I have played with a couple of crafting systems, and although they all have their merit, they also all have perceoved weaknesses that I would like to find someone of like mind to address.
The NWN2 system leaves alot to be desired, as many of the crafting recipes make little or no sense, and are IMHO unbalancing.
I have played the KEMO crafting system on a world, and although I love the direction she went with this one, I believe she stopped on this and moved on before providing a finished product that is balanced.
Strengths of her system:
1) A Secondary Crafting system that provides players with the ability to assign crafting points into:
a) Gathering Material Crafts: Herbalism, Prospecting, Fishing, Farming and Gardening.
Refineing Material Crafts: Alchemy, Armor Smithing, Weapon Smithing, Misslie Weapon Smithing, Cooking, Poison Craft, Tinkering, Woodworking, Jeweler, Seamstress, and Leather working (I may have missed one or two)c) Enchanting Refined Material Crafts: Thaumatology (Arcane) and Theology (Divine).
2) Characters can get experience for crafting.
3) Characters can have critical successes resulting in either exceptional product, or extra product.
4) Characters can have critical failures which result in one or more of the following:
a) Loss of tools required for the gathering craft.
Loss of time until character can use the same craft again (15 minutes game time)c) Loss of materials required in the crafting process. This last one can be expensive when it is the end product being enchanted.
Perceived weaknesses of her system:
1) Too many points to allocate, allows individuals to be master craftsmen in up to three seperate crafts.
2) Some crafting skills are duplicative (Gardening and Farming) being the prime example, the only difference between the two is the time required (Gardening short, Farming longer) in game time, and amount created (Gardening smaller units, Farming larger units).
3) Some crafting skills are missing altogether. Ranching, Tanning and Blacksmithing/Smelting come to mind immediately.
4) Some Refining Material Crafting skills have Items they can make that are magical in nature, and require other NWN feats (Craft Wondrous Item, Craft Armor, etc) or Thaumatology/Theology skill points. (Though you can work with others who have these as a Party, to create an end product.
5) Some of the Gathering Material Crafts are unbalanced compared to the others. Prospecting being the prime example, as you end up getting far more gems than metals, and on critical successes, exotic gems or Radient Essences or all types, while the others only give an extra material.
6) The experience points awarded is odd, some crafts get bonuses to every item made, others only on critical successes.
7) All Refined Materials can be made into Magic Items. I would prefer to see a system where you would have Critical Successes (For a Grandmaster about 1 in 13 or 14 attempts, and about 1 in 100 for critical failure in my experience) provide Masterwork Products, and ONLY can Masterwork Products be enchanted. This would allow the Gathering Crafters to sell their lower valued raw materials to the Refining Crafters, who would make lost of normal swords, Jewelry, Armor, etc, but would have the Masterwork Pieces to sell to characters and crafters for enchanting. Levelling the playing field for the crafts a bit.
8) I believe a person should only be able to attain Grand Master in a Single Craft. This makes every character who is a crafter needed, especially if the risk/reward and exp/financial gains are comperable for all crafters.
9) Many of the Refining Material Crafters should have the capability of taking Raw Materials, and making purified/exquisite specimens of them. For instance:
a) All Prospected Ores could be refined by a Grand Master Smelter/Blacksmith into Purified Ingots. Say 10 bags of Mithril Ore can be refined into a single Mithril Ingot. These Mithril Ingots could then be combined with Power and Fire Essences to create a Single Purified Mithril Ingot. It is this Single Purified Mithril Ingot, that when singally or combined with others (Greatswords need more metal than Daggers or 100 Arrow Hears) and a skilled Weaponsmith, would have a 10% greater chance of resulting in a Masterwork Weapon than using normal Mithril Ingots.
Jewelers could take Raw Gems (10% of normal value for the Gems) from the Prospectors (Miners) and Refine them into Finished Gems (Cut and Polished), with a Critical Succes resulting in a Exquisite . They could use Power and Earth Essences in this process to increase their chance of getting an Exquisite Gem, which would be a required material in all Enchantments (Comperable to a Masterwork version).c) Alchemists can not only refine materials collected into various Essences (Power, Air, Earth, Fire and Water) as they do now, but they could also refine herbs and minerals collected by Gathering Crafters, into additional materials required by Enchanters and Refining Crafters in their processes.
I know this is long, and this is just the tip of the iceberg, but if any of you scripters have interests in such things, and would like to collaberate with me on getting an fully functioning end product to offer PW's, I would be greatly appreciated.
I have decades of PnP DM experience, many with crafting system and economy balancing issues to address, that would be available to discuss balance issues and problem that may arise. I have some scripting experience, but unfortunately it is decades old, and in languages that are now relics. (Fortran, Pascal and Basic.)
Thanks ...
Cyber Troll
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