combat-oriented

schmerl

this quote is from an interview with Richard Garriot from the "GameBanshee"

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GB: How combat-oriented is Tabula Rasa? Can a player advance their character without participating in combat?Richard: TR is fundamentally a combat game, much more so than say UO. Still, there are a few non-combat activities in the game, but not the whole other lifestyles as UO had. I believe the
quality of combat, and the depth of our storytelling will satisfy players.

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first of all i dont want to sound prophetic like so many people who are posting here do. saying that i dont think that this game will fail badly just because you cant spend your entire gametime fishing or blacksmithing but then its quite a disappointment for me though. especially because in my opionion a wartorn sci-fi scenario could offer such a nice bunch of crafting possibilities with the sweet circumstance that crafting makes great sense when it comes to war. just think about all the ammunition and equipment, the fuel for the vehicles and then the research for new technologies maybe even the option of reverse engineering alien technologie and so on...

what do you think? would implementing some clever crafting system hurt that game more then it could actually benefit from it?

_Shadowmage

Yes it would.

In a war for survival you had better hope your supply chain is efficient and delivering all the food, equipment, ammunition fuel you need and that you arent dependant on players crafting the stuff to survive.

Once you add player crafting, then suddenly monsters need to drop cash so players who dont craft can afford to buy the stuff crafters make. As a crafter where would you get the components you need to do your crafting? From monster drops? Scrounged form the battlefield?

Without crafting - you could have players earn a daily / weekly / monthly wage etc to spend on upgrading their equipment, weapons etc. This would be balanced and not distract from the war effort. You also dont need to have unrealistic mechanisms like monsters dropping gold.

That doesnt mean we couldnt have a system where only players in the technical branch are able to create upgrades to weapons or armour - so a small crafting system. Of course then there needs to be some mechanism to keep prices in line with what players can afford.

Hmm - expansions come in the form of planets for this game, so maybe in the expansions they could add not just new battlefield planets but some planets that are supporting the war effort - places where crafters could manufacture the stuff required for the war effort. These could have missions like you suggest where the object is to acquire alien technology for reverse engineering.

Ghost-Hack

I would LOVE to see a system for crafting...
but theres only one way That I would accept it.

I want to see ALL "drops" in this game be componant/scrap/materal drops.
Honestly... bane dont use .45 bullets... they dont wear kevlar... they dont use dollars.
there is absolutely NO reason why they would drop anything directly useful to us out in the field (except maybe some sort of healing item, but even that is "iffy")

But imagine, instead, A situation where you can pick up metal and plastic slag off bane corpses, chitinous hide, and plastic componants...
Essentually... Crafting materals.

If you arent a crafter, you could sell your spoils to scrap yards, or other players who are crafters, for cash, enabling you to buy the cool new stuff at the store or to afford a new modded pistol your crafter friend will make for you...

gone would be tedious mining for materals, as well as immersion killing drops like "combat helmet" off of a walking bio-organic tank... or rats with 12 gold on them...

You get money for kills by selling scrap materal and usable bits of corpses (the poison sacks off those spitter creatures, or spines off of some prickly thing, natural armor off a dead thrax, whatever...)

with a system like this in place... you would be totally justified in crafting. You wouldnt be sitting in the middle of the battlefield with bullets wizzing by your head with your jackhammer macro-farming some rediculous ore...
Also... with a system like this in place.... the ONLY place to get the items a crafter could craft... would be through a crafter.
No more of that SWG bull, where you had to make 200 generic pistols for no reason, that anyone could buy (or simply started out with).
what a crafter makes would be unique to crafting, not the General Issue you could go down to the Garrison and pick up yourself...

schmerl

sorry to say that but i would be very naive to assume that the crafting system should be based on "cash" and material drops from mobs or even that the whole war will go downhill for mankind if noone is really interested in supporting the troops with ammo and equipment.

what i had in mind was kinda basic supply for the soldiers, just basic stuff not really annoyingly bad items. that supply wont be player dependant so, well lets say if all the "engineers" get killed by some ninja alien squad it wont happen that soldier x who skilled for guns suddenly has to melee because he ran out of ammo.

then i really like that idea of Ghost-Hack that the drops make sense because above all i think a crafting system needs to make great sense or it just wont be interesting to skill a crafter for anyone. what i disagree is that, lets assume im soldier x and i just killed some alien guy, im for sure not going to loot him since im in a war fighting together with quite a bunch of others and there is nothing that alien could give to me what i would need except maybe an ear as a souvenier. but now the crafters get to work, any bio-farmer-whatever-guys now start cleaning the battlefield from all the corpses, probably keeping some of the bodies for further studies and probably slicing some stuff of the aliens, maybe "chitin" like Ghost-Hack said. after that happened these guys have done their job for now and the builders bounce over to build a camp other crafters start working on turrets so the camp wont be retaken by the enemy if noone is around. a lazaret maybe is built and injured soldiers can be taken care of by medics and then, just that moment a scout is bouncing over reporting that nearby is that mine where miners can be escorted to and mine. the ore can be used to create better weapons, tougher armor, meaner ammo and so on.

so what i didnt have in mind that lets say a "weaponcrafter" needs to pick up x amount of that jazz and y amount of that cheese to be able to craft _one_ "pistol"... thats just ridiculous in a war. i had in mind that this particular "weaponcrafter" is able to craft masses of these pistols, using the masses of ore the miners are mining and the blueprints the scientists are handing out. a crafting system like that _could_ have the effect that it changes the war completely, since these "bane" obviously are learning from the behauvior of the players, it would be possible to get some advantage from using new technology against them. it doesnt really matter if there always is new stuff to make the aliens blink, it could be very possible too that some soldiers are skilled enough to solve an icky situation just using, lets say basic equipment, so it wont matter at all if a lot of people are crafting or just a few because the game would tolerate both scenarios.

now if it comes to shiney unique item stuff, lets say soldier x wants that "spazz XIIV of uber bane toe tickling" he could still do some solo missions to get that particular "chip" or whatever piece of material a crafter would need to manufacture that thingie. the very important thing about these silly unique items would be that they aint that special so _everyone_ comes running for them like we know it so well from so many other games.

above all i dont think that it makes sense to pay cash for your equipment if you are a soldier in a war, thats just ridiculous. the stuff the crafters manufacture goes into a depot and if it comes to battle the least skilled soldiers get the toughest weapons first if there aint enough for all of the soldiers because the higher skilled soldiers will survive and do fine even without new shiney guns.

ah, i dont know, what do you think?

Rabiator

I mostly agree with Ghost-Hack, except for the availability of newbie items and ammo. Those should be obtainable from NPCs, otherwise new players might be stumped when no crafters are available or willing to spend their time on low level stuff. If those cost money (I like the idea of basic weapons provided for free), I think there should be some easy missions you can do even unarmed to regain some starter equipment.
The idea behind my argumentation is that your char should always be able to recover from a string of bad luck. I've seen the opposite in the FOMK beta, to the point where my char was completely broke without a way to regain some operating funds. Not fun.

But apart from this detail, I'm all for a complex, player-driven economy. I'm also in favor of some playerskill in combat, so I might end up with Fallen Earth or Twilight War instead of TR .
But I' ll decide that when I know more about the various games.