Lord Of The Rings Online: Nik Davidson - Gandalf vs. Voltron

Nik discusses a bit more on the crafting vocation:

I was rather pleased with the response to my first crafting dev diary. It's a subject near and dear to me, and it clearly means a lot to the LOTRO community too. I've always felt that a strong crafting system that allows for dedicated crafters to visibly ply their trades and thus garner a reputation for themselves will be a strong asset to community building in an MMO. Judging by the responses to the system, I see we all basically agree on that, at least. Splendid!

It wasn't long after the first dev diary was released before Ramen came by and started pestering me for a follow-up. She's a shrewd negotiator*, and I quickly agreed. After all, I did want to do a slightly more fact-rich update, and this will give me a chance to do so.

First of all, let's answer the most common question I've been getting in a definitive and final** sort of way: what are the Vocations and Professions, and how do they relate to each other? The following are diagrams of the seven Vocations: Diamonds are "production professions" - tradeskills that make stuff and the Circles are "gathering professions" - professions that gather materials so that you can make stuff. You'll notice that there are seven Vocations, and seven production professions. Very shrewd of you! Except for the Scholar (whose materials are only found via loot), each production profession requires materials from another profession, so although there are multiple vocations that allow you to be a Tailor, only one of them also lets you be a Forester, which will provide needed materials for your own use. Confused yet? Check out this handy diagram!

Whoa! How handy!

Professions marked in red are supported production professions, because they also have the requisite gathering profession to make whatever they need. Professions in orange are unsupported - you'll have to get your raw materials from other players. Gathering professions in light green are non-supporting - you won't have an immediate use for your excess materials, but all those people with orange diamonds will be beating a path to your door!

The next frequently asked question has to do with each of the production professions, and what they actually make. Again, I'm here to help.

Weaponsmith
As expected, the Weaponsmith is the primary source of melee weapons. Swords, daggers, and axes of all varieties are the Weaponsmith's purview, ranging from bronze training gear to weapons of ancient design and great renown.

Metalsmith
Metal armors and sturdy shields are the metalsmith's domain. Though their initial products may be of simple make, eventually their skills will allow them to work finer materials and greater designs.

Tailor
A skilled tailor can make simple clothing from common cloth, but with time and practice can create garments of great beauty that provide significant protection to their wearer. The Tailor can also work with tanned hides to produce leather armor - light, tough and suitable for travel.

Jeweller***
Simple adornments and objects of beauty are the heart of the jeweller's trade. However, exceptional adornments can go far to increasing the stature and confidence of an adventurer, and a skilled jeweller can produce true works of art.

Woodworker
As any archer will tell you, it takes more than a stick and a string to make a worthy weapon. The woodworker is an expert bowyer, but expands his trade to include staves, spears, and other hafted weapons. A master Woodworker can produce weapons that even an Elven hero would be proud to wield on the battlefield.

Cook
A long march can be made all the easier with the promise of a good meal at the end. While it may seem a mundane talent, a good cook is every adventurer's best friend.

Scholar
Perhaps the most mysterious of the professions, the Scholar collects fragments of lost lore, and attempts to interpret their secrets. In doing so, he can produce scrolls that other craftsmen can read to improve their chances of producing a superior product. Other practical applications include lore by which specific enemies (orcs, trolls, the dead) might be best combated, or cures for various maladies.

You wanted details, and there you go! The last topic I want to cover in detail probably deserves its own diary: farming. Why? It's really its own thing. A little bit of resource gathering, a little bit of a "slot-machine" minigame, and maybe a little bit of hobbit shenanigans. Good stuff.

Before I close, I wanted to address something that's come up several times in discussions, and that's the general "power level" of crafting, and the game in general. Raise your hand if you've asked yourself or your friends a question along the lines of, "Who would win in a fight, Gandalf or Voltron****?" That, or questions like it, fill a special place in classic geek debate. Any time you're working with a license with well-known figures, and you throw new players into the mix, you ask yourself, "How do I stack up?"

The same goes for LOTRO. You might ask, "I'm a max-level Champion, I've felled some seriously foul beasts. Theoretically, could I beat up Eomer one-on-one?" You might ask, "I'm a master weaponsmith, are the swords I make on par with Sting? Or even Narsil?" There's two issues here that I want to touch on here.

One is simple - the things I say in dev diaries like this one don't necessarily go through the same lore-analysis that our final game product does. As such, I'm sure to freak some people out from time to time - I'm not a Tolkien expert myself, and I rely heavily on our experts to keep me on the path of not-crazy. I mean, I know Goldberry isn't a kind of pie, but at some point between "crazy ranting" and "stuff in game" I generally need to go get yelled at by panicked lore experts.

The second point is a little more subtle. Characters and items that are part of the players' stories are in a sense parallel to the books - it doesn't matter if you could beat Sam arm-wrestling, because it won't ever happen in our game. You'll be tempted to try to count how many blows it took for the Fellowship to kill a cave troll, and then do the same for you and your friends in-game. My advice to you: Don't. We don't think of the game in those terms, and that's not the problem we're trying to solve when we talk about "balance."

That's it for this installment! As always, let me know what you have to say on the forums, and maybe even give me a few ideas for the next one of these.

Nik Davidson
Lead Game Systems Designer
Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

* - The conversation went something like this.

Ramen: "Nik, we need to give one of your kidneys to the community to appease their hunger for blood and flesh."

Me: "Uh, what? No!"

Ramen: "Why can't you be a team player? You designers are so unreasonable. Well, in that case, can we at least give a second crafting dev diary to the community to appease their hunger for information and updates?"

Me: "That doesn't sound so bad..."

** - Definitive and final until I change it, anyway.

*** - No, that's actually how it was spelled in Tolkien's day, and it's still a valid spelling today. Yes, I know it looks kind of weird.

**** - Let's assume we're talking the lion version, because the car version was pretty lame. Now, Voltron's got a size and strength advantage, this is true. But Voltron pretty much got its butt handed to it by every space lizard or alien robot out there for the first ¾ of the fight... until it formed the blazing sword, and then it scored a quick victory. Now, here's the crux of the issue - is the blazing sword actually fire-based? If so, then Gandalf holds the trump card in this matchup - Narya. Voltron whips out the blazing sword, Gandalf lets the kids know that their cheesy animated fire will not avail them, and then bam, it's over, as Gandalf... eh, I don't know, throws a flaming pine cone or something.

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Nik Davidson is a very grumpy man. Born in the frozen wastelands of the most inhospitable land known as Minnesota, he has made it his life's work to dispel the notion that people of that region are all "nice."

Singularly fascinated with MMOs, Nik has played more of them than you, with an eye toward analyzing their systems and patterns. The fact that he absolutely loves the genre, the communities and the players, well, that hardly enters into the equation. He's been making MMOs for half a decade with no signs of slowing down. Not while the coffee machine's working, anyhow.