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Why do many RPG fans hate crafting?

MRY

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I despise crafting in RPGs, so I am happy to chime in here.

(1) Often if not always, it is used to justify repetitious or degenerate behavior: it is almost never the case that the materials you need for crafting are obtained through meaningful and interesting gameplay; rather, you inevitably gather them by clicking on loot boxes with various kinds of window dressing. A typical crafting design is: click on 100 boxes to find stackable 83 items in 43 of them, then expend 27 of those stackable items to create an item. In short, it expands and aggravates the already awful looting / operant conditioning / padding crap that has made RPGs unplayable for me.

(2) Even setting aside this fundamental awfulness in their design, they -- like most consumables in RPGs -- produce neurotic behavior because it is impossible to know whether [ingredient/material X] which would be consumed in making [marginally less mediocre item 3] will be required in some later formula/plan to make [even less mediocre item 17] or perhaps even the elusive [actually materially helpful item 93]. Because crafting is almost always present in games that are already heavily focused on incremental and tedious progression, there will always be an incentive to hold onto ingredients. Thus, #1 and #2 combine to produce the magpie/packrat behavior that is so unpleasant (but so addictive) for players.

(3) Because crafting typically is tedious and meaningless, meaning has to be given to it by having crafted items surpass looted items. This breaks the game's balance, except that usually the solution is to have crafted items overpowered relative to the balance (to avoid making crafting required), which means ironically that most players (being munchkins) will feel compelled to engage in the dumb crafting process.

(4) Even setting aside all of these flaws, crafting almost never makes sense thematically. Even games that try (like MotB) to give a thematic logic to it fail to realize that "scrounging around for garbage and making stuff all the time" is not a part of any fantasy epic. Very occasionally crafting an important item is part of fantasy epics, and this would be fine from a thematic standpoint, but this is not what crafting as a game mechanic is about. In fact, you essentially never craft important items because crafting is never viewed as a critical path requirement.

(4a) Crafting is almost required, however, in certain settings -- post-apocalyptic settings in particular, but more broadly any "survivalist" setting. Thus, I think that crafting significant thematically enhanced AoD and generally was the least awful crafting I've encountered in any RPG, although it did suffer from the need for magpie/packrat hoarding behavior. Because these settings thematically compel you to encourage the player to scavenge, husband, and cobble together resources, the crappy gameplay entailed in crafting is redeemed as mimetic: the player's misery and meager rewards mirror the character's suffering.

Basically, I think crafting is awful because it fits into that category of stuff in RPGs that isn't meaningful, isn't fun, and isn't thematic -- it's just there because it has become a box to check, because it occupies players' time, and because (provided the right reward structure) players will get a "kick" out of it.
 

sser

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I like it in games where scavenging in general is a part of the overall design (NEO Scavenger springs to mind). As MRY states, it also brings a thematic component. If I'm crafting the means to my own survival, it feels considerably different than if I'm crafting a 25HP potion because I picked up a couple of flowers.
 

Metro

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It's fine in theory. Problem is it requires a lot of work with balancing itemization to ensure it's meaningful and, yes, not undercut hand-placed/unique item drops. In a single-player game it should ideally be very limited and tie into side-quests to keep the process interesting. Or you can focus it on 'upgrading/tailoring' weapons sort of like... oh lawdy... Fallout 4. Say what you will about Bethesderp but at least they made looting all of that trash serve a purpose and none of the weapon upgrades were insanely powerful. You could add scopes, stability, etc. but not necessarily add 200% damage boost to your gun. Crazy stuff like that was left to random drops (explosive combat shotgun) so it still kept finding unique weapons fun and interesting.
 

Absinthe

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I like crafting, but most crafting systems are bad just like most games are bad. For instance, item recipe crafting is an incredibly popular but banalshitboring design which reduces crafting into DIY fetch quests for loot. On top of that, a bad crafting interface (like making someone craft a stack of 20 items one by one) really works wonders for pissing players off. If you ask me, any proper crafting system needs to actually add choices and let players customize the items they craft instead of being yet another way to acquire loot. And speaking of loot, I know a lot of people complain that crafting sucks because it trivializes normal loot drops, but that's fine as long as there is a trade-off and real decision involved in becoming a crafter.
 
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felipepepe

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Gonna say mostly the same thing I said about itemization. "Games are a series of interesting choices." - Sid Meier

What's an interesting choice in crafting? Something like Dark Souls - you killed a one-of-a-kind monster, he dropped a one-of-a-kind material and now you must choose what to do with it. I.e., you just defeated Quelaag. What you'll do with her soul? Forge the Chaos Blade, Quelaag's Furysword or just consume it for 10,000 souls? That's cool.

Baldur's Gate 2 also had a cool system, mostly based on treasure hunting. Wanna make the Equalizer? Then you better keep an eye for its three parts... might even need to replay the game to finally find them all. Forging Crom Faeyr also adds a choice: are you really willing to sacrifice the Hammer of Thunderbolts, Gauntlets of Ogre Power and Girdle of Frost Giant Strength for the hammer?

Sadly, most games with crafting are just busy work. They require nothing but that you waste time farming, and offer nothing but regular or slightly-better items. Fuck gathering X roots, Y flowers and Z empty vials for a meager health potion - If you play decently enough, you won't ever need these extra items.

Thus, while Dark Souls' crafting is a reward and Baldur's Gate's is an adventure, to me most crafting systems feel tacked on and a waste of time.
 

Ash

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It's all about implementation. Most of the time the implementation is shit and banal busy work, but there are exceptions (e.g Ultima Underworld and Arx Fatalis).
 

Anthedon

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Crafting á la Baldur's Gate II/ToB is ok. There's even a little c&c IIRC as you can't craft all items in one playthrough since some share resources.

Crafting á la Divinity: Original Sin is the cancerous opposite.
 

Zanzoken

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Items are way too plentiful in RPGs to begin with. Now you add pieces of items to the mix and it compounds the problem tenfold.

Most of it is just noise that doesn't add to the experience in a meaningful way.
 

Gregz

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On MMOs, this can be justified as each player becomes part of an economic network. This is an important trait. Again, Crafting for its own sake is pointless busywork until it gains some greater meaning in the game. An upcoming sandbox MMOs like Albion seems centered around community driven crafting. Not everyone is going to be an adventurer, many will instead seek to become the greatest craftsman of a given specialization.

This is mainly why I like crafting in MMOs but absolutely despise it in single player games. With an MMO, I'm putting in time to grind away and crafting, which I enjoy as a mundane activity, and then am rewarded when these skills are needed by the community. In a single player game it feels like a waste of my time.

I enjoyed playing bank jew with WoW for a while.

There was a reseller app that would allow you to buy low / sell high, made all my money on the backs of players like Mustard.

Edit: I'm noticing this thread is mostly for hating on Bethdesda
 

Mozg

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Edit: I'm noticing this thread is mostly for hating on Bethdesda

NWN2 is actually what popped into my head as the game that embodies elementally pure shitcrafting, although the Bethesda games are close.
 

Crichton

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I'd say that I'm probably more pro-crafting than your average RPG player and even I don't like or use it much in most games.

Things I like about crafting:
-Assembling unique items (i.e. BGII, a few MotB and PoE items). This feels great and it makes a lot more sense than buying Excalibur in a shop for 200,000 Slobovian rasbutniks.

-Flexibility about what items to use (i.e. PoE, ToEE and NWN2 crafting). It's kind of hard to have a party of archers if there's only one good bow in the entire game. Crafting which can produce enough top-level gear of whatever type for the whole party can open up options that would otherwise be impractical (i.e. five evil clerics using magical glaives and touch spells in ToEE).

Things I hate about crafting:
-Collecting rags, currency, flowers, matchsticks, iron ore, etc. One of the things I liked least about Arcanum was visiting the same shop over and over and over in the desperate hope that the RNG would come up with the schematic/component that I needed for my next upgrade. D:OS takes this to preposterous levels by adding crafting processes to create the crafting components you need out of the crafting components you start with; I can't imagine anything less interesting.

-Same shit, 11.5% better (i.e. Skyrim, D:OS, etc). Investing points in a crafting skill to be able to increase your weapon's damage by 10% as opposed to increasing your strength for the same bonus adds nothing to the game and from a character development standpoint it's pretty much always either useless or compulsory, it's pretty hard to sawyer it into any middle ground.
 
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Sacred82

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Powerful items belong in the gameworld, where they exist dynamically. They are forged by powerful liches in dark rituals involving the body fluids of young maidens, and are then acquired by robber barons and stashed in their dragon-infested dungeons from whence I liberate them. You don't craft that shit from a bone blade and some harpy poo you found on the roadside. You just don't.

Now crafting of mundane items, I'm all for that. Repair stuff, brew your own potions, forge a few arrowheads that are better than standard ones. The day-to-day affairs of a fantasy merc company.
 
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Ludo Lense

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Mainly because crafting systems act as an alternative to exploration/reward itemization and it is impossible to not realize, even if instinctively, that Advance/Explore->Find Mats-> Make Item is a tedious version of Advance/Explore->Find Item.

Good crafting systems are those who do not overlap or provide a sense of place. So we have:

-MMO crafting which connects you the market and thus the world in a personal way. It is not ideal but much more engaging than SP.

-Crafting as a core system. This is where survival games fit in and degradation is almost always necessary.

-Crafting as a separate complementary system. Like the Witcher 1's Alchemy system which doesn't mixes with gear in any way and who has an excellent gradient using similar building blocks. In chapter I you are probably gonna make normal swallows but later you will try and make rubedo dominant ones and so on. It is much more satisfying than using Super Duper Iron Bar to craft Iron Sword +3 in a linear progression system.

NOTE: I don't consider stuff like Baldur's Gate II to be crafting. Rather quests with a crafting thematic than a system. Just because you get a quests that says "find X herb to heal Y person" doesn't mean the game suddenly has systems for you to be a healer or herbalist.
 

SCO

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'Crafting' is basically ok if it's required as a part of a quest with actual lore (think the demon sword of ultima 7) and pure trash if it's pavlov conditioning. MRY post is all you need to know about it really. It's best used to set a mood and not as a super detailed system to give out better version of handplaced loot.
If you must do it, let the handplaced with a story loot still be a required component, though as this isn't part of the critical path, the banalance is likely to be trash.
 

Sigourn

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Crafting is awesome when done properly: you have the potential to get something much better than what you started with, but in the wrong hands it's essentially an useless mechanic.

Again, Vagrant Story did this right. Knowing the mechanics behind crafting were the only ways to get the most powerful gear and the ultimate weapons. Skyrim crafting where you craft weapons you can already buy is retarded.
 

Doctor Sbaitso

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Crafting is great if it isn't shitty. I think Mozg is on the right track. I have two criteria:

  • Item scarcity in general
If in game conditions are such that 'getting a new thing' is a notable occurrence, crafting that something can be very rewarding. If the world and your pack are filled with hundreds of 'things' and shit is strewn all over the game world, crafting is a meaningless pursuit.
Some of my fondest crafting moments involved situations where useful items were very scarce or were needed for survival. There were some good NWN modules where you basically started in your underwear and every item you could scrounge was a prize and meant the difference between life and death. A few of those had crafting in that situation and it made for great experiences, enhanced by crafting and item disparity.

  • Specific, meaningful uses of the crafted item
If you craft an item that plays a part in the narrative, required for survival, or allows you to access content then that is great, particularly if the getting of ingredients or the crafting itself required some non-trivial doing.

  • No grinding
Crafting should never involve grinding but should be an event arrived at by narrative, sleuthing or thinking as a player.
 
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Doctor Sbaitso

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I like it in games where scavenging in general is a part of the overall design (NEO Scavenger springs to mind). As MRY states, it also brings a thematic component. If I'm crafting the means to my own survival, it feels considerably different than if I'm crafting a 25HP potion because I picked up a couple of flowers.

Yes NEO Scavenger is a good example. Finding a clean shirt to make bandages can literally save your life.
 

Maggot

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Cataclysm DDA is another good example of a good crafting system. Lets you get creative with weaponry like bending a pipe into a crowbar to pry open doors more easily or smashing a bench and gathering the wood and nails to make a weapon.
 

vmar

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Oct 17, 2015
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I don't necessarily hate crafting I just prefer to ignore it in most games. Crafting gives me too much of an mmo vibe, I spent enough time grinding mats in WoW all those years ago, and although single player rpgs don't really require you to grind mats on the same level as an mmo I'd just rather not bother with anything like that anymore. It can be fun in some games, it was enjoyable in Underrail, and I liked crafting special arrows/grenades in D:OS for example.
 

Hobo Elf

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Crafting is usually just stupid busywork and the devs don't even pretend to hide it. Who has heard of a single sword requiring more than 10 iron bars and a whole tree's worth of lumber to be made? Video game crafters are the most inefficient bunch ever.
 

shihonage

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The only game where I did "crafting" was Diablo 2, because it was easy and fast. It wasn't a timesink but an optional enhancement to the game.

I stopped playing Alien: Isolation after being forced to "craft" some shit.
 

J_C

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The only game were I enjoyed crafting was BG2, where it was hard to find the components of items, and you could get really cool shit. Unlike in other games where you craft mundene things like potions and oils which add 1% damage on swords. Boring shit.
 

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