Search the Community

This post is brought to you by armchair dev forum poster #209158 Dear Project Eternity developers, This is my attempt to create a well-constructed argument against the inclusion of Item Durability for the sole purpose of giving people a reason to take Crafting as a skill and some notes on your skill design and a proposed solution. Some of the stuff I talk about is ‘best-guess’. I apologize if I have misinterpreted any information I got from your forum posts at various places, but here goes… Grouping Item Durability in with Crafting achieves the design goal of making Crafting a skill that multiple characters (but perhaps not all characters) will want to take; gives Crafting a combat related per-character sliding benefit to match the efficacy of the Stealth skill and is a money-sink for the player. It is even quasi-realistic. It is not a bad design decision, but it is not the best one. Firstly, if Crafting does not affect everything that characters use to make a repeatable standard attack in Project Eternity (i.e. implements for Wizards, if they are used to make a standard attack) then it is not going to have too much use for the Wizard class if they are playing as a ranged spell flinging wizard, but only melee wizards who wear armor and wade into combat wielding spell-enhanced weapons. The wizard was previously the go-to ‘Crafter’ class in previous editions of D&D, so if that is the case it changes that archetype (which may or may not be a good or a bad thing). The issue with tacking Item Durability into the Crafting skill is that Crafting no longer becomes the focus of the skill, the focus shifts to Item Durability because of its relevance to combat and economy. It does not matter which character in the party can craft items as long as someone can do it, but it does matter which characters take the Crafting skill because characters that are going to be getting hit often and attacking often are going to run the risk of having one of their primary weapons broken while adventuring and also draining the party’s gold if they do not take the skill. It may not matter who can craft, because the action of crafting need only be performed by one character in the party to benefit the party, but it does matter who has the Crafting Skill because it is an efficiency and resource drain on the party and thus it is going to be a no-brainer to take Crafting on the primary melee combatants of the party. This does fully depend on how mild the implementation is – how long it takes for weapons to degrade and how much it costs to repair them. If it is too mild it is an insignificant mechanic, probably not worth taking on more than one character and overall busywork, but if it is at least moderate it will have certain pidgeonholing effects on character builds. This may be balanced out by the fact that characters will only be able to have two high skills in the party, and there may be other skills in the skill list that need to be taken by these melee characters in order to cover all of the needs of the party, but it seems like it is going to be important for melee characters to at least dump a couple of points into the Crafting skill just to reduce the efficiency and economic tax on the party. This mechanic creates a Skill tax on these members of the party. Excluding the affect on Item Durability, Crafting in Project Eternity [essentially Crafting, Enchantment and Alchemy] is a one-person-per-party skill. The party member with the highest Crafting skill will always be doing the crafting as crafting is an action that interrupts adventuring, can only be conducted by one character at a time and has no reason for multiple characters to be undertaking it at once. If any other characters in the party take the Crafting skill, they are merely buying “Combat Equipment Maintenance” for its combat and economic benefits. These characters will likely never craft an item in the game. Why is it important that crafting [the action] be a skill that is taken by one character? I cannot think of one, unless the Crafting disciplines were split into groups rather than streamlined so that multiple characters had to take them or Crafting was a party skill [more on that later]. The design mandate of Skills in Project Eternity seem to be highly influenced by the combat efficacy of the Stealth skill because it allows every character to use Stealth get closer to an encounter before being noticed (e.g. one point of Stealth may allow a melee character to reach melee combat with an enemy, taking one projectile hit from a ranged combatant while avoiding the extra projectile hit he would have taken had he been noticed earlier). Based on the current available information it leads me to believe that every other skill is being designed with a similar benefit in mind, even if the benefits are somewhat abstract to the actual skill itself. “Combat Equipment Maintenance” is not abstract from Crafting, it makes sense, but it makes more sense that characters proficient or excellent with a weapon would also know how to maintain their weapons to make them last a longer period of time before repair. The ‘gamism’ of the design is inferior to the obvious simulation. An easy way (but maybe not the best way) to solve this problem and to keep the design intentions intact is to remove Crafting from the skill list completely and make it an abstract action that any character can perform (like Baldur’s Gate 2 and Knights of the Old Republic 2). The restrictions can be present within the item recipes themselves and still achieve the same effect without having Crafting as a character skill since it seems to be at odds with the design principles of the current skill system on its own. I do not believe there is anyone that would complain about that. For the sole sake of keeping the money-sink and strategical maintenance part in the game, you could keep the “Combat Equipment Maintenance” as a skill. But now without Crafting, it is solely a skill tax on equipment based characters. The comments Josh Sawyer made regarding the money-sink part of the skill led me to believe that this was partially intended to affect the party wealth of players that do not invest in the Stronghold, but it is clear that it affects everyone, not just them. You could also remove that from the skill list and make it an abstract system like Diablo 2, but Item Durability as its own entity would probably be more annoying to a larger portion of the fanbase than it is as part of a skill (conjecture, I couldn’t be certain) and it wasn’t present in the Infinity Engine games either – perhaps it makes sense in the context of the world, like Baldur’s Gate or Fallout New Vegas, only you could say. Changing Item Durability to an inverse “Sharpness” mechanic where you sharpen an item and it has more damage and degrades over time does not fix the issue, it retains exactly the same issues and has even more plausibility (which may not be an issue for you). Removing Crafting from the skill list and removing item durability/any sister mechanics from the game solves the problems with trying to make a skill out of a one-character-per-party action which was an abstract action in other games and feat(s) in some editions of D&D. It may not solve the money-sink issue for players that do not invest in the Stronghold, but I do not believe that was a good solution to that problem anyway if that was its intention. But in my opinion the problem is rooted deeper in the skill design, and it is likely similar issues will be present in a lot of other skills. Making skills something that every character wants to take is a hard job because most of them will likely be carbon copies of D&D skills that were only meant to be taken by one person in a party in a system where it was fine that both one-person skills and universal skills were allowed to exist and other skills that are useful for multiple characters do not have the same effect in a CRPG as they do in P&P. It seems that the way you guys are tackling this is giving skills like Herbalism or Mechanics a gamist combat effective bonus to match the efficacy that Stealth and Perception have, which is my problem specifically with the examples of skill design I have seen so far (Survival in F:NV, Crafting in P:E). The problem with this design is the exact same thing is going to happen with other skills as to what is going to happen with Crafting; people in their right mind are not going to take skills on characters for the ‘skill’ action, but for the combat related bonus. Mechanics seems like it is partially a one-person-per-party skill. Sure maybe you can open two locks at once if you have it on two people but the character with the highest mechanics skill will be doing most of the mechanics skill actions. So if you gave it a per-character sliding effect combat bonus (I’m not sure what that would be, but for the sake of argument let’s say it reduces the reload time of ranged weapons) anyone else who takes it will be taking it solely for that, with the exception of possibly being able to do a couple of Mechanics actions at once where the game world permitted. Using reload time as an example, now you’re most likely not going to take mechanics on any melee characters. Your rogue might take it because he gets a natural bonus and it is useful in conjunction with Stealth but a melee fighter will probably not take Mechanics because he might not use a ranged weapon very often, but you’d be a fool not to take it on the Ranger because the Ranger will be (most likely) using a ranged weapon 90% of the time. It falls into the same pit trap as Crafting where melee characters will be a fool not to take it. If there was a skill called Herbalism and it acted like Survival in New Vegas then the same issue would be present. The character with the highest skill points in Herbalism will do the herb gathering and identifying. No other characters will be necessary to perform this action, the only reason players would put points into it is based on the increase in duration consumable consumption. It worked for New Vegas because there was only one character. Survival was taken for Survival, not just for the bonus durations of consumables. I don’t believe adding abstract per-character combat bonuses this fixes one man skills. Sure it gives you a reason to give it to more than one character but it does not make the skill-action useful for every character, it adds a subset system whereby players are choosing options based on abstract combat bonuses. The skill action of Crafting, or Mechanics or “Herbalism” remains a one-person per party action most of the time. Taking points in Crafting on two characters does absolutely nothing to the action of Crafting Items. Isn’t crafting items the purpose of the skill? Wouldn’t it be better to reward taking Crafting on multiple characters by affecting the action of crafting itself, rather than some abstract bonus? If taking Crafting on multiple characters had a direct benefit to the crafting of items for the party, then maybe people would take Crafting on multiple characters if they wanted to make a Crafting-build party. The benefits of taking Stealth on every character are solely within the skill. Taking Stealth in multiple characters allows the party to better avoid combat or get closer to combat. You could take the group benefit of multiple characters with Stealth and apply that to other skills as well. Multiple characters with Crafting could help the crafting action of the party. Crafting already allows skills, talents and abilities from other party members to help facilitate the creation of items, so why couldn’t points in Crafting from multiple characters be beneficial for the party since the action of Crafting effectively stops adventuring anyway. In fact this mechanic was present in D&D 3E, on page 62 of the Player’s Handbook under “Combining skill attempts”. Obviously you wouldn’t use these exact mechanics, since checks aren’t rolled for skills anyway, but you could say that multiple characters with a skill in the party could assist the skill check of the character vs the static target. In relation to crafting you could add a per-character sliding benefit for every character with the skill to the character with the best crafting score’s number for determining certain things about what they can Craft. The same could probably go for other skills that have this problem. That way they don’t have to have some tacked on combat-abstraction that doesn’t feel quite right.