Via Chatty DM - Written by the Lords of Tyr's own Rob from Hero Twice a Month.

Hi there.  My name is Rob, a.k.a. “A Hero”, from A Hero Twice A Month.  While I can be a chatty DM at times, I am not the ChattyDM.  Still, he was nice enough to let me post my thoughts about crafting items while he is off on his GenCon hiatus.

When the game designers at Wizards of the Coast decided to trim the skill list down from more than thirty-six skills in D&D 3E to a mere seventeen in D&D 4E, it was inevitable that many skills would not make the cut.  Most of them were simply rolled into more general skills, like Hide and Move Silently being combined into Stealth.  This makes sense to me since I always felt the skill list in D&D 3E was a bit bloated.

Notably absent from the D&D 4E skill list is the Craft skill.  To some extent this makes a lot of sense, since Craft was more of a background skill which rarely came up in adventuring (barring the occasional use of the Fabricate spell).  Still, I think it is a shame it is gone.  There is something nicely thematic about a dwarf forging his own weapons or an elf crafting additional arrows during the time between adventures.

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