As I understand it, the idea of moving crafting tables was both to force crafters to explore more risky areas and to prevent the case of "oh look there's a Balor outside town again".
It's almost, but not quite worked. I've got 3 crafting skills maxed, and it's incredibly rare for me to find a useful lab unless a DM has announced a hatch-spawning spree. What usually happens is everyone does their research on the persistent +0 or +8 tables, then hoards up their rare resources for that once-in-a-blue-moon chance of a +20 bench.
This is a shame, because I love the crafting system. The random recipe generation means that different crafters can specialise in different products. And there's cool emergent outcomes like people trading Herbalism reagents made in Alchemy to a Herbalist who can use them. It's a system where factual knowledge and individual PC expertise can make two characters with the same levels and skills totally unique from each other. And where people genuinely have no idea OC if I can make something or not. But that sense of mystery doesn't extend to finding the labs.
Issues:- Many of the labs in explorables don't have any bonuses. Why use them when there's persistent labs in more convenient locations? Since they're an explorable, it's more likely you'll run into a PC in them anyway. This wouldn't be a problem if hatches spawned more often, but it means there's good odds on the only lab you'll see this week being useless.
- I have never seen a generic crafting bench hatch any deeper than 97. There appears to be little reason to push deeper on your regular scouting for random craft tables. I've got through a lot of deeper rings in the past week, and have high Search. I've still only found some persistent +0s.
- The easiest place to find herb table spawns is literally the next zone over from a persistent herb table.
- Previously, a cheaply accessible minor faction had a secure +15 alchemy table. This was better than everything, and led to a glut of Peerage alchemy masters.
- On the other side of things, the rentable property in Ticker with a herb table was +0. And a huge investment for that +0.
Herbalism specific:- Both of these are a frustration on the reagent supply side. Herbalism items tend to be weaker or single-use and so are balanced around a steady supply of reagents.
Greedy PCs looting plants. It's terrible because there's no meaningful conflict generated by someone using up your entire patch. You can't hunt them down and enact some payback, as it's impossible to find who did it. - The Herb Seed Lucky Dip. A herbalist is going to want a specific plant for their work. The only reason to be buying seeds is because some PC has looted out your herbs and you ran out of backup seeds. Given that, it's annoying to have to buy random seeds you don't want.
Suggestions:- Tweak the explorable labs to all be at least a +5 bonus. This means they're automatically worth finding and using. Bearing in mind there's persistent +8 tables for Tinkering and Alchemy that aren't too hard to find.
- Massively increase the spawn rate of labs, but decrease the spawn rate of +15 and +20 labs to compensate.
- Spawn hatches in some of those more empty deeper rings that people just sprint through rather than explore. Encourage players to slow down more. And maybe then notice some more of the hidden stuff ;).
- Alternatively, put "a random +5 lab" in the guaranteed spawn table for somewhere like 96-97. Ensure there's always a reason to go looking each reset. E.g. there used to be a +0 herb in 95, where it wouldn't have a druid passing through every 5 minutes.
- Put in a couple more persistent +0 labs. There's now two +0 Tinker benches in the starting Rings, which is great as you can't be sure where someone might be doing tinkering. But with only one Herb table and that in a well-trafficked area, I've met a lot of PCs down there :P.
- Provide a Seed merchant selling named seeds at 30gp each. So you can pay 10gp for A Seed, or 30gp for that one you actually want. Much like the Burgage song merchant, it'll remove a lot of frustration.
A lot of good suggestions, one small nitpick -
It's very hard, but it is -possible- to catch people destroying your plants, depending on the garden. The Alarm spell in particular is very very handy for this.
Another suggestion, now I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement given how hatches currently work, but a lot of modern games with RNG have something called Bad Luck Protection. It's usually applied to things like lootboxes, where the longer you go without opening a rare drop, the higher your chance of getting said rare drop goes, therefore guaranteeing that even if you have terrible luck, you will eventually get one of said rare drops. Something similar could perhaps work with crafting labs, where the longer it's been since the server has spawned one of the better labs, the higher their chances of spawning increases. This would keep some RNG while preventing cases where you wait 2 months (actual experience) for a +20 tinkering table to spawn, and then 3 of them spawn in 4 days.
I don't see why the Brimstone Model can't be duplicated, tbh.
Just put an Herbalism +15 in the Ponds that you can gain access to if you're willing to do a tiny bit of Changeling Juju or whatever favor points earned.
And put a Tinkering +15 in with a ticker Clocksmen having a wink-nudge speakeasy where you can pay 5k gold for access.
Then keep the randoms available for those who don't want to pay or for rarer recipes.
The problem I have with it is that +15 is just too good. As we saw with Brimstone, there wasn't any danger associated with membership. and it completely removed the need to seek labs and go to free-PVP places. What it would mean is that all the people doing "dodgy" crafting would have the most secure places to work from.
Just having access to a secure and convenient +0 lab in Ticker let me blitz cheap recipes and discover a lot of Herbalism.
I think it could work, though, if the model was like the Open Door Kitchen. Rather than an upfront cost, you have to pay a relatively small fee on entry every time. If it was merely a +10 , that'd be a price worth paying for a moderate bonus and security. And it wouldn't eclipse random labs.
As mentioned, the difference between having access to a +15 and not is really huge. I don't think if these are put in, they shouldn't be so hub-specific. There's not really a good reason why a Ticker alchemist should be so heavily disadvantaged compared to a peerage one, and the same goes for other crafts and other hubs.
I like the idea of paying to access a bench and having to pay each time, but they should be in more neutral places. The Tinker bench could be at the Toyfolly factory. Herbalism could be at a ranger's cabin in the Weald, and perhaps the alchemy one could be in the Wizard's Warrens? (Yes the Warrens are harder to access then the previous two. Other options could be an alchemist's guild in a seam in the rifts?)
I'd like to see more crafting areas around. I'm not too hung up on the bonuses but it's always a nice feature.