Lumberjacks and miners

[Wintersheart]

I love the crafting system, I think it adds a lot of flavour to Layonara. With crafting you have non combat oriented goals to strive for and it gives reason for going out hunting or mining.

But all the crafting skills (apart from fishing) are crafting (obvious yes I know), how about we had ressource gathering skills like mining, hunting, picking (mushrooms, flowers, plants etc) gem-minng etc?

But unlike the crafting skills, I don't think it should be impossible to mine without being a miner or chop wood without being a lumberjack, but what I imagine is that miners, lumberjacks, hunters, gem-miners and "mushroom" pickers would work faster, find more and not break their pickaxes so often.

Given the respawn time in some caves and the speed most mine, it would make a real difference to bring an experienced miner to do the task. Likewise with gems - an experienced gem-miner would find more gems quicker, so you wouldn't have to go down the topaz mine three times just to get lucky once. And I think it would make sense of an experienced mushroom picker would find a lot more mushrooms as compared to a newbie.

Any comments?

 

I appreciate this would entail a lot of work - so it is more a suggestion if you at some point are going to overhaul the CNR system.

[Talan Va'lash]

A lot of CNR gathering things, (mining, chopping trees... well ok, two, but thats a lot of it) are tied to combat abilities.  A level 16 fighter is going to get a lot more wood/ore faster than a level 6 fighter, since the more experienced character has twice as many attacks per round and likely a higher str, doing more damage per hit.

Things like picking and gathering things, spidersilk, berries and such that you just grab from the tree... I dont think you can really get better at this.

Gem mining and sand and clay digging and things like that where you're not gathering something (from a container placeable) or using your combat abilites are the area where an idea like this could be implemented.  And gem mining is something you really could get better at.  However, the skill would likely be linked to gem crafting rather than being a seperate skill as carefully chipping off usable hunks of gems with the chisel, uses similar skills as cutting the gems.

[Wintersheart]

Talan Va'lash - 6/1/2005  10:48 AM

"A lot of CNR gathering things, (mining, chopping trees... well ok, two, but thats a lot of it) are tied to combat abilities.  A level 16 fighter is going to get a lot more wood/ore faster than a level 6 fighter, since the more experienced character has twice as many attacks per round and likely a higher str, doing more damage per hit."

This is the point, I disagree with a 16th swordsman being a better lumberjack than than say a 0 level human who has worked in the woods all his life. The attacks per round, hit points etc is all a way of representing the fact that more experienced warriers would get more hits through the defences, rather than actually swinging the sword twice as much. That is why i would like it to be seperate skills. Also mining and chopping wood includes lots of other skills, such as how to cut down the tree so it falls the right way etc.

"Things like picking and gathering things, spidersilk, berries and such that you just grab from the tree... I dont think you can really get better at this."

I disagree - an experienced woodsman would find lots more than the average person, when it comes to mushrooms it is almost an art knowing when and where to find them. Having one or two containers is really just a way of representing the character finding them all over the place.

"Gem mining and sand and clay digging and things like that where you're not gathering something (from a container placeable) or using your combat abilites are the area where an idea like this could be implemented.  And gem mining is something you really could get better at.  However, the skill would likely be linked to gem crafting rather than being a seperate skill as carefully chipping off usable hunks of gems with the chisel, uses similar skills as cutting the gems."

I think when it comes to gem mining, it is different from cutting gems. Gem mining is also knowing in which veins the gems occur, how to extract them etc.

[Dorganath]

Honestly, I think the CNR system is restrictive enough as it is.  There are entire classes who cannot even equip the tools needed for mining and woodcutting without burning a cross-class weapon feat.  In some cases (i.e. druids), such tools violate the dogma of the character's class.  Even though the game would let a druid take a martial weapon feat, it technically goes against their ethos.  In PnP, that's grounds for a loss of powers even to equip a non-approved weapon...and some druids spend their lives in the forest, as you say.

It does make sense that high-level fighters are better at mining and woodworking, especially if they have been at it a while.  Their fighter training lets them hit harder and faster, and it doesn't matter if their opponent is a live being, a tree or a rock.

As for gathering, by virtue of sheer repetition, our characters essentially do become "experts" in knowing where to look for CNR that can be picked.  That's abstraced as specific locations where the CNR spawns, but the point is that sometimes we look and find nothing, other times we look and say "Ah!  Here it is!"