic items is hard by the rules, and that's why you can't buy them in shops" isn't me making an inference; I'm pretty sure that's literally what the DMG said. And simulationist verisimilitude was an explicit goal of 3e, and they did a ton of fairly impressive math work to make it work smoothly. (There's a fun essay somewhere working through how an optimized level 5 expert puts up nearly exactly world-record numbers in multiple track and field sports.)
In practice I'm not really a ttrpg person at all; but I would have absolutely zero interest in a game that didn't at least try to make the NPCs follow the same rules as the PCs. Otherwise how are you supposed to understand how the world works?
by reading worldbuilding fluff and incorporating your existing knowledge and intuitions, same as every other fantasy setting such as those in novels and video games
I think this is related to the thing where I just don't get magical realism.
But my reaction to that is, yes obviously, but my knowledge and intuitions have to be adapted to the rules of the setting: if some poeple can fly, or read minds, or reliably survive two-hundred-foot falls, or murder a thousand ordinary men with a teaspoon, then I have to use my knowledge and intuitions to think about how a world with those abilities would work.
And so I'd say the same thing about worldbuilding fluff: it's useful, but it has to be compatible with what you tell me about how things work mechanically. If powerful wizards have the ability to mind-control millions of people, then I'll ask why any nations aren't run by mind controllers; if powerful wizards have the ability to create eighteen tons of worked iron for fifty gold then I'll ask why there are any powerful wizards willing to work for cash if iron is worth money.
(Pathfinder d20 "solves" this problem by including a clause that "this iron is "not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold", which is the sort of thing that genuinely offends me because that's not how iron works and now I can't use my knowledge and intuitions.)
To use intuitions, to have worldbuilding, you need some sense of what people are capable of doing. And that's what the rules are there for.