Crafty

Inspired by a discussion on KTR, was thinking about what the point is of crafting. Three come to mind.

First, it's a time and money sink, gives players some goals. Although I'm generally against anything that looks like it could encourage grinding, there's definitely some value in this. Collecting and harvesting resources is another topic, but it can be a fun activity and requires that you can do something besides vendor them. This type of crafting seems most appropriate for consumables - potions, ammo, one-time use items and repairing things.

Second, it's a mini game. Something to do besides combat. Some games have explored this avenue, making crafting like combat. This makes a lot of sense - attacks become techniques and mobs are replaced by materials and recipes. The key is to have enough possibly variety in the crafted items to make the game challenging and interesting. I believe this approach would be helped significantly by having "crafting centers" in towns and cities where the forges and looms and whatever are placed together. This would allow for group crafting, analogous to group combat, and also to give different locations their own crafting "feel" with specific breakdowns of techniques.

Third, there is real crafting - player created content. This could work even in a WoW clone. Imagine that there is a type of item, let's say weapons. The developers publish the 3d model format and even provides some helpful samples so that players can use their modeling software to create their own models and textures. It's amazing how many really talented people there are out there who would do such a thing. Now, you can't just flood them into the game, but you could allow players to submit "plans" to an NPC in game, let's call him the BigCity Blacksmithing Authority. Then players can come in game and browse the plans "under review" and vote for the ones they like. Every month, the highest ranked plans are added to the game world, say the top 10. Such a small number is trivial to have an underpayed employee screen for the inevitable Huge Phallus, and no big deal to download to the game clients. Add to crafting the ability to learn how to reforge a sword of some level of quality into one of the new models and just like that you have new, dynamic player created content that people will work hard to get. And the designer could get fame or some level of control over the plan. Lots of possibilities. Now think about armor, pets, furniture, hairstyles, animations...