NWN Discussions and Suggestions > CNR Suggestions/Discussion
Crushing Fine Gems
lonnarin:
Mechanically speaking, shouldn't one be able to take any fine gem they made and crush it for gemdust to use in alchemy? Maybe not get much XP for it, a pittance compared to chipping and polishing it, but still. Only the surface area of the gem would be affected by gem polish, with the majority of the mineral within available for grinding. It shouldn't be too much of an issue of chemicals either, since the flawed gems can be ground after failed attempts to polish them with the very same oils.
It would help a whole lot in storing fine gems which could have future use in either alchemy or jewelry. Right now alchemists either need to carry tons of stacks of gem dust which results in server lag, or store lots of raw minerals which weigh 5.5lbs each.
Of course, this practice should undoubtedly be forbidden to Berylites, who would see the crushing of a finely chipped and polished gem as sacrilege.
darkstorme:
I seem to recall this argument showing up before... and I'm right!
I think the points mentioned in that thread remain valid, most notably, Dorg's:
--- Quote from: Dorganath ---
Really, there's only one main issue here: no other craft allows a person to take finished or semi-finished, non-defective goods and convert them into some form of raw CNR. Sawdust cannot be made from finished staves and such that no one wanted, finished armor and weapons can't be melted back down into ingots, and so forth. But if we add the ability to grind up cut or fine gems, this is exactly what we'd be doing....and I'm pretty certain that other crafts would want something similar.
But essentially, that is exactly what you are asking for here. When you craft, you make certain decisions about what you should make with the resources you have. One cannot take a form of intermediate or final CNR and transform it into another. You decide what to do with your resource and that's the track you need to follow.
--- End quote ---
SteveMaurer:
--- Quote from: darkstorme ---I seem to recall this argument showing up before... and I'm right!
I think the points mentioned in that thread remain valid, most notably, Dorg's:
"When you craft, you make certain decisions about what you should make with the resources you have. One cannot take a form of intermediate or final CNR and transform it into another."
--- End quote ---
So what this is saying is: The reason one cannot take a form of intermediate or final CNR and transform it into a another (more basic form) is because... "One cannot take a form of intermediate or final CNR and transform it into another". We do it that way because... we do it that way.
If the GMs feel this is an issue of play balance, that is acceptable. But the statement above is a non-answer.
There are lots of solutions to this that don't have the unrealistic result of saying that people can't grind up finished items. The most obvious one is to set the XP you get from such a conversion to zero. (I've personally never understood why grinding anything up is anything less than trivial anyway - I mean, come on.) You also might reduce the amount of dust/sawdust you get out of the item, as compared to grinding up raw materials.
But if play balance is really the issue, the result you should be really aiming for is to make it easier to create one-off items than it is to create "stays around forever" type items. (Otherwise the world fills up with junk that never goes away, barring charity drives.) So any conversion from the latter to the former should be clearly allowed, if not encouraged.
miltonyorkcastle:
--- Quote ---We do it that way because... we do it that way.
--- End quote ---
It's not so much the above statement as "It is already established like this, and in order to change it would require a complete overhaul of the current system, which of course would require full balance tests for every craft and craft-overlap. So, since we're not willing to put in the time for a complete overhaul at present, and since we can't apply this suggestion to one craft without doing so to the rest (without a complete overhaul), we must choose for now to leave things as they are."
Hope that makes sense as to what was/is the intent behind noting that no other crafts are designed to have the finished good turned back into something useful.
Dorganath:
*points to milty's post*
It's a general balance thing plus a matter of how much work it would take to really add the concept of recycling into all aspects of crafting...to make everything that can be produced by CNR to be broken down into one or more components after a successful crafting attempt. We'd have to adjust the overall crafting XP downward (or add some other cost) to compensate for the increased "craftability" of any given bit of raw CNR. I recognize that the 0XP for recycled goods has been mentioned but that doesn't change the inherent "bonus" one would get by being able to craft even more things from the one bit of CNR and get experience for both.
Currently, there are options for recycling some items in crafting, but (as far as I can remember) they are all as a result of failing a crafting attempt and with a rapidly diminishing return. Mangled metal as the byproduct of failed smithing attempts or flawed gems as a result of failed polishing or enchanting attempts...These are examples of things that currently have a built-in "second chance", but again, only as the result of failure, not success.
Now, looking at crafting as a whole, we have some crafts which lend themselves to recycling and some that don't. It can well be argued that woodworking, any metal-smithing and gemcrafting/jewelry (and possibly tinkering) are conducive to recycling of both intermediate and final products, but where is the recyclability in alchemy, cooking, tailoring and poisoncraft? Simply put, it's either minimal or non-existant. Some can also easily argue that some crafts are already over-emphasized than others, so adding yet another facet to some may widen that gap even more.
I'm sure there's something else, but those are the balance aspects that we keep in mind. Beyond those, there's the other aspects, like the mechanics of recycling.
We currently have 2183 recipes in the CNR database, and at least half of those, if not more, might well qualify for some form of recycling. Now, believe it or not, the "easy" way would be to create new recipes to allow this conversion of one item into another. I say "easy" because it would require no extra code to be written but would largely be a very non-trivial effort. The other option involves (potentially) no new recipes but rather the creation (and scripting) of dedicated recycler devices that are hard-coded to turn X into Y, though this would effectively be a break from our currently available recycling options, and as such doesn't appeal to me much at all.
So in truth, the suggestion makes plenty of logical sense, but when we look at it from the greater angle of balance, the scope of applying meaningful and fair recycling to the whole of CNR becomes a very non-trivial exercise.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version