I am trying to think of a way to make crafting a large part of the game. To give more value to player crafted items, and to also create a little realism. My main goal is to create a better social aspect in my game. The idea being that crafters are not skilled enough in fighting itself to go out and fight a pack of monsters, but they can defend themselves if need be(someone attacks the city), and warriors are not as used to focusing on detail and cannot create beautifully crafted items. (side note: Players are heavily encouraged to make multiple characters and/or find a partner to create a child with that has better potential stats(think browser based animal breeding game), players would only spend maybe one/two weeks max on any one character before continuing with the family line. Players are more known for "family" names or last names than personal names, any two people can have the same first name, but not the last.) My first idea was to separate the classes(crafters can't do anything more than basic fighting, warriors can't do anything more than basic crafting), and lower the boredom level of crafting through the use of various mini-games that increased in difficulty. This would promote the social aspect well. Warriors working with crafters to get that custom SuperAwesomeRareFlamingSwordOfDoom made, while crafters need to hire warriors(creating player made quests) to get specific items for them. My friend let me know that was a fantastically idiotic idea and to try again. Because "players wont like being so limited and want more choices in life". So my next idea was not to set a hard limit by making people choose crafting or fighting, but to just limit max "brain power" that can be spend in one area over another. One could have a "pure" crafter or warrior, or be mediocre in both, this gives the illusion of choice and the ability to have "more options" but does it really? Is it necessary to make sure the player is not feeling like he is forced to create one character or another? Especially when he is being encouraged to make friends with someone of opposite class or just join a guild where the two work together? Especially when specific characters don't mean as much as the family on a whole? What do you guys think about all this? Do you think the first idea or the second is better? Or do you think I should scrap both and keep trying? Should the scrap the entire idea of going to such lengths to make crafting a big and fun part of the game? Pretty please no comments on the family idea just yet? Yes there are obvious flaws from what I put up, but tis not the point of the thread. It was to show that players wont be as attached to characters as typical games(therefor, hard limits shouldn't really matter, because switching should not take much effort).

The problem with classes in my opinion is the inability to represent multiple subject talented people. There are a minority of people whom are talented with multiple skill areas. No one has a limit to their brain power. It is such that most people do not want to learn things from the bottom up, while some people can learn to relate one skill to another similar or different skill. When relating different skills together, some people are able to learn other skill areas faster or slower based on how they relate the different skills together. But the possibility to learn something from bottom up is always possible for anyone whom have the time to learn it that way. It is true that adults and children learn differently, but children can learn the adult's way but adults cannot learn the child's way because most of them don't want to learn the child's way or because the child's way is too slow. The adult's way can also be known as parallel teaching, where making a connection between two different subjects to teach at a faster pace. The child's way is known as serial teaching, where teaching from bottom up for each subject separately leading to a slower pace.

The point is to have diversity. You have to make sure the situation is in such that there is no redundancy, and there is a need of necessity of the diversity.

One of the things I need to say is beautifully crafted objects tend to have a lower usability, that is swords with beautiful blades tend to not be able to be used in real life. This realistically attribute is one that you purposely removed.

The generalization I want to point out is:
There are some people whom are skillful at everything, and these people will not like limitations.
There are some people whom are terrible at everything, and these people will not like limitations.
There are some people whom are skillful at one area, and these people want to have classes.
Even though they are not absolute, these generalization are guides to compromise ideas.

Personally I prefer to develop one character for a long time and be able to do everything on that character. If you want to encourage crafting in that kind of set-up you can do it by having a global auctionhouse with no fees, big inventories, and NPCs sell basically nothing so the standard place to buy everything is the auctionhouse. Then you make armor invisible and appearance customization items like clothes, dye, etc. craftable.

But, if you want each player to effectively be a clan, that's interesting. That suggests more of a sim/strategy type gameplay to me - tactical battles which involve your clan's army rather than playing as a single clan member, missions rather than quests, property ownership and farming crops/raising animals. This suggests that the crafting wouldn't be crafting of gear at all, but perhaps 'crafting' of clan members which could be captured from the 'wild', traded with friends, and possibly bought/sold at a slave market. If the player traveled around the world at all, they would do so using a bus, wagon train, rail train, or airship, so perhaps these would be craftable and customizable. And the clan army might need food, ammo, temporary enchantments that increased defense or offense for a set number of battles...

Well not so much a clan, because they would only be able to actively control one character at a time(thought they can switch back and forth). Think sims type control, so nobody is gonna go steal your kids and sell them. I mean actual crafting of items, just finding a way to give the items much more value and keep the market from becoming flooded.

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Original post by Dasha and to also create a little realism.

I'll stop you right there to remind you that for thousands of years, up till around the 1500s, and even later, your 'warriors' in most societies were often the same guys as your blacksmiths, your carpenters, and your other random artisans.


The fully professional soldier that does nothing else, and having nearly only the fully professional soldiers as the fighting force of a nation is a very, very recent idea. And even then it isn't really true as most modern warriors are actually reservists, or short time enlistments. Meaning they do their bit as a productive citizen, then go off to war so they can come back to be a productive citizen.

I got the same problem in game design at the moment, but with ohter options to choose from. We got the following options.

1) introducing different classes (warrior vs crafter)[yours]
2) brain power[yours] or skill point[mine] approach
3) separating crafting skills from other skills [mine]

The third approach is standard in many MMORPGS (WOW,EQ). The first approach is not feasable for me, because a pure crafter would have a too hard life in my game environment.

Well, at the moment I would tend to 2 (brain power approach) which adds some choices for the player and eventually a game is all about making choices.

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The generalization I want to point out is: There are some people whom are skillful at everything, and these people will not like limitations. There are some people whom are terrible at everything, and these people will not like limitations. There are some people whom are skillful at one area, and these people want to have classes. Even though they are not absolute, these generalization are guides to compromise ideas.

Yes, 100 different people tent to like 100 different things, that's a fact, what is the conclusion for game design ?
Make whatever you like, don't listen to other people who want to tell you, that class based games are "unwanted" or don't try to clone successful games like Wow, just make whatever you think is a good game idea and what you want to play yourself. The AAA-game industry is pure mainstream with games degenerating to interactive movies, just free up your mind (sorry for the little rant ;-) )

--
Ashaman

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Original post by Dasha Well not so much a clan, because they would only be able to actively control one character at a time(thought they can switch back and forth). Think sims type control, so nobody is gonna go steal your kids and sell them. I mean actual crafting of items, just finding a way to give the items much more value and keep the market from becoming flooded.

Oh. Well... does not sound very interesting to me. I played sims 1 and 2 because I thought they were very interesting conceptually, but I got bored of the actual gameplay real fast. I've also played Dofus where there are a zillion crafting professions, you can have at most 3 per character, and I had all 5 or 6 of my character slots full so I could have all the professions; in this latter case I mostly had no interest in fighting with characters besides my main, they were just tools and their existence kind of interfered with my immersion into my main character's game role.

It's kind of like comparing a book of short stories or essays to a novel - I'd rather read a lot of story about one main character than quickie stories about a dozen characters, _especially_ if, like with most mmos, there's a lack of different story for 2nd and further playthroughs.

But, maybe if you had a system where people could do clever strategic experiments with their build for each character then test the build in some sort of pvp arena as well as against monsters, that might have an audience. I have a friend who has repeatedly told me that researching and designing builds for how to spend skill points and what set of gear to wear is his favorite MMO activity.

Oh! Right. I should add. With the crafting system, players are only given say maybe 30% of total things that can be created in the game, lots of beginner items and such. Then they must figure out the rest. Mixing different ingredients and such. If they create something with doesn't explode and/or kill off their guinea pig(if it is a consumable), then they take it to the local guild to be "named." The local paper writes a piece about "so and so has discovered this and it has this effect,"(If they were one of the first 10 or so in the town) and the PC alone knows the recipe to the item unless they wish to share it or someone else figures it out. So more risky crafters can become well known for special potions thus driving up business.
Other players can choose to get a job at an already established business and work together, or strike out on their own. A warrior can provide a crafter with lots of ingredients for experimenting if they can get a cut of whatever is discovered, or free items from the crafter(me trying to promote player socialization here).

I don't have a zillion different crafting professions and I wont limit players to choosing one over the other, but I don't think it would be easy monetary wise. Crafting would be similar to running a real business. You buy/rent a shop and both make and sell stuff out of it. Or Make it in your home then sell it at the local weekend flea market(set up sort of like a temporary trading house).

I don't think it will work to create more social interaction.

Firstly, by allowing players to create Alts, they can get any crafting they need done by their Alts.

Second having crafting as a minigame, it does not necessarily involve other players and take up the time of the players. This reduces the time they have free to spend with other players (say using their alts for raiding) without expanding the time the need to spend with other players.

So on one hand you are not giving them a sufficient reason to interact with others, and then taking away the free time they might have spent with them.

I think this will actually achieve the opposite effect.

To create a more social experience in a game, you need to give the player the ability to do so, and then make it worth their while to engage in it.

In your example, there is no real purpose to social interaction. As they can get all their crafting supplies with their Alts much more cheaply, there is no purpose beyond expediency (getting the supplies faster). And, if crafting is fun enough in its own right, then player will want to play that too and they can use the results from that to give to their alt.

What you need is a reward for social play that can not be achieved by using an alt. You can then design a structure around that to allow socialisation play.

Now, I am not saying to remove crafting or any of the structure that you have, only that what you have is not geared towards social play.

My suggestion is to have some form of "competitive activity" centred around social interactions.

In Tudor and Victorian times, the nobility would compete with each other by trying to demonstrate how much money they had by throwing parties, buying rate and expensive objects, and so forth. This competition would often drive them into debt and many a noble house would become bankrupt.

In our capitalistic society, when capital is used for increasing your capital, it can be hard to understand this behaviour. But, in those times money was not seen as a measure of your wealth, but instead it was your social standing that was seen as a measure of your wealth.

If you could implement a mechanic that centred around gaining social status (and costing resources - money, crafting, etc), then this could be used to create a social gameplay.

One mechanic I have toyed around with is competing attributes.

The idea behind this is that you have two competing attributes: Conformity and Variety, and the players are trying to maximise both to gain in social standing. However, because you have to decrease one to increase the other, and the exact it always shifting, then there is never a "best solution" to this problem. It forces a constant shift which players have to adapt to or risk loosing social standing, and the faster players adapt to match it, the faster it shifts.

First of all, what you need is something that you can use to measure the Conformity/Variety of the player in. Using these to create a metric, you can determine the level of Conformity and the level of Variety the player has. These are then used to determine if the player is accepted (Conformity) into the social circle, and if they are noticed (Variety) for promotions and other offers/rewards.

If they are not accepted, they can not get the offers, and if they are not noticed, then they will not be offered the rewards. So the player must, both at once, conform enough to be accepted, and be varied enough to get noticed.

You then have the levels of Acceptance and Noticeability set by the scores of the population. If there is a lot of variety, then you have required level of conformity rise and the level of variety fall. If there is not much variety, you raise the level of variety and lower the levels of conformity.

Essentially you create a supply and demand: If there is a lot of one, then the demand for the other goes up. You can then add in some random shifts to make sure it never stays at a constant level.

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Original post by Platinum_Dragon The problem with classes in my opinion is the inability to represent multiple subject talented people. There are a minority of people whom are talented with multiple skill areas. No one has a limit to their brain power. It is such that most people do not want to learn things from the bottom up, while some people can learn to relate one skill to another similar or different skill. When relating different skills together, some people are able to learn other skill areas faster or slower based on how they relate the different skills together. But the possibility to learn something from bottom up is always possible for anyone whom have the time to learn it that way. It is true that adults and children learn differently, but children can learn the adult's way but adults cannot learn the child's way because most of them don't want to learn the child's way or because the child's way is too slow. The adult's way can also be known as parallel teaching, where making a connection between two different subjects to teach at a faster pace. The child's way is known as serial teaching, where teaching from bottom up for each subject separately leading to a slower pace. The point is to have diversity. You have to make sure the situation is in such that there is no redundancy, and there is a need of necessity of the diversity. One of the things I need to say is beautifully crafted objects tend to have a lower usability, that is swords with beautiful blades tend to not be able to be used in real life. This realistically attribute is one that you purposely removed. The generalization I want to point out is: There are some people whom are skillful at everything, and these people will not like limitations. There are some people whom are terrible at everything, and these people will not like limitations. There are some people whom are skillful at one area, and these people want to have classes. Even though they are not absolute, these generalization are guides to compromise ideas.

I would have to disagree with some points of this, respectfully. There may be some people that are skillful at everything in a game but there is no one on the planet who can literally do everything (be an award winning phycisist, star athlete, award winning movie maker, top selling author, Marine, Navy, and Airforce Major, President of the United States, Czar of Russia, world renowned escape artist, prize hunter, award winning poet, masterful painter, editor for the New York Times, best spoons player ;) etc

Game classes reflects this the best way they can.
It doesn't mean that you have to have a class system but you also don't want everyone to just be able to do everything in the game without some form of trade off, what diversity would you then have?

Back to the question at hand. I do like the idea of having crafters be a character class unto themselves. The question is how do you make them as interesting as the characters that go out and fight the monsters?
I love creativity. But when I play a game I don't necessarily just want to sit in my smithy all day cranking out custom made weapons.
Stiull, classes that specialize in creation such as an actual Blacksmith, Artificer, and Alchemist class is a cool idea. As long as they get some of the adventuring fun in as well.

*I gave Artificing and Alchemy a major part in one of my own projects. Ironically, and I think Platinum might find this amusing, I don't have classes in the project.