Lord Of The Rings Online: Nik Davidson - Useful and Comely Things

Nik discusses the crafting system in this dev diary edition:

You've probably heard the joke about how games are like sausage: Best to just enjoy them and not think too hard about how they're made. For those like me, there is no sparing us the greasy intestinal details of design and production. We live it and love it. And like it or not, I'm going to share a bit of it with you. I'm going to tell you a story. A story about a boy, a coffee machine, and a dream. A story about the crafting system in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™.

Before I launch into the explanation of our crafting system, I'll share this with you: At a certain point in the game's development, crafting was almost cut.

This shouldn't actually produce those gasps of shock and alarm I'm hearing out there; these types of games have long development cycles, and we constantly re-examine our priorities. At one point or another, a lot of things have been in, out, on the edge, on the bubble, under the radar, over the top, or under the bus. This happens. But it's true. At one point, crafting was nearly gone.

I joked with Jeffrey Steefel, our Executive Producer, about it when I came on to the project. "You know, The Lord of the Rings is really the story of a crafting quest gone wrong." Given the currently tenuous state of crafting, he suggested that I perhaps keep that opinion to myself. "But it is!", I persisted. "Sauron found some bugged crafting recipes and used them to forge some completely busted equipment, and it's now up to the poor players to try to get rid of all of his bugged loot to keep the server from crashing."

I'd like to think that it was my wit, charm, and complete mastery of analogies that got me working on the crafting system. Also, I've maybe been working on MMOs too long.

Let me tell you a secret about design. Gather in close. Huddle up. Okay, here it is: the biggest misconception of design is that freedom from limitations and infinite options produce the best design and the best games. On the contrary, the best games take their restrictions very seriously[1]: they set up clear and interesting rules, and allow for interesting and variably predictable interactions within those rules (more on this shortly).

Crafting is an interesting proposition. It has factored into games in a lot of different ways, sometimes as heavy features, sometimes as cursory play experiences. The idea of crafting in Middle-earth is a weighty one; items have power in Middle-earth, and for a number of reasons. Take for example, Boromir's sword. "Boromir had a long sword, in fashion like Andúril but of less lineage and he bore also a shield and his war-horn." (The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Ring Goes South") We think of Andúril as a special sword, imbued with special properties. Boromir's sword, not so much. By saying "in fashion like Andúril," the implication is that these swords were fashioned in the same way; perhaps by the same smith, but at least of the same material and design. So why is Andúril special?

In many fantasy works, a sword becomes special when specifically enchanted, by the virtue of the smith who forged it, or as a result of the materials from which it is forged. Tolkien adds another factor to this: the idea of lineage, that a sword can have a destiny of its own. Andúril was made great by those who forged it and those who wielded it, but also by the history it bore witness to. We knew right away that we wanted to capture aspects of this for our crafting system as well.

So, let's return to the premise: A good game, and good systems within the game, are made interesting and fun by the interactions between good restrictions, interesting rules, and variably predictable reactions between those factors. We set out to establish what the system should achieve, and the restrictions that would fall out of that. Here's what we ended up with:

Crafting in LOTRO is a focused system, replete with individual accomplishments and points of advancement. We created an advancement path for crafting that in effect parallels the story and numeric progression that a player will experience through the course of the game. These decisions dictated the overall "shape" of the system; the system has clear paths that you advance along via crafting. The more you craft, the better you get at crafting, unrelated to how many orcs you gut. We want distinct advancement milestones as part of the experience, and that means a series of "gating" events - reasons you couldn't craft a particular item.

The sense of specialization is balanced by the need for accessibility. We wanted all players to be able to casually experience a wide range of what crafting has to offer, while creating a niche for dedicated crafters. Dedicated crafters should truly be able to establish a social identity as a crafter. This leads to one of the more interesting concepts of the system: the idea of Proficiency versus Mastery, a dual-level advancement path. It also leads to the concepts of Vocation and Profession; a player trains a Vocation, which is a bundle of three Professions - a Profession is something like Metalsmithing, while Armorer, as a Vocation, teaches a player the bundle of Leatherworking, Metalsmithing, and Prospecting (gathering raw materials).

Furthermore, we wanted to provide more incentive to explore the world. Raw material gathering is a good way to accomplish this. Now, this is one of the first areas where narrative and gameplay started to come into conflict (and let me tell you, this happens a lot). At no point in the books, while hiking through Moria, did Gimli yell, "Hold up a minute, there's some iron ore over here!"[2] However, I'm willing to give up a certain amount of that narrative consistency to elevate gameplay.

One restriction to investigate is location; the idea of forging an axe in the middle of a forest doesn't sit well with me, so this led to the idea of "forge" objects, to restrict crafting activities to certain areas. No forge, no crafting. This dovetails nicely with the desire to see crafting become a visible and inherently social activity.

Finally, we wanted to have a couple of core concepts to really differentiate the system, and give it the unique hooks it needs to truly stand out: the twin notions of optional ingredients, and critical successes. This means that a recipe can incorporate something special into its crafting, to try to produce something of a different level of quality entirely; crafted items have the chance to be of "similar fashion, but of greater lineage." Critical success is something special; something that only happens for truly dedicated crafters, something worth writing home about. Optional ingredients, special additions to a recipe that are not necessarily always physical materials (research into Second Age forging techniques, for example) are a player's way to alter the odds of a critical success in their favor.

Ok, so there's the concept. Concepts are easy. I can come up with three concepts before breakfast, and one of them, on average, might actually be passable. Concepts are cheap.[3] Doing stuff is not, so let's get to that. Here's how we made it happen:

We started with a pretty simple prototype; harvesting a resource, detecting a forge, executing a recipe, and producing a sword. With all the basic components working, we then went back to the drawing board to lay out plans for what breakdowns of content we wanted within the system. This led to a list of crafting Professions, and the outputs we wanted to see from each. The Professions, in turn, were grouped into Vocations. The Professions were broken down into Gathering and Production professions, and the Vocations created intuitive bundles of Professions that held some amount of conceptual water.

The final twist in the system was balancing the Vocations so that each one was partially self-sufficient, and partially dependent on other players. Let me give you an example: It makes perfect sense for an armor-crafting specialist to work with both light armor (Tailoring) and metal armor (Metalsmithing). The third profession in the trio is Prospecting, which gathers metal to work with. Metalsmithing and Prospecting form a primary pairing, Tailoring is thematically linked to Metalsmithing, but will require raw materials from elsewhere - say, another player - to produce.

Whew. Almost there. At this stage, we needed to start populating the world with raw materials, crafting-specific vendors, and trainers. Quests were made to intertwine with crafting. By the time we were done with the initial implementation, every design team, every art team, every engineering team, and every content team had contributed in some way to a system that, in the grand scheme of things, is actually rather self-contained.

So there you have it: A look behind the curtain into the birth and early life of the crafting system. I'm sure there are plenty of questions about details regarding the system, which will be answered in due time, such as the exact mechanisms for advancement, the specifics of which types of items players can craft, and how deep (measured in meters) or greedy (measured in kilocovets[4]) is considered too deep, or too greedy, when digging.

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[1] I can hear the vehement disagreements already, probably calling out GTA and Morrowind by name. If properly motivated I might start rambling about how designing a "sandbox" style game like GTA or Morrowind inherently places a large number of interesting and useful restrictions on design, even as they appear to remove them from the player. But I digress from my digression, which is a very special kind of tangent indeed.

[2] The Fellowship did not proceed to grumble amongst themselves about how they couldn't take the dwarf anywhere without him stopping to mine, nor did Boromir comment that then really, Legolas was no better, stopping to gather fallen branches all the time. Legolas did not then protest that to do any less would be wasteful of nature's bounty, which did not get the hobbits thinking about food again, starting a campfire, and cooking up some fried mushrooms and sausages.

[3] A good carpenter doesn't just come up with cool ideas for cool looking chairs. It's much more important to know how to use a hammer, and not give up when you whack the living hell out of your thumb for the third time that day.

[4] A covet is a unit of greed, equal to amount that the average dwarf wants a single silver coin. An average Hobbit, forced to delay his breakfast until 10am has about 20 kilocovets worth of desire for sausages and onions. Boromir wanting the ring could be expressed in teracovets.

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