Hangout of the Avatar ~ Crafting Discussion

Thanks for the response Scottie! It is definitely something I can live without, but a neat element that affects the atmosphere. It would be fun to have at some point.

 

Having the blood spatter or "drain" or be dynamic should be relatively straightforward with a projected texture or two.

 

"I love the chatter I'm seeing about crafting!

I have a cooking question for players:
What ideas do you have for benefits of food recipes?

Nominal stuff:
Health recovery, sure.
Stamina increase, sure.
Sickness avoidance, ok.
Strength buff, possible.
How about having "healthy" or well prepared foods give a bit of a buff here and there?

More magical foods:
"Eat me!" Grow food
"Drink me!" Shrink drink
Invisibility potions, etc

Speaking of drinks...
We could make stills and copper tanks of various brewing uses...

But what makes drinks different from each other?

 

I like the idea those tables being able to have several states.

Broken, for one.

Also, you could have them be upgradeable, also to make them more relevant to the users skill level.

 

Food has always been a tricky one. Alchemy will probably provide buffs etc, so to keep cooking a competitive option, it could provide similar or unique buffs.

I also feel you should be requred to eat at least 1 meal per real day. To benefit skill gain. Not needed as frequently as UO required, but at least once a day.

The other thing foods and drinks could be used in is roleplay. Perhaps drinks could give off drunk emotes and stronger mixes might give off a greater emote. You eat a muffin and your a avatar might say yum, but if you eat a more complicated recipe ie triple chocolate cake, your avatar might grin, lick his lips and burp.

So more complicated recipes might display more extensive emotes or animations.

 

I think stills could be used to make higher proof alcohol for things like, say hemostatic properties in addition to beverages.

Differences from drink to drink...there's a good question. Besides buffs/debuffs and the run-of-the-mill stuff we've seen for years I've got nothing besides maybe bad breath and beer goggles.

 

The nominal stuff covers a lot, I like it. Cooking magical stuff sounds like it would overlap with other trades. I don't know what your intention was, but I don't see things like potions falling under the cooking category. That sounds more like alchemy.

If consumables had different ways to be applied to the body that changed effects, duration or even how long it takes to start working, then it might give more meaning to the different trades and allow each to still serve the population in many overlapping, but different ways. For example, a strength potion might take effect nearly immediately, but perhaps not last longer than a few minutes, whereas a strength brownie might take five minutes to start working but last longer. Maybe a strength poultice or lotion takes effect immediately with fast results, but perhaps not with a large increase.

 

To continue with drinks... alchemy and brewing could be related trades or at least share part of a tech tree. Teas would probably fall under this too.

I think there should be a category of drinks/food effects that are simply fun. Different visual effects, perhaps even coordinated between the clients so it becomes a shared 'altered state' experience. Changing the order of the player's typed words or even slurring them. And of course, drunk walking and random burping.

 

First, there's nothing I like more than the developers asking for input around interesting design decisions. I encourage you and your team to ask for direct feedback like this more often.

Second, I began to write a "quick response" to your questions but found that what was intended to be a few short points was turning into a huge essay. I had already planned to write on my fansite regarding PVP Balance over the weekend, so I think I'll just start on that now. Anyone interested should find it posted by tomorrow evening - if not tonight.

I invite you to read these ideas and others on www.evilgrief.com.

 

Ideas for recipe effects -- one effect would be to mellow/calm the diner down. Even to slow/paralyze them, depending on how much they ate (the post-Thanksgiving-dinner, tryptophan-induced coma). Broaden this just a bit to improve the interpersonal skills of the recently-well-fed (as opposed to the 'fueled') individual. Landlords who are solid, even fat, are much more seen as genial and trustworthy ("Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous." Julius Caesar, Act 1, Sc. 2, lines 195-196; http://nfs.sparknotes.com/juliuscaesar/page_22.html)

Some dishes, those with strong and especially fetid spicing, could decrease interpersonal attractiveness. (Kimchee and other heavily-imbrued-with-garlic dishes, some 24-36 hours later, can produce amazingly pungent and disliked exudation.) This might be a balancing factor for the shorter-term 'combat' buffing, or magical potency enhancing.

...aphrodisiacs? Don't see how the gameplay benefits; this can be roleplayed....

Perhaps some special spicing/herbs benefit 'night vision', the way "Dr. Carrot" was supposed to do in WWII? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrots -- Wikipedia says this is unsourced, but see Bombers & Mash: The Domestic Front 1939-1945, Raynes Minns, (c) 1980; Virago Press (c) 1999; ISBN 1 86049 794 2, Great Britain, p. 97; image of Dr. Carrot, p. 101.) (Interrupt; filing 'edit request' with Wikipedia on this)

The aspects of taste and smell are (thankfully?) only symbolically transferrable. Viscosity could range from effervescent (practically leaping upwards out of the glass) to glue-like ('a molasses-slow oozing'). Color is a great attractant/variant (do you want Midori green? Skyrim's "Balmora Blue"? Beers to indicate their flavorfulness by darkening and lessened translucency? The pungency might also be a factor -- the astringency of concentrated bases and acids causes reactions several feet away, even from a small (glass-sized) sample of ammonia, bleach, etc..

Pouring a liquid out of the one type of container it can't affect, into another which it can, might be very disconcerting -- as you watch the aqua regia eat its way through the bottom of your metal tankard, which you put under the glass spout. Your solid gold tankard.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia.

 

How will the balance be for a character between crafting and adventuring?

UO style meant you only had a set amount of skills you could master, and every crafting skill you took meant that was one less combat skill you could max out - leading many people to specialize in one or the other.

More modern MMO's - let's use WoW as an example - let you max out a couple professions without any detriment to your combat ability.

Which way will SotA lean? Have to choose (UO) or have it all (WoW)?

 

I'm fairly certain the dev team stated and is still committed to combat skills and crafting not impacting each other & that unlike the UO example you provided you will be able excel at both in SoTA - which I think is great.

 

Just a quick note, the transcription is done, for this HotA. Enjoy!

 

I like the idea of well-prepared or healthful foods giving a small buff, perhaps rather than hp or mana recovery, or boosted experience, they give you a small boost to performing your skills. As an example, a "well-prepared meal" gives +2% skill bonus temporarily, and certain super-foods made from certain ingredients give an additional bonus. Should over-eating give a negative? Make you sleepy? Hmm..

How would we define well-prepared? If we're rolling for a certain percentage, it could be like a critical strike in cooking.
Other ideas for cooking

• bonus to learning? eg: if 1% of skill takes 1 point, perhaps certain "brain food" would increase this to 3% for 2 points, or better, temporarily
• side-effects: maybe that elderberry tart seems like normal food, but eat one when you're poisoned and find it acts as an antidote for some toxins
• on the trippy/magic effects: reveals previously unseen places. eg: fairy cakes lets you see the door to a cave
• attracts or repels certain creatures

Also, we had a fun and out-there discussion about smell here where we discussed cookin a little. I like the ideas about "light filters" indicating deliciousness.

Will there be blessed/cursed food? Holy water, etc? What effect would these have in SotA? Perhaps virtue specific (humble pie? teehee)

 

I like a lot of the ideas posted here. I'm not sure if I have any new comments but I do have a few olds ones I'd like to reiterate.. ok and maybe one or two new comments.

I'd love and partly assuming crossover ingredients between food, alchemy and reagents. The classic examples from Ultima being ginseng and garlic. I would think that basically any reagent that can double as a food ingredient has the potential to provide some magical benefit but perhaps to a lesser degree. Any differences can be attributed to preparation, quantity and cooking method. Generally speaking would expect alchemy potions to be more potent due to higher concentrations.. but food may have more ingredients. So while a potion will typically only have 1 effect.. certain foods might have 2 or 3 but with lesser potency. Or perhaps there may be one or two ingredients that are more potent as a solid when baked than as a liquid?

One idea I had for cooking that I really liked was optional 'flavor' or 'inactive' ingredients. Example: You can make a very simple beef strew with base ingredients.. stew meat, broth, potatoes.. but take the same recipe and add cinnamon or something else for flavor in any amount for a more dynamic recipe.. you still get beef stew but it could taste great or taste horrible cause you added too much of something that didn't go well with the potatoes... well I think I may have explained it better in another thread.. I forget which one there's some good cooking threads from awhile back.

The other thing I wanted to bring up again.. wine making! In the classic traditions of the monks of Empath Abbey and the rangers of Moonshade. If we have brewing then we need wine making. Also, like cooking these two skills should benefit from similar affects. Not to dilute the possibilities of any one skill I realize that may be somewhat of a challenge to make them all similar but distinctly different and valuable in their own right.

I think we'd also very much enjoy crossover benefits between alchemy and the other 3 skills.

 

Thanks for your hardwork!
The transcription is great help for non-English laungauge speaker like me.
I'll make recap from your work and get updated for Japanese fans.
Thanks again vjek!

 

I think that food and fluid consumption become important and the cooking profession necessary and rewarding when the following are implemented:

1) Essential Food and Fluid Consumption to Counter Nutritional Disease States: Food would have to become essential to basic state of health which means that the lack thereof leads to specific nutritional disease states which affect certain stats of the player until countered. For example, scurvy would delay wound healing (reduce base healing rate) and consuming foods rich in vitamin C would counter the disease state. Thus, a defined set of nutritional disease states are necessary.

2) Individual Food/Herb/Spice Properties and Synergistic Effects: The ingredients (including any spices or herbs) have specific properties that by themselves counter or prevent a specific nutritional disease state, but when combined to create a meal have not only additive protection but perhaps synergistic ones depending upon the combination of items (synergistic effects perhaps being the temporary bonus to stats or health/mana/ stamina recovery rate).

3) Food Consumption Allows Health Recovery: Eating food doesn't work as an instant full health recovery like a potion might but allows for health recovery to occur whereby the natural base health recovery rate gets activated and a player slowly recovers health over time. Potions, on the other hand, should not be insta-heals either but should increase the recovery over time markedly compared to what occurs only with food consumption.

 

One of the ideas out there is that potions should be effect over time items.. all consumables have to be processed by your body so in many respects the instant effects we're used to in games are somewhat out of place. On the other hand, proper pacing of a game often demands that instant effects take place. Nobody wants to sit around and wait for that healing potion to kick in. I lean on the side of the marked increase effort over time.. so long as the effect begins immediately.

 

Exactly. I'm thinking sort of like the way food (its rate was painfully slow) and the Swallow potion worked in the first Witcher cRPG (well, perhaps not as efficiently as the Swallow potion). As far as insta-heals, maybe that's where magic cones in?

Ideally, I want players to consider whether a fight is worth it before engaging based upon the state of their current health and not knowing what the opponent's health state is whether its PVE or PVP. I personally get bored with going from mob to mob to get from point A to point B, grab X, and then fight through mobs to get to point A again. I think if players had a chance to consider their equipment, their skill, their state of health, and the hazards they might face in pursuing their tasks, they will get a richer gameplay experience that is tactically sound even if it means hiding in the brush and recuperating while watching patrol paths before sneaking through the lines or ambushing a dawdler.

 

I mentioned above three things that boiled down to

• Potency - how powerful
• Duration - how long it lasts
• Delay - how long until full effects are felt

If each consumable from all trades (magic included) just varied these three things it would make consumables be useful in different situations. For combat you might want something to take effect instantaneously and be powerful, but not need it for long periods of time. You might use a different consumable if you're done with a dungeon and healing up in town where how fast it happens isn't as important. If you're exploring, you might need something to last for twenty or thirty minutes at a steady rate.

These checks/balances could spread out the player interaction over more trades.