Shattered Kingdoms

From the end of the year polls on what you want to see:

Which options are best for acquiring and exciting NEW players?
#3 Tradeskills (forging, dyeing, mining, etc) 18% [ 42 ]

Which options are best for retaining and exciting EXISTING players?
#2 Tradeskills (forging, dyeing, mining, etc) 10% [ 43 ]

There seems to be consensus that tradeskills and crafting are exciting and have the potential to add a lot to the game. But what exactly does it mean to you? It's likely that when you mention these concepts, they mean something different to every single person.

• What do you want to see from such a system? (What's the goal of adding crafting?)
• What all should you be able to make? (Anything? Weapons/armor only? Tools and accessories only?)
• How good should those items be? (Potentially better than anything found or strictly worse?)
• How hard should it be? (How many steps? How much resources and time to be invested?)
• How fixed should the system be? (Duplicate items you've seen? Need to obtain pre-set recipes or plans? Randomly throw things together and see what happens?)

I've been pondering systems, but I'd like to see some feedback. I'm sure there could be an argument for every thing I've listed above and many others that aren't, based on the type of gamer you are.

1. Personalization options for gear and items, additional interactions encouraged between characters, equalization between those who know where to get existing items and those who can invest the time and effort to craft similar items.

2. Weapons, armor, magical devices (blank scrolls, empty wands that can be filled, etc), treasures and trinkets with particular base innates. String alterations of existing items (re-coloring, re-naming).

3. Potentially but not necessarily better than anything found. Top-tier crafted items should not be a cake-walk to make, but they should probably meet or exceed existing gear.

4. Find Plan > Learn Plan (permanently) > Resource gathering > construct > imbue. Low-tier items (read: below jman) should take ten to fifteen minutes and a minimal resource requirement. Scale that time and resource investment by 10-20% per status of the item. Make the most powerful plans require specific and difficult to obtain resources.

5. Each character should only be able to learn one type of crafting trade (armor smithing, weapon smithing, wand crafting, scroll preparation, etc), and maybe two minor trades that allow resource gathering (mining, farming, logging, etc). This encourages players to work together to gather resources necessary for differing trades, though I wouldn't say any but the highest tier of plan should require more than 3 types of resources, with the best items requiring 3 common types and 1-2 "unique resources" gathered through mini fetch quests to high-end areas that don't require any particular minor trade to gather. I.E., The Blood of A Lightning God might be called for in a crafting recipe for A Strong Scroll Of Energy, but anyone could gather that resource regardless of minor trade. That would then need to be combined with a quantity of High Grade Wood Pulp (a resource that a logger could farm), one or more Magical Overlay(s) (a resource that a Mystic Smith could farm), and a Chemical Bleach (a resource that an Apothecary could farm).

This means the best items in the game require co-operation to create, involve more time and risk investment, and therefore reap greater rewards, whereas someone looking for a more casual "common merchant" approach could content themselves with "A Weak Scroll of Parchment", that could be crafted using only minor trades that they themselves could farm with.

A list of plans learned, separated by status, should be available to each trade (with each new plan listed as it's found, bought, and read similar to new song lyrics for bards). Each status would have a mastery level associated with it, with the higher-tiered plans being more costly and difficult to master, and each progressive level of mastery providing more reliable results up to a near 100% success rate at Mastered. I.E., JoeSmith knows Craft Brass Hood With Weak Innates, which is a Journeyman plan. He currently can craft Journeyman plans at a Very Good rate. That gives him a 70%-80% chance of success when attempting to make NewbScout a new Brass Hood With Weak Strength Innates.

A fun element to add would be your "random experimentation" option, I think. Though the chance of actually learning a new plan that can reliably be crafted in the future based on experimentation should be pretty low (1-3%), with catastrophic failure results including everything from e-drains, to loss of mastery for the current status of crafting, to final-strike-like death effects. That would be pure gravy, though, and should not be required, only possible if you're willing to take those risks with wild experimentation.

EDIT: I should probably mention that specific areas should be required to make specific kinds of items. A Magical Workshop might be necessary to make blank wands, for example, and a Smith might be necessary to make a sword or piece of armor. Crafting could be handled much like enchanting, so the player would type "Craft <plan name>" and then "JoeSmith would start to build." Lag on builds should scale with the status of the plan, with high tier plans taking as much as two ticks of lag to complete.

Read all of OA's post and the way he's described that system seems pretty awesome. I think the emphasis on only being capable of one portion of the crafting of items is really essential. I anticipate certain tradeskills becoming more valuable than others based upon how difficult it becomes to find the material necessary to craft, which seems like it would be difficult to balance.

I think this idea would alter gameplay in ways we cannot anticipate and would require a lot of work, and is something, if pursued, should be advertised to the outside. I also agree that crafted items should be better than those found in the game world, though not scripted for buffs.

Let's not beat around a bush. Tradeskills are whatever necessary mechanical costs it takes to give players the MUSH-like ability to manage their own items.

In most environments I think splitting skills up and creating complex recipes would do much to enhance forced interactions. In this environment, I must disagree. The most competitive groups maintain their own self-sufficient resource pools which would not create any actually new interactions if further workloads were placed on them. I think we should fix the existing quests before we go added new quest-like mechanics for complicated crafting recipes, because it stands to reason there are some problems and bad builder habits that would benefit from being honed or corrected before they get their hands on tradeskills.

Many mechanics in SK have a repulsive time-sink component. It would be very nice if tradeskills didn't fall into the same practices. Still, there's way too much building required for me to openly trust the staff to do it right, given how much of building takes place in uncoordinated secrecy. Substantiating this claim would involve posting things on this board that would derail the thread, so I'm leaving that point unexpanded.

It may be best to frame tradeskills as an alternative form of currency. Instead of spending 12 platinum coins on crappy unidentified vendor junk, the player instead assembles a few wood planks and some cobblestone. Instead of gathering money, you gather these various resources.

The essential quality of a tradeskill system is that there are no forced arbitrary scarcity mechanics on components; even if they are made difficult to obtain there is assumed to be an infinite supply. If there were any limitation on tradeskills, it would best be on the "points" any given character had to distribute among any items he or she wanted and, perhaps, along trees of development for various types of items to be crafted... so you get a classless item-creation development tree to frame your available options, and spend your character's point pool based on what you've unlocked and what you've gathered to make an item.

I think the best rule of thumb to lay down for tradeskill discussions is that any tradeskill system should be so accessible and unfettered that all of our staff, including Dulrik, would be able to actively participate in the game with these tradeskills without feeling it was burdensome on their schedules. And that they should.

Having played the games that OA has which have been the basis of his description, I think he's on the right track for what could help with SK. Alternatively there perhaps should be some merchants (blacksmiths/tailors) who can provide restringing if you can't find someone with that skill in the playerbase.

I agree. It would certainly help new players gear up with end game gear while trying to learn the new areas of SK (or any mud) and where all the secrat treasuuures rrr!

Chris

The only way to force a static time requirement on characters is forced lag; veterans will be able to overcome the time-consuming challenges and forced interactions that would create stumbling blocks for unconnected newbies and Europeans who don't multiplay. I should hope we could learn and apply lessons from the whole experience point thing before going off and making systems with the same weak points.

We're letting characters become builders with a tradeskill system, and builders have the natural limitation of vnums. What is the mortal equivalent of a vnum? It certainly isn't time.

There is one quest in the ITBS log that is reported as needing a fix; Alshain and I are working on updating it. If there are many others, they need to be reported in-game.

While I average around 20 hours per week as an IMM and almost an equal amount of time playing a mortal account, I can't see everything with one pair of eyes. At the end of the day, the players far outnumber the staff as they should. It's unrealistic to expect that we can "know" as much as you do about the kinks and snags that exist: That's why there's a bug/typo/idea log feature in the first place.

If you have concerns about the implementation of certain features, you know the email account to which it is best addressed.


As far as crafting is concerned, OA's post resonated with me on pretty much every point. To address grep's gripes, there could be certain locations where players could sell extra crafted items and/or materials that would be available to other players for purchase. The only way an inventory could exist in such a place is with input from players, but it would retain the notion of cooperation without requiring x-number of people to be online at any given point to craft an item.

I like that, but how would you keep me from making a custom wand for my necromancer alt using such an auction house? It seems like such a system would be a lot of extra work for an already taxed group of administrators.

A swap-meet style shop where farmers could sell excess resources, which could then be bought by others looking for that kind of material is a good idea. I wouldn't allow it to carry the high-end kinds of resources that I mentioned I thought should be necessary for the best plans, if I were implementing it, though. Just the basic resources that can be farmed by the minor trades.