Ok I am sure this has been discussed before. I was wondering why CF does not have a profession system like herbalism, metalworking, leatherworking, etc. It would add a whole new dimension to the game. So if this has been discussed before could someone please post the link?

These would be lame in CF. We'd have a bunch of losers sitting in the inn all day spamming, make basket.

We're not necessarily opposed to them, but most implementations I've seen elsewhere suffer from one of more of the following:

1) Treadmilling: In some cases, the game is dominated by players who can invest hundreds of hours into incrementally improving gear. There's nothing inherently dangerous about making a piece of armor, and a lot of systems are sort of risk-free time-for-results trades.

2) Ownership: Think about how cranky people get now if you kill them and dare take a piece of armor. Now imagine if they spent three hours on that one piece of armor. Some games address this by making crafted items customized for a particular person, but then you have items that are worthless if looted, which just raises new problems.

3) Exploration: If the best armor can be made by players, they'll never visit certain areas. Why risk dying when you 'farm' one currency location for X hours, buy some raw materials, and sit in a forge? (This is also why we don't sell the best items in shops.) You can solve this to some extent by tying item creation to the gathering of items and/or currency, but then you're just displacing the challenge-- instead of going into Trothon for Item X, I'm going there for Item Y which can be made into Item X. It's not really a "new" challenge.

4) Recipes: A lot of games rely on the 'recipes' to make the better items being discovered during gameplay. This can be easily subverted by players circulating lists, etc. There are some sneaky ways around this, but they're more difficult to implement.

5) Rich Get Richer: Crafting tends to preferentially reward the 'top' players. If you have a lot of resources and don't die often.... you get even better gear, which makes it easier to keep getting resources and avoid dying. It's pretty hard to take down a top-end player (especially one who doesn't take risks) in CF as is. If most or all of their gear took a quantum leap in quality, it would be even more true.

6) Legacy/Inertia: CF wasn't really built with crafting in mind. Retrofitting a crafting system onto a balanced game is a lot harder than creating a new game with crafting installed from the beginning.

All of the above are solvable problems, although I've yet to see a game where I felt like they got it all right. It just means that's it's a large project.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

For non-limited gear, we use the same materials its made of, to make it look different.

Please, please, please, please, please!

I love wearing black robes with my necro, but its annoying when I sacrifice that leopard skin because I need the black to off-set my crappy looking boots. Let me re-string the skin as a black leather cape! Woo!

I know heralds might be made out-dated, but they just do 'normal clothes'. You'd then lose out in pk because of rp. Nice for heralds, not for those in violent environments.

Go on, you know you want to.

Yhorian.

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=9217&mesg_id=9236&page=

Could you please tell me how this crafting system wouldn't fit CF? It relies on principles already found in CF (bards, artistry, forgecraft, restring). Seems to me like it would be easy to retrofit, and thus easily balanced.

Is I don't see anything that doesn't lead to solo-grinding to get skill %'s &/or crafting ability increased. Adding things that decrease player interaction rather than increase it, doesn't really hold that much appeal to me.

Would mana usage, and significant timers(I'm thinking a hundred game hours or more) deter that sort of thing, do you think?

nt