The Mana World Forums

i had an idea for a crafting system which allows to craft unique weapons without giving too much abilities for min-maxing.

everything you can craft has a number of material slots representing the amount of raw material needed to create it. a sword could maybe have 8 slots while a dagger only has 3. When forging an item you can fill these slots with different materials to influence the attributes of the created weapon. When you want to forge a sword, for example, you can fill 2 slots with high quality but expensive steel while filling the other slots with cheaper iron. you could put some special materials in some slots for some special attributes.

the boni every material component gives to the weapon attributes aren't fixed values. they are random values in a range depending on the material chosen for the creation of the weapon. for example: every slot of bronze could add 2-3 damage while a slot of iron could add 1-6 damage.

so where does the skill of the blacksmith come in?

the blacksmith should be able to use his skill to manipulate the outcome even further. for every level of blacksmith skill you receive a "reroll". when choosing what slot to fill with what material you can assign your rerolls to the slots. when rolling the values of the materials, those slots with rerolls on them are rolled multiple times and only the best result is taken.

want an example?

so, i want to forge a sword with 8 slots and i'm a level 3 blacksmith. i use 6 chunks of bronze, 1 chunk of iron and one chunk of silver for some additional holy damage. the iron gives the most damage, so i assign one of my rerolls to the iron. but i really want some holy damage and silver is rare, so i assign the other two rerolls to the silver.

now i click the craft button and that's what's rolled:

slot 1 (bronze) roll 1: 2 damage
slot 2 (bronze) roll 1: 2 damage
slot 3 (bronze) roll 1: 3 damage
slot 4 (bronze) roll 1: 2 damage
slot 5 (bronze) roll 1: 3 damage
slot 6 (bronze) roll 1: 2 damage
slot 7 (iron) roll 1: 2 damage
slot 7 (iron) roll 2: 5 damage
slot 8 (silver) roll 1: 10 holy damage
slot 8 (silver) roll 2: 12 holy damage
slot 8 (silver) roll 3: 5 holy damage

the weapon gets the best results from every slot. the bronze gives 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 = 14 damage. the first roll of the iron was only 2. but gladly i assigned a reroll to it and the reroll was 5. the best value is taken. so we got 19 damage. the best of the 3 rolls on the silver was the 2nd one with 12, so it adds 12 holy damage.

so i crafted a weapon made of a unique bronze/iron/silver alloy with 19 normal damage and 12 holy damage. anyone want to buy it?


some ideas for materials:

bronze: adds a small amount of normal damage
iron: adds a medium amount of normal damage
steel: adds a high amount of normal damage
adamantium: adds a very high amount of normal damage

silver: adds a medium amount of holy damage
obsidian: adds a medium amount of dark damage
ruby: adds a medium amount of fire damage
sapphire: adds a medium amount of air damage
emerald: adds a medium amount of water damage
geode: adds a medium amount of earth damage
meteroid stone: adds a medium ammount of space damage
sands of time: adds a medium ammount of time damage

gold: adds a high amount of value when selling to an npc

mithril: adds a bonus to magical skills

(i hereby apologize for sticking too much to fantasy clichees)

What about a material system?

We would need a Base Unit, and restence and weigth for cm^3 unit
Also would be nice to have a mixing table, or family, in that case, I could build a adamantium+gold sword but not a adamantion+wood sword...

yes, of course. the slots should be for a specific family of materials. an axe for example could consist of 4 metal slots (blade) and 1 wood slot (handle).

(more than one wood slot wouldn't make sense for most items because you usually don't glue different pieces of wood together for a handle)

Close to what I've had in mind. Randomness is a crucial part of our creative skills if it's up to me. Additionally this system could use a "masterpiece". This means an item, where for each slot the best possible roll has occurred. In addition to the awesomeness of the item as such, it should receive an additional bonus. There could be different levels of masterpieces, for different ratios of perfect rolls.

And I'd also like to see random effects that just have no obvious reason. For example a mace could petrify monsters of a certain type. This would have an extremely low chance of occurring. Most likely since the structure of the alloy is somehow able to tap into the manastream or whatever of the world or something. Haven't really spent any serious thought on it yet.

depending on how much luck the blacksmith had with the rolls there could be different grades.

perfect
masterpiece
flawless
fine
average
crude
dilettantish
rubbish
horribly failed attempt at crafting which is an insult for everyone who practises this art.

the last one could also have a useless but funny effect, like causing laughter at enemies.

I like that horribly failed thingy. It could also lead to stuff like "Well, it's useless as an axe, since the blade is so huge, but one can wield is as a shield." ?

I definitely like the idea of a slot-based crafting system. Allows for a lot of flexibility and customisation. But...is it totally necessary to have randomised results for materials? I think it might create too much of a gulf between the unlucky, the 'content with what I got' and the 'omg MUST have teh best!!!11' crowds. If the power disparities between the items these groups equip are too great, it could easily unbalance the PvE encounters or the PvP game.

If there must be variation in the quality between two identical crafted items, I would suggest it be either one or the other; masterpiece work or randomisation.

Hum a craft system can be very helpfull