House Servant discussion

Some possible functions of the house servant:

- cooking, preparing meals and drinks for when you arrive home from adventuring.

- gardening; tending to your plants and harvesting reagents.

- tinkering; makes minor repairs to your armor and weapons.

- tailors clothing for you while you are away.

- tending to wounds; creates bandages and heals you when you return home.

- cuts wood and tends to the fireplace.

 

I'm imagining something like a 'House Servant Inerface' where you can select from a list of actions or skills, then target the items involved (whether they are out or in chests and crates or on shelves) and set parameters like 'keep stocked (x)number of (x)item in (x)container.'

We would definitely want to put limits on what and how much a house servant can do in these areas:

- cuts wood and tends to the fireplace. [relatively low quality wood could be harvested(or bought?) from within the town area to be used in the fireplace since it has a very low value ceiling for crafting]

- tailors clothing for you while you are away. [If tailoring ends up a skill that players have significant sandbox abilities in then maybe we could have something like the player designs and makes one garment that the servant can then make copies of?]

- gardening; tending to your plants and harvesting reagents. [It makes sense but I wonder if it wouldn't draw complaints from players that have to do all those things by hand. Also, with gardening as a player skill it may be too complicated]

- cooking, preparing meals and drinks for when you arrive home from adventuring. [Within reasonable limits I think this is great]

- tinkering; makes minor repairs to your armor and weapons. [This is probably encroaching too much on player skills though it would make sense for a Knight's squire to tend to the Knight's armor and weapons.]

Maybe something like exclusive servant 'types' can ensure that a player with one servant can't simply have the single servant do all the cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening, tinkering/repairing etc. Instead the player can select two or three 'types' that determine what tasks the servant can do. So a knight might want to delineate his servant as a 'squire' and 'housekeeper' while a blacksmith might want to delineate his servant as 'trade apprentice' and 'housekeeper.'

The oddity of a situation like that should be apparent; the squire will never grow out of squiredom... the apprentice will never grow into a craftsman... unless there were some sort of dynamic (sims-like?) npc hiring system by which one could replace a servant (maybe they quit/run away if you work them too hard? or you fire them because some coins were missing? Or it's just time to move on!). In that case the squire could move on to be an npc in town (blade for hire?) or the apprentice could move on to do repairs at one of the local smithy's. Or in both cases if they can't get work within their town or the next 3 closest towns they become a transient and eventually a brigand or gypsy.

That kind of dynamic world has a lot to offer for OPO. I'm curious to what extent it's workable.

 

If possible I'd also like to see them be programmable with a few lines of basic text, perhaps custom made greetings or player-made quest hints or riddles that could tie into the treasure/scavenger hunts & geocaching that were recently touched upon by Chris/B of the Dev team.

 

I see some different balancing acts here:
1) People with no house vs house vs servant vs higher tiers
2) People who love vs hate crafting, people who may not mind tedious tasks at all

I'd like to see a million people playing the game. Most will not have all the perks. I would look at games like Farmville for inspiration on how I can make crafting "better" for people who paid but still get loads of people to play.

I can see a good roleplaying / social opportunity to have players being "servants". By this I mean, serf, sharecropper, apprentice, etc. You're helping do chores for someone else. You're learning a bit of the trade, you're getting small compensation for this. Again, think of Farmville type games with a strong cooperative social angle. There's a reason these games are insanely popular.

They could put some deliberately tedious tasks into professions. e.g. to cook, I need to fetch water, and then boil water, or I need to chop stuff. With more tiers of good stuff (crafting station, servants, etc) this gets done for me. If I have sheep and I want to be a tailor, someone sheers the sheep and can make some first tier of thread / cloth or w/e. On the flip side, I can go help someone else by doing some of these chores.

I generally agree with the OP's suggestions. I'm just trying to round out the aspects of it for other players.

 

@PrimeRib

It's an interesting idea to have players working for other players as part of the game mechanics. To expand on the idea a bit, what about apprenticeships? Say within a specific crafting expertise...a player could teach him/herself the crafting skills and it will take time, but if the player opts to be an apprentice of another player who has already reached master level, the player's skills will advance more quickly. There would need to be benefits for the master as well, perhaps a portion of the proceeds from selling the items made.

 

Hew that mechanic was one of the stretch goals we reached, to teach apprentices

 

Of course...thanks for pointing that out. I probably read that at some point and it got stuck in the back of my head.