I’ve been playing a great deal of Book of Hours, the spiritual successor to Cultist Simulator (I love it, but it’s a very slow, patient game of matching up aspects and discovering unexpected combinations to unlock hidden lore in the game, so it has to be the sort of game you like), and it got me to thinking a lot about crafting.
I tend to associate crafting in RPGs with “Things best left to downtime.” I have some players who insist on doing crafting mid session, which means while the other characters are falling in love, rescuing damsels, denouncing the wicked vizier and destroying their enemies, the crafter is… at their workbench, saying “And in 48 more hours, I’ll get to make a roll.” So I tend to discourage that sort of thing heavily.
But downtime is an underrated aspect of gaming. I tend to like the idea of players engaging with the game even when the game is not ongoing. Examples can include D&D players planning out their progression, or reading up a magic items book to find the next bit of loot they want their GM to give them, or Psi-Wars players brushing up on their deep lore after deciding they like the game. Crafting can be a part of that, I think. We can set up what players do between sessions, and crafting can be part of it.
Where I tend to find crafting the most interesting are in games like Book of Hours, though other games have similar elements (like Minecraft). See, in some of these games, you have to go exploring, by some means, to find more ingredients, by whatever means, to create the next thing. In Minecraft, its delving into a new biome or dungeon to see what you can find, while in Book of Hours, it’s delving into uncatalogued books to see what secrets and lores they hold. Once you have those ingredients, there are numerous things, but not limitless things they could be applied to. It’s not that learning a fireball spell takes 4 “lores,” it’s that it takes 4 fire lores or, better, 4 fire or destruction lores, so if you have a fire/earth lore, a fire/destruction lore, a destruction/death lore and a destruction/space lore, you can build a fireball, but are there other things you could do with earth or space or death? You’re making a choice, and often in such a way that has longer term consequences, because building one thing is often a ladder to building another thing.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in an RPG. I’ve tried to come up with something similar for my Heroes of the Galactic Frontier, and you can see echoes of it in some Pyramid Articles (there’s Mr Fixit and an excellent alchemy article). I think After the End has some whispers of this, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a system built out with something like this in any detail, and I’m not sure people would follow it even if there was one, because they want X (“I want a fireball spell”) and I think most players are just looking at ways to get at that thing in the shortest amount of time possible, and any hassle they have, like finding a tutor or engaging with training time, is generally seen as a hassle. They’d rather find a disintegrator cannon than go through a process of cobbling together loot to create new technology and ideas that will later allow them to later cobble together other interesting things, one of which is a disintegrator cannon.
So I tend to think it’s a bad idea, even though I’m drawn to it myself. But I wonder what other people think. Do you use crafting in your GURPS games? How does it work? Does loot play a role in it? Are there “technology trees” that players need to escalate along? Or is it limited to Quick Gadgeteers whipping up The Solution To The Current Problem with Whatever They Have On Hand? If you do have crafting, how do you find your players engage with it? Is it a hassle? Do they love it? Do many of them delve into the nitty gritty details?
Mailanka's Musing 