Equipment

Traditional D&D equipment focuses on adding magical enhancement and utility to fighters. Spellcasters have less to gain, since they have that power out of the box, but they could always grab some stat boosters and defense items. 5e wiseley throttled back on stat boosters and defense items, but this left little for items to offer to spellcasters. Then came system 7 and 8, which ensures every character has powers of some sort, and thus equipment is in a tough place.

But this is nothing new to RPGs, just D&D. In MMOs, players chase items with little to no utility or flavor, simply because they have higher stats. While I think we can do better, it does offer a simple paradigm: items enhance players across the board, rather than offering specific utility. This is the approach I take with equipment in System 8. There are some items that offer utility, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and focus on secondary utility, since anything a PC really wants to do, they'll have a power for.

But which types of items will offer what enhancements?

• Blacksmithing creates weapons and armor, used by all fighting PCs. Weapons directly enhance attacks, and armor offers defense (naturally). Armor should always be the best defense item; there's no enchantment you can put on a cloak that you couldn't put on a suit of plate armor.
• Enchanting creates spellcasting implements--a direct analog to weapons for spellcasters. It explicitly does not enhance weapons, nor does it offer new spells like D&D wands and staves. Instead, it boosts spellcasting rolls, damage rolls, DCs, etc. It can also be used to create utility items, with a theme of "make an object even better at what it already does", like a broom that sweeps for you, or a quill that writes faster and more legibly.
• Tailoring creates clothing and leatherwork, which can serve as light armor, and also the prime utility slots: gloves, belts, boots, cloaks, and bags. These items can offer a wide variety of utility, focused on the area of the body they are worn on. For example, gloves can enhance your unarmed strikes, or allow you to climb better, or let you handle hot objects. Boots can enhance your movement speed, or let you jump higher, or let you walk on water. Cloaks can enhance your defense, or let you fly, or let you turn invisible. Bags can enhance your carrying capacity, or let you teleport items into them, or let you produce items from them.
  • As for cloth "armor", the fact is that most pure casters don't want to wear real armor. But they still don't want to be stabbed. Instead of Final Fantasy logic, where caster armor boosts things they're already good at like spell defense, an actual wizard would want their robe to stop arrows and swords. So cloth armor should focus on AC, DR, etc, just like metal armor. It's not going to be as good per unit cost as metal armor, but it can still be a viable option for casters who don't want to wear metal. It can also have other properties, which synergize with the caster's own magic, making up the difference in protection. Perhaps "spellweave" armor can absorb one of your spells to boost certain defensive stats, or "flameweave" armor improves when you cast fire spells.
• Inscription obviously creates tomes, scrolls, and the like, but also runes: the primary method of adding magical "oomph" to weapons and armor. Runes need a solid base like metal; you could put them on paper, but using it would destroy the paper (which is how scrolls work). Larger weapons and armor hold more runes.
• Jewelcrafting naturally creates rings, amulets, and the like. It also handles the enhancement of ability scores, but not in the broken 3e way. These gems are best for shoring up your character's weaknesses, because they set your score rather than adding to it. As with inscription, these gems need to be set in something--either ordinary jewelry or magic jewelry made with Jewelcrafting; they can even be set in weapons and armor.
• Alchemy creates potions, poisons, and the like. The flavor is essential to fantasy--can't just not have alchemy--but I don't want to only be useful at low level. Healing potions are obviously useful at all levels, but by mid-level, PCs usually have all the powers they need, so we can't count on alchemy's ability to fill in gaps in their power. It needs something unique. Simultaneously, we have to handle the problem of potions being consumed on use; it's fine if they're found, but if you have to buy them or make them yourself, it creates an accounting nightmare. That seems solvable by letting the alchemist craft a certain number of potions per day for free (more with more feats at higher level), and they can still make more if they want, but they have to pay for the materials. As for the uniqueness, maybe since they're so useful to everyone in the party, Alchemists can be a little selfish, gaining a line of unique self-only buffs. After all, historical alchemists were always trying to achieve immortality and the like. Perhaps a high-level alchemist can brew a potion of invulnerability a la Achilles, or a good old-fashioned brew of lichdom; these offer permanent buffs, with dangerous side effects, and are only available to the alchemist themselves.

What, in mechanical terms, are crafting skills? System 8 doesn't have traditional skills, but it does have skill feats, and those are appropriate for many aspects of crafting. But consider alchemy: you have a feat that lets you craft several potions per day. One of those might be natural armor, another fire resistance, a third slowfall. Okay...each of those is a feat by itself. So instead of being balanced against these feats, it would be a single feat that lets you select boons equivalent to other feats, multiple times per day, and give them to someone else. That's just not balanced for a feat.

Now, a power? Now we're talking. They're much more rare, and there's the benefit that pure fighters are always hard up on power options that don't break the "pure fighter" fantasy. If Blacksmithing were a power, we could justify it having very major benefits. Perhaps the Blacksmith gains a free weapon or armor piece that is significantly powerful.