Crafting systems are terrible additions to RPGs

[souran]

I have been playing Divinity: Original Sin recently and while the game is really good, probably one of the best RPGs in at least a decade, the crafting system is completely broken.

The game creates random magic items which helps increase replay-ability and does makes every treasure chest worth getting....except the crafting system trivializes the entire gear system so that you never need to care about anything except the one or two gear slots.

Using the crafting system lets you create what are supposedly level appropriate weapons and armor that are also 10-35% better than what you can find. You can start abusing the crafting system as early as level 4, but before you do the game has interesting tactical combat where using smart combos (oil + a fire source makes a burning zone, create a water/blood puddle + lightning to stun everybody in the water) is vital success. After you master crafting the game is basically about abusing action points so that you 1-2 shot most bad guys before they act at all.

The game is good but the crafting system has made the game less interesting. I was thinking about this last night when I remembered that this was the same issue I had with Skyrim.

I am guessing most everybody has played Skyrim by now, if not an enhanced edition will be coming to your smart watch this fall. However, it is well known that you can use crafting/potion making loops to create weapons and armor that are immensely better than anything that can be found or otherwise obtained in the game. You use potions to increase your enchanting, enchant something to make you better at enchanting or blacksmithing, or portion making, use that to make a better potion repeat until you are satisfied that you are beyond the curve. Again, when I played that game the final boss (which I have seen on lets play can take 10-30 minutes to beat) was killed in 5-6 hits of my power-loop sword. Crafting trivialized the game.

While these are video game examples, the thing is this is also true for pen and paper RPGs. When players make their own gear it wrecks the fundamental dynamic of the game. Regardless of if it is a characters motivation, most players are motivated by the idea of getting new or better gear. If you know you can make something that is basically impossible to surpass by finding gear then you have reduced player interest in progressing within the game structure.

Having special ingredients or treasure that allows you to make something unique at least keeps the dynamic working. If you don't find a magic sword in the dragon's treasure but dragon heart is an ingredient you need then its basically the same thing. However, 3.X crafting is mostly bad for the game's dynamics.

[Iduno]

In video games, it allows the devs to create more specialized and interesting (non-random) weapons with interesting stories, and allows the players to fill in the gaps if they want a different type of weapon.

I've just never seen a game where crafting was worthwhile but not overpowered. It's always uninteresting in one way or the other. Sounds like that is what you're seeing as well.

If they aimed for crafted items being 80-95% of the power of the weapons the devs came up with (and nobody found a loophole for infinite power), people might see it as a reasonable choice.

For pen-and-paper, the GM can already make stuff you would use (why spend the effort to make really interesting vendor trash when you know the players and what they would want?), crafting is pretty pointless.

[Thaluikhain]

I've just started Skyrim, and am just looking into crafting.

I don't have a problem if it's overpowered, I can always just not use it to give myself a challenge if I want. However, I mostly play games like that for the world-building rather than the challenge anyway.

[Koumei]

if not an enhanced edition will be coming to your smart watch this fall.

Yeah but is there a port for calculators or for central heating units like Doom has?

The only RPGs where I liked the crafting, as opposed to accepting it as a fact (and then abusing the fuck out of it) were the Atelier _____ games, where they're basically crafting games with RPGs ostensibly attached, and also dating sim elements. They took a novel approach by giving up on the balance thing and saying "Fuck it, you can craft explosive barrels really early, and then you can just use them to steamroll nearly every fight in the game. Done." Because your real goal is to find the perfect recipe for a pie and then get the perfect ingredients (by going to the right locations and killing the enemies with barrels and harvesting stuff from the resource points). So... yeah. They made the RPG bit sort of vestigial.

Having a crafting system is important if crafting magic items is something that people can do in the game - if there are swords that are magic because of how they're forged, then people will ask "How do I forge one?" and there needs to be an answer. If this doesn't exist (because magic items don't exist at all, or because a sword becomes magic when you do some kind of thing with it) then that's not an issue. D&D has decided to go with the former.

Also if the game has expectations of what you'll have, I guess it's important to give people that option - 3rd and 4th Edition (and Pathfinder) both suffer from that problem where you need certain items (4E taking it to such an extreme that you're expected to write a Christmas list for your MC), so if you're not just straight up given these presents, you can at least prevent a Game Over screen by making your own shit. But at the end of the day, that's fixing a problem they made.

[erik]

I feel like a good crafting system should let players create items that they need but not necessarily create wealth. Typically you want to emulate A Team/Macguyver/Burn Notice, not Home and Garden/DIY shows.

Just be up front about that and don’t even bother with micro mechanics for making money.


[edit: gotta expand on this. I only had a few min to post on my phone on lunch break]

In a fantasy context, what I want for crafting are 2 things.
Consumable items - potions/scrolls/runes/alchemicals etc. that can be made on demand for specific adventures.
Signature items - story events where maybe once a level, trade in old items to get something you really want.

[deaddmwalking]

I think those problems are solved by moving away from the gold economy relatively quickly. Spending the GDP of a nation on an item of personal power shouldn't be the goal.

D&D needs to accept that there are 'some things money can't buy' much earlier than it does. It uses that reasoning for artifacts, but those also don't have crafting rules.

[Username17]

D&D crafting is actually a whole bunch of issues, which vary from good to bad for the game. So let's take a walk through some things that crafting in adventure fantasy does:

• Allows characters to have basic level appropriate gear without having to "find" whip daggers and tower shields lying around.
• Allows characters to spend downtime to tailor their equipment towards specific contingencies, such as making sure everyone has a ring of fire resistance before making the trek to the City of Brass or making sure everyone has an amulet of water breathing before questing for the pearl trident.
• Allows characters to swap out items they find for objects that their players aesthetically prefer.
• Allows characters to build items that obviate found objects.

I would rate those things in descending order of goodness. I think that people making items that render all found items obsolete to be quite bad for the game and I am modestly opposed to characters breaking down found doom glaives in order to make doom whip daggers because I think it undermines the heroic record of characters' actions. But I think having characters spend a week gearing up for missions is totally reasonable. And I think that characters being able to get basic level appropriate gear that is appropriate for their idiom is absofucking necessary for the game to function.

So I'm absolutely unwilling to say that crafting in general is bad. Crafting does some very good things for the game. And if you instituted the paradigm of:

• Crafting magic items that are of the basic tier for your level is easy and fun.
• Magic items that are basic tier for your level are reasonably common. For example, a Drow strike force that you encounter might have basic Protection Rings on all of their members.
• Magic items that are higher tier than your level are found from time to time, but can't be crafted.

I think that would hit most of the high notes. Players would notice and care about the biggest piece of treasure in every treasure pile, but they wouldn't be forced to use every random magic cloak or hat they found and could make some reasonable stylistic choices.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Would you kindly evaluate the following statement...

If 3.x crafting rules were maintained as is, but the person crafting the item must be able to cast the required spell(s) directly (ie, no wands, scrolls or teaming up), but the 'item cost' were eliminated or greatly reduced, that would largely fix crafting.

[Username17]

Would you kindly evaluate the following statement...

If 3.x crafting rules were maintained as is, but the person crafting the item must be able to cast the required spell(s) directly (ie, no wands, scrolls or teaming up), but the 'item cost' were eliminated or greatly reduced, that would largely fix crafting.

Utterly false. The spell list is fairly unbalanced in the sense that some things are much much better than other things. There is however a defacto power level that mostly holds if you accept that the players are going to comb through the spell lists or net.deck a spell list full of "the good stuff" like wall of stone and actively avoid spells that are shit like cone of cold. However, the relative worth of spells when put into items is in no way consistent with that.

Depending on how spells are used, the balance point is sometimes the action used to cast them and sometimes the spell slot or the duration. The fact that attack spells use spell slots at all is usually fairly meaningless because the actual limiting factor is usually combat rounds, while the limiting factor on pre-combat buff spells is the spell slots you have to use to get them going for each fight in the day. Making a charged item is like having 4 extra spell slots a day for spells that you have to precast for each fight, but it's like having 1 extra spell slot each day for spells you only cast once a day.

The spell charge items are the least balanced part of D&D. The Book of Gears ultimately stumbled not only because I left for Europe, but because it was already well behind schedule because fixing D&D Wands is a Nintendo Hard problem. The real advantages of having a Wand of X is just extremely variable, even when X is limited to spells you'd actually prepare. Sometimes being able to blast off an extra 50 3rd level spell slots lets you do completely ridiculous and game breaking things. Sometimes it just doesn't. There's no consistency spell to spell.

It's basically the Warlock problem or the Persistent Spell problem all over again. If you take random spells and make them "at will" or "always on," sometimes that is "fucking meaningless" and sometimes that is "totally game breaking." And there's no rubric you can apply ahead of time based on the spell level or duration or any other parameters.

-Username17

[MGuy]

Would it be possible to get together a list of effects that can be then separated value wise such that being able to craft items with problematic effects is impossible (or next to that) while crafting low level and number adjusting items (if you decide to keep them) is easy. I don't think having a wand of magic missile/fireball/disintegrate ever really breaks the game as far as I know. Same thing with resistance items or items that allow you to be able to adventure at all like fire immunity and water breathing. I know Fabrication and such spells are accepted as bad for a lot of reasons here so you could just get rid of it and similar spells or just straight up day that certain ones can't be made. With a cap and ban policy on the worst offenders while allowing for the personal ability to craft what you need to adventure to places at all I could imagine being able to have craft be useful but not necessary without breaking the game in half.

I say effects instead of specific spells by the way because there are a lot of spells and most of them do the same things. So I'd hope it would be a lot easier to target the effects you don't want replicated in items instead. I don't think going by spell level or price would be better either.

[Username17]

Would it be possible to get together a list of effects that can be then separated value wise such that being able to craft items with problematic effects is impossible (or next to that) while crafting low level and number adjusting items (if you decide to keep them) is easy.

Not based on the D&D spell list, no. Most of the spells that you'd want on a magic item are the only spell that does the thing that they do, or at most one of only a handful and also usually an alternate level from other similar spells.

Take for example, the Image spells. They are incredibly powerful, and based on all the crazy shit you can do where people don't even get a save, having silent image default to a Will Save DC of 11 wouldn't even be a huge problem. But how many first level spells have an effect remotely similar to silent image? You can make the argument for disguise self, but that's much more limited and also a Glamer rather than a Figment.

So if you try to turn magic items in D&D into an effects based system, you have to pretty much write an effects based system. D&D spells do not fit nicely into forms and categories except for the Evocation direct damage spells, and those are the ones you don't actually care about.

-Username17

[souran]

So I'm absolutely unwilling to say that crafting in general is bad. Crafting does some very good things for the game. And if you instituted the paradigm of:

• Crafting magic items that are of the basic tier for your level is easy and fun.
• Magic items that are basic tier for your level are reasonably common. For example, a Drow strike force that you encounter might have basic Protection Rings on all of their members.
• Magic items that are higher tier than your level are found from time to time, but can't be crafted.

I think that would hit most of the high notes. Players would notice and care about the biggest piece of treasure in every treasure pile, but they wouldn't be forced to use every random magic cloak or hat they found and could make some reasonable stylistic choices.

-Username17

The real issue with this sort of paradigm is that is you restrict people to basic items then spending character resources to be a crafter is a big waste. If you can make magic swords +1 but to find a +1 swords of haste, or something you have to adventure then that preserves the basic dynamic of the game (good) but makes also makes it clear that if the DM does not give you your weapon/armor/cloak/trinket that he is basically fucking with you.

If the magic items basic to your tier are theoretically common then players are going to wonder/want to just buy them. If crafting can't produce better results than purchased equipment again it becomes pointless to invest character resources in.

Now if the "easy and fun" part is that you just say that after level X players can craft level appropriate gear for the purchase cost, without spending character resources but one of the reasons crafting systems are usually broken is that the investment vs. the return is very screwed up. If you put in a little you get basically nothing. However, if you put in a lot you get way more than the game can handle.

[Username17]

The real issue with this sort of paradigm is that is you restrict people to basic items then spending character resources to be a crafter is a big waste.

Characters use more than just a single magical sword. They often don't in fairy tales, but in D&D style fantasy characters have hats and gloves and cock rings and stuff that are all magic. The ability to choose replacement level magic items has value when you're using a non-zero number of replacement level magic items - even if you are also using some number of above replacement level magic items.

Imagine for the moment that we're talking about characters with the eight item limit and that the players are high enough level to make minor magic items. Now let's assume that the coolest shit they've found amount to two medium magic items and a major magic item. That still means that crafting lets you pick the contents of 5 magic item slots. Now, probably four or five of them could be filled with various random shit that you've picked up at various points. Bloodsteel helmets, gauntlets of treestride, boots of goblinkind, and so on. But even if you have something for every character slot, the ability to choose which replacement level magic items are indeed replaced and with what still has value. It might just have value in terms of getting equipment that is more appropriate for a character's idiom (or "build" as it were), but that's still value.

And if you're talking about going from 6 slots filled to 8 slots filled on all the characters, the item crafter is probably the most valuable member of the team - even if the extra items are just replacement level protection cloaks and rings of minor displacement or something.

-Username17

[Occluded Sun]

It rather depends on the game system. In D&D and games it inspired, equipment is a fundamental aspect of character development, and being able to make things can easily destabilize things like 'balance', so a whole lot of work is required to ensure that a system doesn't lead to clearly superior or inferior strategies. In games where equipment isn't such a central concept, crafting isn't so much of a problem.

[OgreBattle]

D&D is focused on permanent power upgrades and having a loot cave with all the stuff you loot, but the fiction it's sorta based on has items get used up, or something is situational created and expended.

How important or unimportant time is also wildly varies from table to table. This makes balancing crafting more funky.

On a side note... crafting magic items shouldn't be the domain of casters only. When you slay a dragon, taking its bones, teeth, scales to a 'mundane' smith then outputs magic armor, weapons, cloaks, etc because the dragon material itself is magic.

[Ancient History]

I've got a crafting system in place in Space Madness!, because building and customizing your wand is something people are going to want to do. I tried to keep it simple.

[Judging__Eagle]

I think that would hit most of the high notes. Players would notice and care about the biggest piece of treasure in every treasure pile, but they wouldn't be forced to use every random magic cloak or hat they found and could make some reasonable stylistic choices.

-Username17

I found this to be true as a result of using the BoG notes when I was running [Tome] D&D games.

Even the Barbarian would care if there were magical items of actual value; even if they couldn't use it themselves in any conceivable situation (e.g. magic staffs).

So using the concept of Minor, Moderate, & Major magic items along the lines of BoG that Red Rob applied in their method of approaching the DMGs magic items for [Tome] use; is probably going to deliver this sort of narrative.