Herbalism, Alchemy and serviceable earth golems

I feel like a kid again. Having idea suggested by the games I play, with the desire to elaborate them, making them more involving, deep, significant and even more absorbing than how they are already.

This is what I define "realism" and "immersion". This is what the current mmorpgs have lost and how I plan to renew those qualities.

HERBALISM

The first idea about herbalism and alchemy comes straight from Morrowind and one of the custom plugins. So interesting that it makes you wish more. The game does already a wonderful game making you hunting ingredients. I simply LOVE the exploration and the fact that you know already where to go search the ingredients you need. They usually grow near the big trees and I'd love to see a game where all these ingredients grow in places that make sense, coordinated with the weather and climate. This is already a step forward.

- Planning ahead a more complex and deep system that regulates the respawn and growth of the plants. It should factor the location (on trees, near the water, on the mud and so on, with the spawn points placed by hand), zone of the world, weather, moon cycles and season. The plants won't just respawn, but they will start to grow slowly and pass between various stages. Each plant will have its own specific growth cycle. Some could grow faster than others (also depending on the variables listed) or have less "stages" to pass. Each stage would affect both the type and quantity of the ingredients (like sub-types of plants with their own specific stats and values).

This is the first step, creating a small, consistent ecosystem around these plants that can be picked up (as opposed to static object in the world that cannot be used by the players). I simply love how this works in MW, so we are far, far away from the "radar" of WoW, where the "professions" become just another level-up mechanic without any depth. Fuck those radars, fuck traveling at random around the map while you stare the minimap. Here you go exploring. The true exploration and research that doesn't depend on artificial rules, but YOUR KNOWLEDGE. You'll learn yourself where particular plants grow, you'll learn where to search them, you'll learn how to identify them. The gameplay is VISUAL. You search for the plants with your eyes, exploring the world. Not with a fucking radar.

- The plants will have to be identified with the eye. No artificial mechanics will be used, like radars. There will be books and trainers in the world. But these books and trainers will only teach you in the exact same way they would teach you in the real world. Just explaining where you may find some herbs, explaining their properties, explaining where they grow and how, the different growing stages, rarity and so on. With a low "alchemy" skill the player won't be able to know the properties of an herb (appearing as a "?") and in a few cases (explained below) not even the name of the herb.

In MW you can raise your Alchemy skill by eating the ingredients. The system is rather unrealistic because the plants have an effect on you only if you have an high skill, while the effects just won't work if you have a low skill. What I would do is again to delve in this mechanic, adjust its realism and make it more complex.

- A player with a low "herbalism" skill won't know the name of the herb, nor its properties. Most of the herbs will have to be treated in alchemic processes to have an effect, so they would become fully active only with an high "Alchemy" skill and after the proper treatment. Still, the player can eat the plants he takes right away. In this case, if the player has a low "herbalism" skill, there's an high risk that the plant will poison him or have different kinds of negative effects (vision blur, slow down, penalty to stats, disease and so on). Most of the plants that have "positive" effects will have them active only after a treatment. Without this treatment they'll have an high percent possibility of just triggering the side effects if eaten. So there will be a mechanic with an input of the natural properties of the plant, mixed with various possible side effects that would trigger in this case. Some healing plants will maintain their basic positive effect. So the system is regulated by the type of plant more than general rules. Accordingly to the realism.

Finally the mechanics about the gathering process. How the "herbalism" skill actually works and other possible solutions to make the gameplay more interesting. Even here I tried to delve some more in what is already there.

- When you find a plant, you can try to gather ingredients from it. The herbalism skill will affect the time you need to gather all the ingredients in the plant, the success rate, the amount of ingredients you receive from this process, and the quality of the ingredients. With a low skill you will probably just damage the plant and get no ingredients. Every plant has its own difficulty and, depending on your skill, the ingredients will also have different quality (from 1 to 5, nothing too complex). Aften being harvested, the plant will disappear and will regrow following the rules above.

- The "herbalism" skill will raise with the use. Each plant will have a "target share" on the herbalism skill. For example the basic mushroom could have a "target share" of 1-5. This means that the herbalism skill will potentially only raise if it is between 1-5%. If the player has already an higher skill, gathering that plant won't make the herbalism skill raise. Each plant will also define precisely how much the "herbalism" skill can raise. The more the plant is hard to gather, the less it will make the herbalism skill raise. This means that the skill will progressively become harder to raise as you reach higher %. The "skill up" will happen both if the gathering process was successful and if it failed, with a tinier growth in the latter case.

More in detail, I created a system to define better the successful rate of the gathering. This leaves out the calculations about the quality (for the ingredients) and the time the gathering requires to complete (depending on the plant and skill). It's strictly about the success:

The success of the gathering process depends on two variables: herbalism skill (percent based) and difficulty of the plant. In order for the player to have the possibility to gather something without just destroying the plant, the difficulty value of the plant must be within 10 units from the value of the herbalism skill. So, for example, having a 85% in herbalism would allow you to gather from plants with a difficulty of 95 or below. The raw formula is:

[10 - (difficulty of the plant - herbalism skill)] * 10

The resulting value will be the percent of sucess on a 100 dice roll. On top of this there's another check that simulates if the players is able to preserve the ingredients in his inventory after he collected them. From 1 to 10 in herbalism skill, the player has a 50% rate of destroying the ingredients even after a successful gathering. Then this penalty goes down by 1 for every new unit point in the herbalism skill, till the penalty will decrease to zero when the players reaches 60% in herbalism.

Practical example:
The player has 3.50% in herbalism (yes, low) and is trying to gather from a plant with a difficulty of 10. Now we take the difficulty (10) subtract the skill (3.50) and we get 6.50. Now we take the fixed offset value (10) and subtract 6.50. The result is 3.50. We multiply this for 10 and we get 35.0 which is the rate of success (35%). The game rolls a 100 dice and if the result is below 35 the gathering is successful. Finally, we apply a last check to see if the player can successfully store the ingredients in the inventory that in this case is 50% (skill below 10%). If this check is also passed, the player will see the ingredients in his inventory or some messages detailing what happened.

- The "inventory check" I just explained will have to be repeated if the player trades the ingredients with another player. In this case the check will be done by the player that is receiving the ingredient and will be independent from the player who is giving them. This means that you can safely trade herbs to a player with an high skill, while it's risky for a player with an high skill to trade herbs to a player with a low skill. There will be craftable special herablism "bags" that override this check, making the trade secure.

These mechanics appear as too complicated because I explained in detail the calculations, but in the practical day-to-day use it becomes rather simple. You just compare the difficulty value of the plant (visible only if you learn it from reading books or receiving training from NPCs) to your herbalism skill and, if they are within 10 units one from the other, you can try to gather the plant. If the difficulty of the plant is "9" points above your skill, it basically means you have only a 10% of possibility to successfully get ingredients from it. In the case you gather from a plant much higher than your skill, the plant is destroyed and you get nothing. The number of ingredients you gather from a single plant depends on the type of the plant, with the possibility to multiply the result by two or three if your herbalism skill is much higher than the difficulty of the plant (I won't detail these mechanics here, but they are sraightforward). The rate increase of the herbalism skill (both on success and, much less, on failure, but in this latter case only if the skill is already within 10 units from the plant's difficulty) depends on the type of the plant, but it's an independent value from its difficulty. And finally there will be diminished returns on the growth, so that obtaining higher values near 100% will become progressively harder (and slower). Accordingly one basic principle of the ruleset:

- Suceeding at a poorly-known skill is hard, but you learn a lot when you succeed. An expert in a skill usually suceeds at it. Since he or she already knows most of what there is to know about it, the expert improves at a slower rate than a novice.

Since the whole system is percent based there won't be an exponential, mandatory power growth as in other games. The game is supposed to work as a "system" where each part has a specific, irreplaceable function. No mudflation and no exponential power increases. No big power differential between a player with an high skill and one with medium values.

- About the informations on the UI. Only a timer showing how much time passed from when the ingredient was harvested will be displayed right away and without conditions. The name and difficulty of a plant will be shown only if the character knows the plant. This is possible only reading books or receiving training from NPCs about the specific plant. Other informations like the quality of the ingredients, their basic effects, expiry date (explained below) and detailed informations about the plant (how it grows, where it grows and so on) will only be displayed if the player has an high enough herbalism skill. In the case the skill is too low the unknown fields will be shown as "?".

- Some ingredients, guess what?, will grow on trees. So the plant you gather is like just a part of a bigger plant. In this case all the rules above still apply, but, obviously, only the fruit or flower will disappear, instead of the whole plant/tree. The trees will usually have seasonal cycles, so the fruits will grow only in a precise moment during the year. Not always.

- The game also uses a realistic inventory system that I'll explain elsewhere (factoring weight, types of bags, locations and so on). Specifically for the herbalism purposes, the ingredients gathered will have "expiry dates". So an ingredient gathered will remain in the inventory of the player for a set amount of time before losing its effects (with the possibility to gain negative effects over time due to decay). The duration of the conservation depends on three elements: type of the plant, quality of the ingredient (as explained above, going from 1 to a maximum of 5) and type of inventory. In this last case there will be specific craftable containers that are built with the purpose of storing ingredients, so prolonging their conservation over time.

- Finally, the herbalists will be able to plant seeds in pots so that they can grow and even create and mix new types of plants and practice herbalism and alchemy in their own houses. The seeds can be used in specific, craftable pots, or specialized "gardens". This is a whole new system stacking up that I won't detail here but that adds a whole new layer of complexity and depth (and FUN) to this system to make it even more satisfactory and involving.

- All the possible applications of herbalism and alchemy are designed as consumables.

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That was rather long, phew. I didn't expect to write so much and I even left out some aspects of the idea. The other one is about "searviceable, walking earth golems" that I was planning to describe just from the player perspective. While the herbalism was designed from the developers perspective. Even here I believe that there are so many "fun" points. Even if the idea sounds so silly.

SERVICEABLE WALKING EARTH GOLEMS (mounts)

The character is wearking a dark cloak, standing in a open area without anything special, some trees, some grass. He drops his staff on the ground and stands up again, he extends his arm forward, parallel to the ground, the palms turned toward the ground. He stays in that position for a few seconds, then he starts to quiver. He bends the head down, the body starts to radiate a brownish aura that grows in intensity. From the eyes and mouth of the character some dense vapor starts to flow, evaporating upwards. Then, quickly, two sharp rays of light burst out of the ground, piercing through the character hands. He closes the hands in fists and begins to struggle with the rays, resembling to laces, as trying to eradicate them from the ground, out of sheer strength. This process make the ground slit open, one big hand made of stone coming out of it, with the palm open. The hand 'grabs' the terrain, another hand comes out. The ground starts to vibrate and finally the head and body of the creature come out, then one foot, till the creature can stand up, in a cloud of dust, in front of the player, at least two times bigger than him.

After this summoning process is complete the laces of light between the hands of the player and the earth golem will vanish and the golem remains under the control of its evocator. The earth golem, as instructed, will pick up the character and put him on his shoulder, sitting. At this point the player starts to control directly the golem while his character is "comfily" sitting on that shoulder.

This is how the evocators will use earth golems to travel at a faster speed around the world :)