[PROJECt] Realistic Masterwork Items

I just think that it'd probably be a good idea to disable the sale of masterwork weapons from Brother Smythe until after you're a higher level because it really imbalances the game at the beginning.

There's three ways I think we could do about this:

-1-
Brother Smythe's hammer which was passed down from generations was stolen by a bandit in a recent raid.

In Lareth's dungeon, you find a "Brother Smythe's Hammer" which you can return to him. In return, he's able to forge masterwork items for you. This is a bit cheesy and hard to explain (maybe you guys can flesh it out better than I can)


-2-
Perhaps he should tell you that he doesn't have the equipment and materials to produce the masterwork items and the caravan which was supposed to deliver his shipment of hammers and was sacked by bandits.

After you finish the Moathouse quest (i.e. the 'story forward trigger' is triggered or whatever) you can go back to Brother Smith and he will say he received his shipment of materials shortly after you cleared the moathouse so he's able to make masterwork items for you now.


-3-
Do it in a really cheap, NWN-ish way where the character says 'you aren't ready' until you hit level 3. This method sucks.



Thisis a follow up on the post on the Dev forum but it's giving me errors right now.

These is the original post which I was trying to reply to:

 

2 and 3 by themselves smack a little too much of deus ex machina, hand of god BS (oh my stuff just magically arrived right when you happened to be done with the moathouse). 1 just seems a little "off" seeing as there is nothing magical about the mastercrafting of items, the item that needs to be fetched ought not be something easily replaced like a hammer - no matter how much sentimental value it has for the smith, he could surely make do (and would, given enough $ incentive) with some normal hammer.

I think some combination of 1 and 2 would be best. Maybe something along the lines of:
"Hey Mr PC, these dastardly bandits/gnolls/undead/whatever killed and robbed this caravan that was bringing in a shipment of mastercraft-quality steel (tm) for me. If you could find me another supply of steel of similarly high quality, I could put together some pretty keen stuff for you"

...followed by, surprise surprise, the PCs finding the same cache of steel that was stolen somewhere in the depths of the moathouse. The neat bit about this is that it also gives you a handle on limiting the number of items that he can produce (steel being used up in the creation of the weapons).

another option would be to just price up the masterwork stuff so that it isn't worth it to buy just for the bonus mastercrafting by itself gives, so that only by the time the party had enough $ and experience to craft weapons would it be worthwhile..? (dunno what the min level for craft weapons and armor is, but the $ cost can be adjusted to taste/balance).

 

why dont you just make otis the mw seller?
nulb can only be reached after the moathouse + otis is the one with connections (see slide) and thus more likely able to come by mw items through those.

or you could have the blacksmith sell a really limited collection of mw items with the shop inventory restock having those mw items with a really low probability, and otis selling most of the other stuff through dialogue, which could be bound to the gnome ring for example (otis getting his stuff from the gnomes, or something like that).

 

Agree :thumbsup:

 

I think it is fine as is.

Masterwork items are not supposed to be hard to get, just expensive.

 

Yeah, but I like to see the bandit activity near Hommlet have an effect on the geographical economy.

 

I like the idea of Brother Smyth saying "I can't make anything of better quality, until the caravans can get through with better steel bar. If you were to clear out that moathouse, perhaps I'd get restocked with the quality steel bar that I need."

I can add this, and make it REALLY easy. It would take 5 minutes.

Add a copy of the current "you make masterwork items" pointers I have, have one have a GET function to look for the completion of the moathouse quest, and if completed go to the current 'buy' menu.

The other looks for the moathouse to be incompleted, and if so, brings the PC's to the text I stated above.

Simple, and wouldn't take very long.

 

While the above explanation would be plausible, I still think it is just fine as is.

It is going to take players a while to earn the money to buy the stuff anyway. If they have the money, let them buy the stuff.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

It definitely ain't broke right now. It is following the 3.5 D&D rules.

The only thing about the system that I feel might need to be changed is to move leather-type masterwork items to the leatherworker and cloth masterwork items to the tailor.

Keep in mind that while the game is easy to us, a lot of folks find it pretty hard (check the Atari forums).

Ramping up difficulty will be more effectively accomplished by some of the things we've all been talking about in a "hard mode" with tougher opponents.

 

It also depends on what your goal is as far as your "fixes" go. If the goal if your fixes is to bring the game more in line with 3.5 rules, then the way you have Masterwork items setup currently is the way to go. If your goal is to put your stamp on the game with these fixes and change it up, then do it however you want. But, I agree with Glamis that this game isn't easy to most people, and having the Masterwork items in there as they are isn't going to unbalance the game.

 

Hommlet is a village. There's very few people living there.

The local blacksmith isn't a weaponsmith from a huge town.

I don't see him being able to make masterwork items.

But, for the sake of fun in the game, how about this...

Before he got involved with Jaroo he had tried his hand at making some really nice weapons, it's a quiet place and he needed something to do.

It kind of took a back seat when he got involved with the Old Faith, but he's not forgotten how to do it. He'd need to order some materials, and until the Moathouse bandits are gone, he can't.

Maybe he also needs his hammer, which he'll only tell you about if you use talking skills, because he dropped it in fear and ran in the battle of Emridy meadow. The hammer is in Rainbow rock now.

He might even tell you he won't do it, he took it as a sign that he shouldn't when he lost the hammer. Balance in all things, he should be a blacksmith and apprentice to Jaroo, not heavily involved in blacksmithing. But when you bring him back his hammer (maybe his father was a weaponsmith from a city and that was his hammer) he agrees to make masterwork stuff, just for you.

It's plausible, and players won't want masterwork stuff until they can make magic items out of it. Or if they have a lot of loot coming back from the Moathouse and don't want to spent it all with Burne.

He'll also need some nice wood for the weapons (lots of weapons needs wood for shafts etc) so you'll need to sort out the lumberjack too.

He'll also need a bigger area to work in, masterwork items need to be heated up a lot more than the normal stuff he does, so he'd need to get access to a barn with a lot of room. - Players then have to do the string of quests ending up in the barn being built.

Players don't have money until they've been to the Moathouse, maybe 1.5K gold as much as they could have in advance, and if they have that then they have a sizable amount of xp and a few nice items from getting that. So it's not going to make the game significantly harder for anybody.

The leatherworker could make you masterwork studded and leather armour, but only if the tailor helps him out. He can work the leather just fine, but that kind of precision work needs the tailors help. And he's not going to help unless you solve his quest.

The lumberjack tells you that near Deklo grove is a small lake, and he uses stones from there to pack the wood on his cart to keep it from moving around. So once he's going back there, you can buy? or obtain for free sling stones. And with his new wood his wife will make you arrows and bolts, with the help of the blacksmith, as long as he's got his masterwork stuff completed, she was friendly with Black Jay's wife before she died, and often helped her make arrows for him, so she knows how to make masterwork stuff, and it'd be a lot more profitable than working overtime at the weavers.

Hell, maybe she'll only do it if you get the weaver some extra help from a couple of farmers who are out of luck... - another quest needing to be done for this

The advantage of all these quests? It gives Lawful Evil characters a real reason to be helpful. It ties up the Homlett quests even more and makes a valid reason for doing them all.

And I think it's all completely possible and, while time consuming, easy to do with Co8 can currently do with stuff.

All this _IS_ compliant with 3.5 rules btw, remember it's a small village, and you need to push things in the right direction to get them making stuff you would only find in a town or city.

 

I seriously like Halk's suggestion here, and Dhoom's implementation suggestion sounds like a fine way to go about doing at least one part of Halk's "micro-economy" idea, as I dub unto it.

Yes. Hommlet is a small village, it's not a big city where resources come in abundance. The people have to work together to get anything produced, hence the existence of a town council (the guy who wants you to fake being his wife speaks of it)

I just don't see masterwork items being produced and sold away so easily without having the town work together.

It'd also give parties more incentive to do the town-quests, which are currently very, very bland - not to mention pointless (you can get 200xp per character from an encounter with skeleton gnolls).

It'd certainly make the town a lot more interesting and it'd make sense for even an evil party to want to do the quests - though later in our development of this mod, should we choose to make it, we should offer a variety of ways to go about getting what we want. Perhaps a dirty secret could cause two people to work together out of fear of the word 'getting out', just to name one example.

Edit: For those of you here whom are purists - please realize that 90% of the quests in Hommlet and Nulb are not even from the original module and were just 'flavor' that Troika added. Hardly appealing, as they are so bland. Quite dissapointing, compared to Fallout and Arcanum.

Remember what RPGs are about. They're about role-playing and the freedom of choice. Being forced down a linear path, one full of tragically boring quests which could be fleshed out and given much more meaning is not my idea of an RPG. In all your PNP games I'm sure your DM has done the same. What fun is it to wade through a linear quest with absolutely no choice in what happens next? When you take that path, you end up like NWN.

By the way, this game isn't Diablo. It doesn't make sense for a smith to come up with powerful equipment out of the wazoo without it ... well, making sense!

 

I still think masterwork items are not the kinds of things that should be quest related.

All a masterwork item is, is a high quality version of an item. It just means the crafter took extreme care and worked extraordinarily hard making it: hence the higher price.

In ToEE, after about level 2 or 3 masterwork items are irrelevant because you start finding magic items. The only thing you need them for is crafting (which right now you can do more easily using magic weapon/magic vestment). Since crafting doesn't get serious until level 5+, by that time players definitely do not need masterwork items for general use.

I still think the most logical way to handle masterwork items is to treat it like the 3.5 D&D rules:

1) You go to the blacksmith for masterwork metal items.

2) You go to the leather worker for masterwork leather items.

3) You go to the tailor for masterwork cloth items.

In all three cases you just talk to the guy and ask him to make you a masterwork item (with appropriate cost).

Worrying about masterwork items being unbalancing seems to fall into the same category as worrying about crafting ioun stones being too powerful.

Neither are very powerful and both are dwarfed by things very easily found in the game.

I think worrying about them is much ado about nothing.

Convenience is important here since masterwork items are not powerful items in this game and really only serve one long term purpose: raw materials for crafting.

Lastly, I think the game needs more INTERESTING quests. Having a bunch of quests (or adding flags to existing quests) just to unlock the ability to get masterwork items seems like time that could be much better spent making more alignment and race based quests.

Many (most? all?) of the Hommlet quests are exceptionally tedious. I know that I have no intention of repeating them in replays of the game. If I had to repeat them every time I played a new game just to have access to masterwork items that would become VERY frustrating.

I have already read some of the quest ideas people have and fortunately they sound a lot more interesting than just helping a blacksmith be able to make masterwork items.

 

Unless there's a lot of people who are against this, then as soon as somebody who has the ability to do it volunteers, I'll flesh it out with quests and dialog.

 

Oh my god, yes. Anything to make Hommlet more interesting. Offer plenty of evil sort of choices to accomplish things, too. That never hurts. What hurts is how little options evil parties have in the game.

 

Without a doubt.

My first party was good and everything was peachy.

After beating the game with them, I am running through with an evil party and it is really disappointing how little there is for them.

I am forced having to RP the "well, I will just do this because I am trying to earn their trust to backstab them later." That rings hollow after a while.

Fortunately, Dhoom and others seem to be making evil stuff a high priority! :thumbsup: