Player interraction from crafts

[Jharnul]

This thread is a bit of a

pot-pourri of suggestions, some harder to implement than others, and some still that may already be on the wishlist forums. What they have in common is that they (in my opinion) tend to encourage player interraction in the context of crafts.


You can jump to the bold text for a TL:DR version, or read everything as it comes.

A problem (again in my opinion) on Sylvan Heart is the ease with which any player can have a complete crafter trained in a few days of macroing and gathering ressources or money. This results in a lack of demand for crafting services between players, and a lack of interest for a player to dedicate most of his time and character slots and to crafting.
Indeed, why play a dedicated scribe when everyone has a character somewhere with 120 inscription? On the other side, why try to buy exclusively from player to encourage the crafter's market when there are but a few well-stocked vendors on the shard?
I myself wanted to make no crafter, and buy exclusively from player vendors to encourage them, even if I love crafting. After a long time of trying every vendor teleporter, quite a few of which even have vendors on, and another few having nothing on the vendors, I decided I needed to roll a crafter toon for my needs.
I understand that SH playerbase is limited compared to OSI, but I believe that with a bit of pushing more players may be motivated to stock their vendors (and place even more vendors), and other players will be interested in being customers for those dedicated crafters.

Maybe I write all this in vain, because maybe everyone is quite happy with the way things are (not that I'm unhappy), but I still think it's worth checking what options there are.

Lowering the amount of characters per account: *gasp!* Radical, I know. Still, it is one of the most effective ways to separate the players who enjoy the profession of crafting from those who just want a crafter handy. With like 2 maximum characters per account, you have to set your priorities straight! It's not my vote to do so, but I would be willing to limit the number of characters I can create for the sake of interraction and roleplay. As a workaround, more characters could be available as donation rewards or vet rewards, not exceeding the traditionnal 5, of course.

Crafter secondary skills: This idea aims to make possible different crafter "builds", by giving craftable items more than one required skill in order to craft them. As an example I could use the items already using this principle, like the forge, requiring both carpentry and blacksmithy to make, or musical instruments, that need the carpenter to have a certain level in musicianship. If crafted items require different and varied combination of skills, this will give the players a choice of a "build" to make as a crafter, and prevent a crafter character with all 1200 points distributed in crafting skills to craft everything in the game. Examples for variety are many, but I will list a few:

• Stable Stone (carpentry and veterinary): Make it craftable and off the vending machine, and ask for a rare ingredient to craft.
• Porcelain and Obsidian mounts (alchemy and animal lore): Knowing the physiology of the crafted animals helps
• Some fancy custom dresses (tailoring and anatomy): No completely logical, but it can make some clothing more rare to obtain.
• Wines (cooking and alchemy): Some people would say that cooking is chemistry is anyway

And in the idea of overhauling stuff from classic UO:

• Exceptional Weapons (blacksmithy and the weapon type skill): I did not take the time to weigh the pros and cons on this one, but think of the RP possibility of one particular smith known to make legendary swords, and another who is master in crafting spears!
• Necromancy Scrolls (Inscription and Necromancy): Because the one creating the means to toy with the dead should be as devious as the one doing the toying![/i]
  

I could go on this idea for a long time, but this should be enough to get the gist of it.

Skills that can go above 120, and items having higher requirements: This one is another important change. It would take much longer to raise a skill to its maximum, which would weed out those lazy players no dedicated enough . Change the required skill levels for craftables to higher numbers would even out the difficulty of crafting them for masters of the trade. The other effect of a higher individual cap is that it would take less skills maxed out to attain the 1200 total cap, and give the opportunity to crafters to be somewhat different from one another. For example, if the cap for crafting is 180 per skill, one could not make a character that has all of blacksmithy, carpentry, tailoring, alchemy, cooking, bowcraft/fletching, and inscription, as they would require a 1260 cap, and that is not counting other much needed stuff, like magery and arms lore, to craft decent items.
The equivalent of power scrolls could be implemented to go over 120, which would give more player interraction from trading those precious scrolls. This idea could be applied to much every skill in game, so it would make possible more varied combination of skills for warriors, mages and thieves too, but I will not go there here.

Crafter paths, like a skill tree: This sounds weird, but the idea is taken partly from the Mondain's Legacy recipes mechanics. Recipes are learned by crafters who earn them from quests, or buy them from people who earned them from quests, or other means.
The idea I have expands on this, making it look like a skill tree. For starters, some (most really) recipes would have other recipes as pre-requisites for the crafter to know in order to learn them. Also, some recipes would be mutually exclusive, in the sense that knowing for example the recipe to a ninja smoke bomb (in a recipes path mostly dedicated to stealth and cunning) would prevent you to learn a recipe for a tower shield (in a path meant to benefit knights and/or warriors).
Add to that rare ingredients as prerequisite like in ML, and you have not only a wide variety of crafters that can make different things, but also make gatherers even more looked for to supply the means to craft those.

The housing idea, characters version: Another major, perhaps less radical than others, though. The multi-housing plan proposed by SH is awesome. 5 houses per account allows to make a house for each characters, or 2 houses for one character, etc. But (and I sepecially like that) the fact that you cannot have them all be the maximum house size makes you prioritize which concept you want to be the biggest, and which concept are smaller (less important). Let's apply this idea to charcaters: the first character you create has the standard 1200 cap, maybe the second one too. The third toon you roll, however, has only 1000 total skills, and the ones after, 800. I haven't thought it through very much, it is more of a last-minute idea, but it might work for those who don't want less than 5 characters because of the RP variety this allows, but don't care too much to have all of them that strong. Players who prioritize crafters would have better crafters than other player, and players who prefer adventurers will take on the bigger critters, creating this interdepence that I feel is amiss on SH.

Boosting BODs: This one is a bit simpler than other (or at least it seems that way). It consists of changes made to the Bulk Order Deed system. First, make BODs available for other crafts, such as the bowcrafters, the carpenters and the tinkers. It is long needed in my opinion. Next, make BODs more frequent, like half as frequent, or make craftrs get two each time they can ask for one. Then, make Runic crafting kits have less chance for their maximum results, so that more uses are needed in order to obtain the ideal piece of armor/weapon. This will results in favor for those who want to spend more time crafting, as they will need to complete more BODs to get runic kits, while more combat-oriented players will not really to spend that much time filling orders when they could be spilling monster blood. Warriors will buy more from crafters, and maybe at a higher price. Of course the amount of VSs needed to purchase these kits would maybe need to be increased. Also runic kits for tinkers and carpenters (runic staffs! yeah!) would need to exist.

That's about what I got for now. Some of these ideas suggest a lot of changes and consideration, but I included them anyways, if only because I'm passing the time at work. Also it might make other, better ideas flourish in the mind of those reading it. Some of these will make you think I was dropped on the head when younger, and you might be right (I have very little memory of my childhood).
Feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong, praise me if you think I'm right, develop on my ideas if you think they need reworking, and feel for me if you were also dropped in the head when younger.

Most of all, thanks for reading!

**EDIT: fixed some formatting**[/list]

[Lucian Darkfire]

I deffenatly like the idea of more bods can be got at one time. I liked the shard were i could get a say smithing BOD from every smith in the land, and the cooldown on that particular smith was one hour. Not like here were its any smith you go to it counts as your 1 BOD you can get per hour. I also like the idea of bods for other crafts. And i think it would be a cool idea to add somthing like special masterpiece items as a bod reward. I dont know about low skill cap for 3-5th chars. The specialty items thing would be cool, but im not sure how it would work besides adding a few new weapons for each class and make it to were you need to do a quest to get the blueprints for that weapon. The invididual skill cap to 180, not sure that would be for the best though. Now some of the ideas i like and some i dont, but that dosnt meen you still shouldnt strive to have your ideas implimented.

[Jharnul]

Thank you for the feedback. Note that these are not all ideas I want in the game, but means that I feel could lead to a result I would like in game. The result desired is more interaction between crafting oriented players, and those who favor hunting and combat.

1 smith BOD per NPC smith per town seems like a lot of BODs for one player! I'm not sure I had that much in mind, but if it favors the players who want to dedicate their time crafting, then it might lead to what my post aims.

[Lucian Darkfire]

Well on my old shard you couldn't trade bods in for other bods, so it was basically picking and choosing the ones you want and dont want. But i think it would be cool to see more interaction between crafters.