I'd like to pose a few questions to get some opinions on Item Crafting. Feel free to give your two-cents on any of the questions or add in something that I've not thought of.
As an example, lets assume that this is for an RPG where weapons and armor can only be crafted or purchased (Slimes do not carry Broadswords...).
How many things can I craft?
Would you prefer it if you had a vast number of items that you can craft, or a smaller number that is a little better than the ones you can purchase.
How many different materials will I need?
Would you prefer only a few unique materials (3-4) or a lot (5+)?
How will I gather my materials?
Would you like to go off mining to gather your ore? Perhaps you would prefer to simply purchase your materials from a vendor, or even have all materials dropped by specific enemy mobs? How about a combination?
What about crafting 'Special' items?
Would you like to further boost your items power by being able to craft a special version of it? Perhaps by adding a unique material dropped by a boss or something?
How do I discover new things to craft?
Would you like to find recipes and formulas from somewhere or simply have all all items available? (See next question also)
How will I level my crafting skill?
Do you really want to? Or would you prefer to be able to craft any item as long as you have the materials? Perhaps you have a different sort of restriction in mind, such as being able to craft whatever you are able to equip?
What about success rates?
Ew, but I had to ask. Does anyone really like having the chance that you will fail to craft your item and thus lose the required materials?
Where can I craft items?
Should you have to travel to a crafting area in a town, or would you prefer to do your crafting on the fly while you are out exploring?
What about enchanting?
Should enchanting be a completely seperate system or should the two be tied together? Should there be restrictions on what enchantment you can put on certain items? E.g. Add a FireShell to your materials when crafting to give your sword +2 Fire Damage. But will not work for a Dagger.
Anything I forgot?
Give your opinions on anything I have left out. Perhaps your experiences with some other good/bad crafting systems.
ID:1347759
 Aug 8 2013, 7:28 am
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Being able to buy materials is kind of lame. It's stupid for rare materials because they should be something they player has to go get and common materials don't make any sense to include in the first place. Buying fake iron and crafting a fake sword isn't exactly the most interesting activity in the world. At least when it's a mithril or adamantium sword, you have that "better item" factor.
There's a point where you can have too many items/materials/whatever, but it's not something to worry about. Add more content but be ready to cut useless stuff out. What's "best" is just what you like. There's some things that are factually good or bad, but mostly what you're going to get is just other people's preferences. If you follow them, you'll just get bored since you're making a game other people like, not the game you like. I'd suggest playing other games with crafting systems and seeing which ones you like and then tweak and mix them to your tastes. No reason to reinvent the wheel. Ones I personally like include Cataclysm, Wayward, Stranded, and Magicmaker. Enchanting is more rare sadly, but a general system like you'd find in the Elder Scrolls series is at least a good place to start. | |
I feel as long as each item has an actual purpose, I'm fine with having hundreds of items. But it's its something like HP potion +10 hp, then HP potion + 20 hp, followed by hp potion +30 hp- you could just make one HP potion increase health by 25% and call it a wrap.
It would also be cool for items to have multiple uses, for instance a health potion that could be a restorative to race X but a sleep inducing agent to race Y. I also prefer for my stats to increase as I'm doing something in terms of skill. It's also nice to be able to get trained in an ability- like in Skyrim (not sure why many other games don't do this) since usually getting the money for training can be just as much of an adventure as spending x hours to gain +1 level in said skill. | |
Dariuc wrote:
I feel as long as each item has an actual purpose, I'm fine with having hundreds of items. But it's its something like HP potion +10 hp, then HP potion + 20 hp, followed by hp potion +30 hp- you could just make one HP potion increase health by 25% and call it a wrap. I'm in general agreement on this. Although there's something to be said for mixing potions with more efficacy with greater skill, you don't really want 200 different potion strengths running around. One option for this would be to classify potions by relative strength for the player carrying them. All "weak" potions could stack together, and when stacking you could effectively mix them so their "dosage" changes. You could account for rounding error when "destacking", e.g. anything that would split the stack such as using or dropping or destroying some. | |
Lummox JR wrote:
Dariuc wrote: Also, you could simulate a "potency" factor by making better potions last longer per volume. (the player takes less of it for the same effect, thus, a same-size bottle will last longer) In this scenario, all health potions (for example) would give the player the same HP boost (25%, perhaps), but those potions created by less-skilled hands might require the player to chug the entire contents of the bottle, while the better potions may last multiple uses. | |
Go and play Legend of Mana. To this day I have never seen a crafting system that surpassed it.
I cannot explain it all (there are hundred page documents written that cannot explain it all). But here is how the basics of it went. You selected a material and type of item to craft. Each material had it's own modifiers. Such as attack, weight and so on. Every item type had modifiers too. If you picked Iron which has 5 attack, and a dagger which has 2 attack, you get an Iron Dagger with 20 attack. While a steel dagger might have 15 attack. Or an Iron Sword 15 attack. Once the weapon was made, you could reinforce it. There was hundreds of items for this, and all of them had several properties. The first was energy. Everytime you reinforced an item, it gained energy. Each item has it's own energy value and each material the item is made from has resistance to energy. An Iron Dagger might have 10 energy resistance, so an item that gives 20 energy only gives 10. It becomes increasingly hard to increase energy if the item being upgraded has high resistance to energy. You cannot keep adding items to keep increasing the energy amount. You either use items with higher energy, or make an item with lower energy resistance. Certain items impound this energy to your item. This item gains elemental levels based on the amount of energy it has when this process happens. However, the material the item is made from has resistance to energy, so 100 energy might give you 5 fire levels, or only 2 depending on the material used. A lot of items had "enchantments". When you reinforce an item with one of these, if you meet the requirements that enchantment is added. For example adding fire element attacks to a sword might require level 5 fire on the sword. If you don't meet this, then the enchantment isn't added. Finally, certain items have their own modifiers. An iron sword might have 15 damage, if you add an item to it, this item gives it a bonus to damage. There is a limit on the number of enchantments and modifiers that can be added to an item. Not all enchantments and modifiers are positive. The items overall power (damage for a weapon, defense for armor) is based on the items base type and it's base materials properties. Then any modifiers are added, then this number is increased based on the number of elemental levels it has. This entire system might sound weird, but it works extremely well in the game. Someone who has knowledge of this system can take 10 items, and make an amazing sword. Someone who has no knowledge can take 200 items, and make an absolutely useless sword. The entire system is based on the players knowledge and skill. How good or bad the item you want to make is entirely up to you and how well you understand the system. | |
The Magic Man wrote:
Go and play Legend of Mana. There have been a few people who have told me to play this game, I guess I have a reason to now. It sounds like quite a good system, although I'm sure I'll understand much more clearly once I actually play the game. | |
Variety is always better. The greater variety of everything in your RPG (monsters, weapons, terrain, etc.), the better.
Skyrim uses about a couple dozen, mostly various metal ingots, gems, then leather and dragon bones/scales. Again I'd go with the variety rule. More variety also means that if materials are overall relatively scarce, crafted items will be very very different among your player base.
Absolutely a combination. I would also recommend managing the economy somewhat, preventing certain overused materials from dropping or showing up in shopkeeper inventories. Having sinks for anything that can clutter up your world is a really good idea.
Yes. I like the idea of working in enchantments as well, whether at creation time or later.
Knowing how to craft everything seems unrealistic, but on the other hand you have to assume a character in an RPG will have seen swords, staves, shields, etc. and knows the basics of how they're constructed even if they lack the skills to replicate them. I'm thinking that knowing all the "recipes" is fine as long as there's no real innovation (e.g., inventing a whole new class of weapon), which is kind of a difficult thing to do anyway.
I prefer the notion that you can craft anything, but item quality is impacted by your skill with the materials and/or the type of crafting (e.g., that type of item) in general.
I think the chance of losing the materials outright should be low, but should also depend on the materials. Losing iron or steel in the process of working it seems really unlikely, but silk is something you'd cut or sew, and if your work went awry you'd have to start over.
More often than not, however, failures would not be complete and it should be expected that with low skill you'd just make a really crappy item. You might be apt to burn some leather or screw up cutting some linen your first few times around though, and those materials might need replacing. Fail on a per-material basis, and make them much less common with each successive level.
Depends on the item type, I'd say. Different things need different tools to work. You can sharpen a sword with a stone, but you can't mend it without an anvil. If you have the right tools you can probably mend armor in the field.
A sword and a dagger are pretty similar; either the effect should be the same or should be proportional in some way, but not limited to just one of them.
Enchanting while crafting is the more Tolkien-esque way of doing things, working in blessings and whatnot as part of the material shaping process.