No, the world is saved by engineers.[/quote]
We can use a sentence like this in the present time. Alas in the past (medieval, renaissance, the usual time of the classic RPG) engineers had very much less impact than today.

BUT!
I think that with some creativity someone can create a story structure also for past times.

You can start out in a poor village. Most RPGs would have you fighting rats, but a poor village wouldn't really have killer rats -- it would have problems keeping enough electricity going. It would have problems getting water. You as a "craft person" could solve those problems. Then when you've seriously improved the lives of that village, someone in a bigger city hears about you and you go there to help solve those problems. You don't kill trogs for loot, you build useful things in exchange for money or other items. [/quote]
I like this.
Maybe you can apply something like this in the past, but maybe if you want a crafter RPG you've more choice in the current times.
The only flaw I see is that usually solving city problems needs a crew and not a stand alone crafter.

Creating a city (past or current time) and filling it with problems (no water, no electricity, bad roads etc) can grant many challenge for a possible crafter player.
Maybe you can also add some "cooperative" challenges.
If you want to add congruency you can use as a setting poor countries with few resources or country after some catastrofic event who needs all the system to be repaired.

Another interesting setting could be the future time. Something like Fallout, with much knowledge, but few resources. And old system who always need to be repaired.

I was browsing around randomly and this thread caught my eye as interesting. I had a thought for you:

Every year, young engineers participate in robot challenges - they have to build robots which are able to defeat some sort of puzzle, run a track, or even fight with other robots. This can be quite an engrossing 'crafting hobby' which I think would be interesting to virtualize.

So how interesting would you find a crafting game where you designed a robot - pre-programming its behavior in order to accomplish a task? The logic, tools, and tricks your robot could use would relate to your characters crafting skills. The major goal of crafting the robots would be to win some sort of competition and the rewards and fame that go along with it... but you could embed this game in a larger world where the crafstmen have to create robots to accomplish all sorts of tasks.

Perhaps there could be espionage engineers, who specialize in building sneak robots which are able to infiltrate enemy workshops in order to steal plans and blue prints from other players. Then maybe someone would have to build harvester robots to go out into a hostile environment and farm needed materials. Then perhaps you might want to make guard robots to guard your harvesters... or attack robots to stop your opponents from harvesting.

I remember I ran a bot in Diablo 2 - which automatically farmed certain bosses for equipment. It was really fascinating to watch. You could set certain behavior parameters in the script to try to keep your character from being killed (I did this in hardcore/permadeath). You could choose which abilities it used, which equipment it picked up, which bosses it attacked, under what conditions it ran away... I'd watch it, engrossed for about half an hour, ensuring everything went fine. And even though everything initially looked good, I often came back later only to find that my character was dead. Apparently a strange scenario that came up defeated the logic of the script. On a rare occasion, I happened to be watching as the catastrophe unfolded.

Currently I'm considering some sort of hybrid of animal breeding and plant growing as one of the main crafting activities. Something where A player has eggs (instead of seeds) but has to actively take care of the egg to hatch it into a creature (like growing plants). But that results in the major question of what the creatures do in the game world, why there would be a demand for the player to produce lots of them, and how the player would be benefited by producing them. From the plant growing side of things, the typical result would be crops, which double as crafting ingredients. From the animal breeding side of things the creatures are usually fighters (although farm animals might produce resources like milk, wool...) But what _else_ might a crop of monsters be good for? In a typical RPG the world produces an overabundance of monsters that the player must eliminate. Could this be reversed? The world might have a shortage of creatures which the player would have to create? Or, perhaps creatures could function as single-use items within minigames, something like using a faerie in a Zelda game as a health pack?

Gamplay related to animated agents:
o Creating them
o Raising them, training them
o Controlling them directly (as PC)
o Controlling them indirectly (e.g. assistant, sidekick, faerie, servants, mounts)
o Having them as autonomous beings (e.g. pets, adventure partner, competitor)
o Having them as enemy

Creation Goals
Suppose the game only allows the player to create the animated agents, but do not allow the player
to interact in the other 5 ways, some gameplay goals are:
o Create an agent that possesses certain abilities
o Create a team of different agents that can perform some task
o Create a number of the same agent to met some quota <--- Perceived meaning of a crop of monsters

Variations in Player's Motivation
o To satisfy a goal that the game defines
o To satisfy a goal that the player defines

Types of Motivations
o Economical (e.g. to sell them or what they can provide)
o Ecological (e.g. to populate)
o Legendary (e.g. to satisfy a legend, to create a legend, to remake a legend)
o Social (e.g. to make something the others like / to make something that terrorizes)
o Situational (e.g. to make something that solves a particular problem: needing something strong, something fast, something that can fly...)

Gamplay related to animated agents:
o Controlling them indirectly (e.g. assistant, sidekick, faerie, servants, mounts)

This might be better stated as "equipping" the agent. In the case of a mount for example you don't really control it, even indirectly, instead you control you and having the mount equipped passively modifies your appearance and/or abilities.


An unrelated thought I just wanted to make a note of here: growing each monster from an egg could be like solving a puzzle. Possibly the type of puzzle where you have to take actions in a correct order. For example, say you can heat the egg or you can polish the egg as two basic actions. A particular egg might require a sequence of "heat polish polish heat" to trigger it to hatch. This puzzle should be of a type where it is not possible to accidentally ruin the egg or waste expensive resources. But it could be possible to use gatherable resources; for example the player could gather sand or grass to make two different types of nest.

Currently I'm considering some sort of hybrid of animal breeding and plant growing as one of the main crafting activities. Something where A player has eggs (instead of seeds) but has to actively take care of the egg to hatch it into a creature (like growing plants). But that results in the major question of what the creatures do in the game world, why there would be a demand for the player to produce lots of them, and how the player would be benefited by producing them. From the plant growing side of things, the typical result would be crops, which double as crafting ingredients. From the animal breeding side of things the creatures are usually fighters (although farm animals might produce resources like milk, wool...) But what _else_ might a crop of monsters be good for? In a typical RPG the world produces an overabundance of monsters that the player must eliminate. Could this be reversed? The world might have a shortage of creatures which the player would have to create? Or, perhaps creatures could function as single-use items within minigames, something like using a faerie in a Zelda game as a health pack?

What if there were some condition that doesn't affect creatures' abilities to live, but inhibits their ability to reproduce? That is, they either can't in the wild or can only at a very low frequency (or success rate). The player could be tasked with breeding the right creatures to keep an environment balanced. This would also have a nice multiplayer aspect to it, as some players could creat an imbalance that would be like a puzzle for other players to resolve. If you have enough different areas, you could have some really nice regional cooperation (or competition), and lots of shifts to keep product prices variable to keep it from getting stale.

There could also be a dynamic in which similar types of creatures are bred, but with variations in stats based on different conditions, like chance or materials used while hatching. Players would look at conditions in the game world, like relative populations, effects of creature populations on crops (needed for some other purposes), and so on, but it wouldn't be quite so cookie-cutter as "boll weeviloids are decimating the cotton fields, we need X creature to keep them under control". Rather, players need to breed the creatures they choose in a particular way to get optimal results for a given situation. Non-optimal results might result in another sever imbalance for other playres to try and resolve. Players could compete for the prestige of producing the best results for their region or faction.

Gamplay related to animated agents:
o Creating them
o Raising them, training them
o Controlling them directly (as PC)
o Controlling them indirectly (e.g. commandable NPC, wingman, servants, pack mule)
o Equiping them (e.g. mounts, shoulder faerie)
o Having them as autonomous beings (e.g. pets, adventure partner, competitor)
o Having them as enemy

Next ingredient in this story - The player's identity will specifically include cleansing tainted, ruined, or otherwise damaged plots of land and subsequently farming them or building on them. What kind of species, race, culture, or personal background would lend itself to a story about cleansing land?

Re:

If you can make a polluter turn around and clean up, there is no relation between the background character and the activity in the game.
There is nothing stopping me from featuring a master swordsman in a babysitting game, or a babysitter in an epic battle. I think it is
more of a matter of what sort of story you want to tell.

Variations on the overall style:
o Historical
o Realistic
o Whimsical
o ...

Re:

If you can make a polluter turn around and clean up, there is no relation between the background character and the activity in the game.
There is nothing stopping me from featuring a master swordsman in a babysitting game, or a babysitter in an epic battle. I think it is
more of a matter of what sort of story you want to tell.

Variations on the overall style:
o Historical
o Realistic
o Whimsical
o ...

I think the relation between the character background and the in-game activity is important to the theme. With your example, taking a character who has been a polluter and converting them to a cleaner would suggest a theme of guilt, repentance, and penance. So yes, it is a matter of the story I want to tell. I don't particularly want to tell a story about repentance. I am interested in bildungsroman stories, magical stories with a positive feel (the world is improved in some way by the player's action), romantic comedy, the player as experimental scientist, and stories which are more or less non-violent and about problem solving and building-up rather than destruction.