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I was wondering if such a concept would be appealing to people. Having guilds that give you absolutely no combat skills or advantage whatsoever and are solely focused on other activities.

We do have craft guilds but they all seem more like a shadow of what could be achieved with real crafting system implemented.

What I have in mind here:

Merchants - very high trading and appraise skills, ability to set up your own shops etc.
Alchemists - making potions.
Hunters - gathering animal skins, furs, bones and other things that could be used by other professions.
Herbalists - kinda like gardeners but with better skills and other options like getting sap from the trees and such (for alchemists).
Miners - mining ore and gems.
Tailors, Blacksmiths, Jewelers etc. - creating gear for players.
Thieves - running around roofs, breaking into houses to procure miscellaneous stuff.

Obviously not all of them would be full OCC guilds since we don't really have the playerbase to support it but that's what this thread is for. Brainstorming.

With this we could potentially introduce alternate forms of progression, where doing your job is what gets you experience, not combat (merchants getting xp for selling stuff in their shops, alchemists for creating potions and so on).

I think that without such additional activities Genesis is a bit too one-dimensional and all that's there to do for the players is just grinding the mobs endlessly without end. I would like to see what are other people's opinions on that. We could use this thread to get some ideas going, perhaps create some outline of how such inter-connected crafting system could work and start to slowly introduce it to existing craft guilds and perhaps at some point it could evolve into a fully fledged system.

Obviously it's not a small task or something that can be done quickly but even having some roadmap for it for posterity might be a good idea.

I'd totally play something like that (and have actually posted about it once just in case), assuming some depth in the gameplay and progression. However, I think it would need to have a reason to be needed from other players for some kind of support (e.g. making excellent potions as you grow, so people seek you out to get some or recruit you as the guild's bartender, extra warm cloaks for a ghostly ice castle that would otherwise be hazardous to visit..).

The problem I find is that some professions would benefit from not being mutually exclusive, like tailors/blacksmiths/hunters. Combining the crafts and making things in the end would be the most interest/complex way to go about it but I am not sure Genesis can support that easily. For example, I'd love to play a character that does everything in the list and nothing else, just grow from those activies and quests (finding bodyguards would be a thing!), provide my friends with stuff and chill behind the stall a bit.

I got so excited just by reading this, awesome to hear there are thoughts!

I would suspect a bunch of scripting to become normal in these.
A lot of seconds created, on vpn's, to do all this work to support the "real" character.

Question is, how much is this for gameplay in itself, and how much is it to be part of a community that supports other people?
As with everything else, I believe, it will be abused.


Beside all the pessimism, I find it to be interesting ideas and I am likely to try it out.

Thalric wrote: ↑

16 Jun 2020 21:32

I would suspect a bunch of scripting to become normal in these.
A lot of seconds created, on vpn's, to do all this work to support the "real" character.

Question is, how much is this for gameplay in itself, and how much is it to be part of a community that supports other people?
As with everything else, I believe, it will be abused.


Beside all the pessimism, I find it to be interesting ideas and I am likely to try it out.

Well, that's part of the process. If you make it random enough and dependent on other professions enough it won't be that easy (let's not go into the realm of impossible) to script it. Besides, at this point who cares if a blacksmith will script his work if he'll need ingredients from 2 other professions (which he or she can potentially buy from the player merchant) to actually perform?

Scarcity of material is what makes great crafting systems and gives people incentive to go further. It's all cool and dandy with basic stuff, but when you want to create something truly magnificent you'll need to invest a lot of time, effort and it will require other people to do the same.

Sounds like a bunch of potential craft guilds not new occs to me.

Tarlok wrote: ↑

18 Jun 2020 04:00

Sounds like a bunch of potential craft guilds not new occs to me.

Yeah, but I was thinking that maybe we could upgrade them a bit. If blacksmiths could make the best weapons and armours in the game they shouldn't really be a craft slot any more. Obviously, being able to do such feats should only be available to truly dedicated people and using materials they couldn't gather themselves.

The first though I'm having is "I would play the fuck out of an Occ Blacksmith / Lay Potionmaker / Craft Herbalist" but maybe there needs to be a different setup in place.

Possibly a "Craftsmen" Occ (or occ/lay, whatever deemed appropriate) which allowed its members to join an increased amount of Craft guilds as they gain more crafting experience. You start with +1 craft guild and, as you progress with Gexp, you could join more of them (probably not all of them even at top level to promote cooperation between crafters and co-dependance).

I assume that "Craft guilds enhanced and/or expanded" would be a first step though, meaning there is more interesting stuff to do and an actual product that makes people seek you out for your craft.

Feel free to post any ideas you might have. I'm especially interested in possible craft economy. If herbs were used in crafting recipes for other professions and not just as spell components and such there could suddenly be a demand for people who are Gardeners and are focused solely on gathering herbs, not as an extra-curricular activity but as the main thing they do in the game. Perhaps there could even be extra xp reward for completing specific orders, making it a viable way to grow your character outside of combat. For blacksmiths such xp rewards could come when you created a certain item for the first time (promoting variety) or when you scored a critical success to make the better version of an item etc.

The possibilities are many, but for that we need to really start from the ground up and that would be the economy model or how different professions might interact with each other. This would help decide on which would be redundant, in which order should we implement them (pointless to create a "crafter" when you don't have a "gatherer" required for it already in place or coming in at the same time) and so on.

One potential idea is to have the craft guilds as they are but expand on them in meaningful ways. Craft smiths can do basic stuff already, once you've reached certain rank you could opt to also get them to occupy your layman slot, giving you new options and allowing you to create better stuff. After a while you might think this is the way to go and opt for it to also take your occ slot, making you truly and fully dedicated blacksmith whose sole focus is making awesome eq.

So, for the smiths example:
craft - as they are
craft + lay - you can now make more intricate stuff, Bubba quality, custom adornments, hit descriptions, maybe repairing broken items
craft + lay + occ - you can make weapons and armours that are unmatched by anything you can find in the wild, people pay you fortunes for the stuff

Just a thought: these occ smiths could be a part of a grinding party, where their duty would be not only to repair gear, but they would get the added benefit of being able to temporarily fix broken gear (not a permanent fix obviously) so the grind can continue. In this way, smiths can be included in combat.

In terms of ideas, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. There are other posts with suggestions, I remember reading long ones on the smiths in particular, I remember a post about special materials etc. Zhar, since you are interested maybe you can gather some bits from the forums and keep a list of ideas.

The "occuping more and more slots" would be very neat on one hand, quite tunneled to one particular craft on the other. I would see more value (and honestly, interesting gameplay/choices) to both be more specialized and getting into more crafts (cheering for my idea - hehe).

As for Gardeners, herbs create a market solely because of skunk berries. The thing is that guilds and people have maps by now for many places (Which is a good thing, developing such guild resources) but it is definitely not an endeavour only gardeners can undertake. Yes, being a Gardener is comfy, but you can be a herber without gardeners and watch netflix on the other monitor.

The guild itself needs some more stuff. Possibly new good herbs, or being able to use more herbs on oneself more quickly or idk. I think that a gatherer-of-greenery kind of direction would be interesting, the potential of gathering potion ingredients is there, and cooperation/market between potion makers and Gardeners could be a thing.