Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9846378" data-attributes="member: 907">I think a lot of people enjoy crafting aspects of various video games and try to translate those things into RPGs. But they work very differently on a fundamental level. Primarily, video game crafting is often about finding crafting materials. In many cases, this is something done semi-passively as you are out doing other adventuring – you're running from Crossroads to one of the oases in the Barrens in order to kill some centaurs and examine the weird magic going on, and hey look at that, some Mageroyal up on that hill, I'll go pick that up. But in an RPG, what would happen is that you'd leave Crossroads, and then the GM says "at about noon the next day, you approach the oasis." Travel time is usually abstracted away, which means there's little opportunity for gathering resources along the way. Or if there is, it's going to be a matter of some random rolls, which isn't as satisfying.One way of solving this is to make components an optional bonus to crafting things. I am thinking of something like Ars Magica, where there was a big list of modifiers to item creation based both on materials and on the form the item would take – a wand would be better for projectiles, while a staff would be better for controlling things. Incorporating a ruby would give a big bonus to fire magic. Things like that.That said, another thing I think is important for optional complexity in a game is that the affected sub-systems are primarily ones not done in stressful situations. You might have a time limit for your ritual magic, but it's usually more along the lines of "We need to do this before the army gets here" or maybe in extreme cases "before the goons break down the door", but it's usually not "before the wolf tears my throat out." You want the player to be able to discuss things back and forth with the GM without breaking the pacing of an action scene.</blockquote>

Verification