I suggest looking at how A Tale In The Desert handles their crafting. In order to make some sort of building or item, the player needs to have the knowledge for it. This means going to a school or university and paying for it with some sort of resource. The player can then gather, make, or trade for the resources necessary to make the building or item, or to pay for the next skill.

As has been mentioned, the main problem with crafting systems is that you have to make thousands of useless items to build up your skills. I remember making thousands of arrows in RSIquest... err sorry... Everquest before the fletching skill was useful.

ATITD requires that to learn higher level skills, the player must use some lower level items. This means that the things that new players make can still be of use. For instance I remember spending a couple of evenings gathering grass to make hay so thjat I could trade for a couple of sheep. The other player needed the hay for his camels. Now even though this wasnt too exciting, I quickly moved from that to other things. Now I was able to raise sheep and benefit from trading sheep products.

So, what could the lower level swords be used for?

Well, maybe they need to be used as payment for learning a higher level sword skill.

They could be traded to a tailor for use in a material cutting machine, or a farmer for a thresher.

Other players might need them to learn higher level skills. A soldier might have to pay a thousand basic short swords and a hundred magic longswords to learn Expert Swordsman III.

I guess what I''m saying is to try and think of other contexts that you can use the ''noobie'' equipment for. Don''t just use swords for fighting, or armor for protection. That way the young crafters will find their skills useful at a much earlier stage.

Oh, and ATITD is pretty cheap. Free download, 24 hours of actual gameplay trial, and fifteen dollars a month (IIRC). Give it a go. Since its a crafting game (essentially, though there are a lot of other things you can do) it''s a good place to look at for a different viewpoint.

Someone has been playing too much Ragnaok Online *rolls eye''s*

I like the first idea better, in all honest how about mixing the both.

Just picture this. There is no "real" documented way of finding out the chances of forging a weapon. So how about you have a skill that would give you the blueprint to understanding how a good weapon is forged, and trick is that the luck of success is biased on the combination of the items in specific orders. Just say a sword combines 5 different items, that''s 120 different possibilities of succeeding at forging the weapon. Of course you can''t just have a table of 120 different percents, so the best way is have merging table. Say with forging you have 20 different items you can use for all weapons. Say that metal has a 90% chance to merge with other metal, but metal has a 50% chance to merge with diamonds. So if the item was say a ruby gold dagger and contained gold, copper, ruby''s, and fabric. The best way to merge it would be (gold + copper) + (ruby + fabric) that way the deviance for failure would be reduced.

|8-O omg?!?! ANOTHER MMORPG, when will they learn, I''m have a major headache, cannot.. talk.. much.. longer, vital systems shutting down...

snyp, don't post just to roll your eyes. It's rude and counterproductive.

Jotaf, I think it would be best if the designer put all the "component recipes" in at the outset. Maybe some of them, like "Holy aura embedding" or "Dragonscale working" would only be known by a few key NPCs, and you'd have to apprentice yourself to them for a long time, or earn their trust through questing or creation of a masterpiece before they would teach it to you. So you could be a famous cobbler, making boots for kings and princes and using the most exotic and challenging materials, but when you finally meet the "Boot Guru", he takes you to school, showing you how to use incredibly difficult styles that haven't been used for centuries.

I think a system like this would be great, since it would allow you to BUILD the incredible, badass, magic sword of light and joy instead of just rooting around in tombs or finding it on the corpse of a giant snake.

[edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on May 8, 2004 3:53:54 PM]