Neo Phonelobster Prime wrote: ↑Thu Apr 28, 2022 1:51 am
merxa wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 10:42 pm
I'm curious if you'll answer any of my questions? Do you enjoy rolling dice?
Are you, unironically not only unable to have determined my opinion on this from what I just wrote, but ALSO unironically at the level of game design where you think "rolls fun good" is a justification in it's own right for a mechanic that includes a roll?
I am not, maybe quote a prior sentence you believe espouses your view? Please keep it to one sentence, preferably a simple declarative one, but if your view requires some conditionals so be it.
Neo Phonelobster Prime wrote:
You know what that rambling paragraph of nonsense tells me? You don't know what a game economy is, and you don't even seem to know what I meant when I was talking about real money shops in MMOs.
Though it certainly IS interesting that you A)Claim that no game currency for magic item shops exist yet, or B) They do but they are probably wildly over priced or not you can't decide, or C) You think the primary response of players noticing a significant price increase for purchasing rather than making magic items would be a decision to stop playing the rest of the game and go into the magic item production and sales business.
I mean. Could your understanding of this be worse?
I freely admit, what you say, what you say you said, and what I understand of it, it's often rather murky to me. But if you were truly talking about running a game where I had some 'cash' shop between me and the players, you weren't being serious right? Beyond a bunch of teenagers trying to bribe their new gm with free pizza and soda, I'm really not familiar with this setup -- is it common? Are you part of a community that gives gms real money out of game for in game benefits? If not, then it is hard to understand why you would even bring it up or what relevance it has to... well anything, besides maybe gambling but you seem to insist you weren't making any references to gambling...
But to try and answer, the passage about setting up an in-game magic shop was a thought exercise -- I engage in lots of thought exercises as they help me imagine and think through possibilities and outcomes, perhaps I should label passages as thought exercises if that will help you? But the basic conclusion is, if creating magic items costs X and Y, and buying magic items will typically only be priced in units of Y, then the purchase of magic items should be some Y value that is higher than the Y value for creating the items especially if creating the item isn't 100% certain. Lets take a very simple case, say creating magic items only costs Y, but there is a 5% failure chance. How much should a shop charge for this item? They should charge at least 1.05Y, otherwise they are guaranteed to lose money over time, and the 1.05Y doesn't account for other costs of running a shop (nor does it cover the opportunity cost to do the labor or sales).
Is that more clear? I'm actually fairly well versed in economics, so we could have a larger more technical conversation if you think it would be helpful for our little make believe world we are discussing.
merxa wrote:It is interesting you speak about gambling, an example of an activity that involves games becoming so addictive that people will suffer personal hardships playing them. I certainly don't want to write any magic crafting rules that will do that to someone.
Neo Phonelobster Prime wrote:I didn't speak about gambling. You did. Your mechanic makes players into gamblers. They spend their in game currency and the time they spent playing to earn it, on a spin on an item upgrade wheel which can net them nothing or worse than nothing. They put the currency into the item shop and sometimes it spits out the item they bought.
This is NOT an addictive mechanism. The rewards and other factors are the addictive mechanisms that MMOs use. The chance to lose everything spent in return for nothing when trying to buy better items is a mechanic used to induce frustration.
I am pointing out that the primary result of the primary mechanical component of your proposal is that it has an opportunity to induce frustration in your players.
Oh. But it rolls a dice. So you know. Must be fun and engaging and a net good idea?
We haven't really gotten into what the failure chance should be, just the very controversial assertion that there should be a failure chance. As an aside, I had this thought the other day, if we were every to play a game together, I'd offer up this simple game: Whenever one of us declares an in-game action and we don't agree it is absolutely certain to succeed, instead the person who wants to perform the action rolls a d100, and prior to rolling that person also decides how likely that are to succeed -- they just pick a number between 1-99.
Anyway, failure chance. Sometimes characters fail at what they attempt, right? Failing at tasks can be frustrating, especially if it feels like it happens too often, but never failing also seems problematic, doesn't it? If you don't find it problematic, then why are you talking about a game that typically involves rolling dice? What is the purpose of these dice rolls to you?
addiction is a large subject that can be talked about lots of different ways, but rewards by themselves are not intrinsically addictive unless the reward is a substance that can cause physical and/or psychological dependence. So Skinner very convincingly showed that when giving out rewards (for operant conditioning) the most addictive scheduling is random interval scheduling (ie your reward comes out after you press the lever 1d6+3 times), this beats out random time interval (your reward comes out every 1d6+3 minutes independent of how many times you press the lever, although interestingly this scheduling tended to create the most 'superstitions' behavior), and these beat out the fixed interval schedule (reward always comes out every 6 lever pulls) and fixed time interval (reward always comes every 6 minutes). This is why most slot machines and other electronic gambling machines, and 'gatcha' systems, loot boxes etc, use the random interval schedule, it is by far the most effective method to drip out rewards that will encourage most people to continue pulling for more rewards.
Now, I suppose someone could take these definitions and claim fighters rolling iterative attacks per round is a type of random interval scheduling, and we're creating a terrible addictive system, but that claims seems a little precious doesn't it? I think one big distinction is the fighter can do things to increase their chance of succeeding, so choices can be made that increase or decrease their lever pulls (attack rolls) needed to be rewarded (hit and do damage). In contrast, gambling typically depends on people making either the non-optimal choice sometimes, or for the rules of the system itself to be statistically against the player, so that, over time (see the law of large numbers), the gambler puts in more money than they extract from the system. I also don't want to write rules that are that exploitative, using crafting rules should be a net gain.
Now whether using crafting rules should be a net gain over purchasing items, that feels unclear or highly debatable, likely with lots of people on both sides. If say crafting is not a net gain over purchasing items, but instead a net loss, then the rules seem to be punishing, ie you're a sucker for using these rules when you can just buy an item instead. That suggests to me that should not be the equilibrium, all else being equal. If say purchasing magic items wasn't always certain or a possibilty, or certain items weren't always readily available, then perhaps even at a net loss, crafting items would still find a niche use at times.
For those who worship balance, making the two equivalent seems like a laudable goal, but the two activities aren't fully commiserate unless you pretend they are. In particular, if crafting requires a sufficient component the opportunity cost of gathering it is not self evident. I think all of us here are used to modern capital markets where practically anything and everything can be priced against the us dollar, and even in our modern world odd things can happen in markets. In our make believe fantasy setting, capital markets are just not that prevalent nor efficient. There could be lots of items that are too rare or difficult for most people to get so have no liquid exchange market for them -- if you know a recipe for your arrows of petrifaction requires cockatrice urine, we could try to work out how well an industrial farm would go over in our fantasy world, but I think the starting assumption is this won't be in stock at every magic walmart you walk into -- but admittedly this is very setting dependent.
Trying to achieve equivalence I think ends up with a system similar to what erik mentioned, where the flavor of crafting is done away with and it sort is just like having a magic shop on hand to give you whatever is considered level appropriate gear. Rules for crafting should feel different, at least a little, from purchasing an item. One thing my short rule set is trying to encourage or suggest is that anyone with a crafting skill can make magic items, so its intended to be a rather low investment.
Now in the situation where crafting is a net benefit to purchasing them from the local shop, I think flavor-wise, this is where I would want to end up. The net benefit shouldn't be so incredibly amazing that those who use the 'in-game' shop don't feel like suckers either, but encouraging a more explorative and interactive experience with the game world seems like a good goal? Purchasing items from a shop could also require exploration and interaction, but that seems a little less interesting, not uninteresting, just not as rich of a field as crafting could be.
Lets do another thought experiment. Lets say the game world had my skeleton of magic crafting rules as well as a second widely known method, so we have the travis tock method as well as the PL special. The PL special works very similar to the travis tock method, except crafting an item takes 1d6 days, there is no chance for mishaps, and failure on the roll only means time is lost but no materials so it can be attempted again.
Now people will want to use the PL special method as much as possible -- it has minimal risk and only takes extra time. However, I suspect PCs would engage in both crafting methods depending on other circumstances and desires. I suspect there would even be times where PCs would pay a shop the risk premium needed to get an item within minutes instead of days, especially if there's enough material to attempt the craft more than once. Still, having these two methods exist should create significant downward pressure on the overall cost of magic items, common items will closely approach the at cost price as shops make bulk amounts safely, but for niche items, and for those in game with the disposable wealth, the near instant delivery would be, I dare say, fairly common. This is all dependent on how common the failure/mishap rate is, as well as how abundant materials are -- ie if when you go questing to gather your sufficient material, do you often only collect enough for one go or do you often gather enough for several attempts? Players, and their characters, will all have different risk premiums, and how these work will greatly inform in game choices.
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One discussion that is cropping up is inventory management and spreadsheets. I also don't want to encourage this behavior -- playing ledgers and logistics instead of dungeons and dragons can sometimes be fun for some people, but overall people don't want to sit down and play a ttrpg if it involves moonlighting a second job as an accountant. This crafting method is meant to avoid that effort -- a player knows their character wants boots of flying -- they can immediately make a check to know what item they need to make it, and that item can be determined on the spot. Remember, as a sufficient component, it could be but one of many recipes for that item. Once in game a recipe is established, a note or entry should be made to stay consistent (ie we don't want a situation where the ingredient was a sufficient component at one time but now it isn't). And if multiple characters make the roll, you can always provide multiple sufficient component recipes.
It seems part of the spreadsheet issue comes up when the reverse scenario occurs: the party has just killed a chimera, and surely the chimera must have some parts within it that can create some sort of magic items. This could be handled a few different ways, if the party has a wishlist, you can just roll against it and say this or that part can be used as the sufficient component -- as for why they may have not known that prior, there's plenty of explanations that could be provided, perhaps their direct experience with the chimera corpse reveals this, or it simply didn't occur to them prior they instead came up with a different sufficient component.
You could roll in some way to determine if the chimera has any sufficient or only optional components, you could put together some rules that abstract out the chimera as a creature type and CR and have that automatically determine what sort of items of what sort of power can be made with parts from it. You could fully abstract this and just give 'monster' components a GP value, and in the crafting you have the GP conversions for both the sufficient component and fuel although this option does away with the flavor the most and edges towards the assumption there are robust and liquid markets for all these components.
In a rules heavy system built from the ground up, you could start out by ensuring every item comes with a recipe or two, and every monster has a little section of what parts can be used for what magic craft and maybe even a suggested retail price. Of course you wouldn't want monsters to be the only source for components, so some additional effort would need to go into creating non-monster components to populate the game world with. and indeed, in this rules heavy system, this could result in a large, intimidating spreadsheet, this would be alleviated somewhat by the spreadsheet already existing, but still this would likely lead to people tracking monster items and labeling what can used for what item.
Some of this is a little bit of a negotiation between everyone at the table, no one really wants to track a bunch of recipes for items they will never use. Instead the intention is for the PC to communicate the item they want, and the GM gives them a clear hook on how to get it, saavy GMs will try to make these hooks multi purpose so the party isn't just out foraging for the sufficient component, but might be foraging in an area they are also searching, or the foraging area is in a direct path to where they happened to be heading, or the component happens to come from a monster they know their enemy keeps etc.