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I'm thinking about ways to implement a crafting system in my game, and I'm trying to puzzle out the best solution for gathering resources to use in crafting. Some of the tenets I'm working off of:

* My system is not going to be super-realistically complex. It's not one where you can walk around and find dozens of different kinds of trees to chop down or plants to harvest. Rather...

* Each gathering skill will have ten experience levels, each allowing you to gather a new material that will make your crafting recipes better.

* I want crafting to be viable as its own path to advancement, if people want to become high-tier crafters I want them to be able to successfully do it without developing combat skills if they don't want to.

It's that last part I'm having some trouble with. The way I see it, there are pretty much two options:

1) You can gather any material from a given resource node, and what you get depends on your skill level. Example: you are in a room and receive some sort of generic message that you're able to mine here - a lowbie does their mining and gets a chunk of copper, whereas someone with a higher skill gets their chunk of mithril.

Problem: there's no reason for anyone to move away from the basic newbie area, so actual newbies trying to either kill or gather resources in the area would have to compete with the entirety of the crafting populace of the MUD.

2) The material gathered is specific to the resource node, with better materials spawning farther away from newbie areas. Example: you can find cotton plants around the starter city, but you have to go to a distant forest to find mulberry bushes that have silk caterpillars.

Problem: having higher-level resource nodes only exist in farther-away areas means they are inherently dangerous and would either force crafters to train their combat abilities to gather them or rely on getting the necessary materials from other people, neither of which is desirable to me.

Any thoughts? I did think of having resource nodes in safe areas near cities that are progressively far away from newbie areas, but while a viable solution to both problems it seems realistically questionable to me - Newbieville has a cotton plantation next to it, and Knightsbury keeps a flax garden and Uber Station has a mulberry patch.

How about a mix? At resource nodes near the city, you have a high chance of getting a common plant like cotton or switchgrass, but a high gathering skill gives you a small chance of finding something rarer. Further away from the city, you're able to find more interesting varieties of resources more reliably.

Now personally, I'm not really too into crafting so I'm not sure who exactly would want to level exclusively by crafting. Maybe give gatherers an easy run away from monsters, like if they're not wearing heavy armor. Maybe you can use some ingredients to cook up a pungent scent or attractive lure to keep the critters away.

Ultimately, you do need some kind of risk and reward, otherwise it's probably not very exciting crafting items.

Now personally, I'm not really too into crafting so I'm not sure who exactly would want to level exclusively by crafting.
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Ultimately, you do need some kind of risk and reward, otherwise it's probably not very exciting crafting items.


Well, you'll just have to take my word that they exist :) I've played a number of games where I just wanted to play with the crafting systems, and for some people that's what they look for in games, rather than the combat.

That kind of gameplay is not based around risk and reward, but around the interactions of selling your wares, forming relationships with buyers and being part of an economy.

That's not to say there can't be any kinds of tradeoffs, but it would be in a chance to make an subpar or particularly excellent item, not in physical danger to their character.

Suggestions:

1) If you're using a level based system for characters (not for the crafting levels), you could easily have them level up from crafting the same as fighters would from combat. This would eliminate the scenario where the crafters would be at a disadvantage trying to reach higher level materials in more dangerous areas. Additionally, you could allow crafters to make special, powerful armors and artifacts that would allow them to run right past traps and monsters without taking too much damage, so long as they don't stand around too long and try to fight. After all, there's a difference between "combat" and stumbling through an area, oblivious to the beating you're taking.

2) Have an option of buying the raw materials (either player driven economy or at NPC shops), for the people who just want to make stuff, without the hassle of navigating dangerous areas to track down the components.

3) If crafters are expected to be more financially wealthy than fighters (surely you'd get more for selling fine wares than from picking up stuff off corpses), then you could allow them to hire NPC bodyguards to protect them through dangerous areas. Maybe they could even have an option of hiring NPCs to go gather raw materials for them. This point provides an alternate to each of the above.

4) Finally, I would definitely recommend that you spread the materials out across the world. If you leave them all in one place, not only will players cluster in the beginning areas, but you might as well not build anything else. If it's not going to be explored - why bother?

1) If you're using a level based system for characters (not for the crafting levels), you could easily have them level up from crafting the same as fighters would from combat. This would eliminate the scenario where the crafters would be at a disadvantage trying to reach higher level materials in more dangerous areas. Additionally, you could allow crafters to make special, powerful armors and artifacts that would allow them to run right past traps and monsters without taking too much damage, so long as they don't stand around too long and try to fight. After all, there's a difference between "combat" and stumbling through an area, oblivious to the beating you're taking.

2) Have an option of buying the raw materials (either player driven economy or at NPC shops), for the people who just want to make stuff, without the hassle of navigating dangerous areas to track down the components.

3) If crafters are expected to be more financially wealthy than fighters (surely you'd get more for selling fine wares than from picking up stuff off corpses), then you could allow them to hire NPC bodyguards to protect them through dangerous areas. Maybe they could even have an option of hiring NPCs to go gather raw materials for them. This point provides an alternate to each of the above.

4) Finally, I would definitely recommend that you spread the materials out across the world. If you leave them all in one place, not only will players cluster in the beginning areas, but you might as well not build anything else. If it's not going to be explored - why bother?

It's fitting you should respond with suggestions when we spent some time the other evening discussing your crafting system :)

1) I'm not using a level-based system - characters' ability to survive in combat depends on weapon and stance proficiencies and Offense and Defense skills, all of which only improve with use. The deterrent items are not a bad thought, but it's hard to reconcile having something like that in each category of crafting skill.

2) This will definitely exist, but I'd like you to be able to gather anything you want to use rather than requiring you sink part of all profits back into procuring resources.

3) I actually like this idea quite a bit. It has a bit of 2's circular economy, but it's more hands-on and the code already supports characters having multiple instructable minions. I think. I'll have to check that.

4) Well, everything will be explored by the people who want to participate in combat as they'll need higher-level opponents to increase their skills, but I definitely want the various resources to be spread out, as I mentioned originally.

I like the notions of deterrent items and hiring bodyguards, and welcome any more suggestions. It's also true that crafters can devote some of their gained experience into levelling up their invisibility spell or hiding skill, but I don't want it to be necessary for all of them :P

That second suggestion is an "and", not an "instead of". I just know from experience that if you give players only one way of going about accomplishing something, you're going to end up alienating some group (likely the most vocal group). You can easily have the ability to choose between gathering or buying your resources without worrying about the buy option unfairly requiring that you sink your profits back into procurement. Think of it like this - time is money. That is, you're paying for the time you saved not going out to gather the resources. This, in turn, allows you to spend more time crafting, and thus make more money. It shouldn't be too difficult to balance out the net gain from the two methods. The only difference is that one is entirely producing, and the other is split between procurement and production phases. It would just be left to the individual players' preferences.

(Comment added by Lyanic on Fri May 22 16:45:17 2009)

The sale of raw materials also adds a potential element to a player driven economy, perhaps even allowing for players to choose only the procurement phase.

I understand the benefits of being able to buy materials, and do plan to make them available in that fashion, I just don't want it to be the only resource for crafters. My fear is having the game be WoW - one of the best crafting systems I've played with, but you can't do just that, you're required to level your character.

It's required both by the skills, because the levels within the crafting skills have character level requirements, and by the resources, because the ingredients for higher level recipes only can be found in higher level, more dangerous areas. These things were a big turn-off for me when I played that game, and so I'm trying to think of ways around it in mine.

Right now, the most plausible ideas seem to be to have garden areas attached to different cities, and then allowing players to hire bodyguards or train up their sneaky skills if they want to go out and explore for them.

Guessing from your view points on area-difficulty-reward ideas, more rewarding areas have a reflective higher chance of dying from danger.

What strikes me is your want to separate fighters and crafters into their own tiers of achievements and leveling, and yet, the assumption is that you have to put high quality materials in very dangerous locations. That, to me, is simply not necessary.

Out of curiosity, why are you suggestins that high quality materials MUST be located in high danger areas? If you design resource and crafter characters around gathering said resources, why not simply go an easier route:

-Higher Quality is more rare - add a random factor in the code.
-Higher Quality requires higher skill levels and abilities. If you are a new resource gatherer, and you have found high quality materials, you will only harvest low quality materials.

Dratgard wrote:
Out of curiosity, why are you suggestins that high quality materials MUST be located in high danger areas?

Simple: I am not. My post above was describing the crafting system in World of Warcraft which, despite its down sides, is the best I've played with so far. I specifically listed having high quality materials only available in high danger areas as one of the things I didn't like about the system.

What I did say was that I wanted to encourage exploration and movement even for crafting characters, rather than implementing a design that encouraged them to sit around in their starting town forever. There are also good RP reasons to support higher-end materials coming from more exotic/dangerous places: you want to craft fireproof armor? You'll have to get lava-touched iron from the dragon's volcano. Want to make a potion that will cure wounds as quickly as you receive them and forfend death? You'll have to brave the faerie's forest for a sprig of felerik.

This just means that I'll have to make sure there are ways for non-combat characters to survive journies, using stealth skills or hiring bodyguards as suggested above.

You might consider more of a combination. Let gathering be level based, but actual crafting wouldn't be. Let them trade with each other. In terms of RP, this still fits. If you want to be a craftsman but can't defend yourself enough to get what you need, then you just need to purchase materials from people that can gather it themselves.

What about balancing to ensure prices are proportional to the difficulty of getting the item, etc.? Let supply and demand determine it. If you think something is too cheap or too expensive to be reasonable, then you can change the rarity of the item.

How will a newer crafter buy the more expensive materials if they are poor/broke when they first create a character? The wouldn't. You have to make money by being a low end craftsman until you are good enough to make bigger items which use harder-to-get materials. If you get to this point, and had a successful 'business' up to that point, then you won't be broke. Players could also 'bank-roll' a crafter for promises of X% of their profits.. all player-to-player contracts witout IMM intervention. What if someone breaks a contract? Then that sounds like a good RP reason to PK the person, or hire someone to do it for ya. I guess some of these suggestions really depend on what limitations you have on your MUD.

What I did say was that I wanted to encourage exploration and movement even for crafting characters, rather than implementing a design that encouraged them to sit around in their starting town forever. There are also good RP reasons to support higher-end materials coming from more exotic/dangerous places: you want to craft fireproof armor? You'll have to get lava-touched iron from the dragon's volcano. Want to make a potion that will cure wounds as quickly as you receive them and forfend death? You'll have to brave the faerie's forest for a sprig of felerik.

This just means that I'll have to make sure there are ways for non-combat characters to survive journies, using stealth skills or hiring bodyguards as suggested above.

It seems to me that if you want crafters to be distinct from warriors, you need to think of putting obstacles in the path of materials that require high-level crafting skills to circumvent, not high-level combat skills. You want to engineer things so that a high-level crafter finds it comparatively simple to collect them, but a high-level fighter finds it just as difficult as a low-lever crafter.

Making the areas "dangerous" is therefore probably not the way to go - particularly not littering them with dangerous monsters. That makes the materials accessible to warriors, not crafters. Stealth doesn't seem like the way to go either - again, that makes te stuff accessible to thieves rather than crafters.

Instead, how about adding a whole swathe of crafting skills which pertain to the gathering of materials rather than the actual making of the final item? So think about mining skills - the ability to detect iron ore, the knowledge of how to make a tunnel that doesn't collapse, how to avoid fire-damp and choke-damp (methane and carbopn dioxide) below ground. Think about knowing how to burn charcoal and how to quarry limestone. All of these things are necessary in smelting iron ore. Then put the high grade ore in places where only the most expert miner can reach them safely, while the average warrior would just blunder in with a lit torch and blow himself up the first time he hits a methane pocket, or bring the tunnel crashing down on his head because he doesn't know how to set a pit-prop.

Similarly, botanical crafting skills would let you recognise and avoid poisonous plants in forests where a warrior will get painfully stung or end up hallucinating when he brushes against the wrong kind of fungus.

> Making the areas "dangerous" is therefore probably not the
> way to go - particularly not littering them with dangerous
> monsters. That makes the materials accessible to warriors,
> not crafters. Stealth doesn't seem like the way to go
> either - again, that makes te stuff accessible to thieves
> rather than crafters.

That's a good point, but it does raise another question: How good is the craftable equipment relative to looted equipment?

If crafted equipment is desirable by warriors and thieves (which seems likely, or they wouldn't buy it) then that suggests a dependency - the warriors and thieves need the crafters to a greater or lesser extent, because they (presumably) can't craft their own equipment.

I don't think it's unreasonable to make the dependence two-way, and have certain resources that can only be gathered through combat or stealth. The dependence could even be made circular - warriors gather resources that can be used to craft items for thieves, who in turn gather resources that can be used to craft items for warriors. This could even provide the basis for a simple economy.

The OP has stated that he wants crafters to be able to gather their own resources, but is it necessary that they can gather all resources on their own? If so, what is their motivation for selling the equipment they craft? What do they spend that gold on, that they can't just collect or make themselves?

Instead of using quotes, I'll just say that I agree with KaVir. Also, the an issue that would come up very quickly is that making crafters "sneakier" or allowing them bodyguards will make combat players that choose to craft also get these attributes. Now when a warrior (or anybody combat-designed) wants to get through the beginning of an area towards the larger boss-like mobiles that carry the rarest equipment (not materials, equipment), they can sneak by a lot of the mobiles and hire bodyguards to help them survive much easier until they reach the "big guy" they are after. Obviously this could be prevented with building areas in a specific manner (including some form of scripting, even standard MPROGs could do the trick) but that would mean you probably have to go back and adjust a majority of your current areas. Well, this is just something to think about.

I still think that, in an RP sense as well as to support fair game play, some materials should be harvested by craftsmen while others require combat skills. The body guards these craftsmen hire are fine for RP, but to make sure it's balanced, let them just hire actual players (form a group). A player would probably be a far better bodyguard anyways, being able to think for itself. Things like cotton, you could even allow to be planted. This may be best handled with mob scripts, where a farmer goes around planting crops, and craftsmen that are skilled in 'cotton harvesting' could go pick it after X hours. Lots of possibilities that relate to the real world. The more something is based on real life, other than the time factor, the more likely players will play it as just a craftsmen. Pure craftsmen characters probably wouldn't venture into the side of a volcano for a material though. They would hire someone good at handling such situations to do it for them, perhaps giving them part of the reward (whether it be crafted items, or just some of the gold they make by selling it).

I think you get the point, so I'll stop there.

I'll throw this idea out there since I am surprised that nobody else did. If you really want to encourage people to explore, create a depletion system for each area where one may gather crafted materials. It encourages multiple crafters to spread themselves out, does not require that you have to use dangerous areas if you don't want to, does not necessitate combat and is flexible enough to encompass any of the other ideas I've noticed on this thread.

(For those not familiar with depletion systems)
A depletion system creates a specific quantity of material within an area. As people draw from this quantity (by resource gathering) their probability of finding more drops. Leaving an area alone would allow the quantity to recover. This encourages crafters to seek out areas that others do not use often for crafting... a private 'stable' of areas that they like to use. As more crafters show up in the game, it becomes more important to journey afield in search of more remote places to deplete. If you make depletion gradually drop the odds of materials being found, it's not immediately obvious to people what's happened and after they hear Field B has better drops, they migrate. Many will not realize how the system works for quite some time if you don't tell them, and those that do will become nomadic to stay ahead of the curve.

Just my 2 cents.

Another point I thought would've been addressed by now that hasn't is that of simply separating areas. For example: in almost all muds there are areas, and the nondescript landscapes between them, for instance, beaches, plains, minor forests and rivers. Assuming areas in your mud have a single entry point, you could simply set up resource rich "nodes" around certain areas that permit crafters to gather resources without encountering too many high level mobs. For example, there is a particularly high level city to the east, and a cliff to the west. A narrow pathway winds around the edge of the cliff, and, ironically, this point has heavy amounts of silver to mine. The crafter can then make a decision, risk the city and walk to the other side of the area, go along the cliff, with the added benefit of potential silver with the risks of falling off the cliff or bein spotted by hostile guards on the outer wall. It adds a sensible way to navigate arou fighter and thief specific areas while maintaining a certain level of risk.

(Comment added by Sevrior on Sun Nov 22 15:04:45 2009)

That'd be around also.