[MUD-Dev] Crafting/Creation systems

[lynx at lynx.purrsia.com]

On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, Paul Boyle wrote:

> Personally, I think something that gets overlooked is the explorer
> style play that can come from crafting.  The thrill of discovering
> or creating something new noone else has managed to.  That's why
> I'm looking for alternatives to reciepe-style systems, where all
> the possible results have been mapped out in extremis by the
> system designer.
 
> I realize that leaves the possiblity of unbalance items coming out
> of the system.  I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on this as
> well, if anyone's looked at balancing crafted items not by knowing
> the possibilities at the beginning, but by coupling an evaluator
> at the back end of the system to see if the product is allowable.

Have you looked at Diablo II's 'crafting' system?

Items can have sockets (but do not always have them), and a variable
number of sockets up to a limit based on the type of item and the
quality level allowed (i.e. low level monster loot won't reach the
maximum for the item type).

In these sockets you can put:

  Gems (boosts some attribute or confers some extra damage; varies
  in quality)

  Runes (as gems but no variation in quality)

  A combination of runes (which fully occupies the sockets and which
  forms a 'runeword' which is valid for the item type; properties of
  runes plus some additional attributes)

It created a nice market for 'perfect' gems (and for the lesser gems
which could be combined to make perfect gems) and for runes, both
individual (and potentially powerful) runes and runes that belonged
to runewords.

An eventual interesting twist came about when they added a crafting
formula which took three chipped gems (the worst quality, easily
found by low-level characters) and a sword and turned it into
another random sword, socketed.  People quickly started a market
where high-level characters would pay prestige currency (Stone of
Jordan rings, unique items, etc.) for a large quantity of these
gems, which they would then use to repeatedly reroll a high-level
blade until it had the best possible attributes that could be
randomized, then could add perfect gems to the resulting weapon's
sockets.

Adding new formulas like that kept the economy going, that's for
sure.

Now, anyone could craft items under Diablo II's scheme; for some
formulas, higher modifiers would only be available to higher level
characters, but for others, it didn't matter what level or class you
were.  It remains to be seen if it would 'work' for crafting to be a
separate profession for players, so that players would not only have
to accumulate the ingredients, but find a 'reputed' crafter to
transform the ingredients into something worthwhile.

-- Conrad

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