Hey everyone. I’m looking to create a super simple progression system (between adventures advancement) inspired by games like Monster Hunter and Dauntless - where progression is based on crafting stuff from the monsters you hunt. However, I want this to be a system that is easy for even 10 year olds to run and interact with. Does anyone have suggestions for similar systems in other games that got the essence of this feeling without getting into the nitty-gritty crunch of a lot of crafting systems?
Looking for rules for a super simple, accessible crafting/progression system
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I’m going to be honest, I don’t think there is such a thing. Crafting systems are hard, and all of them basically rest on a scale between:
“Keep track of every Xorn foot you manage to loot, and have a huge list of components where you need exact, specific objects to craft with.” – This option has the advantage of feeling a lot like crafting. If you want to make a Dragon Skull Helm, you NEED a Dragon Skull, and iron devil wire, and supernal copper or whatever.
and
“Everything you loot fits into a couple of categories, so when you skin a dragon, you get X units of Hide or Skin.” – This option has the advantage of being sane from a “keeping track of what you have and what you need” perspective. (You see the Final Form of this approach in D&D4, where basically everything can be ‘melted down’ into Resdiuum, which is used to create Magic Items.) You can make whatever you want as long as you have the appropriate amounts of the appropriate types of Magic Stuff.
The problem is that the closer you go to option 1, the bigger of a pain it is to implement the system, because not only do you need to keep track everything you’ve got, but the system needs to furnish you with recipes (or a recipe making system) for everything you might want to make. And the closer you go to option 2, the less it feels like a “crafting” system and the more it feels like “buying stuff with alternate currency.”
You might be able to split the difference here, where everything you create needs one “named item” and a certain amount of “magic sauce” or whatever to create, so if you wanted to make that Dragonskull Helm, you’d need a Dragon Skull, but you’d also need 100 units of Magictanium, which could’ve been gotten from umber hulk blood, or ice giant toenails, or magma from the caldera of Mount Scaldington. I am not, however, sure that this actually avoids giving you BOTH the problems from extreme 1 and extreme 2, however. =/
Crafting systems are hard.
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Check out D20 Apocalypse. It has a robust but easy to use crafting system for modelling salvaging, but could be very easily modified for other uses.
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Do you think the Savvyhead’s workshop approach is simple enough?
I mean, obviously you’d change the language and the specific requirements. But it’s always struck me as an incredibly robust way to deal with crafting.
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I don’t know how simple it is, but I know that Kingdom of Death Monster has something like that, a crafting system based on the resources recovered from each enemy you battle - pulled from a deck of cards I think.
Now I have no idea if it’s adaptable, available outside of a $500 miniatures game and I’ve not played, but heard that it’s fun from some rather trustworthy folks. If you can snag a pdf of the rules it might be an interesting read?
Great summary. Both these systems presuppose though that there is a set list of items to craft, and only seek to address the ingredient side of things. The experience for players here is going to be kind of the opposite. Players are going to hunt a monster, harvest some monster parts, then see what they can craft with it. They get a stinger from the scorpion, or a dragonskull… What cool gear can they make out of that item specifically?
So they will not, at any point, try to use items from multiple monsters to make something? Because that seems like a natural idea given your setup.
I could easily see them wanting to use items from multiple monsters too. The basic structure though is “hunt monster, we don’t know what we’re hunting yet, find out exactly what it is only once we’re fighting it, kill it, harvest the parts, use the parts to make better gear or upgrade existing gear”. This could work in a lot of ways, from getting loot boxes of generic crafting materials to getting one or two special crafting materials and trying to make specific things based on that. That seems more thematic to me. I’d like the heroes to be a record of their previous hunts with more specific items.
The hunt itself is more like a mystery. The players discover as they’re hunting the monster what it is, and there are mechanics based around that discovery process. They gain benefits for figuring out what it is based on what they find while hunting it (charred corpses hints at firebreath, etc). So they can’t pick a specific monster to hunt to gather specific ingredients.
That’s interesting! It’s definitely a case I hadn’t considered. It might be possible to work something up under those constraints without it falling too messily into either category, I’m not sure.
Now is the time when I confess I don’t know any games with good type 1 crafting systems, however.
A point to consider is: how much of a focus would the game put on crafting per se? It could require in-game rolls, or it could be more of a pre- or post-game thing, not unlike character creation or downtime XP-spending, and the game experience would probably change depending on which you decide to favor. In any case, by “how focsed on crafting you intend your game to be?” I guess I mean something like “roughly speaking, how much time would players be expected to dedicate to crafting procedures?”
My approach here would be to basically go with some random tables, possibly modified by the power level of the monster. The table entries could have mad libs style blanks that get filled in by monster attributes/names/etc. If you combine multiple table rolls (e.g. d20 x 2 or d100 x 2), it’s unlikely that two kids will ever get precisely the same result.
The next step here is that if someone ends up with two helmets (or whatever) you can have rules for combining them into some more powerful hybrid of both. That will make repeat results more interesting, instead of “oh another dagger” the player might say “oh, now my dragonstooth dagger provides electricity protection”.
There are a few games I’ve read (For example Totem, an Ice Age RPG) where completing tasks/quests rewards you with downtime instead of experience. You can use this time to practice skills, craft objects, heal, etc. You could probably leverage something like this as a scaling factor for crafting items. So for example if you want to make a big warpick, it takes X hours, but since you just slayed (slew?) a dragon with foot-long teeth, you can bargain with the GM that that gives you a Y-hour discount as you use the tooth instead of forging a spike. Ditto for stuff like using venom sacs to make poison weapons, elemental infusions, etc. Basically, budgeting out the recipes, but then providing a lot of narrative control on how those recipes are satisfied, with modular rules that allow for player input.
Personally I’ve never really been a fan of highly codified crafting systems. IMO it feels like the kind of busywork that videogames do well but inappropriate for games played in 2-6 hour sessions where a bunch of your friends get to watch you do your taxes. For me it also feels really weird because the resources available to the players are arbitrarily provided by the GM. you want 10x mushroom caps? Unless we’re playing the O-est of SR, you’re only seeing 10 mushroom caps because the GM put them there.
Thanks for all the ideas. I believe I found a solution.
The basic idea is that each hunter can harvest one high quality monster part after slaying a monster (like a dragon’s horn or a werewolf’s fang). This monster part has a quality tier that match’s the monster’s difficulty tier. A tier 2 monster drops tier 2 parts.
Back in town players can then do one of four things with a monster part:
- Make it into a weapon
- Make it into an armor piece
- Make it into a tool
- Sell it
Naturally weapons are used to attack, armor is used to stay alive, tools are used to provide benefits on non-combat tasks. I’ll have a simple table of the stats for weapons, armor pieces, and tools of each quality tier (as well as the gold you get for selling the monster part instead). For example, tier 1 weapons provide a +1 bonus on your damage roll.
If they’re making an item out of the part, the player will tell the GM what the new weapon, armor piece, or tool looks like. If it’s a weapon, the player will also suggest a tag that makes sense with it (like the PbtA weapon tags). If it’s a tool, the player will need to describe what it’s designed to be used for (so the GM knows what types of tests it should provide a benefit to). Armor is pretty straightforward. it’s armor.
Items made this way have no additional special properties (unless the GM is feeling generous). If you crafted a +3 sword from the everflaming horn of a fire giant, the magical flames are WHY it’s a +3 sword. It’s baked into the boost to begin with. It’s not an extra property. You can still give it a Flaming tag though, and point out it should probably do extra damage to creatures vulnerable to fire or use it to burn away a spider web.
Example: A hunter harvests a dragon’s skull (a tier 4 monster part). They might snap off the teeth for a blade (craft a weapon), or use the skullbone as the basis for a helm (armor piece), or create a truly excellent grappling hook from the strong bone (crafting a tool). They decide on a blade. Because it’s a tier 4 part, they get a +4 weapon out of it. They choose the piercing tag for it, because they feel like it makes sense for a tooth to be better at piercing than slashing. Later when the hunter comes up against another dragon, the player suggests that a dragontooth weapon would probably be very good against other dragons. The GM agrees and gives the player an added damage bonus in that fight.
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Is there a disconnect or am I just missing some information? It feels really, really lame that I take the time to harvest a fancy monster part and when I process it all I get is a “vanilla” weapon with a bonus modifier and a quality thrown in. Based on the last part though, it seems like the dragonbone part of the blade is the real quality? Do I remember that it’s made of dragonbone because I name it “dragonbone blade” or is the monster ingredient listed as a mechanical aspect of the weapon? Maybe this was implied, but the impression I got from what you wrote was that the process of forging a weapon kind of drains some of the character out of it’s origins.
I might recommend checking out Trophy Gold in the current issue of Codex. How it handles monster hunting and selling the parts is really smart in my opinion.
Thanks. To clear things up, the key idea is that the +4 provides the baseline progression for the game (there aren’t levels, so this is how you get higher combat/health/utility bonuses) but the item’s special properties should be based on its nature. It is a Dragonbone Blade specifically, and the idea is that anything special about it being made of Dragonbone should apply when you use it (but only when it matters).
One approach to that is to create a huge list of possible material categories and specific properties, but due to the diversity of the potential monsters (any weird thing the GM can imagine) and the desired simplicity of the system that definitely isn’t feasible. So my approach here is to provide baseline stats based on monster part tier and then use a PbtA style system to create per-weapon-differentiation based on what the weapon is made of and what it looks like.
However, if this narrative aspect doesn’t feel like “enough” to sell that this weapon is really made of dragonbone, or a fire giant’s horn, then the system won’t have met my design goals.
Blades in the Dark also has an in-depth crafting system although I’d hesitate to call it “super simple”. This particular system just popped up on my radar last night when our Leech decided to start working on a related project; working through it on the fly was a little complex but I think we’ll have it straight by next week’s session.
Yeah I was not impressed with BitD crafting when I played an alchemist character, although that may just have been with how it interacted with the downtime system and how our group ran missions.
I’m really curious how it didn’t work for you, as I’m still trying to figure it out (especially for a character that has some of this but not all).