It would be nice to have a crafting system where people can make choices and skill matters. I've heard of systems which employ a 'fighting with an item' paradigm, which probably ends up feeling a lot like the Everquest minigame quixadhal mentioned. I think this is great for any game where crafting is either a central activity or an integral one, at least on par with fighting.

As KaVir said, it's also possible to have a less complicated crafting system in a supporting role. This is very much the case with mine. Its goal would be to enhance the main themes: exploring, gear set creation over many years, strong differentiation of class/race gameplay styles, co-op synergies in experience groups.

That my craft system will not be in the focus is clear from the first lines in my proposal, where I've described it as a background activity (it will take as many game days as, say, a real-life armor takes to make an armor). The quality of products will be directly proportional to gameplay time (time spent crafting will increase 'skill' percent) and lifetime experience (time spent killing or questing will improve quality). Notice that I'm not only taking out the skill element, but the random element as well, in order to discourage people from botting as crafters and thus not actively contributing to central community activities such as experience groups.

I really only try to discourage botting when it affects the community experience (for instance, a bunch of idle chars hoarding zone keys) and apart from that, I don't try to police it at all. But I believe that by making it convenient to craft while doing something else, I'm making it less likely that people will bot. We'll see.

And who can craft. It seems like anyone can the way you talk about it.

Anyone of the chosen profession based on the pattern required to make the item. I failed to mention that the builder also sets the flag for the profession that crafts the item. I haven't decided yet if there should be a limit to professions. If so, I might only allow 1 or 2 per player. Although, I may have no limits there.

ConQUEST's crafting system has a nice idea (among many others in its crafting system – the game is back up by the way, for those who want to check it out) where learning more craft skills makes it harder to get really good at one of them. A simple idea but it works well IMO.

I've thought quite a bit about crafting because it's one of the areas that I believe really falls short in so many games. Back in the day of games where crafting was essential, because it was the only way to get items, there was much more diversity. Of course, dreams of mine tend to have economy systems similar to EVE Online where the players are fully in charge of keeping the economy running. Of course, then you have to deal with size of playerbase and whatnot, but that's not really the point.

Above, someone was saying that they wanted to see a MUD that had the crafter class being powerful on the merits of their crafting abilities alone. I actually was impressed with the way that New Worlds handled their merchant class (at least with regards to this topic). They, with their large flows of cash coming from caravans supplying outlying cities and cooking/brewing for the Tavern drinks/food… were easily the wealthiest group of people in the game. Many of the merchants used that wealth to buy mercenaries from within the playerbase, including paying off judges and bribing officials to get out of doing things they didn't want to do. Of course, this is from a very roleplay specific game, but that's primarily what I'm familiar with lately.

As far as the botting goes, at some point you're going to have to take a step back and realize that you're not going to be able to stop people from botting. People playing MUDs especially tend to be a bit smarter than your average MMO player and with that, they have ways of making things automated if they really want to. You can put rules in place within the game that say you're not allowed to automate things, but the bottom line is… people are going to do it, whether you want them to or not. Hopefully, and again this is the dream, you can build a good community for your MUD that discourages that style of play… but it will be even harder within a game where min/maxing is a viable play method.

All that aside, I like the ideas that you've come up with so far. I'm guessing that your MUD is more focused on hack/slash, mainly just with the focus on item and stat buffing, and for that… I like the actual product ideas that you have going on here.

Group based crafting would be interesting, which would allow for various roles within the crafting process like combat has tanks and healers among others. Then there is component quality, can the crafter tell the difference between a low and high quality piece of oak wood, if a bottle of blood is that of a virgin, and if it's fresh? The crafter might have to put some trust in his salesman, who in turn might have to put some trust in his suppliers, guaranteed drama. The position of stellar objects and other time based events are potential influences that can significantly reduce the number of items that can be pumped out, or allow for experimentation and subsequent trade secrets. Freshness combined with distance can be interesting, if the mud has a sense of distance you could make it very challenging to make a potion that requires fresh ingredients from opposite sides of the world, possibly requiring two people to harvest and meet at the center of the world. Ingredients might have to age as well. While rather challenging to implement it'd make botting much more difficult.

@Runter


Well, you can always make it so you can only train two professions at once. Then, the player can use any profession they've learned at it's current skill level, but only improve 'active' professions. Otherwise people will be frustrated at losing all their skill in something and never switch which could be very frustrating. Assuming you can switch professions, the switching itself ought to have a 'cool down time' (possibly between several days and several weeks depending on what works best for a particular game) so that people aren't just going to massively train each and switch back and forth the whole time. That way they are likely to choose more carefully. Also, there could be a max limit on professions learned, say 25% of all of them that they are able to learn at all. They could trade at most one profession at a time (losing all skill in it) for another, on the sort of in-game premise that they don't have "time" to maintain more than the max number of professions ( this probably also needs a similar "cool down" timer as above).