Well, I am up to my old tricks :-)

[paxx]

I want to pick your brains to see if there are any crispy nuggets to be had.

So here is the question I am hoping for insight or at least a new way of looking at it.

How would you guys make or wish craft skills worked?

I have looked and pondered about many possible systems, though the fact that craft skills are either.

A.  Repetitive and rewarding the players most willing to bore themselves to attain a high rank.
B.   Done offline and thus rewarding players who are not playing the game
C.  Advance very quickly but have the player ?forget ? how to do what they where perfectly able to do before and that seems downright unrealistic/stupid?but it is an idea :-)


I am wondering how to make them none of the above, yet enthralling and involved?. While some of these aspects we have overcome (in theory) we really have trouble overcoming all of these and was hoping maybe for some new out of the blue ideas?.So I?m open to ideas?

[kinshadow]

Well, just as a case study, in UO skills work by a variation of method A.  You use the skill over and over to increase it.  The harder the item, the greater chance of failure, and the more skill is gained with a success.

Another thing about UO skill system, they used to have a \"power hour\" in which you gained faster in the first hour you were on each day.  This helped out people that played the game more casually.

Later, the moved to a \"Gaurenteed Gains System\" where each failure of a skill increases the chances of a success.  Thus, you are \"gaurenteed\" to gain in the skill after so many uses.  Again this helps the casual player.

IMO, I think both methods are nice, but kind of miss the target of the crafter.  I\'d like something a little more involved in the world.  Perhaps a combination of several methods.

Here are some ideas that I posted in earlier threads:

1) Start off with a variation of (A), but focus on making new items and creating unique items to gain in skill.  People who always make the same simple item should primarily get money as compensation and gain little skill.
2) Complex materials/crafting system for creating diverse items.  Exotic elements and items can create more skill (in crafting).  Maybe a \"method\" system to help diversify farther.  I.E. when making a sword, you choose to fold or simply draw the blade.  Constantly changing methods increases skill.
3) Craft Skill Questing, you are given a quest to make a special item (must find instructions, materials, etc) or large number of items (like UO BODs).  You get a bonus of skill (rationalized by teaching) for completing the quest.
4) The use of \"recipes\",  where by you get a scroll that allows you to construct special items, gaining in skill.  The scrolls are artifacts, but are of no use to anyone besides a type crafter.  This increases trade between adventurers and crafters.

[Aruneko]

Here\'s another idea.

Take the \"A\" category, but make it so that the way you gain skill is mostly through making varying types.  Say you make a dagger the first time, you get a bunch of experience.  The second, less.  And it keeps decreasing until you try to make different weapons.  Also, perhaps you could set up limits, like so:

A smith must achieve 5 skill points in smithying to create long swords, broad swords, and scimitars.
Before they get 5 skill, they must practice by making daggers, arrowheads, and short swords.
And once they gain 10 skill points they can make even more types of weapons, until they begin to be able to make enchanted daggers.  After practicing making enchanted daggers, they can make enchanted longswords and so on.

Confusing, huh?

I don\'t know if this\'ll work, or be interesting.  But the idea is to make small things until you gain very little skill by it, and then start making other things.

[Abemore]

sure, you can go with method A, or...

what about purchasing training?  
or perhaps performing a task/quest with training as a reward?
you can be trained only to the level of the trainer... from there you must either train yourself or seek out the master crafter who lives deep inside a cave somewhere... complete his task, and recieve the ultimate crafting lesson.... but be warned, the master crafter will not train you if your current skill level is not to his approval.

[Aruneko]

Purchased / NPC training is no good.

That way, anybody can just get good without even getting his hands dirty, and muling (exchanging of items b/w one\'s characters) will be more widely done.

[Creathor]

The basis should definately be A but you should throw in quests that raise your skill for variety. Also better tools should raise your rate of success.

[Abemore]

Originally posted by Aruneko
Purchased / NPC training is no good.

That way, anybody can just get good without even getting his hands dirty, and muling (exchanging of items b/w one\'s characters) will be more widely done.

Training can be very expensive and become progressively more expensive as your skill increases, so not just anybody can get good.  Perhaps you will be required to practice your skills in between each training lesson.  During training, perhaps there can be a walkthrough on how to craft, and in further training sessions maybe tips for impoving your skill (strike at more of an angle, give it extra heat, pray to the gods).

Also, perhaps you are easily able to forge many common weapons, but you must be trained to forge other more special types of weapons (crystal weapons, mythril weapons, jagged edged weapons, etc), and few people know how to forge these weapons, and even fewer will train you...


p.s. please explain muling

[kinshadow]

Originally posted by Abemore
Training can be very expensive and become progressively more expensive as your skill increases, so not just anybody can get good.  Perhaps you will be required to practice your skills in between each training lesson.  During training, perhaps there can be a walkthrough on how to craft, and in further training sessions maybe tips for impoving your skill (strike at more of an angle, give it extra heat, pray to the gods).

p.s. please explain muling

Again, as a case study, I will site the only surrently workable MMOG skill system, UO.  In UO, there is 100+/-  cap on each skill and you can buy a skill up to 30 points.  The whole reason behind this is that you fail so often in the first couple of points, it can very frustrating.

In a previous post, I brought up the idea of an Academy, where you can buy \"training scrolls\" (or are given some to start with).  You give a scroll to an appropriate instructor and he gives you a leg-up (+XX ponts) in that specific skill.  I think this should be the limit of training as schooling only takes you so far.

Muling is a concept originally coined in UO.  It means making a character for a very specific skill/purpose to exploit.  An example would be a mining mule, in which, all you train on the person is mining and just sit there (or macro) and mine the max you can for a given period.  Then you\'d sell and give the money to the char you really care about (or pass it off to another mule, like a blacksmithing mule).  The reason they are called \"mules\" is that they do all the heavy work (make money) and you don\'t really have fun with them.  People also use mules to make money on ebay and the like.  Muling is done because it is impossible to have an all around character and it is easier to just start a new one for a specific purpose.  

In UO, muling is only a problem on shards that let you have multiple characters.  Since there is no way to stop this in PS, the best idea, IMO, would be to have multiple intertwined skills, forcing someone to actually develope the char in multiple ways (i.e. your arms lore skill effects your blacksmithing skill).  They have done this in UO, but have yet to get it right IMO.

[Aruneko]

One more thing:  why do failures net you no experience?  I have yet to find a mistake which I didn\'t learn from.  Failing in making a piece of equipment should give you some experience, even though not as much as a success.

[Abemore]

i often learn more from my mistakes...

I still think purchasing training is a great way to get skilled.  You just have to take into account all the money you would have been paying to buy those weapons and make that the cost of the training.  An NPC blacksmith would not want to train just anybody because that would take away from his business, so he would only reluctantly do so if he was greatly compensated.  I think this system would make a macro\'ed mule very close to impossible to create.

you have very intelligent posts kinshadow.  nice work.

[kinshadow]

Originally posted by Aruneko
One more thing:  why do failures net you no experience?  I have yet to find a mistake which I didn\'t learn from.  Failing in making a piece of equipment should give you some experience, even though not as much as a success.

I think there are a couple of reasons that games like UO give so few skill points (or none) for a failure.  One of which is to slow the progession of a skill that prolongs the personal game it creates.  This is very nessecary when there is a hard limit on the skill that you can achieve.  The secound reason stems from macros. When you fail in a crafting endeavor, there may be a downside in that you loose money and materials, thus this limits a macro\'er to only letting the char go for the amount of time it takes to use up their equiped resources.  For skills that require no resources (i.e. hiding, music playing, etc)  a seperate deterant had to be created.  As players chance of failure goes up without food, etc. , then the longer you macro without eating (leave your char while you sleep) the slower your gains will be.  They have a couple other ways to combat the macroing, but I won\'t mention them here.

Now PS\'s skill system does not have hard caps (as elluded in earlier posts) nor will it have inate macroing, so these problems do not exist in the same extreme.  I think crafting (where you loose materials on failure) should give some small skill IF your crafting target could have been accomplished (no intentional failures on cheap items).  Non-crafting skill failure gains should be dependent on enviromental conditions (ie shadows when hiding...could it have been accomplished?) and current position (so you don\'t just stand in the same place/zone hiding over and over.... you wouldn\'t really learn anything after a awhile).  Varying of skill used and intertwined skills would help this too.

Originally posted by Abemore
i often learn more from my mistakes...

I still think purchasing training is a great way to get skilled.  You just have to take into account all the money you would have been paying to buy those weapons and make that the cost of the training.  An NPC blacksmith would not want to train just anybody because that would take away from his business, so he would only reluctantly do so if he was greatly compensated.  I think this system would make a macro\'ed mule very close to impossible to create.

you have very intelligent posts kinshadow.  nice work.

Thanks, I\'m hoping that at least 1 out of 20 of the threads on these boards can be a real discussion.  

In a real apprenticeship (or medeval training)  both the master and the apprentice get something out of it.  The Master gets some of the smaller dirtier work done and an extra set of hands, while the apprentice gets the training he/she wants.  Payment is more focused towards accademic institutions in my opinion.  Perhaps that is the two-fold solution.  You go to the academy to buy up your skill (increasing price and only to a certain level)  and go to a shop keeper to get crafting related quests (apprenticeships).

[Aruneko]

Originally posted by kinshadow
I think crafting (where you loose materials on failure) should give some small skill IF your crafting target could have been accomplished (no intentional failures on cheap items).  Non-crafting skill failure gains should be dependent on enviromental conditions (ie shadows when hiding...could it have been accomplished?) and current position (so you don\'t just stand in the same place/zone hiding over and over.... you wouldn\'t really learn anything after a awhile).  Varying of skill used and intertwined skills would help this too.

Thanks, I\'m hoping that at least 1 out of 20 of the threads on these boards can be a real discussion.  

Hehe, are you inferring that this isn\'t one of them?

When I speak of mistakes, I mean more like the ones involving such things as smithing.  If you create a faulty set of armor, you learn just as much if you create a good one.  Eventually though, making faulty sets of chainmail will not give much experience, only the first few times.

Meanwhile, mining in the wrong place or swinging the pick incorrectly teaches you little to nothing.  It mainly depends on the skills.

And I agree with Abemore, too.  Nice posts.