Didn't see this before. Sorry, essay incoming.
So, while craft profusion annoys me, the specific charm you mention doesn't help. The number of projects you can make at once is dependent primarily on how much XP you have.
In theory the rule is established this way to give the party reason to travel around. You play the game to earn Craft XP which then allows you to build cool stuff. This I like, however I wish it was the default method of getting craft XP.
Instead you get 'inspiration' by working on small non-artifact projects and selling them. So you make 40 swords and then use that 'inspiration' to make one daiklave at the start. Not only is this painfully slow, but it requires you to sit down and make 40 swords (Not actually mathed out there, but a good deal.)
And you still need to work on projects full time to roll.
But you can't just hand out craft XP to anyone, so you make the craft-XP for story charms low investment works. This is fine.
I'd much rather one craft skill with better, more consistent rewards, or a charm that gave you XP for craft specialties to get the same results.
The fact that it doesn't cap means you can always raise another craft skill to be better, though declining returns make this a problem. In practice, you need 2+ and then want to work every single project you do into the axioms of those two crafts outside of that one charm (Or 3 if you want first age tech)
But craft profusion is something I can and will houserule away with a single penstroke. Delete 1-2 charms (like Supreme Celestial Focus which lets you buy new craft skills with your excess craft XP.)
It's annoying and saddening but something easily fixed.
What's bad is how actual crafting looks.
With no charms you have 3 major project slots, and need to fuse them together to make one superior slot which can make an artifact rated however many major slots you used (2 slots is one artifact 2, etc) This costs a small amount of gold XP and you can create temporary major slots with more gold XP, a bit complicated, but manageable.
You then have to spend a certain amount of time working, after which you can roll to 'finish' the artifact whenever. This is a series of extended rolls, and my first major issue.
You get 6. Each roll costs 10gxp to try and if you don't finish in six that artifact is failed. YOu can never attempt to remake it, and all your 60+XP spent on it is down the drain. It's punishingly expensive and means you need to really slam heavy craft boosters just to really attempt to make an artifact.
So, how will this work?
Well first you by Tireless Workhorse Method. This gives you 2 major slots for each point of essence, meaning you probably won't ever need to make temporary slots again unless you want to do a lot at once. You then grab Ages-Echoing Wisdom which gives you 1gxp/major slot every story. This rapidly builds up to about 10+ every story.
Dragon Soul Emergence gives you a free superior slot so you never need to use your major ones. Useful since you now keep your 10+gxp/story without issue.
Spirit-Gathering Industry decreases the GXP/roll by essence (minimum 3).
And now we get the big one. Unwinding Gyre Meditation lets you skip out on getting XP from completing projects (but you get more from breathing anyway at this point) in return your next project is a bit easier, decreasing the number of successes you need and adding 1 to the project's terminus (so you get 7 rolls instead of 6) Cool! It also gives you more gold XP each project.
And it stacks. Forever, without wearing off with no cap. Eventually you don't actually need any successes to craft an artifact. You'll roll once at difficulty 5 and auto-succeed. How long this takes varies by artifact rank. For 5s this means each craft project requires precisely 5gxp.
Eventually you might cash in your bonus for Completed conditions (max 3)X(# of projects+2) goldXP (easily hundreds or thousands given how fast you can make stuff with Gyre) Since this can be converted to white which can be converted to real XP, you can easily use this build to give yourself tens of XP on the party. In short games this looks fine, but the longer you play the more that huge Craft-XP costs suddenly refunds itself.
What it does mean is that your elders can go rebuild the first age in a few months of work.
Think of this as a gas stove. You need that pilot light to get it started. That's a lot of resources and work and charms, after which it perpetuates itself forever with minimal costs. All your craft booster charms? Kinda useless for anything but artifact NAs.
And you'll rapidly reach the point where you're crafting 4-5 artifact 5s at once, meaning that the time it takes to get this fire burning is pretty easy.
And then there's a ton of craft charms that give you small benefits to building 2 dot artifacts that no serious crafter would ever reasonably want because Unwinding Gyre Meditation is so good, and you never need to worry about slots in the long run.
Design-wise the trees are full of speed-bumps. Silver XP has 0 value in the long run, unless converted into gold, but there's a ton of charms that give you small increases in silver XP periodically.
Or rather, high ranking artifacts start out really hard and then get extraordinarily easy as you make a half dozen every month of gametime. (less during timeskips)
If you play a crafter I'd preliminarily recommend (For 5s, not NAs):
Ages-Echoing Wisdom, Tireless Workhorse Method, Unwinding Gyre Meditation, Supreme Perfection of Craft, Thousand-Forge Hands, and some craft roll boosters at first that you'll never use outside of NAs in the long run.
No clue which craft boosters (See part 2 below!) are useful because the math is kind of crazy.
I think the crafting system is less complicated now, because it's streamlined. Before, you had to damn near do algebra to determine difficulty of things to craft, and now it's mostly uniform.
Err, less complicated? You need actual algebra to figure out if you can craft things in 3E.
In 2E rolls were simple enough that I could write stuff down (X successes+Y dice in Z interval) and then roll that every interval and mark the motes/wp if it was relevant. I did the math once and then it took 3 seconds forevermore.
Let's look at a sample craft roll in 3E. This uses a few (maybe more than necessary) craft boosters and I'm not sure I'm interpreting every charm interaction properly (it's vague).
You might have 10 dice+3 specialty+10 excellency dice. 23.
First you use a charm to raise your dice cap by 5 or so, so 28 dice. Simple enough.
Now roll. Mark down your successes (all dice 7-10, 10s and 9s count as two successes)
Now you'll reroll every 10 and every 6.
Now, look for every 3 of a kind success (counting both the rerolled 10s and 6s) for each of these, turn 1 non-success die into a 10 and reroll it, looking for 3s again. Do this until you've rerolled as many 3 of a kinds as you have.
Add one success for every three you have (1.33333X your current successes)
Now roll essence dice+ one more die for every 3 successes (before adding the ones in the last step) roll them, rerolling if 10s or 6s appear and go through the 3 of a kind thing again.
Now add up to essence+successes successes to the total.
How many successes do you have from those 28 dice?
This still isn't near every possible craft booster. I tried it. It took several minutes to work out the total and I have no clue how to guess averages or deviations (though it looks to smash what you need to reliably craft artifact 5s). I'd probably need a calculator to figure this out, and a fair bit of algebra/coding to write a program to do it for me.
Except this costs a lot of craft XP, so I want to find the cheapest way to get enough. The function for that is hideously complex, and then utterly predictable but time consuming once I know what combos are best at every essence level. I now need to find the most optimal combination relative to resource/charm XP cost. (Because "do better at craft rolls" is a boring way to spend XP and I don't want to keep doing it if I don't need to)
Anyway I look at it, this is hideously more complicated every roll than 2e.
