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[Pathos]

I'm sick and tired of (MMO)RPGs just throwing in crafting as an afterthought, instead of incorporating it FULLY into the game or leaving it out. So, let's discuss how you guys would implement crafting!

My idea is thus ( and this is strongly tied to a setting I'm thinking of ):

Spoiler: My Idea (click to show/hide)

- Crafting should produce the most used / available items. Also the best or close to.
- Crafters should be able to mass produce at a lower quality or individually create items at a higher quality.
- All items should decay, even those stored in banks etc. Higher quality items have higher durability ( i.e. they last longer ) and higher durability means a MINOR increase in usefulness. Temporary decay reducers ( whetstones etc ) cause increased permanent damage when not used by skilled blacksmiths.
- There are a wide variety of resources with strengths and properties, even the weakest of which should have an alternate use. I.E. Iron is stronger than copper, but copper can be used to bind spirits.
- Items are modular. i.e. you have five different hilt types and five different blade types and you can combine these however you like.
- Crafters don't produce magical items, they produce items with "qualities". As an example from D&D: Keen, which means it crits more, or masterwork, which means it's easier to handle. Also, crafters can attune the items to a specific character, which makes it worse for others but better for them.
- Items are made magical using runes ( temporary or permanent ), or binding spirits to them, which gives different properties to items ( and some can only be used on certain materials ) but which lessens the effect of the craftsmen's "qualities" as the items slowly fade into the "magical realm". Temporary runes mean characters can use their favourite weapons but altered to suit the situation. Enchantments increase decay on the weapon.

That's pretty much it, any questions or feel like posting your own ideas? =D

[ein]

You start with the raw material.
The raw material is worked into the base components.
The base components can then be decorated.
Then they're assembled and enchanted.
Certain base components can't be decorated, for example, it would be fuckin' stupid to decorate the firing mechanism of a gun, but the handle is fair game.
Overall though, decorations decrease the general effectiveness of an item.
So on one end you've got plain and practical, and on the other is fancy and hard to handle.
Gems can be incorporated into an object to provide the ability to reenchant that gem.
So if you start off with extra damage in the gem, you could change it to plus accuracy.
However, if you enchant the blade directly, you can't reenchant it unless you melt it down to the raw materials and reforge it from scratch.

About stuff degrading, I'm an advocate of it degrading from use and improper storage.
So a gun in a bank would not get worse, but shooting that gun or leaving it on a table will degrade it.

Temporary enchantments can be used on a weapon from a scroll or direct magic, but they're weaker than regular enchantments.
Enchantments from a gem are as strong as integrated enchantments.

Materials are definitely suited for particular purposes, based on material properties, similar to what it's like in DF.

[IronyOwl]

My idea is thus ( and this is strongly tied to a setting I'm thinking of ):

Spoiler: My Idea (click to show/hide)

- Crafting should produce the most used / available items. Also the best or close to.
- Crafters should be able to mass produce at a lower quality or individually create items at a higher quality.
- All items should decay, even those stored in banks etc. Higher quality items have higher durability ( i.e. they last longer ) and higher durability means a MINOR increase in usefulness. Temporary decay reducers ( whetstones etc ) cause increased permanent damage when not used by skilled blacksmiths.
- There are a wide variety of resources with strengths and properties, even the weakest of which should have an alternate use. I.E. Iron is stronger than copper, but copper can be used to bind spirits.
- Crafters don't produce magical items, they produce items with "qualities". As an example from D&D: Keen, which means it crits more, or masterwork, which means it's easier to handle. Also, crafters can attune the items to a specific character, which makes it worse for others but better for them.
- Items are made magical using runes ( temporary or permanent ), or binding spirits to them, which gives different properties to items ( and some can only be used on certain materials ) but which lessens the effect of the craftsmen's "qualities" as the items slowly fade into the "magical realm". Temporary runes mean characters can use their favourite weapons but altered to suit the situation. Enchantments increase decay on the weapon.

That's pretty much it, any questions or feel like posting your own ideas? =D

Seems to me that this would simply add "Everyone's a crafter who remakes their gear every so often" to whatever the rest of the MMO was. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it would be quite as revolutionary or awesome as you probably think. The ability to mass produce items at lower quality in particular sounds like a feature that would never actually be used without serious other features.

It would also basically just shift the focus from fighting monsters or whatever to get the best equipment to fighting monsters or whatever to get the components for the best equipment. Depending on how the rest of your MMO played out, this might be a neat feature, or it might make portions of your game horrible or unnecessary.

[Pathos]

Seems to me that this would simply add "Everyone's a crafter who remakes their gear every so often" to whatever the rest of the MMO was. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it would be quite as revolutionary or awesome as you probably think. The ability to mass produce items at lower quality in particular sounds like a feature that would never actually be used without serious other features.

It would also basically just shift the focus from fighting monsters or whatever to get the best equipment to fighting monsters or whatever to get the components for the best equipment. Depending on how the rest of your MMO played out, this might be a neat feature, or it might make portions of your game horrible or unnecessary.

Well, the idea is to make crafters the go-to place for gear. Probably the ONLY go-to place. I should probably have mentioned that people would PROBABLY only get one character slot and enough "level ups" to be the best at either combat or crafting. A mix bag might work, but they'd probably be overrun by crafters and combatants far better than them - but it'd be viable for a single player.

Crafters and fighters would both be heavily specialised, too. Possibly with a third "tree" based on administration, diplomacy and discussion, used for control of cities, morale boosts etc.

[ein]

Leveling your skills by leveling up is NOT the way to go.
You should level up skills through use.

[qwertyuiopas]

An alternative I was thinking about yesterday:

Spoiler: Long. And unusual. (click to show/hide)

You have something, for now called "essences", that are generally accuired from various things. They disappear after one week of having them.

However, their purpose is that you combine two of them to get an element, the base material for crafting.

Depending on the essences used, the element will have different statistics or bonuses.

Elements are split into tiers, based on the number of statistics/bonuses. You can combine two elements of the same tier to create one of the next tier, however those two must share all but one effect/bonus, and the other one must match at least one of the doubled ones. By match, I mean it must be either one of a handful of similar ones(If you arranged the effects into a circle, the closerst 4 or so) or it's rival(in that circle, the opposite one).

Essences can be turned into a "ghost" of an essence(needs a beter word even more then the rest!), where it will not decay after 7 days, but is unusable. This is mostly for bragging rights and collectors, especially with the rarest ones. However, a "ghost" can becombined with a second essence identical to it's original one to produce a perpetual essence, that combines the non-degrading of a ghost with the usability of a regular one. Only perpetual essences can be traded.


Now, all of that was, when I was thinking of it yesterday, a build up to this:

There is a bonus essence, given to one in ten thousand players each day. On the anniversary of the game, every player gets one. This bonus essence, when combined with any other essence, creates a unique(no two essence types produce the same result) and extremely powerful effect.
(still building to the conclusion)
However, when combined with annother one, it produces an element literally named "unobtanium", with the maximum bonus of every effect.

Now, recall that non-perpetual essences cannot be traded, and the only way to get a perpetual essence requires *two* of those bonus ones, so only the lucky few players who get a random bonus essence within a few days of the anniversary giveaway or convert theirs into a ghost and hold onto it for a long time will ever get their own unobtanium.

And finally where all this was going: Each of the game's creators would have at least one piece of unobtanium equipment, and unobtanium should have a unique and easily identifiable hue.

Also, an adminium element, that a player is given, and when turned into equipment, becomes the source of their admin powers. Naturally, adminium is untradeable.



Weapons should *not* degrade over time and the best resources only come from the most powerful foes, and if crafting is a separate skill tree, then you would likely have some players develop to the point where one top-level warrior harvests the resources, and one top-level crafter creates ultimate equipment, and they sell it and split the profits.

[psyn]

Maybe you should take a look at pre-NGE SWG. It basically did what you proposed. Crafters were the richest and most famous people on the server. I think every person I have talked to has concurred that SWG had the best crafting (and correspondingly, economy to a lesser consensus) system of any MMO, before it folded with the NGE.

I didn't have the time to play it, so I can't say a whole lot more than that. Last I heard (years ago) there was a pre-NGE emulator server in development. I don't know if it's running yet.

[eerr]

everything needs: 3 base materials, 3 enhancement materials, 3 gems for the slots, 3 magic rune components, 3 vials of flux, 3 vials of poison/flaming/liquid electricity, 4 hammers of various strength, 1 axe, a table leg and a mug, for variety.


the gem slots are optional, and can be added in later.

[Nolor]

Well, there's Adellion, which is an MMORPG in development that is pretty much based around crafting. There's combat, of course, but you won't find deer that drop gold or +1 swords. No goblins or kobolds to farm, either.

[Mechanoid]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Raw materials are given a short list of simple +stats, -stats, and general abilities. Each raw material is attempted to be made as equally useful as another material in some way, even if by a simple labor-to-produce cost of time and other resources. (cloth and leather are obviously easier to make then metals)

Raw materials are used in template peices. These template peices can be rotated, scaled, skewed, and generally reshaped so that they fit together. There is no real limitation to what material can be used where, as long as the stats of the material fit the checks the template peice require. Once the whole template or just a single peice is setup, the game considers the statistics of what category the item can fit in and the possible abilities by checking the template peice connections to what other peices, and lets the player put the materials into the item. If you scale a dagger blade up larger, the game will re-evaluate what the item is and then consider it a sword; or a pole-sword, or spear, or whatever.

The player is then allowed to play a series of minigames to construct each peice of the item, mostly timing /rythm /puzzle sorts. How well the player does in the minigame determines the quality of the item, altered by how difficult the minigame was; the player can play a long-lasting but easy minigame for a more certain high score, or a shorter more difficult minigame for higher reward at higher risk. Mistakes or failure alters the object by a non-random amount; if you butcher a wooden pole enough, you won't even be able to make tooth picks out of it, but not because the game threw a random number generator against a wall. Character skill is used to auto-play the minigame for the player, with the option of producing the highest quality item possible offset by time, and can be increased the hard way, or by passively observing a crafter, or by the crafter actively teaching the other character.

tl;dr
You are given a wooden sword. You can whittle the wooden sword into a wooden spoon. You can use the massive chunk you cut off to make a pair of all-wooden daggers; or several wooden handles and then attach sharpened stone as a blade, which you can use against a monster that would normally rust a metal weapon (but not stone)

[abculatter_2]

Make a system which is like Garry's Mod in a box. Any item you are carrying you can add to this box, and can attach to the main craft object with anything which would logically allow you to attach the objects together (glue, string, strip of intestine/leather). Once this is made, you could select a general item type (weapon, clothing/accessory, trinket, ammo, etc.) which would determine how the character/player would interact with it, then have another editor to fill in specifics (such as where to grab, pull, twist, slash, etc.).Then it asks the player what he wants the character to do when you press the action button or something if applicable (if it's something more complex then 'you hit the Giant Cave Spider in the head with a sharpened cave spider chitin pickax!' or 'The spinning spiky pebble hits the elf in the head!'), then the object goes through some sort of simulator which determines what the object actually does in-game. It then asks a confirmation message to make sure you really want to make this, and if you click okay it stitches all that information together, compresses it, and plops it into your inventory as an item which you can rename if you so wish.

[MrWiggles]

My idea is thus ( and this is strongly tied to a setting I'm thinking of ):

Spoiler: My Idea (click to show/hide)

- Crafting should produce the most used / available items. Also the best or close to.
- Crafters should be able to mass produce at a lower quality or individually create items at a higher quality.
- All items should decay, even those stored in banks etc. Higher quality items have higher durability ( i.e. they last longer ) and higher durability means a MINOR increase in usefulness. Temporary decay reducers ( whetstones etc ) cause increased permanent damage when not used by skilled blacksmiths.
- There are a wide variety of resources with strengths and properties, even the weakest of which should have an alternate use. I.E. Iron is stronger than copper, but copper can be used to bind spirits.
- Crafters don't produce magical items, they produce items with "qualities". As an example from D&D: Keen, which means it crits more, or masterwork, which means it's easier to handle. Also, crafters can attune the items to a specific character, which makes it worse for others but better for them.
- Items are made magical using runes ( temporary or permanent ), or binding spirits to them, which gives different properties to items ( and some can only be used on certain materials ) but which lessens the effect of the craftsmen's "qualities" as the items slowly fade into the "magical realm". Temporary runes mean characters can use their favourite weapons but altered to suit the situation. Enchantments increase decay on the weapon.

That's pretty much it, any questions or feel like posting your own ideas? =D

Seems to me that this would simply add "Everyone's a crafter who remakes their gear every so often" to whatever the rest of the MMO was. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think it would be quite as revolutionary or awesome as you probably think. The ability to mass produce items at lower quality in particular sounds like a feature that would never actually be used without serious other features.

It would also basically just shift the focus from fighting monsters or whatever to get the best equipment to fighting monsters or whatever to get the components for the best equipment. Depending on how the rest of your MMO played out, this might be a neat feature, or it might make portions of your game horrible or unnecessary.

This doesn't happen in MUDs. The crafter are always a niche player group and cannot fully service the entire playerbase, but they can make some of the harder to get items easier then it would be to chase down the mob that drops them.

[qwertyuiopas]

This doesn't happen in MUDs. The crafter are always a niche player group and cannot fully service the entire playerbase, but they can make some of the harder to get items easier then it would be to chase down the mob that drops them.

To solve that, make a quality factor, where the naturally accuirable(enemy drops) items are generally low quality or severely damaged at the higher levels of item drops.
What, you think that goblin has studied the intracasies of sword maintainence and carries maintainence gear with it at all times? Surely not!

As a result crafter-made or crafter-repaired or crafter-improved versions of the upper tier stuff would remain a valuable and desired commodity. To offset the possibility of everyone being a crafter that might result, require some higher level raw materials, like ores and metals, that can only be accuired from dangerous areas or melting the previously mentioned damaged upper tier weapons, and ensure that such a resource is required to repair/improve/build such upper tier weapons.

To make it further interesting, maybe a pool(in a distant point of a vast dungeon) that will enchant a weapon based on the difference of the character's crafting skills and fighting skills, so that non-crafters get the best stuff from it. Maybe, though, have mostly-crafters get crafting enchantments(bonuses apply only to tools), while mostly-fighters get fighting enchantments(bonuses apply only to weapons).

[MrWiggles]

I've seen that done. The crafters still remain a niche player group, though. The most that I've seen (depending on how the skills are grinded and broken down), is that they might be able to do their repairs.

It seems that mob hunting is more fun to the general playerbase then making things.

I think the question here is 'What kind of ratio do you want between crafters vs. the other player niches?'

[Pathos]

I think the question here is 'What kind of ratio do you want between crafters vs. the other player niches?'

For my idea, it'd probably be 10-15% dedicated crafters, 20-25% people with a crafting skill / semi-crafting skill ( basic cooking skills from learning wilderness survival training etc ) and the rest focused on whatever they're doing.