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[Yoink]

It makes me sad that people want to "prevent Tinker". 

Ye goddamn gypsies better stay oot'f mah town if'n ye know wha's good fer ye. >:[

[Ozarck]

That crafting system sounds like "Tinker: The Game" anyway. Soooooo .... it will be fun for a specific subset of the player base.

I was expecting a much more simplified type thing, but this sounds like "hey go find whatever and build whatever with it. Ask me about armor thickness."

On the other hand, you could turn it into a Kerbal type thing.

"I wanna use this icebox as my command module." "Sure"
"I found an old typewriter, a holographic laser projector, and half a stained bedsheet. I'm going to make that my keyboard and monitor. "Okay."
"I've got this cargo container. I'm going t o upend it and use it as the rocket tank. Don't worry, I'll reinforce it with sixteen spools of chicken wire." "uhhhhhh, let me do some rolls."

...

Dammit, now I want to run THAT game, since i know PW prefers darker, more sarcastic humor and dystopian realities.

[piecewise]

The combination of needing items to craft along with establishing recipes as we move along should prevent tinker syndrome.

I don't think this quite addresses the issue with Tinker.  Yes, scarcity would help some, if only because we can only tinker at a tenth the rate due to needing to find stuff, but open recipes are exactly why Tinker created OP items.  Tinker created OP stuff because you'd give us some material or items and state that they have certain abilities, but then have those abilities be poorly engineered or utilized.  The PSL, for instance, was a really stupid weapon from an engineering perspective, and was only balanced because it had significant engineering flaws.  Forcefields were rather clearly intended exclusively for being armor, and were balanced in that role, but not at all when we started getting creative with them.  Tesla sabers were a stupid rule-of-cool design which were greatly improved by being stuck on a laser, but were balanced for the stupid design, and therefore not the bayonet design.

Another issue which could easily come to the fore in this system is stupid questions.  For instance, asking how well a gun works against an armor that it's terrible against, or how well a deliberately flawed design works.  This tends to result in the stuff from the first paragraph--balanced items which have engineering flaws as a key part of their balance.  Fix the flaw, and suddenly you have an OP weapon.  Generally this has been accidental in the past, but it's easy to do intentionally, and will result in OP stuff.

You're not gonna prevent tinker with nothing more than an open crafting system.  Slow it, sure.  But to stop it?  You need something more, be it harsher retroactive balancing, more competent people, or just not having an open system to begin with.

...Oh, and making a list of a thousand random parts is stupid.  "Cathode Ray Tube" type stuff is just gonna be worthless bloat the vast majority of the time.  If you're gonna collect a parts list, collect of general "component types" list.  Like the big spoiler I posted before?  It should boil down to two or three different categories of item.  When things are being added to the inventory, you can be more specific, and maybe limit their use in crafting recipes more, but it would be much better to roll for what type of item is found, rather than the specific form that item takes.

There are a few things that prevent that stuff.

1. There are no scifi items. Everything in the list here is just normal stuff. And not every high tech at that. There's not even a plasma screen in there.  And the lack of high tech stuff means that it becomes a lot harder to make reality defying things.

2. Guns and damaging dealing weapons in general have a set damage. No rolls. This pistol does 3 damage every time you hit with it. Armor has set block numbers. This armor has 5 HP. When the HP is gone, it breaks. There are upper limits on both.  Is it possible to make a rocket launcher that does far higher than any normal gun? Yeah. but it still has set damage

3. Stupid maybe, but the alternative seems massively boring and also really strange. So you pick up "Generic Electronics" X3 and combine that with "Generic structural" x 2 and get a tv?  That seems like it's begging for abuse because whats to stop someone from saying "I have 300 generic electronics. I build a death star." It also kind of ruins any attempt to have areas you scavenge this from be unique.

[piecewise]

However, if you guys are worried that this will be broken, I can just make a big book of recipes and then add to it as the game goes on based on input about what people want. It would be a lot more like a normal crafting system that way and I would control all the aspects of it. But it might take a bit.

[piecewise]

I suppose the good thing about me making the recipes is that there's more  freedom in what I could make; since I can defy reality where I want.

[syvarris]

It makes me sad that people want to "prevent Tinker".

Sorry; bad choice of words.  I only really mean to prevent the metagaming/unbalancing portions of Tinker, since that's what people have actual issue with.

Though, honestly, the more I think about it, the more those portions seem intrinsic to Tinker.

Don't want to bog down with the rest of the discussion (since I'm in the minority here, apparently), but - why allow "flawed" items to be considered "balanced" in the first place? If something is a glaring engineering flaw, then it cannot be "average" or "good" by design at all - at best, it can be "marginally viable"

Simple.  Piecewise is an abysmal engineer, and is generally unlikely to recognize a significant flaw.  Even if he wasn't, it would still be possible to come up with a decent idea, get an item balanced for that, and then repurpose it for a great idea.  Nobody is perfect and capable of instantly seeing all uses for something.

1. There are no scifi items. Everything in the list here is just normal stuff. And not every high tech at that. There's not even a plasma screen in there.  And the lack of high tech stuff means that it becomes a lot harder to make reality defying things.

There won't be any magic either?  Sounds more boring than I expected.  This will likely help, since it's harder to come up with new ideas for stuff that actually exists, but won't prevent the issue.  Say someone makes a gun that fire cheesewire bolas with little motors, and gets you to specify that each shot does x damage--if they then find a better way to utilize the cheesewire, problems happen.  If someone can't make a cheesewire bola gun, then you aren't rewarding creativity, which makes the game even more boring.

2. Guns and damaging dealing weapons in general have a set damage. No rolls. This pistol does 3 damage every time you hit with it. Armor has set block numbers. This armor has 5 HP. When the HP is gone, it breaks. There are upper limits on both.  Is it possible to make a rocket launcher that does far higher than any normal gun? Yeah. but it still has set damage

So?  If a flawed pistol does 3 damage, and I fix the flaw, would it not do more afterward?  That's what I'm saying would happen.  If it doesn't do more damage, you're just rewarding people for jamming a bunch of parts together in a vaugely gunlike shape, and not for being creative or intelligent with the parts.

3. Stupid maybe, but the alternative seems massively boring and also really strange. So you pick up "Generic Electronics" X3 and combine that with "Generic structural" x 2 and get a tv?  That seems like it's begging for abuse because whats to stop someone from saying "I have 300 generic electronics. I build a death star." It also kind of ruins any attempt to have areas you scavenge this from be unique.

I stated what I meant poorly.  I'm getting worse at conversing at one in the morning, apparently.  I meant to categorize parts based on their function; you could have "metallic kinetic fasteners" (nails, screws, rivets, etc.) and "fabric wrapping fasteners" (tape, straps, rope, etc.).  These are in a roll table, and you can choose something more specific if that category is rolled, and maybe the specific item has some influence on how it can be used.  Mostly, this serves to have the list of parts be built around things that can be used in some fashion, rather than a bunch of worthless bullshit that'll probably just be melted down or ignored.  It would also help ensure there's sufficient coverage of useful items for crafting.

Prepostedit:

I suppose the good thing about me making the recipes is that there's more  freedom in what I could make; since I can defy reality where I want.

As long as people can't improve on your designs, sure, that would work well.  Otherwise...

Spoiler: What did I just say? (click to show/hide)

[Harry Baldman]

The names of the pieces are there to give off a feel. If your death ray has a cathode ray tube, the still-beating heart of an infant held in a pickle jar full of Ringer solution, a few electrodes and a butane lighter as its active components, that makes it automatically cooler than a regular death ray. It's a literary difference that you're ultimately striving for, and what you're building need not necessarily make physical sense, but it should require that you go out looking for something, or at least have a good idea of what you're putting into it if the resources are on hand. You want that radioactive gun? Gonna need to find yourself a dangerous core to put into it that you've dug out of a forlorn scrap heap, probably giving yourself three kinds of cancer in the process. The idea is for you to be engaged with the technology from a writing perspective. A good system to look at would be Genius: the Transgression's mechanics for crafting Wonders - a simple enough system that produces a wide variety of results while somewhat successfully universalizing the mechanics of mad science. I'd be pretty chuffed to see something similar to that in any game, honestly.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if we need to craft, I don't want to be crafting sticks. I want to be crafting shit that does something unusual or looks cool or feels different from what I could find. Recipes and reproducible results seem to kind of go against this idea (and you can justify irreproducible results because no two parts are actually the same anymore - in Genius terms, this would mean you roll for a different Fault for each separate invention). Doing Minecraft shit where you plop down Part A, Part B and Part C in an L-shape to get some shitty item X feels profoundly unsatisfying to me, though possibly not to other people.

[piecewise]

The names of the pieces are there to give off a feel. If your death ray has a cathode ray tube, the still-beating heart of an infant held in a pickle jar full of Ringer solution, a few electrodes and a butane lighter as its active components, that makes it automatically cooler than a regular death ray. It's a literary difference that you're ultimately striving for, and what you're building need not necessarily make physical sense, but it should require that you go out looking for something, or at least have a good idea of what you're putting into it if the resources are on hand. You want that radioactive gun? Gonna need to find yourself a dangerous core to put into it that you've dug out of a forlorn scrap heap, probably giving yourself three kinds of cancer in the process. The idea is for you to be engaged with the technology from a writing perspective. A good system to look at would be Genius: the Transgression's mechanics for crafting Wonders - a simple enough system that produces a wide variety of results while somewhat successfully universalizing the mechanics of mad science. I'd be pretty chuffed to see something similar to that in any game, honestly.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if we need to craft, I don't want to be crafting sticks. I want to be crafting shit that does something unusual or looks cool or feels different from what I could find. Recipes and reproducible results seem to kind of go against this idea (and you can justify irreproducible results because no two parts are actually the same anymore - in Genius terms, this would mean you roll for a different Fault for each separate invention). Doing Minecraft shit where you plop down Part A, Part B and Part C in an L-shape to get some shitty item X feels profoundly unsatisfying to me, though possibly not to other people.

huh...that is a 500 page RPG system. Jesus.

Lets see if I can extract the relevant parts.

[spazyak]

holy fuck...

[NJW2000]

If you do, could you post them? I had a brief glance then ran a mile.

[Harry Baldman]

huh...that is a 500 page RPG system. Jesus.

Lets see if I can extract the relevant parts.

The story bits are a good read if you have the time. Genius is probably one of the coolest things written for nWoD - shame it's not updated for the 2nd edition.

Make sure to get the tabbed version, though. You're looking for the Wonders and Axioms section under Systems and Foundations, which is more like 50 or so pages. Might be a bit difficult without experience with nWoD 1st edition, but a good read regardless.

EDIT: To help translate, New World of Darkness works under the Storyteller System, where for an action you roll Stat + Skill dice (with modifiers for situation and equipment), and on a 1d10 an 8, 9, or 10 is a success, and on a 10 you roll again. If you have at least one success among however many dice you roll, you succeed at an action (more difficult actions incur penalties to your dice pool, like trying to pilot a jet fighter when you've flown Cessnas all your life would be something like a -2). Rolling no successes is a failure, and rolling 5 or more successes is an exceptional success.

EDIT 2: Ultimately, the takeaway is that you don't necessarily want to put in pre-baked recipes for how to craft stuff, what you really might consider instead is conferring advantages upon certain inventions much like the Variables for a Wonder, which provide advantages in return for decreasing the core modifier (basically the modifier to the roll for using it) or disadvantages in return for increasing it, and you can pile on as many as you like. The parts themselves don't matter in Genius because it's madness that powers the inventions, but you could do something like letting the parts used inform the fault of the invention, if not necessarily decide it, and if somebody drafts up a plan to make something you tell them roughly what they need that isn't trivial to obtain ("you need a cathode ray tube and finely ground quartz" vs. "you need 3 blocks of wood and a block of metal").

[piecewise]

huh...that is a 500 page RPG system. Jesus.

Lets see if I can extract the relevant parts.

The story bits are a good read anyway.

Make sure to get the tabbed version, though. You're looking for the Wonders and Axioms section under Systems and Foundations, which is more like 50 or so pages. Might be a bit difficult without experience with nWoD 1st edition, but a good read regardless.

EDIT: To help translate, New World of Darkness works under the Storyteller System, where for an action you roll Stat + Skill dice (with modifiers for situation and equipment), and on a 1d10 an 8, 9, or 10 is a success, and on a 10 you roll again. If you have at least one success among however many dice you roll, you succeed at an action (more difficult actions incur penalties to your dice pool, like trying to pilot a jet fighter when you've flown Cessnas all your life would be something like a -2).

I've never been much a fan of the new worlds of darkness lore. Something about the way its written gets on my nerves. The actual content is neat but the style feels like something out of a new age self help book for some reason.


Having skimmed through this a bit I do see one major problem: The system seems VERY bound up in the way characters are created.  It's not the sort of thing where I can just pluck out the crafting and use it, because it's all connected to these Axioms and Foundations that the characters pick. It also doesn't seem to have any connection to ingredients; seemingly you can just roll to make things without any items, but having things or being in certain places gives you bonuses to those rolls.  Which is very mad scientist, but not really what I'm going for here.

My goal is much more "Mad Max in Trashland". A game about being thrown naked into a hellish environment and using the random crap around you to build yourself up. Where you can build that death ray, but doing it represents a lot of effort and time and struggle, fighting through rust golems, fending off other players who want your crap, scaving the plague lands in a hand made gas mask, etc.


I mean, if that sounds boring to people and they'd rather do mad science or metal slug where they can make a shotgun that shoots shotguns that shoot rockets that explode into explosions, we can do that.

[piecewise]

Gah, why would you put 19 pages of text BEFORE your table of contents.

[Harry Baldman]

Genius isn't your average nWoD thing, it's got a much nicer aesthetic going for it than most nWoD.

As for adapting it, that's not really that much of a problem. Variables you can basically keep as-is. Axioms can arise from parts - for instance, if Katastrofi 3 allows you to shoot annihilating bolts of plasma, it's obviously the sort of thing that needs components of much greater sophistication (actual hi-tech junk, basically) than, say, a gun made of bones that shoots teeth, which only requires that you kill a guy for it and have something to carve them with. Faults make sure nothing works quite as imagined, or does so with certain qualifiers. And Foundations are basically character classes, since their benefits are a specific ability you apply to your crafting and use of inventions.

Above all, it makes sure that the system is intuitive. The problem with the grid-based stuff is that it's unintuitive to consider beyond the basic Minecraft wood + wood + metal = shovel or whatever, and you need to keep coming up with recipes and, worst of all, you need to harvest basic components. Nobody wants to collect 5 metal pipes or whatever the hell, or keep track of just how many dentures they've dragged out of the scrap heap. It's busywork at its finest, and busywork in a play-by-post is pretty much death. Meanwhile, Genius' system is easy to comprehend, but difficult enough to encompass that you want to explore it. And it's kind of what you're doing anyway - much like a pistol has a set base damage of 3, a Katastrofi weapon has a base damage of 5 that you modify with varying things - you start from a base and iterate on the design.

EDIT: Going further with it, it also somewhat makes sense that not any idiot could make a functioning firearm out of scrap, or know how to turn water into delicious soda. The domain of any idiot would be, for instance, to charge into battle with cutlery taped all over your body in the hopes that the 1 base damage you inflict by smacking into someone gets you somewhere based on surprise alone. Furthermore, a place with an overabundance of trash would have an overabundance of components - shitty components. So trivial ingredients you can easily find just about anywhere. Good stuff, meanwhile, takes effort and questing to find.

Gah, why would you put 19 pages of text BEFORE your table of contents.

It's the opening fluff, all nWoD books have that. At least Genius is pretty good at presenting most of its terminology in an understandable way (well, if you read it from the beginning).

[NJW2000]

Making the crafting game a teensy bit magic might make it simpler and more possible to create actual items.  And a bit easier for some people.