Shattered Kingdoms

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.

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.