Crafting in computer rpgs

The Game Room
1

Say what dragon? You dropped a powerful artifact with an interesting backstory? Too bad it’s not as good as the +5 weapons with 3 types of elemental damage I made a few weeks ago in my living room.

I’ve found I dislike crafting in most rpgs that I see it in. I really like the aspect of finding loot from quests and hard encounters. When everyone in the party is already wearing Boots of Striding +8 that you mass produced, finding a new pair of boots isn’t all that fun.

Note that I’m talking specifically about the type of crafting that’s generic, produces items as or more powerful than what is found elsewhere, and not very limited. I love Baldur’s Gate style crafting where you take unique parts of a unique weapon, and make it whole through some effort. Making a hugely overpowered item by just using gold, experience or some not that uncommon materials feels very lame to me.

I guess a crafting system like in Neverwinter Nights 2 frees the item designers from making loot for every single different play style. I used crafting very little in NWN2 and Mask of the Betrayer, and I felt it was more fun for me that way. It still felt a little like I was gimping myself voluntarily, as the crafted stuff was a million times more powerful than anything you can find anywhere in the game otherwise.

It also still leaves the problem of who to design the difficulty for. If you assume full crafting, the game may become impossible for people who do not use it. If you assume crafting isn’t used, it’ll become laughably easy for those who make use of it.

I recently ran into a DnD rpg called Knights of the Chalice. It seemed interesting at first, but after some reading I found out that you’re expected to make heavy use of crafting to get through the more difficult encounters. It made me somewhat lose interest in the game. It just doesn’t feel as epic to make your own gear in an afternoon, than to find them piece by piece from the lairs of dragons and other powerful creatures.

To me items of power should be found, or at least crafted through special events, quest chains or by finding their parts. I wonder if anyone feels the same way?

2

There was an old old game called the Magic Candle. It was the first game I came across with crafting. You would occasionally have to leave one or more of your team(the old six man party standard days) to craft for money or to make or fix something while the rest of your party went on to get something done because of time limits. And you switched back and forth.

It was a great new aspect to team dynamics, dropping the kick ass thief for a priest who was horrible, but could cut gravel into valuable diamonds.

3

Heh, I’m of the opposite opinion. Finding a Vorpal Sword of Ultimate Killery in some mob’s chest is OK, I guess (though it begs the question of why he wouldn’t use it on me…), but killing people with my Vorpal Sword of Meta-Ultimate Killery, which I made after hunting for components all across the place and powered by the soul of an angel I had to incinerate myself (à la Morrowind crafting mods) is leagues better.

I also loved the crafting/alchemy aspect of The Witcher - sure, you could power through encounters using just your magic powers and a runic sword sharpened with some bit of junk found in a cupboard, but annihilating everything through judicious use of potions makes me feel more smarter, if you will. Like the Goddamn Batman, I’m prepared.

The “tailored item” thing you mention is in the same category - I’d rather make my own sword of Killing That Specific Dude than pray the random loot generator doesn’t bugger me sideways. Plus, again as you say, sometimes it lets you build items for character builds the devs hadn’t even thought about. What’s wrong with that ? It’s ingenuity in action, and more options. More options is always a good thing (that should be a gamer’s mantra).

4

Yes, the Witcher got this perfect. The unique weapons were awesome, but if there wasn’t one that was right for you, you could make enough good stuff to overcome it.

5

Personally, I’d like to see a pseudorandom crafting system. Like, you could get ingredients all over the place, and any given combination of ingredients will result in something (always the same thing for a given combination of ingredients), but not even the developers would know in advance which things would be good. Any given item would give you a set of possible attributes it could give you, some good, and some bad. Adding one new ingredient to a recipe would change the outcome completely, either for the better or for the worse. The more ingredients you used, the more powerful the item would be, but also the more likely you’d trigger the bad properties.

So, for instance, suppose you have a mage who uses a bunch of fire spells. You might try crafting together the brain of a magic-using creature, which tends to give traits relating to mental abilities, and the tongue of a fire-breathing monster, which tends to give traits relating to fire. You’re hoping for an item that increases intelligence and gives a bonus to fire spells, but you might end up with an item that decreases the strength of the wearer and gives a penalty to cold resistance. And even if you get the intelligence and fire-spell bonus, it won’t be very powerful, since you only used two ingredients. So you toss in a wing feather of a very fast-moving bird. You’re hoping that this will give you a faster casting speed, but it might instead cause your movement speed to decrease, and in the meanwhile, you’ve increased the chance that you’ll get the strength penalty and the cold vulnerability, too.

Eventually, as people experiment with the recipes, they’ll find some that work better than others, and the word will spread. But if you want something truly unique, or if you have a very different sort of character than most, you could still experiment on your own.

6

Alchemy works sort of like that in Oblivion : any old flower, fruit, mushroom or random bit of meat you come across has up to 4 “properties”, but a novice alchemist will only see the first of them. Train up, and you’ll see the second, then third, and finally master alchemists see all four. Some properties are common, like “heal fatigue”, some are more difficult to find, and some are only found in a few specimen.

You may combine up to 4 (IIRC) reagents, but not the same one twice, and any property which appears at least twice among the ingredients will take effect when the potion is drunk. If you have three or four reagents with that property, then its effects are boosted some more (and your skill in Alchemy, as well as the quality of the alchemical gear you’re using also affect the final potion). If you have 2 ingredients with property X and 2 with property Y, then the final potion will do both.

The big catch is that not all properties are positive, there’s fewer variation in negative properties (meaning you’re more likely than not to get two of them if you’re mixing at random) and they’re usually in the third or fourth slot, so you need some in-game skill to be sure not to end up with a dud.
It might be a property of the mods I’ve been using, but the negative effects that make it into the potion aren’t displayed either (that is, unless you know about them), so a noob alchemist wouldn’t know his healing potion is in fact laced with a deadly poison until he tries and drink it.

It’s a bit complicated, but I really like that system myself. Plus, if you know what you’re doing, you can really break the game using nothing but Alchemy :slight_smile:

7

One of the things I really like about this is that with better equipment, you can produce more ‘refined’ potions. I forget which does which, but for example a good calcinator might reduce the negative effects, while a better alembic might increase the length of time the potion lasts for. There’s usually a skill requirement for the equipment as well - it’s such that you can’t actually use ‘high-level’ equipment when you’re not skilled enough. That could be better, but the idea of having the results affected by skill, tools, and ingredients makes for quite a number of combinations, and theoretically a really wide variety of player styles.

8

In Eclipse, we detailed several methods to make the coldest gamer’s heart warm. There are traditional methods of item crafting, with lots of new options. But we also put in some other tricks you’d absolutely love, sohvan: Relics and Artifacts.

Relics are investments of charcaters points. You can have your Epic Sword of Badassery - and it’s yours. It’s made from your character. You can lose it, but it has its own powers and abilities. This is the One Ring of items, which gives you extra boosts of points compared to buying them the normal way, but which takes up some of your personal goodies in the process. They’re very popular with players.

Artifacts are not your pansy standard DnD artifacts, which are usually either useless or less useful than random loot at that level, much less stuff you make. This is the stuff you go on big epic quests to make, one at a time, and don’t entirely come out the same every time. If you want the create the mighty Fymbulkalt: the Rod of Winter, then you’ll just have to cold-forge the rod itself in the pure waters of Skull Glacier, bargain with the Norns for their breath, dip in the blood of a Ice Giant, and complete the enchantment on the coldest day of the year as determined by the Sages of Piteng. And you don’t exactly know what it will do when you do that, just in a general way that it has lots of ice magic.

However, the essential point here is that standard DnD does not really have “special” magic items, except maybe in a really brutal setting like Darksun. Any midlevel character was likely to have a few magic items. Later ones had a lot. Magic is normal DnD is a standard branch of engineering with predictable outcomes for a given input and method. There’s no mystery to it. And item with a special history… is just that, and nothing more.

9

I really liked the crafting system in Anarchy Online. You had 3-4 different profs that had at least some crafting skills, each one having different “green” (enhanced) tradeskills. Even non-crafting profs had to get used to snapping pieces of stuff together for quests and whatnot, so it was sort of built into the game. You could make some basic stuff with shop junk, but a lot of the really cool items in the game required boss killing for functional loot, then tradeskilling it with other items to make it better. I had a martial artist close to endgame, with maybe 60-70% of my endgame gear, a good bit of it was crafted or enhanced by crafting something else onto it. And you have a LOT of equipment slots in that game. I was just bristling with incredible gear with lists of modifiers that covered most of the screen. I’d really like to see them do an Anarchy 2, the game as it is now has gone kinda stale for me.

10

I like the crafting in Saga of Ryzom. Nothing drops except mats. All weapons, armor, etc. are built by crafters.

11

I don’t like to see any randomness in crafting. In MMOs especially, it leads to really bad situations. In FFXI*, if your skill greatly exceeds the minimum level to craft a particular item, you have a 10%-30% chance of getting a “high quality” version where every stat bonus is one higher. Whether it’s a lowbie item that gives +3 strength instead of +2, or a high level item that gives +56 to several stats instead of +55, these high quality items are highly sought after. So much so, in fact, that normal quality versions sell for significantly less than the cost of their materials. Crafters will make dozens of the same piece at a loss in the hopes of getting a few high quality pieces that will make them a decent profit. If you’re trying to level your crafting skill, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose a lot of money in the process. You’ve also got an uphill battle ahead of you if you want to try to make money on pieces for which you can produce the high quality version.
*At least back when I played; I quit a few years ago.

12

I presume that the “profs” mentioned in Anarchy Online are professions? And what are “mats” in Saga of Ryzom?

Remember, not all games use the same abbreviations.

13

Haven’t played the game, but I would assume it’s short for “materials”. That, or they’re really big on yoga in this game.

14

I’d like to see crafting that requires multiple professions to complete an item.

For lowbie stuff a single person could do it alone (say make some leather armor) but to make high level really good stuff requires the interaction of multiple crafters working together.

For instance to make M1 Abrams Plate Mail you’d need:

  • Smith to hammer the metal into shape
  • Leather crafter for straps worthy of the armor
  • Engraver to put the Runes on
  • Magic user to provide power to enchant it
  • Priest to bless it

Something like that. Make them do preliminary work for various aspects then they all have to get together and produce the finished product.

Then they can all fight to screw over everyone else and steal the finished product. :slight_smile:

15

That would be LOTRO - some of the special weapons & armor take ingredients from 3 separate craft skills (tailoring (leather) gemcrafting & metalworking (armorcraft)…though most Armorsmiths are going to have tailoring, metalworking & mining leveled up.) not counting getting the raw materials (ore & gems from mining, leather from forestry.) And then if you want to dye it, that’s another two professions: farming* & scholar.

*though a couple of dye ingredients are derived from mining, and most others are rare world-spawns.

16

Take it from me, who played EQ2 from release : in practice, that system is complete, utter, exhaustive and absolute bollocks.

I mean that.

How it worked in early EQ2 was that every profession had some low-end trinkets recipes (stuff like nails, chain links, thread, planks…) which only they could make and gave fuck all XP. Then every actual recipe would call for like 2 trinkets you made and one trinket made by some other profession.

This was ostensibly done to promote interaction between crafters and tone down the “autistic monkey” syndrome of crafting in MMOs which, if you ask me, never happened. The most lively RPing I’ve ever engaged in was while crafting because, let’s be honest here, crafting gets real boring, real fast.
But anyway, EQ2. The problem was that, to move from say Weaponsmithy level 20 to level 21, you needed to make like 20 suits of chainmail. To make 20 suits of chainmail, you needed 60 nails which only weaponmakers could make. Which, in itself, is quite obnoxious, and I say this as the guy who fulfilled an order for 200 pages of parchment in one hour. But the kicker is : once you were level 21, making nails or planks didn’t give you a smidge of experience until you reached level 30 and started working on the next kind of metal or wood or cloth or whatever. Whereas moving from 21 to 22 required 25 suits of chainmail, then 50 to move to 23 and so on and so forth.

So, in the end, crafters were forced to spend entire evenings making shit they hated doing and which didn’t give them anything, except the prospect of trying to hunt down one crafter of another sort who would be as desperate as they were for six billion nails and then maybe, if they planned things right, they could possibly grind up to the next layer of crunchy bullshit. The whole process cluttered the chat channels so very badly, any other kind of crafting request like, say, a dude who wanted a *club *made got instantly lost in a sea of “hey, I need some adamantium chain links, anybody up for three hundred ?”. It was ridiculous.

And it became even more so when the crafting pool became *more *insular as a result : crafters who belonged to a guild took one for their team and produced batch trinkets for their peeps, whereas trinkets reached ridiculous prices on the open market simply because everyone needed ridiculous amounts of them and nobody could be arsed to make more than a handful at a time before getting bored as hell and moving on to killing goblins. Eventually, most players simply made toons of all crafting professions just to make their own fucking trinkets. And the chat channels became deadly quiet, save for some spontaneous bouts of bitching at the goddamn nails system.

If you got bored just by reading this, know that even as such I can in no way, shape or form convey how utterly, soul crushingly SHIT that system was. It really was. Not the least of which because the process of crafting those gorram trinkets could actually KILL you at that point - but that’s another story.

Then they changed it, and removed the inter-dependency gimmick from the game entirely. And people bitched at them for “dumbing it down” :smack:

17

Materials. My bad.

18

I would expect that to lead to high-level crafters buying nails or whatever from low-level crafters. The low-level guy still gets a reasonable amount of XP from making them, the high-level guy gets the materials he needs, and he probably pays the low-level guy an amount that’s negligible for him but significant at low levels. Win-win.

19

IIRC, EQ2 did not have a reaosnable economy. No auction house + painful grinding == torment.

WoW makes things awesomely better simply because you can be selling things while not standing around selling things. That is, you can simply dumpt stuff on the clearinghouse and let it ride, while picking up what you need from it at the same time. This actually more or less reasonably simulates an actual economy.

The EQ2 system basically made it not at all worth it to buy low-level stuff. You had to have a lowbie available who could supply you, or try to make deals with dozens of them. But they probably couldn’t afford to produce that much in the way of goodies, so it didn’t happen.

20

The problem in that scheme is that it relies on a steady influx of newbies, and moreover it requires there to be much, much more newbies than high level crafters since grinding up calls for exponentially more trinkets.
Nor did buying trinkets cost “negligible” amounts - as I said, guys who were ready to make lots and lots of trinkets for sale were in the minority, and everyone wanted what they got. The price of trinkets on the open market was ridiculous, and I went bankrupt quite a few times buying grinding supplies… until eventually I found a few partners.
We made crates of shit for each other on a barter basis (eg 1 nail for 1 plank), and never spoke to anyone about trinkets again. We all danced in the streets when they pulled the plug on the whole concept, a couple months after release.

The system plain doesn’t work as a, well, system. I could see it happen in a very limited fashion for extremely high-end, artifact items in which case finding N crafters to complete the N steps of making the item becomes sort of an interactive part of the quest. But for general issue crafting, it’s naff.