Crafting as a "class"

anemo · February 2020

Just bored so curious what people would think of a "crafting class" as a type of combatant, or crafting skills giving combat abilities related to the craft. Along with some ways that I could see it working with skill examples. Essentially in most cases it feels like crafting is just added after the fact, sometimes if you're lucky there will be gaps in "final content" where crafted gear is BiS for a bit.

Probably something party affecting along the lines of: "The next consumable you use is applied to your party/pets as well (to your allies it fills a different slot than the consumable used if it was a buff)". Meaning it would be possible with a crafter on a party to chug down an antidote as status effect party heal, allow you to easily poison all ally weapons, or allow some min-maxers to double apply their buff flask if they worked with the crafter (themselves drinking one, and the crafter drinking the duplicate).
Something to make gathering feel worthwhile to the party: "Each time you gather a resource party gains X health/mana/stamina" (after combat regen), "Each time you gather allies gain a stacking %damage bonus, bonus slowly decreases with use " ,or "each time you gather, allies gain a chance to get a duplicate of the resource", and similar.
self buffs that drastically increase their personally crafted gear for short periods: "for the next X seconds, stats of self crafted gear/armor/potions are doubled", meaning that there could be periods where you could take on a secondary DPS/Tank/healer role depending on which version of the skill you have in your build.
A damaging version of the self buff "weapon/armor stats are increased by a %, gear takes non repairable damage while this skill is on" (didn't need that spammed gear anyways, or a way to spite someone who will loot it).
Some enemy interaction abilities "Target enemy does not gain any benefits from their weapon/armor/consumables ( percentile debuff for generic humanoids, affects some bosses/uniques in an interesting way)".
probably another enemy interaction ability "refresh damage over times in an area (mostly aimed at crafted poisons, but affects other DoTs)"
Another party interaction of playing with Aggro: "Swap aggro score/points with target party member". Meaning that you could in the middle of a DPS player's rotation remove aggro from them so they could run longer, use it with your what could possibly be better escape abilities, or in other cases be an off tank for short periods (with other skills).

Obviously not complete. But I think it would be really cool if crafting skills at least had a few combat abilities tied into them to give some interesting options.

ChildoftheShadows · February 2020

I kind of feel like that’s what engineer like classes in some games were meant to be.

Ungood · February 2020

I see what you are saying, but in any game that would have a "crafter" class, if feels like this would be a part of a PvP game where crafting for resources was very combat intensive, and a team based kind of event, where some players would need to secure/defend the area, and the crafters/harvester classes would then go in and do their jobs.

In this regard, the crafter/harvester would not be a good combat/DPS class, but one amazing augment/defensive class.

This would then need to follow a theme. Like for example, if the setting was Sci-Fi, like Warhammer 40K.

And you had say, Earth Cast Tau, (Crafters/Harvesters), they would be able to do things like build turrets, walls, buildings on site, to establish fortifications, and automated defenses.

They would also be able to repair the Fire Warriors Armor, Weapons, Tanks, Transports, etc, to keep things from being destroyed. Basically they would function as Medics for the other players directly, as well as being able to build Structures, Automated Defenses, Vehicle, Titans, Tanks, Personal Transport, Gateways, Etc, etc.

In short, if you were design a Crafter/Builder, the idea would be that at best they would swing their "wrench" in combat, doing little to no damage, but, if they are given time they can drop a Imperial Titian on you.

That is just my view of things.

AlBQuirky · February 2020

Interesting take, but I'm not for separating out the activities I enjoy into separate classes

Adamantine · February 2020

Well, I want crafting to be its own sphere, with its own classes, skills, feats, stats, clothing, tools, consumeables, etc. And the crafting process should be sort of involved, with failure chances.

So lets say we have a very simple game and your adventuring classes are Knight, Wizard, Priest and Rogue, while the crafting classes are Smith, Carptenter, Tailor and Alchemist. Then you can freely choose to for example play a Wizard thats actually a Smith, even if one would usually think a Wizard would probably be either Tailor for the robes, Carpenter for the magic staffs, or maybe Alchemist for the consumeables.

Now I dont oppose an Engineer class which actually uses a lot of consumeables during battle, though this looks to me like its not the easiest thing to balance. But it shouldnt be the only character able to craft. I've seen that in Lineage 2 and its a PITA that you have a class that really cant do much, just because you want a crafter. An Engineer class which promotes a certain playstyle would only be even worse over the plain crafter classes L2 had. There would be players who would love to play Engineer because of the playstyle, but wont have any interest in crafting. Worse, there would be players who want to do crafting, but really cannot stand playing an Engineer.

Amathe · February 2020

I kind of like the idea. But I think it would be better to have your crafting skills enhance your combat skills, not be them.

So a fletcher would be a better archer, a blacksmith would be better with metal weapons, a potion maker would be a better healer or poisoner, and so on.

And/or, maybe you could get one extra useable combat skill out of each crafting skill. So, for example, a fletcher would get a bow attack that not every archer gets.

Mendel · February 2020

The immediate positives. Crafting as a class removes the player's desire to do everything themselves. @Adamantine's desire to make every profession a separate class further removes the player's ability to do every class by themselves (a non-historical situation that I really hate in games). This could make the game far more group oriented. Or increase multi-boxing on everyone's part.

On the down side, how would the crafting class earn experience? That might be the biggest hurdle that developing a dedicated crafting class would face. Traditionally, MMORPGs earn generic XP through combat activities. So, either the crafters would need some non-trivial combat skills to be able to contribute to a group's success, relegate the crafters to the easiest newbie zones to harvest materials, or have a completely different (non-combat) means to earn XP.

I'm not sure if current developers are interested in developing solutions that would make crafting an equal partner in an MMORPG. Equality and balance are absolutely necessary to make the tasks (combat and crafting) fun and rewarding, without making either a second-class citizen. A player doesn't want to wait through a 3 minute fight in order to harvest a wolf spleen.

I don't personally believe that many developers are capable of doing something original. Certainly, the money seems to favor the clone of something else. The money might restrict any chance to try something innovative. Innovation involves risk, risk introduces the chance for failure, and businesses don't want to fund failures. Maybe (hopefully) this situation will change.

cameltosis · February 2020

My preference is definitely for classes / roles to remain fairly focused, so I don't particularly like the idea of giving a crafter combat abilities, especially if those combat abilities make them desirable in a group.

I do like some of the specific ideas for your crafter class, like turning consumables into group-wide bonuses. Having played the captain in lotro for years, I'm always in favour of including buff classes / support classes.

My preference for a crafting class is to take the SWG pre-cu route. Plenty of research has shown that the average human is capable of mastering 2 or 3 things during their lifetime, if you are exceptional then you might hit 5 things. So, I'd like my game to reflect something similar: keeping each class/role separate, but allowing players to master 2 or 3 of them.

So, I would have a crafting class (or, likely, many crafting classes) and then let players choose how they want to build their character. If you want to craft and fight, then pick a crafting class and a combat class to master. Pure crafter? Go that route.

With all that said, my current opinion is that spending time working on a truly engaging crafting experience is a waste of time. Whilst we, as players, and devs have such a fixation on loot, why bother wasting time on a whole system that is mostly pointless?!?!

If a game decides that it wants to build a full player economy that is based on crafting, rather than on loot, then it'll be worth investing in crafting classes. But, such a decision needs to be made early in the design process because so much depends on it. For example, a big part of being a crafter is the selling process, so do you want to design the game so that players can fulfil their shopkeeper fantasy? If so, that means no auction house, the sellers fantasy requires that players dont have all the information. Also, how do you stimulate the economy, keep demand? Item degredation, or breakages? How do crafter's distinguish themselves from one another? Do you stick to recipes, or do you try to put some genuine player skill into the crafting process?

Then you've got the issue of independence vs interdependence. If you only allow players one character then it makes their choice of class(es) much more important and helps increase the community spirit and interdependence. That's good. However, a lot of players like being independent, and a lot of players enjoy rolling alts. There's no real good answer here, so I tend to prefer the allowing of alts. I tend to think that most players are pretty lazy and are unlikely to spend 100s of hours leveling up alts, just so that they can craft their own stuff instead of buying it from others. For the small percentage of players that are willing to do that, well, good on them, they're still playing the game for 100s or 1000s of extra hours just to gain that independence and all of that is good for the studio and thus the game as a whole.

Mendel · February 2020

cameltosis said:

My preference is definitely for classes / roles to remain fairly focused, so I don't particularly like the idea of giving a crafter combat abilities, especially if those combat abilities make them desirable in a group.

I do like some of the specific ideas for your crafter class, like turning consumables into group-wide bonuses. Having played the captain in lotro for years, I'm always in favour of including buff classes / support classes.

My preference for a crafting class is to take the SWG pre-cu route. Plenty of research has shown that the average human is capable of mastering 2 or 3 things during their lifetime, if you are exceptional then you might hit 5 things. So, I'd like my game to reflect something similar: keeping each class/role separate, but allowing players to master 2 or 3 of them.

So, I would have a crafting class (or, likely, many crafting classes) and then let players choose how they want to build their character. If you want to craft and fight, then pick a crafting class and a combat class to master. Pure crafter? Go that route.

With all that said, my current opinion is that spending time working on a truly engaging crafting experience is a waste of time. Whilst we, as players, and devs have such a fixation on loot, why bother wasting time on a whole system that is mostly pointless?!?!

If a game decides that it wants to build a full player economy that is based on crafting, rather than on loot, then it'll be worth investing in crafting classes. But, such a decision needs to be made early in the design process because so much depends on it. For example, a big part of being a crafter is the selling process, so do you want to design the game so that players can fulfil their shopkeeper fantasy? If so, that means no auction house, the sellers fantasy requires that players dont have all the information. Also, how do you stimulate the economy, keep demand? Item degredation, or breakages? How do crafter's distinguish themselves from one another? Do you stick to recipes, or do you try to put some genuine player skill into the crafting process?

Then you've got the issue of independence vs interdependence. If you only allow players one character then it makes their choice of class(es) much more important and helps increase the community spirit and interdependence. That's good. However, a lot of players like being independent, and a lot of players enjoy rolling alts. There's no real good answer here, so I tend to prefer the allowing of alts. I tend to think that most players are pretty lazy and are unlikely to spend 100s of hours leveling up alts, just so that they can craft their own stuff instead of buying it from others. For the small percentage of players that are willing to do that, well, good on them, they're still playing the game for 100s or 1000s of extra hours just to gain that independence and all of that is good for the studio and thus the game as a whole.

Overall, I like your ideas here.

The idea of a person mastering 2-3 things has been around in society for quite some time. One thing that counteracts that, particularly in a world built around a medieval economy/society is that information was much more restricted. Experts could and did hoard information and carefully controlled new practitioners of their skill. That was expected by society, and even helped to maintain knowledge. The craftsman would take on an apprentice and train them.

So, the human was capable of learning multiple professions. The opportunity to learn the skills of multiple professions was strictly limited, though. A community didn't want 217 extra blacksmiths to show up and drive out old Samuel the local blacksmith. People were loyal to friends and family. They'd trust Samuel and his apprentice more than an upstart.

Having a character with the opportunity to learn multiple trade skills fits more in a modern-to-futuristic game.

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As to alts, people have been shown to level multiple alts, to experience all classes or all trade skills. This was a thing even from the early days of EQ1. The problem is that there's never been any requirement to starting a trade, just a minor in-game investment to buy some equipment, collect some raw materials, peruse a spoiler site for some know-how and off they go.

Even in modern societies, there are costs to entry for any profession. It may take lots of education and experience. Even with the knowledge, starting a new business is going to require licenses and permits, and have to pay taxes. These cost to entry aren't present in games, and probably shouldn't be, they're more a precursor to the more interesting aspects.

centkin · February 2020

The thing is, crafting is more like an NPC thing in flavor than a PC thing if you want to look at it as a primary class. I mean you could have a PC crafter have his own storefront. He could make quests that would hire adventurers. Heck, he could be sending out groups of adventurers into the deep dark dungeons to bring back materials that he could make things out of. He could gain fame by which adventurers are wearing his stuff. Sir Puffington might have slain the dragon but he did it using a Blandings suit of armor. Blandings, keeping adventurers alive since 534.

Wizardry · February 2020

This is a VERY easy one to comment on.

The reason a crafting class is a waste of time is because players would just create alts to cover as many bases as they need.This type of altaholic design has imo ALWAYS been a bad design.

In a game like FFXI we could play EVERY class on that same player,learn all the spells and abilities,various weapon choices etc etc.We could nearly craft everything on that same player.
However a smart idea that Square did was design crafting to be very time consuming both collecting mats and crafting.This way it allowed a market to exist,so even the lowest noobs in the game could earn currency selling those redundant mats to higher level players that were too lazy.

Point is that there is no reason at all to have a crafting class,to lock a player to a one dimensional game design makes no sense.

anemo · February 2020

Wizardry said:

This is a VERY easy one to comment on.

The reason a crafting class is a waste of time is because players would just create alts to cover as many bases as they need.This type of altaholic design has imo ALWAYS been a bad design.

In a game like FFXI we could play EVERY class on that same player,learn all the spells and abilities,various weapon choices etc etc.We could nearly craft everything on that same player.
However a smart idea that Square did was design crafting to be very time consuming both collecting mats and crafting.This way it allowed a market to exist,so even the lowest noobs in the game could earn currency selling those redundant mats to higher level players that were too lazy.

Point is that there is no reason at all to have a crafting class,to lock a player to a one dimensional game design makes no sense.

That's one of the points of the skills suggested. Outside of the hands of a crafter their traded output is pretty mundane (to the point that it'll probably end up eventually replaced by loot). The crafter using their own gear, has the ability to "redline"/"exceed normal limits", meaning that the crafter can participate in normal content or be able to explore content that is "their level" (could be a tradeoff that instead of "questing exp/exploration/gear" a player could get that type of direction from crafting).

aRtFuLThinG · February 2020

Crafting as a class has always been a good idea and I think that might be the reason why a number of people still misses games like SWG pre-CU pre-NGE - because that was one of the game were crafting and trade are really classes, and useful classes they are on top of that.

Adamantine · February 2020

Amathe said:

I kind of like the idea. But I think it would be better to have your crafting skills enhance your combat skills, not be them.

So a fletcher would be a better archer, a blacksmith would be better with metal weapons, a potion maker would be a better healer or poisoner, and so on.

And/or, maybe you could get one extra useable combat skill out of each crafting skill. So, for example, a fletcher would get a bow attack that not every archer gets.

Hmm.

Okay, also possible.

But at that point you might as well link the crafter class to the adventurer class. So a mage would always be a tailor, a rogue would always be a carpenter, the knight would always be a smith and the priest would always be an alchemist. Just to keep people from screwing over their character.

I mean OK - maybe instead you could still give a couple choices, and depending upon choice the special abilities you get differ accordingly. So to return to my previous example, the Mage would now actually be blocked from smith, because as a mage he cannot get any benefits from that crafter class. But if he picks tailor he gets some better defenses (robe), as a carptenter his staff useage improves, and as an alchemist he can boost himself even more than others with potions. And if you want to make a smith, you'll have to pick a Knight or Rogue, and that gives the Knight certain extra defensive moves and the Rogue some extra attacks with steel weapons.

That would be a kind of extra subclass choice. Next to the race and possibly subclasses themselves.

All in all I cant say I would hate this idea. In fact I think I like it maybe even better than keeping crafting and adventuring completely separate.

Lacedaemon · February 2020

I'm reminded of the Dealer/Artisan class from ROSE

Utinni · February 2020

Crafting classes in SWG had roles in invasions. Needed multiple to build all the turrets and defensive structures. Also needed entertainers for that too.

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