Valet Familiar and Crafting Scrolls and Potions

Question

The feats for Crafting both Scrolls and Potions both state

Scribing a scroll takes 2 hours if its base price is 250 gp or less, otherwise scribing a scroll takes 1 day for each 1,000 gp in its base price.

Brewing a potion takes 2 hours if its base price is 250 gp or less, otherwise brewing a potion takes 1 day for each 1,000 gp in its base price

A Valet Familiar gains the Cooperative crafting feat which says.

Benefit: You can assist another character in crafting mundane and magical items. You must both possess the relevant Craft skill or item creation feat, but either one of you can fulfill any other prerequisites for crafting the item. You provide a +2 circumstance bonus on any Craft or Spellcraft checks related to making an item, and your assistance doubles the gp value of items that can be crafted each day.

For context, my group is using the Downtime rules which uses 8 hours of time for each action meaning you could craft 4 potions/scrolls during this time as long as they cost less than 250gold. So the question is by RAW could the crafter craft 8 potions/scrolls instead of just 4? Is this also RAI?

My GM disagreed saying the Familiar doubled the possible gold crafted during one session, but you could still only have the same amount of sessions but if you went over the 250 value it went up to the full 8 hours. IE if you craft a potion under 250gold it still takes 2 hours but if you go over that it takes the full 8. The way I read it you double how much you can craft so either you can craft an item in a single hour, or you can craft up to 500gold worth in 2 hours.

Answer 1

Cooperative Crafting increases the value of what you are crafting per day, not the amount of things being crafted in any given time, nor the amount of time you take to create a potion/scroll. Valet familiars gain the feat even if they do not meet the requirements.

If your crafting limit was 1,000 per day, with a valet familiar, this limit is now 2,000 per day. But what the feat helps with is the Crafting Progress you make each day. If you would take 10 days to craft a 10,000 gp magic sword, with a valet familiar helping you, this task now takes 5 days.

For potions and scrolls, that are normally 250 gp per 2-hours work, it doesn't become 500 gp per 2-hours, but means that your daily progress will be limited at 2,000 gp. Which makes the feat only useful for higher level scrolls or potions crafted using a higher level caster level, as potions are capped at 3rd level.

You cannot craft two items at once, nor you can craft twice the amount of potions. You are still limited by other rules:

• Potions and scrolls take 2 hours per 250 gp on their price, or 1 day per 2,000 gp on their price.

• Other magic items take 1 day per 2,000 gp on their price.

The GM could house-rule that it also increases the 2-hour limit for potions and scrolls, but that's not what says on the feat.

Answer 2

No, Rules As Written this feat will not help you craft cheap potions or scrolls any faster than you already could. From the item crafting rules, emphasis mine:

Creating an item requires 8 hours of work per 1,000 gp in the item’s base price (or fraction thereof), with a minimum of at least 8 hours. Potions and scrolls are an exception to this rule; they can take as little as 2 hours to create (if their base price is 250 gp or less). Scrolls and potions whose base price is more than 250 gp, but less than 1,000 gp, take 8 hours to create, just like any other magic item.

The Cooperative Crafting feat has no effect which changes these minimum required times, nor the threshold value at which potions or scrolls become easier to make. You can't brew an individual potion in less than two hours no matter how much help you have, and if it costs more than 250gp, it always takes at least 8 hours to make.

The special two-hour case for cheap potions and scrolls exists to make things slightly easier for adventuring crafters, because:

The caster can work for up to 8 hours each day. He cannot rush the process by working longer each day, but the days need not be consecutive, and the caster can use the rest of his time as he sees fit. If the caster is out adventuring, he can devote 4 hours each day to item creation, although he nets only 2 hours’ worth of work. This time is not spent in one continuous period, but rather during lunch, morning preparation, and during watches at night.

The idea is that a crafter on the move can make one simple potion or scroll per day without it interfering too badly with doing that whole adventuring thing.

The feat as intended is meant to help speed up the normally very lengthy creation of significant magic items, because "months" is a long time to have to take away from adventuring to create major items. It was not designed with the special case very short crafting times in mind, and is not intended to help you there.

Your best bet for getting more potions out of the situation is to hope your GM can't read too carefully and try to make the argument that the Valet Familiar knows all the item creation feats of its master, so it could independently craft a potion (relying on the master for access to the necessary spell) - thereby netting you two potions in two hours if you and your familiar work on separate potions. Sadly this isn't actually legal either because the familiar ability is only that the master treats the familiar as if it has those feats so it can automatically assist in whatever they are crafting.

Answer 3

Technically, Rules-as-written, the valet familiar only references gold per day, meaning that it would have no effect on the 2-hour version. Practically, you've already received a DM ruling on the matter, and are trying to appeal it on the internet. That's... not a good place to be. The only arguments left to you are Rules-as-intended and appeal to common sense.

You might like to think that Rules-as-intended would be on your side, but I'm not convinced that it is. If it was, I'd have expected them to let you brew a 500gp potion in 4 hours, rather than 8. It's entirely possible there's something about the 250gp line that's particularly important here.

Appeal to common sense? I suspect you've tried that already, and it's failed in the face of DM fiat. Now, if it were my world, there's a decent chance I'd let you go through with it, but it's not. If the DM decides not to houserule the 2-hour cap (and, given the RAW, it would be a houserule), that's on them.