by JohnDW » Sat Jul 19, 2014 4:07 am
I came up with an idea for crafting, I know your opinion is that crafting of items takes away from the rewards of finding good items, and that being able to create the rare material weapons and armor almost from the start like in KotC make it a bit too easy, so I've taken those things into consideration for 2 parts on how I would change the crafting from KotC to balance it out.
To start with, instead of 2 forms of 'currency' used to create items, gold and xp, I would expand it to 5 forms of currency; gold, xp, 'common materials', 'rare materials', and 'magical materials'.
My idea would be that regular steel/wood/leather and silver would fall under 'common materials', adamantium, mithril, cold iron would fall under 'rare materials' and any form of enchanted item or enchanting of weapons/armor would require 'magical materials'.
As an example, a steel dagger might take 1 common material in addition to some xp/gold, while a silver dagger might take 3 common materials, an adamantium dagger might take 5 rare materials and 3 common materials, while a cold iron dagger might just take 2 rare materials and 3 common materials.
If you wanted to enchant a masterwork weapon to +1 it would take say.. 2 magical materials, from +1 to +2 would take 4 magical materials, from +2 to +3 would take 8 magical materials, 16 materaisl to get up to +4, 32 for +5, etc.
This way, you can place a limit on the ammount of common rare and magical materials are given as rewards in order to limit the crafting options of players.
IN addition to the above, I have a second idea that can limit crafting while keeping it available and making reward loot a good thing.
When players get the abilty to craft items, they are only allowed to make weapons and armor of the most basic materials first, and not even make master crafted items. Then through a quest reward they can unlock the ability to make silver weapons, then as another quest reward they can unlock the ability to make masterwork items, and then later they can unlock as separate rewards the ability to make cold iron, mithril, and adamantium.
In a manner similar to this, instead of just having a level requirement and magical material requirement for the enchanting of magical weapons/armor/items, players can only craft up to +1 enchantments when they unlock the ability to enchant items, and then unlock the ability to enchant up to +2, and then +3, and so on as the game continues.
The same could be true for wands and scrolls and potions, at first they can only make level 1 spells, they might find some level 2-3 spells as loot but only be able to make level 1 spells, then unlock the ability to make level 2 spells as these items, but they can find level 3-4 items as loot.
The key to the above time when these unlocks are made, is that the unlocks are never better than the loot the players earn at any point in the game. If the players can only make +1 items, then the best loot they can earn at that time should be better than the best items they can craft. This I can see as being tricky to plan out, but to me it would be worthwhile to have in the end product.
WIth everything posted above, players would eventually still be able to make their own weapons/armor/items and enchanted magical items, they would never be able to make anything without having enough materials in addition to gold/xp, and materials would only be available as loot/rewards. In addition, while players are able to make +1/+2 items they are finding +3/+4 items as loot, so they are not able to make the best items available to them, but can make a versitile array of items to customize their characters if they are willing to not use the 'best' in order to use what they like.
As a few end comments I'm wondering, whats with the choices in player races for Kotc2/Fantasy World Engine? Also, I would not mind if fighters has less feats in general if the weapon focus/weapon specialization feats were boiled down so that they were a single feat that applied to all weapons, or maybe just two weapon groups "melee' weapons and 'ranged' weapons.