[PF] MMO-Style Crafting

[cloudjsh7]

So, I'm starting this very post-apocalyptic campaign very soon. The theme of it is this very dirty, grungy, and dusty setting where there is no working economy so everyone is pretty much reduced to scavengers/junkyard scrappers. Gold and money have lost their value and tranactions are all done via bartering and the like.

And in light of that, I wanted to implement a way for my PCs to upgrade their gear by harvesting the materials themselves and taking it to le blacksmith to have him reforge and add enchantments and what-not.

*le gasp!* "MMO crafting in a tabletop? SACRELIGE!!!"

Yes, I know. Before we climb down my throat, I used to be totally against this idea too. But after 7 years of tabletop gaming experience, the classic, run-o-the-mill fantasy setting can get a little stale after a while so I'm just trying to add a bit of a twist on it.

My current thoughts so far:
There are 13 creature types. Killing a creature of a certain type will result in different materials that the player can carve (sorry, 800+ hours in the Monster Hunter franchise since 2004) or harvest to use to upgrade their gear, or simply trade to the tavernkeep for a pint.

Abberations will drop various magic spirit dusts and what not.
Animals can be tanned for their hids, furs, etc.
Constructs can be scrapped for whatever they were made out of.
Dragons... you get the idea.
Fey can be used for their magic essence and stuff.
Humanoids' gear can be salvaged for various metals and leather
Magical beasts can be used for their magically potent fangs, claws, what have you.
Monstrous humanoid (see humanoid)
Ooze? Ooze!
Outsider? Like, everything. Elemental dust, salvagable gear, all sorts of things
Plants (see Dragons)
Undead could yield all that nasty stuff. Like hearts, bones, and the like.
Vermin could be used for their fangs and poisons.

Wanna make your Masterwork longsword into a +1 longsword?
8 ores of appropriate metal, 2 bands of leather, 1 pile of dust from a magical beast or abberation (or something)

"What if I want a specific enchantment? Like 'Frost'? Do I need to hunt a freakin' Ice Worm at level 3?"
No. My goal is every creature type to have a small handful (like 3-6) things that you can get from killing them. More ranks in Knowledge (appropriate skill) will yield higher chance for better materials. Because of the vast number of enchantments for both weapons and armor, I want to keep material requirements fun and flavorful without being too specific.
I understand that creating a system like this will take a bit of work, but seeing as that survivalist-type mentality is the basis of the setting, foraging and scrapping is a key component to the game and I wanted to have fun with it.

I'd love for ideas, even though I'm aware some may balk at the concept for our beloved tabletop RPGs.

[cloudjsh7]

Nobody? Anyone have ideas?

[Thunderfist12]

Wow. Makes more sense that you can get things related to the monster, rather than random loot.

And the whole "bringing back metals to the blacksmith" thing reminds me of Final Fantasy, especially Chrystal Chronicles (probably because I play that one the most, and failed epically to convert it to D&D 3.5).

That being said, great idea!

[Tanuki Tales]

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread. I'm intrigued by what this concept could ultimately yield.

[Deepbluediver]

Nobody? Anyone have ideas?

Twice I've tried to start a group-focus'd revamp of the crafting system. Neither attracted any interest. Its something that just doesn't seem to grab people's attention.

At its most basic, I think the concept can work fine. The hardest part will be writing out the "recipes" for each item or enchantment. Think about a MMORPG, like WoW or whatever your drug of choice is. Just for basic equipment, there are hundreds of different combinations. If you start trying to plan out individual formulas for all the different unique items and spells, you've got quite a task ahead of you.

I might suggest you have some general rule, like "all light weapons are X amount of metal, all enchantments of level Y require Z amount of magic dust" then tell your group that you will allow exceptions or replacements on a case-by-case basis for things that are convincing or make sense. Like, replace the normal requirements for a Fiery Weapon enchant with a red-dragon tongue, or Construct Body-parts give Fortification to armor, etc etc etc.

[cloudjsh7]

...I might suggest have some general rule, like "all light weapons are X amount of metal, all enchantments of level Y require Z amount of magic dust" then tell your group that you will allow exceptions or replacements on a case-by-case basis for things that are convincing or make sense. Like, replace the normal requirements for a Fiery Weapon enchant with a red-dragon tongue, or Construct Body-parts give Fortification to armor, etc etc etc.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Light weapons are 2-4 "ore clumps" (or something), one-handed weapons are 4-6, two-handed weapons are 7-9. Or wood or whatever your weapon is made out of. Light, Medium, and Heavy armor are kind of the same ideas.

You pretty much read my mind. =P

[Maquise]

I'd probably like this system better than the default. Watching, and waiting to see where it goes.

[BWR]

Look at the old magic item crafting rules from Player's Option: Spells and Magic.
Basically, making a +1 sword was an adventure running around trying to find the right ingredients and hoping you don't blow your crafting roll and waste a Constitution point. The more powerful items could easily be a mini-campaign to find the right ingredients to make.

[Yakk]

I'd do a level based system.

Each ingredient has a level. Each ingredient has keywords. The keywords are relatively free-form.

To make an item, you need 10 ingredients of that items level or above. At least 2 of them must be magical materials (leather, metal, etc), and 5 of them must have appropriate keywords (this can overlap -- a material can have keywords as well).

Map item price to level somehow, probably using a hacked up wealth by level chart.

You could also have lower level items requiring fewer ingredients, and have tiers instead of levels of ingredients.

When you make an item, roll 1d10 to see what additional random property gets applied to it. Because random properties are fun.

[cloudjsh7]

I'd do a level based system.

Each ingredient has a level. Each ingredient has keywords. The keywords are relatively free-form.

To make an item, you need 10 ingredients of that items level or above. At least 2 of them must be magical materials (leather, metal, etc), and 5 of them must have appropriate keywords (this can overlap -- a material can have keywords as well).

Map item price to level somehow, probably using a hacked up wealth by level chart.

You could also have lower level items requiring fewer ingredients, and have tiers instead of levels of ingredients.

When you make an item, roll 1d10 to see what additional random property gets applied to it. Because random properties are fun.

I was thinking something similar. I wanted to keep materials interesting and fun to find but not having a billion "recipes" for a very specific enchantment and what not.

I was thinking three "types" of materials
Base Component (X) (basic material) - ore, wood, leather, hide
Catalyst (Y) (basic chemical reactive)- magic dust, essence, inherent "magic" materials
Additive (Z) (material for specific enchantment) - fangs, poison sacs, firestones, monster scales, etc.

For instance, upgrading a +2 dagger to a +2 frost dagger would require 2-4 X materials, maybe 3 Y materials (I said just 3 because it's becoming a +3 weapon), and 1-3 or whatever Z materials. Z materials can be anything from ice herbs, froststones, ice elemental dust, white dragon fang-- any Z material that the DM says would work within reason.

Also, certain materials may have levels or ranks like you were suggesting.
Maybe your +3 frost dagger needs 3 or more rank/level 1 materials like frost herbs because they are somewhat common. But if you had a white dragon fang, you would only need one because its a rank/level 3 material.

[SamBurke]

While I like the idea, nad the freshness of a new crafting system, I'm wondering about something.

Won't this encourage grinding? An activity that's vastly less interesting in tabletop than in online? I mean, what's your goal? What should the system look like post-completion.

[cloudjsh7]

While I like the idea, nad the freshness of a new crafting system, I'm wondering about something.

Won't this encourage grinding? An activity that's vastly less interesting in tabletop than in online? I mean, what's your goal? What should the system look like post-completion.

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. I know what grinding is (see my first post for my clocked hours on Monster Hunter. =P) but I'm not really sure what you mean in this context.

My goal for this setting is to really stress the fact that everyone and their mother are scavengers. The world is just that messed up (there's only one remaining city in the world where all of the races live) and I wanted to highlight the fact that every single person's #1 concern is their own survivability. Thus, scavenging and scrapping is pretty much what everyone does to get by. For the players though, seeing as they will be (unfortunately for them) leaving the city now and again into the utterly dangerous wilds, I wanted them to be able to collect things from their adventure to use as a sort of "replacement" for standard gold and silver.
In the terms of them maybe focusing all of their attention to it- I mean, that's all normal commoners do: salvage and scrap. My goal is for the hunting for materials be a secondary goal for the PCs whatever their quest might be. It's the only viable way of life in this setting. At least, that's what I want to emphasize.

[Yakk]

I would push for tiers, and lower-tier items being relatively useless to make good items.

This discourages grinding -- tier 1 frost items are useless when you want a higher end frost weapon. So even though the creature you got your tier 1 frost item from is easy to kill at level 7 (you could fight them all day without being hurt), there isn't much point.

You could also work "craftsmen" in, and those craftsmen knowing how to work with various ingredients. In order to make a +X total bonus weapon, you need a master crafter of a certain skill level. This ties you back to the remnants of civilization, and rebuilding said civilization.

Similarly, to craft ice items, you'll need sufficient knowledge of ice crafting, either by learning it yourself (possibly a feat), or finding a crafter with that knowledge.

This provides adventure hooks: protect your master smith, find an ice crafter, etc. And because only "sufficiently tough" monsters produce tier X ice ingredients, to upgrade your ice sword you'll want to find a sufficiently tough ice monster instead of finding weak ones.

[Kazy]

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread. I'm intrigued by what this concept could ultimately yield.

I like pretty much everything that's been said. And so far I can come to 3 conclusions.

1.- Early game is more of an adventurous quest, something like a bridge-side-quest that lets you (by buffing your weapon) /actually/ do a more dangerous quest that you wouldn't be able to normally do.
2.- Late game will probably be trying to find the legendary mother-beholder-like post-chernobyl psionic mutant that originated in the first 20 megaton bomb from which you want the brain; which will allow you to craft some item.
3.- I have no idea where mid game buffing items would fit. It'd be more of a "Hey I found something, let's use this." type of craft. Which isn't at all bad, but I'm not quite sure how a mid game level pc (which is pretty above average) would like it. I think the solution to this would be making items mergeable, having item W and item X fusion with a Y catalyst resulting in item Z.

[SamBurke]

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. I know what grinding is (see my first post for my clocked hours on Monster Hunter. =P) but I'm not really sure what you mean in this context.

My goal for this setting is to really stress the fact that everyone and their mother are scavengers. The world is just that messed up (there's only one remaining city in the world where all of the races live) and I wanted to highlight the fact that every single person's #1 concern is their own survivability. Thus, scavenging and scrapping is pretty much what everyone does to get by. For the players though, seeing as they will be (unfortunately for them) leaving the city now and again into the utterly dangerous wilds, I wanted them to be able to collect things from their adventure to use as a sort of "replacement" for standard gold and silver.
In the terms of them maybe focusing all of their attention to it- I mean, that's all normal commoners do: salvage and scrap. My goal is for the hunting for materials be a secondary goal for the PCs whatever their quest might be. It's the only viable way of life in this setting. At least, that's what I want to emphasize.

In this case, grinding would refer to killing lots of enemies so that you could get their stuff, as opposed to going through with the plot. If you're looking for a good reason to promote combat, this crafting would be just such a reason. If you aren't, Yakk's ideas are pretty solid for discouraging them.

[Jormengand]

Catalyst (Y)

If it is consumed in the crafting, for the love of god do not call it a catalyst because my internal chemistry fanatic will want to punch you every damn time it comes up.

[LordErebus12]

very cool, suprised no one else thought of it earlier.

[JBPuffin]

If it is consumed in the crafting, for the love of god do not call it a catalyst because my internal chemistry fanatic will want to punch you every damn time it comes up.

So additive, right?

This idea looks rather cool on paper, and the ideas of weapon fusion and random properties seem to be appropriate and remind me of Terraria, which is always a plus.

What's the tech level here? Depending on if there are things like appliance-powering electricity and batteries, you might be able to take some recipe ideas off of Dead Island, like the maquahuitl and the electric razor saw attached to a stick...good times...

Other than that, my advice is if you do this, you might want to change what the enchantments do precisely; take a page or two out of Dungeons and Dragons Online for the sort of enchantment hierarchy/tiers you might be looking for.

[GolemsVoice]

You will also have to explain how much material each creature drops. In an MMO, you can just say a dragon, for example, drops 2 scales and 2 teeth, and that's ok. However, in your game, you can't just limit what "loot" theplayers get.

So say one ingredient is dragon scales or dragon teeth. Now, a dragon has thousands of scales and dozens of teeth, how do you prevent the players from using each scale individually, which would give them quite a lot of ingredients?

[LordErebus12]

You will also have to explain how much material each creature drops. In an MMO, you can just say a dragon, for example, drops 2 scales and 2 teeth, and that's ok. However, in your game, you can't just limit what "loot" theplayers get.

So say one ingredient is dragon scales or dragon teeth. Now, a dragon has thousands of scales and dozens of teeth, how do you prevent the players from using each scale individually, which would give them quite a lot of ingredients?

this is true, but numerous things could alter the amount of the items. instead of giving a set amount of each, simply state two or three items that can be found. sure you may have a dragon, but after the battle only a few good scales might remain after being cut down by axes, swords and magic. sure this one dragon may drop 30 scales and a half dozen fangs, but the rest were knocked out or broken (the warriors crit'd with a warhammer a few times), rotted (no toothbrush for all them teeth) or burned from the mage's fireball (teeth do this popcorn thing with enough heat and scales can burn, assuming they are not fireproof).

Generic drops:
Animal (furred): hide (or hide scraps, if killed with melee weapons), long bone, haunch of meat
Animal (scaled): scaled hide, chunk of meat

Animal specific drops:
snake (viper): venom (1 dose), snake fang
deer/elk: antler
lion: long canine, cat's fang

Other ideas:
Mummy: Old Bandages, Mummy Dust, Bonemeal
Dragon (adult or higher): dragon fang, dragon scale (colored), dragon bone, dragon bile (rare)
zombie: rotted meat, bonemeal, tattered cloth (refinable into bolts of cloth).
giant: bone necklace, giant's toe, large teeth, tattered cloth (refinable into bolts of cloth).

[TuggyNE]

You will also have to explain how much material each creature drops. In an MMO, you can just say a dragon, for example, drops 2 scales and 2 teeth, and that's ok. However, in your game, you can't just limit what "loot" theplayers get.

So say one ingredient is dragon scales or dragon teeth. Now, a dragon has thousands of scales and dozens of teeth, how do you prevent the players from using each scale individually, which would give them quite a lot of ingredients?

The way I'd suggest is to first state that it's quite difficult to successfully harvest undamaged scales/whatever, and have a skill check to govern whether you get them. Then, to save time rolling, have a single check control how many you get by lookup on a table.

For scales specifically, a couple more tweaks seem indicated; first, like leather, different areas of the hide will obviously have different properties and different grades of quality, so start by dividing the surface of the dragon into maybe a dozen or so areas. Then, for many applications (all of them?), require not just one or two scales, but an entire square foot of connected scales; taking a page from the Firefish of George Bryan Polivka's Trophy Chase series, it might be quite challenging to treat the connected scales properly without losing their special properties.