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(A blog focusing on the development and design of Norwegian Wood, a privately run Ultima Online-shard - with focus on design-theories, discussing pros and cons of individual features, status-reports from the development process and other tidbits that people might find interesting.)
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Crafting Skills
As an area of Norwegian Wood that will have a large effect on the general ecconomy, as well as decide whether or not the players will eventually be able to take control of everything at first NPC controlled - the crafting skills need to be carefully considered before fully implemented.
I'm not happy with the way normal UO handles crafting - nor the way most other MMORPGs do - which usually follows the same path; The need to create lots upon lots of items to advance in your crafting skill, and in general this is implemented in a way that ultimately bores the crafter to death. UO's carpal tunnel syndrom (or macroing), DAoC's crafting timers which the player sits watching passively, etc. So in this Journal Entry I'll try to talk a little about how we COULD do things differently, and try to provide you all with some idea of WHY I think it'd be better to do it differently. Nothing is currently set in stone, so I'm just discussing potential solutions here - hopefully some of you will comment with feedback, new thoughts/ideas, let us know if we're on the right track or if we should do something differently. Either use the basic comment-feature under this journal entry, or partake in the discussion on the thread at our forums dedicated to this.
Things we should avoid:
Players having to make X daggers to gain enough skill to make X short swords to gain skill to make X chain boots to make...etc and so forth...so that in the end they can finally make the items which are actually useful.
Players falling asleep while passively watching a "crafting" timer alá DAoC.
Less failing? Failing = "grinding". If the player fails at making the item 10 times in a row, it's boring. He should either not be able to make the item in the first place or fail less, perhaps make lower quality items (though again that's likely to continue in the same steps....bad quality? Melt item down to ingots with some resource loss, try again.) Give them a chance to learn something more about the specific item they're making if they fail to make it? Like discovering that folding the metal twice makes it sturdier, etc?
Things we should include:
Ways of ensuring that everyone and their grandmother won't become a crafter. Self-sufficiency = bad in the environment we want to make, since we want players to interact with eachother, depend on eachother, trade with eachother.
Ways of letting crafters seperate themselves from other crafters of equal "skill" by other means than dressing differently.
If not less failing, we need at least to reward failing more than it currently is. Learn skill only by failing? Heh. Perhaps not, but some form of reward for failing which doesn't make it such a pain to bear.
Ways of doing all of the above without ruining the ecconomy and/or fun.
We could make the crafting processes more "interactive" - i.e. taking longer time because they require the player to do a specific (or optionable?) set of actions throughout the crafting process to complete the item. We could give the players various ways of crafting each item - so two players with equal amount of bowyery wouldn't necessarily make bows with the exact same qualities. Bottom line for this though - longer crafting time per item, higher skill gain per item crafted, less failures, less repeating.
Or we could go the "Recipes" way. For a smith to create a longsword, he first has to know the "Recipe" to create a longsword. These could be saved on the character itself, or in a "Book of Recipes" where he keeps all his recipes - which he could then trade/teach others for gold/other recipes at free will. Though to keep someone from getting rich simply by hoarding recipes and selling them, or low-level characters being given full sets of recipes/gold to buy them from higher level characters (who might even be on the same account :P) we could require that the recipe is taught to the other player, and have a cap of "You can max teach any given recipe to X other people." This way they could for instance "Pass on" recipes to apprentices etc - while not really giving away the recipes to every stranger they meet on the road.
We could also have a "Recipe-Tree" of sort - where you can say, know X amount of recipes at any given time. Lets say you know the recipes for making various types of swords. You could then get hold of "sub-recipes" to make better swords of a given type (or for all swords for that matter), to make them sharper, stronger, etc. And combine these properties further down the Recipe-Tree. This way two Grandmaster smiths may not have the same capabilities, and you might eventually see two GM smiths cooperating in a store or guild - where one is damn good at making armors and the other is damn good at making weapons - but neither really knows the other's craft :)
Also - the recipes further down the "Recipe-Tree" shouldn't necessarily make the first recipes obsolete. Perhaps make the newer recipes complement the older ones instead - or have the quality of the old recipes increase depending on the amount of skill/other recipes the smith has/knows.
Or determine quality based on how "well" the player executes the crafting process itself...like does he heat the metal enough, too much, too little? How long does he polish the wooden crate he just made (ok bad example, can't think of anything else).
How would you get these recipes? Hm. Could start by becoming an apprentice for an NPC smith, who will teach you basic recipes while you work for him. Then perhaps as you're upgraded from apprentice you get to choose a "sub-set" of the craft that you wish to go further in - or just a "general" category where you may craft the basic items from every category. Ancient recipes found in dungeons/old dusty libraries? Given by ancient grandmasters who will teach to anyone reaching the right skill-level in exchange for something? Discovered by experimenting somehow? I dunno - unsure about this part :) We need a good way to handle this though, so it's not just a matter of who has the most gold to buy new recipes, or the the best "main" character.
Also, recipes wouldn't necessarily mean that two smiths with same recipes create the same items...we could allow for some ustomization by for instance giving the different crafting materials different "properties", which when combined would make the items stronger/sturdier/better in some ways, worse in others. For instance: Using 3 ingots of iron and 1 ingot of silver when making a sword could give it properties such as.... a little more damage to undead(silver), low durability and heavy weight (iron). And so on.
Question is though - can this Recipe-Tree-system be used in all the crafting skills, or just for specific ones?
What about the functionality of lower-level crafters versus higher level crafters? How would the lower level ones be able to compete versus the higher-level ones for ANYTHING? That is, if they should be allowed to compete at all? Higher level ones usually have better sources of resources, can offer items at lower prices, etc and so on.
The actual crafting processes for each skill? It should certainly involve more than f.instance just using hammer on metal near anvil, selecting item, banging hammer once on anvil - DONE. But HOW, exactly?
What's the best way of handling the actual skill (which would affect what recipes could be learned, the "quality" of the created items, etc) gain? Give X amount of skill for each recipe learned? Give X amount of skill for each item successfully created, and X amount for each failure? Normal skillgain from 0 to 9.9 in each "level" of the 0.0->100.0 process, but require theory/studies/being taught by someone more skilled to reach each real new level of skill (10.0, 20.0, 30.0 etc)?
Any thoughts?
As an area of Norwegian Wood that will have a large effect on the general ecconomy, as well as decide whether or not the players will eventually be able to take control of everything at first NPC controlled - the crafting skills need to be carefully considered before fully implemented.
I'm not happy with the way normal UO handles crafting - nor the way most other MMORPGs do - which usually follows the same path; The need to create lots upon lots of items to advance in your crafting skill, and in general this is implemented in a way that ultimately bores the crafter to death. UO's carpal tunnel syndrom (or macroing), DAoC's crafting timers which the player sits watching passively, etc. So in this Journal Entry I'll try to talk a little about how we COULD do things differently, and try to provide you all with some idea of WHY I think it'd be better to do it differently. Nothing is currently set in stone, so I'm just discussing potential solutions here - hopefully some of you will comment with feedback, new thoughts/ideas, let us know if we're on the right track or if we should do something differently. Either use the basic comment-feature under this journal entry, or partake in the discussion on the thread at our forums dedicated to this.
Things we should avoid:
Things we should include:
We could make the crafting processes more "interactive" - i.e. taking longer time because they require the player to do a specific (or optionable?) set of actions throughout the crafting process to complete the item. We could give the players various ways of crafting each item - so two players with equal amount of bowyery wouldn't necessarily make bows with the exact same qualities. Bottom line for this though - longer crafting time per item, higher skill gain per item crafted, less failures, less repeating.
Or we could go the "Recipes" way. For a smith to create a longsword, he first has to know the "Recipe" to create a longsword. These could be saved on the character itself, or in a "Book of Recipes" where he keeps all his recipes - which he could then trade/teach others for gold/other recipes at free will. Though to keep someone from getting rich simply by hoarding recipes and selling them, or low-level characters being given full sets of recipes/gold to buy them from higher level characters (who might even be on the same account :P) we could require that the recipe is taught to the other player, and have a cap of "You can max teach any given recipe to X other people." This way they could for instance "Pass on" recipes to apprentices etc - while not really giving away the recipes to every stranger they meet on the road.
We could also have a "Recipe-Tree" of sort - where you can say, know X amount of recipes at any given time. Lets say you know the recipes for making various types of swords. You could then get hold of "sub-recipes" to make better swords of a given type (or for all swords for that matter), to make them sharper, stronger, etc. And combine these properties further down the Recipe-Tree. This way two Grandmaster smiths may not have the same capabilities, and you might eventually see two GM smiths cooperating in a store or guild - where one is damn good at making armors and the other is damn good at making weapons - but neither really knows the other's craft :)
Also - the recipes further down the "Recipe-Tree" shouldn't necessarily make the first recipes obsolete. Perhaps make the newer recipes complement the older ones instead - or have the quality of the old recipes increase depending on the amount of skill/other recipes the smith has/knows.
Or determine quality based on how "well" the player executes the crafting process itself...like does he heat the metal enough, too much, too little? How long does he polish the wooden crate he just made (ok bad example, can't think of anything else).
How would you get these recipes? Hm. Could start by becoming an apprentice for an NPC smith, who will teach you basic recipes while you work for him. Then perhaps as you're upgraded from apprentice you get to choose a "sub-set" of the craft that you wish to go further in - or just a "general" category where you may craft the basic items from every category. Ancient recipes found in dungeons/old dusty libraries? Given by ancient grandmasters who will teach to anyone reaching the right skill-level in exchange for something? Discovered by experimenting somehow? I dunno - unsure about this part :) We need a good way to handle this though, so it's not just a matter of who has the most gold to buy new recipes, or the the best "main" character.
Also, recipes wouldn't necessarily mean that two smiths with same recipes create the same items...we could allow for some ustomization by for instance giving the different crafting materials different "properties", which when combined would make the items stronger/sturdier/better in some ways, worse in others. For instance: Using 3 ingots of iron and 1 ingot of silver when making a sword could give it properties such as.... a little more damage to undead(silver), low durability and heavy weight (iron). And so on.
Question is though - can this Recipe-Tree-system be used in all the crafting skills, or just for specific ones?
What about the functionality of lower-level crafters versus higher level crafters? How would the lower level ones be able to compete versus the higher-level ones for ANYTHING? That is, if they should be allowed to compete at all? Higher level ones usually have better sources of resources, can offer items at lower prices, etc and so on.
The actual crafting processes for each skill? It should certainly involve more than f.instance just using hammer on metal near anvil, selecting item, banging hammer once on anvil - DONE. But HOW, exactly?
What's the best way of handling the actual skill (which would affect what recipes could be learned, the "quality" of the created items, etc) gain? Give X amount of skill for each recipe learned? Give X amount of skill for each item successfully created, and X amount for each failure? Normal skillgain from 0 to 9.9 in each "level" of the 0.0->100.0 process, but require theory/studies/being taught by someone more skilled to reach each real new level of skill (10.0, 20.0, 30.0 etc)?
Any thoughts?
