Something that can always stand scrutiny is the assumptive frictions that Crafting systems, whether its tabletop or video games, tend to always have. This is the angle I approached it from with my own take on Crafting, and while I'm still a ways off having an actual written system to show off for it, my playtests with it bore out what I was suspecting.
The core frictions I identified as useless was the grinding for Materials, and Failure or Time gating. Gathering shouldn't be a chore (and in my system I took it a step further, and built into my Exploration system as one of the key story generators), and there's simply no practical gameplay or gamefeel benefit to failure.
Particularly if we're assuming Crafting in the form of items rather than contraptions; in something like Kerbal Space Program, failure is hilarious and reinforces the triumphs. Failing to make a Sword, or having it take an egregious amount of in-game time, does diddly squat.
From there, Crafting now needed to focus on volitional engagement. Players need to be able to identify desirable intrinsic goals for themselves, and then also have fun systems and scaffolding that allow them to pursue and accomplish those goals.
There's a pretty big design space you open up with that, but where I went with it was to use Durability as a vector for Customization, basically completing the thought Nintendo had with the Fuse mechanics in Tears of the Kingdom, and bringing it aesthetically into the realm of crafting.
Essentially, through Durability, players can Repair their items, and use new Materials to confer new, temporary properties to their item. By letting the items break and then reforging them, they can apply those properties permanently, and items depending on what they were made out of will have so many new Properties they can take on.
For example, if you repair your sword, and opt to use some Springhorn Dust, you can get a Boomerang Property; it'll fly back to your hand when thrown, assuming nothing blocks it.
And then on top of this, ongoing aesthetic customization is also included, with further properties that can be conveyed; a golden, bejeweled hilt for a sword can be both a status symbol, and something that mechanically matters. Its scabbard too, and so on.
Now Durability is a sticky subject, and a lot of people are simply not going to like it no matter what. But what one has to realize is is that you can't make a system for people who aren't going to be satisfied with it until its deleted, and that goes for Crafting and Gathering as much as it does Durability.
But there are still frictions there that aren't useful. Durability dropping effectiveness is one I explicated, as is the frequency of losses.
Effectiveness drops don't do much unless you're wanting people to maintain 100%, and in this case we don't; I want people to be experimenting with the Materials they can find.
And having a high frequency of Durability losses is also useless in this context, as I want to encourage players to push their luck with it out in the boonies, and eventually come back and Customize, not jealously safeguard their items precious Durability points. Items disappearing on breakage is another related friction we can explicate.
Its a lot better, if we don't want weapons to stick around, to collapse the Durability limit itself, and thats how my concept for Improvised weapons works; they break relatively quickly, but you can make a decent enough weapon out of any garbage you find.
And I have an entire playstyle focused on that; up to and including ripping off, say, a Dragon's scale and beating them to death with it, and doing so empowers you when you inevitably smash it apart, which in turn synergizes with Brutal Criticals ala Zelda, where you double your damage or defense (I have active defense in my game, and regular Crits do something different) if you break your item.
So just in terms of core design, I've been able to observe in playtesting that this produces exactly what I want for it. Players break their stuff, and are constantly engaging with the system to augment what they can do.
And its inclusive too, as players can opt to build out their own golf bag of weapons, or they can just focus on Ol' Reliable.
The only thing left then is the nature of the Material system itself, and thats something I've been putting off hard-defining until I'm certain the core system is locked in, but I do know I'm going systemic with it; TOTK style material effects on steroids.
For example, say we have that Sword thats already got the Springhorn effect within it, and lets say you reforged it to make that effect permanent. Now lets say you repair it again, and now you add Vibranium to the sword (not that I'm putting Vibranium in my game, just don't have a material example with this particular effect yet), which adds a Ricochet property.
Now you can throw that sword and it will always return to you, no matter the circumstances, unless something directly tries to catch it before you can (whic is more than possible in my game).
But it goes deeper than that, as my intent is for Materials to have a number of possible Properties (up to 7 different ones, though that will be rare), so there's going to be a huge possibility space to play with, particularly as I'm also including Spell Effects, where Materials can be consumed within the Spellcasting system to generate new effects, and this has already provided for a lot of neat designs.
It'll be a lot of work, and something I have to be very careful about the UX work for, but I'm fairly confident it will work well with ny ideas for that.
