NWN2: Crafting

[Overfilled Cup]

I personally would not want crafting that did not support masterwork but beyond that I dont mind it being DM controlled.

[TheCrazyGoblin]

... someone will figure out how to Our Ford those first two steps and double thier wealth every 7.5 hours.

So, iaw the APM they are dealt with.

Why is that a reason not to have crafting.... punish everyone for what a minority might do?

[Fionn]

If we expect to see the arms race aborted, we'll tightly control the supply of magic items. Allowing even minor permanant magic items to be crafted with no direct DM oversight is sure to see the value of what can be crafted lowered. This will lead to peeps *needing* better gear to deal with the beefed up mobs that were made to deal with all the crafted magic items....

I've little issue with a system that allows crafting of mundane & MW items as long as we tie the wealth created to time crafting. For any item with charges or properties, we need to control quantity via DM dropped (or at least scripted rarity) reagents. Crafting Alchemist's Fire is fine. Crafting 500 bottles so your party can flambe the Orcs is not.

Why is that a reason not to have crafting.... punish everyone for what a minority might do?

history shows us a wide variety of PWs over the past decade that have been ruined by crafting. I'm pretty sure every one of them thought they had it 'right' this time until their economy ran amok.

[dergon darkhelm]

how about crafting tokens?

just like the loot tokens that are dropped --- they could be turned in for the eqivalent craft item, but couldn't be over abused

[Smoothie]

If there was armor and weapon wear and tear and breakage, then I could see having adventurers have some skills to maintain their equipment. However, historically speaking, artisans (crafters) generally did not become wealthy, but they do in many of the crafting systems out there.

Becoming skilled in a craft would take a long time. People were coopers, blacksmiths or bakers. They were generally not cooper/baker/scribes or blacksmith/alchemist/warriors, which is what you would see were we to adopt crafting. It's not to say that blacksmiths couldn't fight, but they were usually not trained well enough to do both well.

Of course there are stories of the blacksmith becoming the hero, but that would be every hero if we adopted crafting.

This is not to say that adventurers can't do jobs. Warriors can chop trees and wizards obviously might be suited to alchemy or scribing. This is probably easiest and best left to the dm's.

The thing is, adventurers should be avoiding work. They should make a lot of coin from an adventure and live off that. Why work so hard to do something you can pay someone else to do better? Adventurers should be spending their time training in their chosen specialty. More statics to keep adventurers adventuring, I say!

Another thing, if you play a noble... Nobles don't work! That's why many poor nobles would become highwaymen. They had the weapons and skills to use them and to get a job was unimaginable.

So, what we can do as adventurers is go out, brave the wretched goblins that have taken up residence in a mine to clear the way for miners, escourt the woodsmen to the duskwood grove and stand guard while they fell some trees and prepair to have them dragged back to town. So, this would mean dm's running things or static quests.

A profession that does make a lot of money is the merchant. PC's can do this to some extent but, money made from big operations should go back into money sinks (buying land, keeping up/improving the land etc. NOT buying a sweet kit).

Merchants also make great sponsors for beginning adventurers. Look to them for static and DM'ed quests/jobs.

Adventurers don't let adventurers craft!

edit: I do agree with whoever said that rogues should be able to make traps, bards instrements and rangers arrows. This should be dm'd or scripted to make a skill check along with some checks to make sure it's not used to create wealth.

[Overfilled Cup]

Having PCs hang out in Inns and taverns drinking is what we currently do. Now if you were looking for prospective dogooders to drive the goblins off your land and out of that cave would you go to the drunkards at the Inn..Or the blacksmiths that sported an adventurers lounge where adventurers could hang out.

Also i think most adventurers would dabble some in the forges or tanning or whatever craft may come there way. itleast if they were over 9 Int. It is a way of becoming self sufficient. It would be important skills to have to some degree for there very survival. This proposal adds a ton of static material and RP oppurtunities. The wealth can be balanced and limits set.

[TheCrazyGoblin]

...that allows crafting of mundane & MW items as long as we tie the wealth created to time crafting.

Exactly what I'd like to see, I agree anything to do with magic items must be closely controlled

Becoming skilled in a craft would take a long time. People were coopers, blacksmiths or bakers. They were generally not cooper/baker/scribes or blacksmith/alchemist/warriors, which is what you would see were we to adopt crafting. It's not to say that blacksmiths couldn't fight, but they were usually not trained well enough to do both well.

Bruenor Battlehammer forging Wulfgars Hammer immediately comes to mind and I'm sure there are more instances of heros creating mighty magical items

[Dorn]

Just dont have crafting end up like Avlis is supposed to be woth people just running back and forth to get rich to lead get strong.

The reason this game is about adventurers is that these adventurers are the ones that went seeking another way to fame and fortune than crafting.

If we have people spend a lot of time crafting we should intriduce a 'commoner' class and have them take that instead of fighter of mage or rogue. After all, most of the blacksmiths, potters, leather workers, bowyers etc are 'common' class NPCs

[fluffmonster]

the HDMs have repeatedly rejected crafting. What looks good from the perspective of 1 individual (crafting would give me something to do, a source of income, etc.) is bad when everyone is doing it. To make it work, you would need big controls that make the whole thing look OOC and so people complain about it not being realistic enough...meh. So, yeah, this is an adventuring game, so that's where we should focus our efforts.

P.S. probably the best control is high failure rates. Spend all the time to collect materials and work, only to find you didn't really know what you were doing afterall. A lvl1 crafter is a njub apprentice, can't make it right even 75% of the time.

[Duck One]

If ALFA is to be defined as a persistent world (yes, this is not-so-subtle prod again for more clear definition to ALFA's goal), then crafting would go a long way to bolster the online time of our player base. We need to learn from other projects and professional MMORPG to avoid the issues cited above. Things I've noted:

Make the crafted items have no marketable value to NPC's. Make the only market for such items other PC's. This means the overall wealth of the entire PC base will not change as a result of crafting, but simply distribute it differently to those who work harder, and offer value gains to other PC's in the form of price competition.

Make the PC's spend skill points on their crafting if they're going to do it. Want to make armor, then you hide in shadows skill is going to suffer. The NWN1 engine put in some of these skills, and with some clever programming, they can be adapted to our needs.

Make the availability of raw materials involve increasing level of travel and risk to obtain for high grade materials required for high end goods. This offers the opportunity of the adventuring class to earn some money back as body guards on harvesting.

Locate production facilities close to other PC gathering points (e.g. put the blacksmith shop near the pub where all the PC's congregate). This means that when adventuring opportunities arise, PC's can readily form parties.

Make certain materials server specific (the good iron is on 004 and the good copper is on 009), and maybe even certain production facilities on specific servers (tannery is on 032 and the jeweler is on 021). This creates cross server trade opportunities in certain raw materials and refined goods. Enter the other opportunity for PC's: merchants.

Depending upon how good the database capabilities of NWN2 is, developing a persistent chest / merchant script would be great. This would also help in terms of looted items.

Think of the adventuring side effects. How about a campaign where the evil follower of (insert appropriate divine influence here) has cursed the Moonwood causing all the ash trees that produce shafts from arrows to become blighted, threatening the future of arrow manufacturing. Or a PC merchant gets robbed, and needs the help of adventurers to find the bandits. Or the trade route between two servers has become overrun with orcs causing the supply of something to get cut off.

Bottom line, anything that gets players more interested in their characters and online more often is more plot ideas for DM's to exploit and more players to get involved is a good thing.

[fluffmonster]

"But duck, good iron can be found lots of places, why should my PC have to haul his cookies to one particular server? Its not realistic I tell you, i shouldn't have to go through so much trouble to craft!"

Good ideas duck, but that's not always enough for the people who want crafting the most...the above paraphrase is just the most common complaint to one condition you bring up. There was a debate on the DM boards about just potion crafting, and there was such vehement insistence that it happen a particular way i just walked away from the conversation.

[TheCrazyGoblin]

Make the crafted items have no marketable value to NPC's. Make the only market for such items other PC's. This means the overall wealth of the entire PC base will not change as a result of crafting, but simply distribute it differently to those who work harder, and offer value gains to other PC's in the form of price competition.

I like this idea.

Make the crafted items have no marketable value to NPC's. Make the only market for such items other PC's. This means the overall wealth of the entire PC base will not change as a result of crafting, but simply distribute it differently to those who work harder, and offer value gains to other PC's in the form of price competition.

This should definitely be the case

[Castano]

you can't sell homemade knives to Walmart (insert Euro store here)...why would the smith buy your PC's homemade dagger or sword..he has a store full of them to unload already. Crafting could be useful in a true low wealth world where gear is scarce and you have to make your own. That is not FR.

Regardless my only point is it should not be repeatable and sellable. And ideally not easily repeatable... making 1000 daggers in a day by right clicking a few times sounds like torture. I wouldl like to see it put in ideally as part of a fun static. E.g. go collect materials, bring to master, study under master make item. etc.

If people want to make food and stuff that is valueless....mundane clothes / boots etc. go for it.

[ç i p h é r]

I understand D&D crafting rules to apply in two ways:

1. mundane/masterwork item creation

These would simply fall under professions. They require skills in the specific "profession" to produce the items, but otherwise only material costs are involved in their creation, either harvested somewhere or purchased. It seems like this part wouldn't be very objectionable. This would really be akin to ATS and CNR in the way it would work, I imagine.

Perhaps we can also introduce some kind of skill detioration over time if crafters don't craft often enough to preserve their skill. The higher the crafter level, the more time you need to spend time crafting to maintain the requisite skill.

2. magical item creation

These require a number of things, not the least of which is lots of gold, which seems to be a rather hard thing to come by in ALFA already, and lots of time. It requires casters who have the appropriate feats, that know the spell they wish to imbue on the item, and who are willing to suffer the XP cost to manufacture it. It seems like most of the objections lie here, despite the existence of significant barriers to "productionizing" the process.

I think Duck's ideas here are spot on. In my experience with ATS, the way PC crafters really get wealthy is by selling items repeatedly to NPC merchants. Outside of that, the next best thing is managing the drop rate and randomness of material components so items can't be manufactured reliably or consistently. Introducing money sinks/item wear might also mitigate concerns over craftable items and help tie them back into professions which require skill points and regular focus.

We could even go as far as limiting the number of professions/feats that can be taken by one player so no one person can be utterly or totally self reliant. That at least ensures some interdependencies between players.

But without question, crafting is a lure and helps keep players logged in longer and/or more regularly. I remember days long gone when I would spend many an hour with other PCs organizing mining parties to get to rare materials. They were some of the best of times and most entertaining of adventures. With permadeath, the anxieties of embarking on such missions would be 100 fold. The fact of the matter is that I would MUCH rather pursue in game solutions to player retention than to try and achieve that through downsizing.

[Amar]

The personal proposal i laid out on the table.

http://www.freewebs.com/phenics9/AmarsC ... posal.html

With the CTC team as a whole we developed a better one, but the one above is a personal suggestion to align it with HDM requests.

Neither have been passed. Above is my ideal input for ALFAs crafting.

If someone at all would like to respond and help improve it, it would be one of the first bits of informative feedback any of the CTC team has gotten since the project for a standardised crafting system began.

EDIT: Cant post the CTC proposal, since its private work from a private forum. But i can post my suggestion.