The issue with Gardening

[wundyboy]

Hey its wundy.

I've been playing a herbalist for the past few weeks now, and while I enjoy the system overall, I feel it is super gated by the locked in garden sites. While I get the intent to prevent super high stealth druids from hiding their stuff in obscure places, if everyone knows where a garden is, then they can easily raid it and set you back several resets as you wait for the plant to regrow and allow you to continue where you left off.

I have a few varied suggestions to help fix this.

1) Increase the amount of yield a plant gives per reset. This will allow a herbalist a better chance to get to their garden and take the things they need with less down time. Maybe instead of one seed / produce per reset, it is instead 2 or 3 seed / produce per reset.

2) Increase the amount of plants in a garden. I don't know if this is due to plants being in an area, or the garden itself, but some gardens can hold up to 8-10 plants, while others can only hold a single plant. It's hard to tell if this is intended or not.

3) Invent a new system that can be tied in with tracking. Put some of those foot prints down, let them be clicked by anyone, and have them roll a tracking check to see if they can determine some clues about who has been here recently.  This suggestion is a bit far fetch'd and would require a lot of work, but there'd be some use for actual PC trackers and add in a new style of RP / mechanical reason to invest into tracking skills.

These are just a few ideas I have, and would like to hear other players suggestions and comments about them too.

[Cruzel]

What if we stopped a plant from being destroyed, without a conscious effort to do so?  AFAIK, a non-gardening PC has no idea if they're about to kill a plant. So what ( I think?) most people do is take a seed, then take as much produce as they think they can get, then re-plant the seed?

That seems counterproductive, and we could probably just put in a "There is nothing suitable to harvest from this" feedback message when someone tries to harvest the plant. Make them only destructible via either bashing or player tool maybe?   One way or another, this would be a HUGE quality of life change for crafters and gardeners to not have to constantly replant their stuff.

On  one of Wundy's other points:

I'm not really sure how I feel about these pre-set garden areas, either.  The plans around the underdark in random places were actually kind of fun to hunt for (the ones that spawned naturally) and finding a cool place to try and build a garden was also fun.  It meant people had to actually LOOK for your stuff, if they wanted to disrupt your crafting or ambush your PC.   Now, there's little to no challenge (or fun) in that, with areas that are constant being the only place you can put plants.

I haven't done much ringrunning so I have no idea what the layout of the rings is or how appropriate/fun it would be to go back to the old system though.

I think the "not killing plants" thing solves a good chunk of the gardening issues aside from general use?  When it comes to protecting/catching people, we could also consider REWARDING a PC for staking a claim and spending time in the area? Maybe similar to the wage tick, if a PC is active in their garden and not AFK, every 15 minutes of their presence could have a chance to make one/some of the plants bloom/produce a thing early?   That would encourage more of an active component to gardening, reduce waiting times and increase the likelihood of encountering other players who use the garden, rather than a "I  log in, I plant things, I log out. I log in, I harvest things later. I craft things. I plant more. I logout."     Active gameplay is almost always better than "fire and forget"!



Another possibility is using the EE's instancing options to full effect. Allow established gardener or crafter PCs to be granted the ability via DM, to place their own gardening zone and hide it somewhere ( shovel tunnel, hatch requiring a search check, etc?) w/ a limit on these per ring (and additionally per PC)  Like a mini-lair system. Other players could raid it as they please if they find it?  That should be fairly easy to implement (I think?)

[d1n4l9q7]

Could also add gardens to fitting existing lairs

[One_With_Nature]

Just put in private / rentable plots for dedicated gardeners that only they can access for a weekly rent like the old room rent system

Problem solved

[Yamo B. There]

Some thoughts I had on this system in the distant past:

* Placeable signs stuck in gardens persist over reset just like the plants so that gardeners can "mark" their crop. Not going to stop anyone who wants to steal it, but...

* The plants, when fully grown, aren't pickable for the first reset of their full growth by anyone but the planter.

* A round-about version of the above, characters with high skill levels have a chance to pick plants one growth stage earlier. Everyone else sees a plant that's not developed fully yet, but the expert farming knowledge of a few will know how to extract useful materials without damaging the crop, essentially letting them have at it before the unwashed masses get a chance to muck everything up.

[Anonymous Lemur]

How having set plants always grow in the wilderness with 1/2 druid/ranger + 1/2 herbalism number of harvests per reset per player in addition to the already existing gardens.

[Garem]

IMO, scrap the whole system of planting. Make plants static or semi-static - if you know where to go, you'll find 1-3 plants of a type in that place per reset and each PC gets to "pick" so many based on their farming, herbalism, ranger/druid levels, etc. Make it valuable for exploration purposes, and worth taking a group out for.

These might even have baddies spawn from time to time, like a semi-static explorable.