It's not quite that simple. Crowdsourcing has many of the drawbacks that AI has too.

While it can have a higher reliability in detecting nonsensical inputs or inputs that it's simply unfit in processing, that comes at an intrinsic cost in scalability. Some tasks can't be effectively crowdsourced for, either because of volume or urgency.

Machine Learning systems learn to approximate decision making and thus can attempt at learning from crowdsourcing efforts. It is notable though that depending on the use case, model and training method, machine learning algorithms can potentially be better than the data it was trained on. Or much worse, it's very fickle.

It is definitely still the case that crowdsourcing is a really important tool and oftentimes machine learning relies on it's efforts. And it naturally can solve tasks that we don't have a viable automated approach for.

Something about that airship idea tickles my memories of playing Final Fantasy, so I can't say no to that. It's also something that would certainly garner massive favour, while not making the characters feel overly powerful beyond reason. Especially once the airship has plenty of limitations for being a prototype it's fully under DM control and still feels incredibly cool, I imagine.

Thanks for the idea, I think it's really shaping up.

That is an excellent idea. Together with the other stuff I read here, I think I know what to go for. I love the idea of the character trying to garner favour with the idol only to end up being ripped off when he is on the path to his grand goal. Thanks a lot for the idea!

I agree with your statements, I've made the mistake of pre planning too much before.

What concerns me more is having a plan on how to set his character up for that journey of creating such an item. When they say legendary, they mean an item that would become renowned for having been created, maybe not necessarily truly legendary. The characters primary motivation is to prove themselves the equal of their long-standing idol artificer.

I guess what bothers me is the fact that I have a thorough idea for engaging character quests for all the other players. I have thought of personal storylines that each player gets to explore that will lead their character along some plot line based on their backstory. It's only the artificer that I can't think of something overly compelling for.

I especially like the idea of a form-changing enemy. That is already giving me ideas to create interesting enemies that can effectively just repurpose existing statblocks into this type of enemy. Maybe an enemy that can change quite liberally like with a reaction and has different kinds of immunities might be quite interesting.