Craft randomness

[yarnevk]

Not a mini game fan outside of lock picking where is makes sense that you have to align the tumblers or something, because it is an occasional thing. But crafting is often a repetitive thing, being an apprentice is making a lot of useless wooden swords to practice, so mini-games get old really fast, since mini-games can never really mimic the art and science of actually crafting something it turns into stupid wack the mole sessions.


As long as you have skills and tools to improve your odds I am OK with realistic randomness, that masterwork gear is harder for a noob to make but he has an odd chance, same as a master has an odd chance of slipping and making crude gear. This is not the same thing as randomly rolling a die to see what you get with you having no control. Even D&D has bonuses and multiple die to tilt the odds, it is the character skill that decides things not the players skills throwing the die (despite their rituals in doing so). The player only decides strategy of attempting to roll the die or not, or doing something else their character is more suited for, but you should leave it to the character skills to decide the outcome of things, not the player skills. If player skills controlled things then there is no point in having a skilled character, because if the player sucks at mini-games as badly as they suck at dance party games, you have nerfed their skilled character.

To provide entertainment during crafting, do what Skyrim did and actually play an animation of you actually using the workbench rather than treating the workbench as a window. That makes crafting immerssive even though you are still just clicking on resources.