“Basic Supplies Packs” for Crafting to Replace Cards

[Lira]

Proposal
It's an open secret that alchemists, herbalists, tinkers, and cooks made heavy use of the Playing Cards packs for crafting. With those items no longer usable in crafting, I propose the creation of themed packs of consumables to take the place of cards. This would both enable crafters to engage with these systems at a rate that isn't (even more) soul-crushing, and do so with ingredients that are appropriately represented in the fiction: no more smashing cards together until you get a sourdough.

Example: A cook goes to Sparrowbroth and purchases a pack of "Cooking Essentials." The item's description tells us that the pack contains the essentials any cook might want: flour, salt, common spices, etc. The pack contains 50 charges which, when used, add a unit of of "Staple Cooking Ingredients" to inventory, which are valid components for Cooking recipes.

Similar packs would exist for Alchemy, Herbalism, and Tinkering: "Alchemical Fundamentals," "Assorted Herbs," "Sack of Parts," etc., for which I'm happy to write the text. This also opens up the possibility for future expansions: rare-drop or purchasable-but-expensive packs that provide a bonus to a relevant skill until consumed, or whose products provide some intrinsic bonus to the crafting calculation, perhaps.

Why Is This Beneficial?
In short: to alleviate a massive burden of carrying capacity, so that people will continue to engage with the crafting systems.

Speaking as a successful EFU:R alchemist and current EFU:COR cook and alchemist: crafting beyond the very basic combinations is a character-defining endeavor. While it's possible for almost anyone to dabble in crafting and get a result or two, going beyond those basics requires:
•   10-20 EFUSS points
•   A dozen pounds or more and at least a full page of inventory devoted to reagents
•   A full set of skill-boosting gear, which is often rare and expensive
•   Literally hundreds of hours of experimentation and careful note-taking

This is a difficult, tedious, immensely time- and resource-consuming endeavor that pays off only to people whose brains are wired to enjoy filling in spreadsheets. I spreadsheet for a living and enjoy EVE Online, so I have a relatively high tolerance for this sort of thing, but even then, shortcuts and efficient research paths are required to keep it manageable.

Cards have been the go-to because they were a solid base to work from, a way to fill out recipe slots while having "only" a couple dozen pounds and a page and a half of inventory space devoted to other crafting reagents – not counting the full set of skill-enhancing gear which is required for more-than-basic crafting. In this way, cards allowed something approaching a reasonable rate of discovery: you could, for example, relatively easily discover the fundamental crafting recipes in Cooking with a hundred GP and a week of evenings devoted to it. Going any deeper requires exponentially more engagement, at a direct cost in effectiveness in other areas due to carrying capacity requirements. Here's an example:

Say we want to find new cooking recipes. In my experience and in the experience of other crafters I've asked this chapter, the rate of discovery for new recipes is around 25-35%: that is, one in every three or four attempts will yield a viable recipe, rather than an invalid combination. It won't necessarily be one that's new to you, mind – the odds are good that a successful combination will be another way to make something you've already discovered, unless you're working in a new branch of your craft. Let's say for simplicity's sake that each combination we try has a 33% chance of being a valid recipe. What do we need to carry to have a productive cooking session?

Assuming we're cooking in one of the branches, and not looking for new ways to make dough or what-have-you, we need to carry a "primer" item like a Raw Chicken, and at least three other valid "combinatory items" to combine with it. But! In any given branch of a crafting skill, you will rapidly run out of permutations which "only" take four items, and will do most of your work in the 5-item range or higher. Primers are usually about 0.5lbs and take up 1, 2, or 4 inventory slots, and valid objects tend to be 0.3 to 0.5 lbs and take up 1 or 2 slots each; we'll assume the low end and say 1.5 lbs and 5 inventory slots per combination. On average, to find a valid recipe, we'll need to commit 5 * (1.5lbs and 5 slots) = 7.5 lbs and 25 inventory slots until we're ready to head to the oven, per recipe we hope to find. That's over a third of an inventory page, and a huge chunk of weight, for a single recipe. Ideally you'd want to only carry the primers and then buy all of your combinatory items immediately before you go crafting, but given the difficulty and time involved in reaching crafting locations, most PCs are going to struggle with this, especially with combinatory items that you can't purchase.

What this means in practice is that people who are serious about crafting are going to be carrying around 20+ lbs of combinatory items and primers, and occupying at least a full inventory page, at all times – and probably quite a bit more, even before you factor your crafting gear set. Cards lessened this burden by making it possible to carry around about 33-50% fewer combinatory items, although they did nothing for the all-important (heavy, bulky, often rare) primers. Blood is no substitute: even leaving aside how deeply weird it is in the fiction, the requirements for syringes, healing-and-resting, and so on made them at best a useful add-on for card combinations. A crafter with cards (or card-like themed packs) is able to keep their committed weight and inventory slots down to something manageable with effort and sacrifice; the alternative is onerous in the extreme, and is going to result in a significant decrease in the number of people willing to engage with the crafting systems. 

In Conclusion
EFU's crafting is a neat system, but the burdens it places on people who want to engage with it are substantial: even with cards or card-like objects, you really have to want it and be wiling to put in the hours, be diligent, take good notes, and make the mechanical sacrifices. This is actual work, and many people are not going to be interested in Doing Work in their leisure hours. It's a small subset of the population who considered this worthwhile, with the tools they had until this week. Lacking one of those tools isn't going to kill crafting dead – there will always be some people willing to go to any lengths to scratch the particular itch that only filling a spreadsheet with entries like "Syrup" and "Summoning Scales" can fulfill. But it will make it much, much more onerous. Considering how much time and effort has gone into making crafting available to us again, it seems a shame to cut down even further on the number of people who will find it accessible.

To that end, I propose a flavorful but functionally identical counterpart to cards, with descriptions tailored to the crafting systems they facilitate.

[Time_Stomped]

How about a "Tear Collector" to use on subdualed PCs to create a vial of tears to be used for crafting.  Dispensary fights now have a double innuendo.  You're welcome, people.

[Grouch]

3 gold for 52 ingredients was ridiculous.

I am sure you know you can buy things for 1 gold each and throw them in the pot.

[Anecdotes and Annotations]

How about being able to order a pack of crafting ingredient from npc dealers. Much like healing supply orders.

[Damien]

I think people are misunderstanding how crafting works, or rather the purpose of it. Only do it if you're interested in, for lack of a better word, tinkering. It's something fun to play around with in your spare time. It's also a  massive puzzle, when version one was first launched it took probably about 2-3 years before most people knew any real recipes.

To think you're somehow owed something or deserve instant gratification is silly. And the idea that you sacrifice anything mechanically is also ridiculous. Spellcraft? Fucking useful. Lore? The most useful non mechanical skill there is.

You guys should just stop whinning it's hard honestly. And grouch is right, you can literally craft with anything.

[Black-Forest]

I think people are misunderstanding how crafting works, or rather the purpose of it. Only do it if you're interested in, for lack of a better word, tinkering. It's something fun to play around with in your spare time. It's also a  massive puzzle, when version one was first launched it took probably about 2-3 years before most people knew any real recipes.

To think you're somehow owed something or deserve instant gratification is silly. And the idea that you sacrifice anything mechanically is also ridiculous. Spellcraft? Fucking useful. Lore? The most useful non mechanical skill there is.

You guys should just stop whinning it's hard honestly. And grouch is right, you can literally craft with anything.

I struggle to believe you actually read the OP. Even crafting with cards is still engaging with an absurdly complex system with enormous RNG that will take an absurd amount of hours of your real, actual life to master.  "Instant gratification", what???

This is a game we're playing to have fun. That's what we're "owed". That's the gratification people are looking for. For some, that's crafting and spreadsheets. Clearly the OP is one of those people, but exists in the (fairly broad, based on discord discussions) spectrum of crafters who will quit/scale back because of the card change.

[Damien]

If you think you are owed anything you are sadly mistaken.

He just hasn't worked out the fundamentals of the system yet, and I guarantee there is rich reward to any who work it out.

The only thing I would argue is it's maybe a bit vague what items have value and which don't. For instance quartz crystals going in first nearly always produce a recipe, and I've learned that spending about 30min max on the system, but also the only reason I know to use that is because that's what the old system used.

[Moonlighter]

I'm not sure why EFU especially has this culture for people to barge into suggestion threads and say that no, this feature isn't meant to be fun and your opinion is invalid or whatever.

It's personally why I haven't bothered lodging a complaint about the removal of cards from crafting or really bothering with making suggestion threads at all anymore.

I will say that all of my (not even good) recipes got scrapped and I had to start over from scratch, and I know it certainly gives me less incentive to try spending enormous amounts of gold, time and effort to tediously explore crafting when stuff like this is prone to happening.

[I love cats]

I"m just going to say. It was a joke that Cards could be used in so many recipes in the first place. Or that for 3 gold you could buy 52 ingredients. I think the idea of alchemists being these idiots that throw Cards into pots is ludricrous.

It isn't unfair and it isn't a nerf. Alchemy is meant to be a challenge. Getting ingredients is supposed to be tedious and encourages you to find allies. Card flinging was not Alchemy

[Miscellanious]

Just my two cents:

“Herbal Solvent” - Herbalism (“A combination of various acidic herbs, this solvent acts as the primary reagent for many herbal remedies.”)

“Magical Dust” - Alchemy  (“A myriad of hues, these dusts are the magical refuse that form the basis for most alchemical reactions. The effects can be quite dangerous, given the unpredictable nature of magic.”)


“Base Ingrediants” - Cooking (“Salt. Pepper, flour, and broth. These are just a few ingrediants used in many meals, which can be combined with reagents to create wonderful things.”)


Edit: the benefit of adding a new variable that can be controlled to say “how good” something is. For example... cards would cost .07 gold per a card. To unlock a tier 1 system, it could cost a measley .21 gold. To make something from that tier item could cost a total of .35 gold + one reagent. This could create something like barkskin (3), which is worth 75 gold.

That is just rediculous, hands down. But with controlled “base” reagents it could then be changed to cost 55 gold with a value of 75 gold.

[Lira]

ShadowCharlatan: Suggestion made. Agreed that cards were absurd as a thing occurring in the fiction, though I'll die on the hill of their fulfilling an important role which ought to have a good, flavor-appropriate substitute. Essay attached because making suggestions results in debate among players, and I'd rather do all the important writing up front than unspool the argument over an endless thread. I hope you'll forgive my adding another piece to this, which is that giving crafters a basic supply unit to work from is going to prevent "degenerate" behaviors we've seen in the past: rat-farming to replace worm-farming, in this case.

Follow-up suggestion: if the goal is to eliminate degenerate behaviors that don't promote grouping, remove every item that comes from common animals from the list of valid crafting combinations. People are going to go into the sewers and farm rats, just like they farmed worms in EFU:R, and for the same reason: a reliable, cost-free way to get the same ingredients, over and over again, because ingredient consistency and reliable sourcing is incredibly helpful for crafting.

[Charnelist]

I for one really love the idea of capitalising on the 'shipment' scripts with this. As it stands, we've got our share of shipments to schedule within Ticker Square, and adding more might weigh more favour, mechanically, on the Tickers. So I'd suggest that shipments be made available for order from specific NPCs around the module (In certain 'friendly' Seam locations, or in certain Rings, you DMs surely know better than I what I'm getting at here) - where a PC can order shipments of 'tinkering implements' or 'herbal assortments' or 'alchemical compounds' or 'varied spices'.... whatever the case. It should be different PCs for each one, I expect, and/or multiple PC 'sellers' whose shipments offer higher chances of better returns - this might also give players with spare groats something to spend them on which might tell them what items WORK for what system. That can be confusing, initially and even in the later lifetime of crafter PCs.

I also really like what Lira's posted about having some sort of staple. I don't know if they should be something a Ring 99 merchant carries in stock - maybe just for cooking - but I could see - again - other NPCs out there selling such things. For oh, 250-300 gold and 50 charges. And let it be lightweight while packed, and it looks like a very good compromise to me.

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[Lira]

"Shipments" is an interesting concept - I'd need to think about the implications at more length to really weigh in on it. Seems like it has potential though!

What I do want to comment on is the idea of 250-300g for a pack of 50 charges: that price point is at least twice as high as it needs to be for people to use it. Paying even 5g per charge is way, way beyond what people will pay outside of the crafters who have already made it big and are selling their products for large profits: it's a "rich get richer" situation. Crafters learning their trade - i.e., still trying to figure out what they can reasonably make with the seed they were given at character creation - are going to look for the most time- and resource-efficient ways to work. Which, right now, means rats. Lots and lots of rats. Also, trashgull eggs are available for 1/5th the proposed price of these pack charges.

For alchemy or herbalism, wealthy characters might be willing to pay a three-digit price because the upside is a potentially saleable item to recoup their costs, or something useful enough to be worth the price. No one will bother with it for cooking, however, because cooking items have value only for roleplaying purposes, and you can make a spectacular cake for your liege lord out of rat intestines and lizardman scales as easily as you can out of a 250g Supply Pack. I've already risked SC's wrath pointing this out, but I can show the math if people are interested.

[Garem]

I hope this adds some value, but I saw someone post up recently asking for big bundles of healing herbs. They were buying them at a fairly reasonable rate for the seller to make money, given how common they are. I thought that was awesome!

But I'll be damned, it's the weight. It's just so heavy in bulk, so adding that to the tedium of actually collecting those things and it becomes a rarity.

Take away or drastically reduce the weight of common crafting-intended items and I think you'll see them become part of the economy. Even .1 instead of .3 would go a long way to making it easier to indulge in, both for collecting/selling and using.

[Voideka]

TL;DR: I actually like all of SC's suggestions and would urge staff to consider them. At the least, however, a light-weight and reasonably priced fodder item, especially in a pack like cards were, is something I feel is required in order to make reasonable progress in the crafting system.

----

Part of the problem here is that, to me at least, it's unclear what staff actually want the crafting system to be. How cost intensive, how time intensive?

To give some perspective here, I'll give some numbers from my previous attempts with tinkering, so people can see what things were like. I had discovered a path using the cards that made a total of 4 ingredients at reasonable rates. This provided me with 1,344 base permutations to test, with a total of 34,835 cards needed to test all permutations, or 670 card packs, and would require ~58 real life hours just to get the cards out of the packs. Based on a success rate of around 25%, this means I would have discovered approximately 336 valid recipes. This seems like a lot, however, the recipes are not guaranteed to be unique or even good. I would consider 40% of my discoveries to have been useful, and all of these were additional ingredients and not otherwise usable items. For example, I have recently discovered 3 ways in tinkering to make a single Caltrop.

Now for the real numbers, add in crafting modifiers like schematics, and multiply the previous result by that. I've come across 5 different modifiers thus far, which means the total number of permutations I had to investigate was 6,720, requiring 174,175 cards, 3,350 card packs, and 290 hours to pull cards out of them. To me this feels a little extreme, but ultimately workable.

Now, it is likely that one would discover usable recipes without needing to explore 100% of this line of permutations, but based on my previous success rate of getting nothing useful except for more ingredients, I cannot make any reasonable estimates here. However, this should give people an idea of what delving into the crafting system is like, and why suggestions like 5gp base crafting items might seem reasonable, but ultimately are not.

In a crafting system that is entirely random, with little to no logic to be found in terms of actual recipe structure, the only way to find recipes is via trial and error. With the amount of possible permutations we are dealing with, a light-weight, acceptably priced fodder item is the only way to make reasonable progress.