FASA Games, Inc.

In my first games shields added directly to physical defense. Seemed okay, but we only played a few circles like that.

When you decide to allow shields to be forged to gain higher armor values that would only make the combat option of going inside a shield more important.

So any update on my questions above about
1. How much of each day must be dedicated to forging 8 hours, 16 hours?
2. Can the weapon smith be doing other things like item history, manning his store, hanging out at the bar, training, teaching, handling other forge business, etc...?
3.. Can he only work on 1 forging at a time?
4. What happens when he is 2 days in and needs to take a 1 week break then resumes forging? Does he start over or count the previous 2 days?

Unless otherwise stated, a week is seven days. (we operate on the Throalic calendar, thank you We booted the Therans out of Barsaive, remember?)

As far as delineating the specifics of how much time per day... I don't envision the ritual as being a super exclusive activity. But let's look back...

The original (ED1) version of the talent just indicated that the smith needed to spend "at least one week" working on the weapon at a forge. ED2 specified the time required as 8 hours of work within one week -- certainly not an exclusive level of activity. ED Classic used weapon size in days, but didn't specify anything about how much time per day was needed. ED3 and ED3R used the same timescale, with no additional specifics.

(Remember how I had to lay out the history of the talent to explain what the problems were and why we changed it the way it did? Yeah.)

Okay.

The activity is not exclusive, provided the other activities do not (for the most part) take the Weaponsmith away from his forge. Let's say, for our purposes here that it requires 8 hours work per day. Minor interruptions don't cause a problem with this -- so a Weaponsmith can eat, take breaks, have a brief conversation with a client (no more than a few minutes).

He could certainly do Item History while using the Forge Blade talent (as that only requires an hour a day for study). If he is really pushing himself, I suppose he could meditate to raise a talent -- but that's starting to stretch my personal credibility for what they can do. He can only work on one Forging at a time.

If he takes an extended break, he will need to start the Forging ritual over again. There is no negative side effect of doing this.