Forums » Crafting and Gathering

What if crafting was a choose your own adventure story?

    • 1315 posts
    November 30, 2020 6:38 PM PST

    What if crafting was similar to a choose your own adventure story? 

    Rather than thinking of crafting as a single step process how about each base recipe being a crafter specific choose your own adventure story of sorts. 

    You start a crafting object by picking your base recipe you want to make.  By base recipe I am talking weapon type or armor type and slot. Other crafts can emulate as appropriate. 

    This object then has a list of tasks that must be completed at different sub workstations.  Based on the sub skills you have unlocked for your profession you will have more options to pick from at each of the sub stations.  There may be higher advanced options to loop a set of actions for greater effect. 

    The object is not done until you have worked through all the steps, adding ingredients to the object as you reach that point in the process. If you fail at a step you may be able to retry just a single step or revert to a previous step and retry at the expense of extra fuel. 

    The final object stats reflect the base recipe, the materials chosen, the options chosen, and your skills at both the base recipes and the options.  Exp would be reward to the base recipe, the material knowledge and to the options used.  Each step could also consume an amount of crafting mana in order to put a limiter on how fast you can effectively click through the process, though there could also be a crafters meditation option to speed up regeneration. 

    There could be special substations around the game world that have extra special options so maybe the very best items require you to travel around the world to hit all the desired options for what you want to make in one item. 

    There may also be a way to discover or invent new base recipes by blindly trying out sequences based on a small amount of logic by effectively making a blank book where you chose the next substation to go to without guidance. 

    Thoughts? Criticisms? Mountains of praise at my ingenuity? (hope springs eternal) 

    • 334 posts
    November 30, 2020 6:55 PM PST

    I presume you to mean that the player selects a fixt end result, and the game would then generate a random list of tasks to perform to achieve that end result.
    Novel, I think. I can come into that.
    It would be the opposite of performing skill tasks with random results based on skill of the player. Then... the game could also compensate for the character's lack of skill in generating a list of near impossible tasks, lol.

    • 1315 posts
    November 30, 2020 7:30 PM PST

    I was more thinking that the player picks the starting point, say a dagger.  A standard dagger is a blade, guard, grip and pommel.

    The first step is the blade.

    First choice is the material which asks you to input a bar or go to the smelter to melt metal for casting.

    Second choice is blade style (stilleto, chopper, double edged slicer, hooked slicer, hooked chopper)

        Each blade style will have a different sequence of heating, drawing, fullering and bending to get the basic shape roughed in. The end steps could include rough grinding steps as well.

    Next choice is heat treatement technic. Full quench, partial quench with mud anneling, maybe thermal cycling for specific combos and to restore lost durability. 

    Final blade step is edge grinding. Different grinds will have different edge profiles which will change how it functions.

    Next stage is forming the hilt.

    Similar to blades you pick the guard grip and pommel materials.  Depending on the material you have different processes to shape them.

    Final stage is the finishing stage.  Here you pick how to attach the blade to the hilt, final polishing and possibly enchantment.

    The sequence of choices from a common starting point is what dictateds the end point.

     

    • 334 posts
    November 30, 2020 9:19 PM PST

    Check, i see what you mean now ...
    I would think then that my "idea" is also something Nephele could look into
    I suppose that fitting a character with clothing, items, weapons, etc., would display a unique appearance...
    That you could do that too for a specific item; your dagger for example
    Aside that, then combining different stats too


    This post was edited by Rydan at November 30, 2020 9:20 PM PST
    • 1315 posts
    December 2, 2020 6:43 AM PST

    I can get behind the idea that the process sequence may change from crafting to crafting.

    Hmm one step further if you “know” the recipe you can pick the end point and the system guides you what to do next. If you mess up a stage it will direct you how to fix it with a follow up process. At some point there should still be a total failure due to running out of durability because you critically failed without doing a subprocess to rebuild the durability.

    If you don’t know a recipe you can start from the beginning and guess your way through the sequence. Some set of net successful actions will yield an item based on your materials and final crafting durability. It might not be what you were originally going for.

    So maybe not fully random but a standard path with chances for detours based on the skill level and chance of failure. It could be a simple choice menu or an active minigame. The mini game could take longer and require full attention but increase the odds of success, bypassing rework steps of a failure through menu probability.

    • 1921 posts
    December 2, 2020 7:09 AM PST
    Seems like a reasonable idea. I would say without a recipe, and/or for the first time through the creation of an object, this type of process could be fun.
    • 1315 posts
    December 2, 2020 7:41 AM PST

    I feel like this system would be a way to build time into the crafting process without resorting to staring at a cast bar, contrived cooldowns, some repetitive mindless minigame, or shifting the time spend to another profession i.e. harvesting.

    It becomes a turn-based strategy game. You can spend extra fuel (and maybe raw materials) to take extra turns to undo failures, gaining action specific experience points each time you succeed. You are only done when either the process runs out of durability or you finish a major stage which could result in a game object like a small blade without a hilt.

    You can fail a lot but rather than loosing adventuring cash rewards or harvested material you purchased with adventuring rewards you spend yet more time. It also has the added benefit of broadening the crafter profession from a single crafting class level to a fairly long list of subskills with their own levels. Your crafter rank (novice, apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Grandmaster, Guildmaster, Legendary Craftmaster, super epic craft master of shark jumping) would be the Mastery quest you have completed which will likely require sub skills in an equal tier of mastery. For that matter there could be specialist sub titles that have independent action skills.

    And now I am rambling.

    Back to the choose the endpoint vs start with a blank page idea. There could be a “study the design” option when salvaging a dropped item. It consumes the item just like regular salvaging but it starts being able to give you hints on how to go about making the item. Only after receiving a step by step recipe, salvaging x copies of the item or successfully completing the item x number of times (likely easier when getting hints from salvaging) will it become a guide-able recipe.

    • 96 posts
    December 2, 2020 9:28 AM PST

    I like this concept a lot. As a person who usually never gets in to crafting, I could see the fun in this. However, if it becomes too overbearing, the rewards would need to be substantial enough to compensate. Definitely would need balancing (but what system doesn't?!). Cool thoughts Trasak


    This post was edited by Neyos at December 2, 2020 9:28 AM PST
    • 1315 posts
    December 2, 2020 11:07 AM PST

    Neyos said:

    I like this concept a lot. As a person who usually never gets in to crafting, I could see the fun in this. However, if it becomes too overbearing, the rewards would need to be substantial enough to compensate. Definitely would need balancing (but what system doesn't?!). Cool thoughts Trasak

    If I were designing crafting progression (looks at Nephele) I would try and break up crafting into multiple sub parts without a true central crafting level, or atleast one that is just a title or quest gate.  If that were so then you could award a small amount of experience towards each check you successfully make with a crafting technic (maybe even a small amount on a non critical failure). 

    So if you fail at a later stage in the processes and need to jump pretty far back in the loop you have the consolation that you did still make progression on your crafting technic skills.  By the time you have the challenging item finished you will likely have gained more experience than if you had never once failed due to gaining technic progresion by redoing a loop over and over.  This is really all practicing is, failing in order to eventually succeed.


    This post was edited by Trasak at December 2, 2020 11:09 AM PST