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There’s been a trend for a while now in video games and anime: crafting what you kill. D&D is finally catching up.
Dungeons & Dragons has always supported the concept of collecting stuff, with detailed inventory lists and encumbrance rules. Despite this, the actual act of crafting has often be relegated to side characters, with a myraid of classes in Dragon Magazine dedicated to fleshing out hirelings and henchment for that purpose. In short, D&D implied that heroes don’t craft. This has gradually changed with each edition and has propagated into D&D-inspired video games and anime.
The Virtual Forge
The world of video games has long embraced the satisfying loop of gathering resources and crafting items. For two popular examples, look no further than Minecraft and Monster Hunter.
In Minecraft, players begin with nothing and must literally punch trees to gather wood, eventually progressing to building elaborate structures, powerful tools, and intricate machines through intuitive and interconnected crafting recipes. The game emphasizes exploration and resource management as fundamental to the crafting experience.
On the other end of the spectrum, Monster Hunter offers a deeply intricate crafting system centered around the creatures players hunt. From the scales and bones of monsters, players can forge a staggering array of weapons and armor, each with unique properties and appearances tied to the monsters they originated from. This system not only rewards skilled hunting but also provides a compelling incentive to engage with the game’s monsters, turning fallen foes into powerful gear that aids future hunts. Of particular note are the Palicoes, cat-like companions who run the canteen and prepare amazing meals for hunters.
The Culinary Artisan
The anime and manga series Delicious in Dungeon offers a pragmatic take on crafting, primarily through the lens of cuisine. Faced with dwindling resources in a deep dungeon, the adventuring party, led by Laios, learns to identify and cook the various monsters they encounter. This act of transforming dangerous creatures into nourishing meals, similar to Minecraft and Monster Hunter, emphasizes the practical application of monster knowledge in a dangerous environment. They utilize everything from basilisk meat to slime to create surprisingly edible dishes.
This concept of utilizing the environment and its creatures extends beyond mere sustenance and aligns with the logistics aspect of D&D. While the crafting system in D&D 5th Edition (2014) had limited mechanical depth, D&D 2024 formalized crafting with the Utilize Action. As detailed on D&D Beyond, the new crafting rules allow players to engage in various crafting activities, from creating weapons and armor to brewing potions and enchanting items, with clear guidelines on required resources, time, and proficiency checks. Relevant to Delicious in Dungeon, a character proficient in Cook’s Utensils can now craft rations, detect spoiled or poisoned food, and improve a food’s flavor — all skills the culinary dwarf expert Senshi demonstrates repeatedly throughout the series.
From the meticulous assembly of components in video games to the inventive cooking of monsters in anime and the detailed creation of magic items in tabletop RPGs, crafting has a lot of appeal. It offers players a sense of ownership over their gear, rewards exploration and resourcefulness, and allows for storytelling opportunities — after all, knowing how to craft a monster’s corpse means knowing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities too. And if Delicious in Dungeon is any indication, it’s an economical to “live off the land” while keeping adventurers both sated and healthy.
