Crafting Ideas (From professions to systems to wide populations)

[Mefur]

(This is merely wishful thinking and none of my ideas have to be heard. However, please read and agree, disagree, change, build upon, or comment on these ideas.) I would like to start of with this game being planned as an MMO, and should be treated as such. Also, this is a game that has amazing potential to bring a massive player community together, and I hope they do just that. Too many games are focusing on the individual progress of people, and not of groups or communities of people. With that said, the basics of crafting would follow professions specialization. I’m talking about making one character (ONLY one) and creating him into a craftsman that you want to be. There would be many choices for a profession and every single one would be needed in order to further the next. (I’ll explain this later on) Every profession could be learned by all, but not all could learn every profession. What I mean is, someone could put in enough time and effort to master every profession, however, with certain limitations, it will be near impossible, but still possible with much time and effort.
The first topic I would like to discuss is the overall system mechanics of professions and crafting. All professions will have a level system, and without a certain skill level, certain blocks/items/structures could be created or functional. (ex. to create a grand project such as a permanent portal, a skilled miner would mine Oortstone, a skilled blacksmith would melt it, and a skilled architect would lay it down and a skilled wizard/magic profession would enchant it) One person, given enough time could do this on their own, or multiple people could cut down the required time and effort due to every profession in the example needing to have a high skill level. In order to create checks and balances, each skill or profession would “rust”. If one profession isn’t practiced enough, the character will become “rusty” or lose their skill and levels in the profession that they are not specializing in. This is keeping in mind that the game should push for a community to work together and several specializations should be made and kept active across several players acting together. Also, the classes/professions will be separated in their contribution. Such as crafting professions, combat, explorer, magical, political, business, etc etc. I really believe that Oort Online has the potential to create a massively diverse and unique game with the proper amount of time and effort put in. Each class should have certain locked abilities that would be necessary for town-building, homesteading, exploring, combat, etc. (An explorer would have the ability to create geographically accurate maps to record their travels. A historian should be able to read temple glyph writing. A warrior would have combat abilities.) This would help create a diverse game that would suit people of all types. With that said, please, change, build upon, disregard, agree, disagree with what I have put out.
Next I would go into some overarching categories in particular followed by their respective classes (not all). For instance, one category would be the craftsman category. Being a part of this category would give you certain abilities of obviously crafting items, weapons, blocks, houses, and so on and so forth. Also, being a craftsman would give you bonuses to being able to identify harvestables along your way that a warrior without prior knowledge would look at and not have the name in their HUD or its uses. There could be other bonuses, limitations and special traits that follow the craftsman ability such as not having a skill tree that utilizes weapons. A combat profession would have access to said skill tree, but unable to create or lay down any block except your average cubes. They would also be able to see health bars for all other NPC’s or even players. Being a magical profession would give you access to the elements and mana and golemancy and enchanting and magical secrets. Being an explorer would give you a longer grappling hook range, higher base movement, double jump, reduced fall damage, etc.
The next topic would be of some classes and the specifics of each class to give you an overall idea of my vision and what I want to see. Starting with your standard blacksmith. He/she would have the ability to melt down the ores to certain purity ratings and create molds for coins, weapons, blocks, ingots, armor, etc. The blacksmith profession would follow a “mold” path, in that their major creation method would be to create molds and fill them in. At higher levels, personal molds could be created, purity levels could be changed and alloys could be made. Also, molds could be common such as your average iron sword or could be rare such as a moonstone sword mold found in temple that requires special forges and sets of distinct steps in order to create it. Molds could be used for mass production and the blacksmith would need to follow the procedure of the instructions inscribed on the mold. Maybe NPC’s specializing in certain classes could visit settlements and a blacksmith would sell molds or with certain levels of friendship, improve an existing mold. With higher levels, the sharpness of blades and the impact of blunts can be increased. After certain level achievements, different ores could be worked with without breaking or being inferior in quality. Next, an explorer profression could be a scribe (I was debating on this or just the generic explorer, and this seemed better to use since the latter could be figured out easily on your own.) A scribe would have the special ability of being able to record and read on a tablet or canvas of their choosing (wood, clay, papyrus, bark, etc). However, these scribes would also have the special ability of reading temple glyph writings. These writings may contain secrets such as a hidden passage with loot, a weakness of the guarding titan, a blueprint to a magical construct (yes.golems.) or secrets to using certain crafting stations found in the temples, which can later be moved to the town. I like the idea of this, because a group can choose to use pure brawn and overpower a titan, or a smaller group could guide a scribe to the temple where the titan isn’t protecting the goodies, and find ways for small, developing towns to get a nice boost. The next class would be in the business profession, (kinda skeptical, it might fit with a hybrid of craftsman/explorer.) a merchant. A merchant would have the ability to talk to NPC or players and open up trades without having to barter. Normally trade would require both sides to give something, but the merchants can use an economical ability to use credit. Basically, a merchant would either go by themselves or have a mount (obtained by a beastmaster, maybe explorer profession) that would carry goods found in one capital/settlement to the next. While carrying cargo that is to be sold, a merchant cannot move freely between worlds, but may absolutely walk between the gateways. A merchant could buy for lower prices, sell for higher, and always carry goods that many people should look at. For instance, a merchant visiting a gold mining town would carry food, clothing, wood, or other necessities that the gold mining village could not find, in exchange for solid gold ore. The people of business class could see the coinage value of each item being traded and always find appropriate costs. These values would be determined by a system that saves all of the coinage-item trades and make an average, or some other system. A magic profression would be an enchanter. Someone who could permanently enhance or activate blocks and weapons. A moonlight sword with added diamonds for durability could be identified and still have an activation slot. An enchanter could activate this slot and give it farther bonuses such elemental damage, boons to the character, permanent light to surroundings. Also, as said before, an enchanter could activate blocks. A permanent portal would need a highly skilled enchanter to activate the blocks with the proper enchantment in order for the portal to function. An construction profession would have an architect class. An architect would be essential for building villages, since they would be the only one with the ability to create copies of houses using blueprints. For instance, an architect might like the design of someones house and create a blueprint for it, come home to his town and recreate ten of those houses. Under player beacons, the houses could not be blueprinted unless the beacon owner wishes it. Also, architects could work with the cube blocks and create sloped, inverted, corner pieces, etc using certain tools to create vivid and beautiful structures. Also, a temple may hold a blueprint that the architect has to follow in order to create a powerful structure such as an ancient fortress or a permanent portal or a beacon connector that connects many adjacent beacons into one property. The last one I would like to mention would be the harvesting profession and of course, a farmer would be a good idea for this. A farmer could plant crops and harvest them for food, textiles, or material. A farmer could also raise livestock or create insect farms such as spiders and bees. A skilled farmer could give bee honey to a cook who can make a honey dish that boosts speed or something else. Also, a farmer could harvest spider silk and a tailor could create robes that have a higher enchanting value than regular cotton. Also, a farmer could find wild docile creatures and domesticate them. A wild chocobo can be tamed and bred to be used as a horse, the ability for the chocobo to become a mount would have to be influenced by a beastmaster.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for my hopes and dreams, I may or may not create more pages depending on how the responses are with this post. Of course, I believe that the classes would hold a deep influence on community building, exploring, renown, and races would also play a part in certain class abilities. Again, please, comment, agree, disagree, build upon, change, and do whatever to make a great game fueled by the people.

[Mittekemuis]

I wrestled my way through your massive post and there are good ideas but can you please break the text down in blocks of manageable text 🙂

[Havok40k]

Yeah, I took one look at that wall of text and fled.

[Thorbjorn]

Some similar threads with ideas that could fit to this or with different opinions on the matter:

http://oortonline.com/forums/topic/crafting-pick-one/
http://oortonline.com/forums/topic/tools-and-weapons/
http://oortonline.com/forums/topic/combat-skills-utility-skills/

That should be it 🙂

[Zouls]

dont link mine, its nothing like it.

Honestly i disagree with every single thing but let me list them

1) there are most likely not going to be and would very much like to NOT see any npc’s in the game except the enemies

2) making people choose what they want to do when making a character is just… no, i want to be able to level a crafting profession up but i am ofc also going to fight + saying you pick what you want at start while also saying you can have all is kinda contradicting

3) all the classes you would like to see are basically going to be races, some races are good for exploring and some are good for crafting while others are genius for combat.

4) limiting the ability to sell items to a specific class since everybody always have a few things they would like to sell from time to time

5) the idea of molds might be cool but it just feels weak, i think that every piece of armor and weapon should feel special and be hand crafted

6) making a proffesion which can make a titan fight much easier is just…. not a good idea, ofc it may help the smaller guilds, but they should just team up with others or get better if they want to take down a titan.

All though i disagree with most of it i can agree on the idea of having specific things be multiple crafting professions like you said with bigger portals. and ofc we need things like enchanters and stuff

[Thorbjorn]

Actually as there is a lot of discussion about restrictions of skills on your thread which is strongly related to the idea of needing to choose a class/profession at the start of the game.

[Zouls]

Purely for crafting, the way i read this is like ”you are a crafter and cant fight if you choose that” which would be really boring :/

[dapasdapro]

I like those ideas. A system as it was in Ultima Online would be awesome.

Having just one profession will increase the teamwork and more important the economy.

[Author]

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