Ingot Recycler

[Faldred]

Would it be possible to modify the ingot recycler to convert finished products back to metal ingots instead of just mangled metals?  Where I'm coming from... in armor and weapon making, an awful lot of metal ingots have to be used for very slow advancement, especially early on.  As a result, a crafter can get way ahead on smelting while still being a very low-level weaponsmith and/or armorsmith.  Any chance of recouping raw materials from "practice" weapons and armors might help balance this out a little.  As an example, Zug is already level 5 in smelting but still only level 1 in both armor making and weapon making.  To avoid abuse (such as buying a whole bunch of cheap copper daggers in order to get copper ingots), I would suggest that for each item placed in the recycler, the number of ingots you could receive back would be:    

Number of "mangled" metal on creation failure for the item minus 1 -OR- Random (uniform distribution) amount from 0 to Number of "mangled" metal on creation failure for the item
[/list] In the first case, trying to recycle a copper dagger or a bronze helmet would be pointless (ingots = 0), but a small copper shield could get you back 1 ingot if successful.  Under the second scenario, cheaper items could still produce ingots, so perhaps some form of minimum value requirement could be set.  In either case, the point would be to make the lower levels, especially, of these crafts not quite so pointless -- ideally, the ability to make bronze and/or iron weapons and armors should happen roughly around the time the character could use such items.

[miltonyorkcastle]

I think this is an excelllent idea, if it could be implemented.  not necessarily to speed up armor or weapon crafting, which it shouldn't significantly anyways, but becuase it makes sense that you could melt down a metal shield for its raw material, etc.  It would also make all those random metal objects one finds on monsters worth more than something to dump in the trash, pawn, or donate (which some would anyways, rather than haul it somewhere to melt the stuff down).

[Faldred]

Yeah, that's basically what I was going for... I didn't play up that angle, though.  But, c'mon, how many times have you said to yourself, "another bronze bascinet?"

You're right that it won't speed up crafting too much, but the "cost" for making even a low crafting XP value weapon or shield is pretty high in ingots, and every little bit will help.  Crafters are likely only to be melting down low-level stuff anyway -- they should be able to get a decent amount of gold for high-level stuff, so this really should help out the low-level crafter a bit, and not make much of a difference at higher crafting levels.

Naturally, though I didn't say it above, you'd still have to have a successful smelting check on the recycler to get the ingot(s) anyway, so it shouldn't overly unbalance things to a low-level/unskilled smelter.  The XP for recycling is pretty low compared to original smelting anyway, so it's doubtful this could be abused to advance in smelting much faster than before.

[Faldred]

After being online very briefly last night, I saw that my worries about abuse via "buy a cheap copper dagger to melt into ingots" is pretty much unfounded.  Copper daggers sell from vendors for about 35 GP, and the market price for a nugget of copper seems to be about 15 GP -- both would produce (at most) one ingot under the propsal, so the crafter is actually better suited using nuggets than manufactured items from a cost standpoint.

In that case, the yield of ingots on a successful recycling check could be equal to the number of "mangled" metal a failed attempt to create the same item would have produced.

[Stranzini]

There are other CNR-using worlds where it works exactly like you describe, so there is not a question of whether this can be done.

The gods of Layonara probably have made this work exactly like they want it to, although of course it would be pleasant for us if it did what you describe.

To be fair it IS a balance-changing request. Characters which do not mine for themselves do not have ready access to metals and have to either buy them or work out some deal with miners to get what they need. This change makes it much easier for those types of characters to advance in crafting more on a parity with the mining-capable characters, and also makes it easier for anyone to advance more rapidly in crafting as soon as they are working on any metal (iron, platinum, mithril, etc) that it is difficult (life-threatening) for them to obtain. They can get their hands on a small amount of metal, or on some recyclable items, and get more crafting attempts and therefore more crafting progress out of it.

Its a game balance decision.

[Faldred]

I absolutely agree that it's completely up to the designer's discretion... I'm full of loads of ideas that will probably get shot down.    (Despite not playing one, I think I have a touch of bard in me...)  As for the balance issues... I don't it is quite as unbalancing as you suggest.  Now, I don't know how common "junk metal" items are across Layonara (my own characters have barely begun to explore the world), but even still, someone who hasn't dedicated much time to smelting metal ores is going to have a low probability of using the recycler correctly (as far as I can tell, it's a smelting check, so it there be a considerably higher fail rate for low-level smelters), and even when they succeed, they get very little smelting XP.  And that's just for copper.  Someone who hasn't been getting many/any smelting levels isn't going get much out of recycling "higher" metals.  Then there's the cost issue... from what I've seen on the boards, the prices for nuggets/ingots of metal are considerably lower than what a finished product that could potentially yield the same number of ingots under this suggestion sells for.  Again, unless junk metal is far more abundant than I suspect it is, it makes more economic sense for crafters to buy nuggets/ingots than to buy finished items to melt down.  Of course, one of the main points of the exercise is to allow more crafting attempts from the same amount of raw material, so if this is an unbalancing change, then that does wreck the entire idea.  It seems to me, though, that at least at lower levels, armor and weapon making are unbalanced with respect to smelting (and in fact, most other crafts).  It takes a lot of ingots to make enough items to level up, especially compared to how easy other crafts are to reach level 2.  (Of course, it doesn't help that Zug has horrible luck with d20 rolls in the Smithy.)  I imagine this is the main reason that "mangled" metals are the by-products of failed attempts in the first place.  There are certainly mechanisms possible to limit the usefulness of this recycling, if it turns out to be abused in the form suggested:

Higher failure rate on recycle attempts for finished products vs. mangled metals
Reduce the number of ingots produced from successful attempts to recycle finished products
Restrict recycling to only items that can be made from the armor and weapon anvils (this should probably be done anyway)
Place a minimum "lens of pricing" value requirement on the item to be recycled relative to the metal ignot to be returned on success
Reduce or eliminate XP award for successful recycling
Make recycling a two-stage process - 1) break down item into "junk < metal type >" at the same bench at which it would have been created; 2) recycle junk into ingot - to force recyclers to have more diverse skills in smelting and armor/weapon crafting in order to be successful (combine with reduced/eliminated XP for these tasks... the metal is its own reward)
[/list] [Note: I'd rather have used a different word that "junk", but the correct 5-letter word beginning with "S" seems to be causing some language filtering issues with the remaining four letters.  The proper word has an anagram of "scarp".]

[darkstorme]

This would potentially open up a whole new area for characters without the martial weapons capabilities to wield a pick (much as it would require martial skills to wield a pick in BATTLE, it's unrealistic to make an extra feat a requirement to hit rock with a pick.  I know it's hard to code around, but it's still a valid beef.)  It might be something to consider when redesigning Layonara for NWN2 - let creatures like goblins drop their weapons - bows and other expensive things can break, but low-level enemies dropping a copper morningstar or dagger would let non-mining characters melt them down for ingots...

[Stranzini]

Well...Sen IS one of those characters that can't wield a miners pick.

And I assume that Layo works the way it does because the designers don't WANT me to be able to do this, they want to force me to deal with the problem by interacting with other players. This is what I was talking about when I said this would be a balance-changing issue.

As far as it not being realistic to require a feat...if you think of the feat as only indicating can I or can I not swing a pick and hit a rock, OK, it would be purely a strength question. I can swing an axe, I could swing a pick too. But isn't using the miner's pick also a question of knowing how to recognize an ore vein, how to tell one ore from another, stuff like that?

Hmmm...if that was actually true, there is no reason that martial weapons should give you the mining pick either, there perhaps ought to be a mining feat required for everybody to use a pick, which dwarfs could get automatically as a racial characteristic.

[Faldred]

Stranzini - 4/24/2006  10:44 AM

Hmmm...if that was actually true, there is no reason that martial weapons should give you the mining pick either, there perhaps ought to be a mining feat required for everybody to use a pick, which dwarfs could get automatically as a racial characteristic.

I'm pretty sure the idea of having "crafting feats" was pretty well nixed in previous discussions by the designers.

[darkstorme]

It's a heck of a thing to waste a feat on, really.  Much as interaction is good, though, most of the non-mining classes tend to need money more - because when they're small and weak, they tend to get hurt more... both in terms of frequency and severity.  (At least, that has been my experience.)