The “I” word and Crafting – Part 2

This is a continuation of my brainstorm on crafting and eliminating the monotony.

Every game has thousands of items added to it on top of the recipes that are given to crafters. Usually these are separate from dropped items from mobs or quest related rewards. I have never liked this approach. I really feel that it separates the players. These dropped items are linked to loot tables that are being implemented much better in games. You no longer see that level 10 boar somehow drop a dagger or bow. NPC mobs are actually coming closer to dropping what they are wearing and using in game and I think this is something that we should use to an advantage.

The system I’m about to tell you about will not appease those of you who love the click process of crafting. Now here, take these John Lennon glasses and follow me for a moment. Imagine if mobs actually dropped items that they were wearing and crafters could use those drops to learn new recipes and then craft the items. This would create a world of items availiable to both crafters and adventurers.

How in the world could this ever work? It is a very free system and not like anything I heard of before. The crafter is not limited in the traditional sense to what they can craft.

How would you keep track of all of those items? The User Interface can be a wonderful thing if done correctly and to be honest, I’m pretty sick of the small window with the scroll bar, moving through a list format of my recipes. Lets please get with the program and change this. How often do you look at your avatar after you have seen the animation of him smelting copper for the first 100 times? Give us an optional full screen display of our recipes and we can accommodate all of these items.

Think family tree format but each point on the branch is a style of that weapon or item. Mousing over that style gives you a list of the recipes you have. For a quick example, lets take One-handed Swords. You would start out with the most basic of sword and then this would progress to scimitars and rapiers, shortswords and gladius. Each of these categories are nothing but placeholders for actual items that you might find.

Once you pickup an item or receive one in trade, you study it and open both the category and recipe for that item. Studying the item should be detrimental but rewarding to the crafter. It should destroy the item but in its place you receive the recipe to create more.

Well, thats about it for this brainstorm and I’m not sure I can really continue on with that thought of making a crafting world without the need to harvest materials. Its possible and I probably just need to drink the 4th cup of coffee.

later

The “I” word and Crafting

Darren over at Common Sense Gamer wrote an interesting article asking the community what they thought about the current state of crafting and what in the world we are going to do about it.

The actual act of crafting itself needs to be spiced up just a bit. Something needs to be added to make it go…for lack of a better word…”pop”. Honestly, I’m at a loss right now (I blame the Corona I’m drinking…too much lime) as to how this would be done…

I hate grinding, I like reward and I love the “I” word. Innovation is what is needed here and that does not necessarily mean making it more complex. Crafting has been in almost every MMO I have played and I usually have tried it beyond the beginner levels. There are only a few that I have maxed out the level or skill in and I have yet to find a system that I could not understand.

Now, hes asking about the act here, and not how its implemented in game or across the “spheres” of gameplay. The act I assume is the actual, click click – change recipe – click click – check inventory – click click – drink beer – click click – skill-up. I agree that it is monotonous and even in the most complex of systems its just a disguise of a grind. So how do we change this? I’m going to try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one but answer it best that I can.

Why does crafting need to have this longwinded approach to creating an item? Why do we need levels or tiers? Lets bring together the players by combining the adventuring and crafting and I propose this by not basing what a crafter can create by how much time they have sunk at a table but how many items they have studied.

If a Weaponsmith for example, had an action called “study” or “reverse engineer” and that action allowed the player to use up items in the world to learn a recipe, this would open up the system to a whole new area that I have yet to see before. Clicking a shortsword for the first time adds some type of notation that shows the type of sword it is and how many more are needed before you truly understand the recipe. Then once the recipe is learned the player simply goes to town and can craft the item. The timesink of crafting is moved to that of adventuring and discovery rather than grinding and repetition at a table.

What about the harvesting and materials needed to craft the item, what do they use?? Well let me ask you this, how often have you been ticked off about the amount of boar skins or dwarf swords you have gathered through the years had absolutely nothing to do with the game economy? Imagine if these items actually contributed to a regional stockpile of materials. This could include not only quest items but also drops sold back to vendors as cash. These materials could then be used to create items by crafters. Do you see the cycle here and why a crafter would be able to create items from these drops? Its because he learned recipes from them as well.

I’ll go into this idea more in part 2 as its leading more into the game integration of crafting and not about the actual mechanics of it.

later