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→{{msg:BASEPAGENAME}} Mechanics
== {{msg:BASEPAGENAME}} Mechanics ==
''' Add mechanics specific to the skill in this question, like [[Unarmed]] and [[Lycanthropy]]'s Combos, Skill-specific activities (Altar of Norala for Lycanthropes), and Equipment that is specialized for the skill.'''
=== Mechanic 1information from Citan's blog post 20 april 2017===Doing laThe basic ideas of brewing are the same as I described last week, but the details have changed many times. In fact, I think this is the most times I've ever iterated on a craft skill before it went live! The first few versions were prototypes, trying to figure out what the system's goals were and how it would achieve them. I blogged about the system last week based on a fairly fun prototype version. But then I needed to future-proof the system, which turned out to require a full rewrite. I don't usually bother trying to future-proof crafting skills, because rewriting it later doesn't usually cause alpha-testers too much pain. When I rewrite a craft skill, you keep your old level and recipes, but the contents of those recipes change. No big deal. But brewing is different: brewing recipes have randomized results which will require a lot of player experimentation, so I want to protect that time investment. For instance, if I later decide that apples aren't a low-level fruit anymore, and replace them with, I dunno, kiwifruit, what happens to brewing recipes that can take apples? Obviously, kiwi should be a drop-in replacement in those brewing recipes, doing the same things as apples used to do, so that you don't have to re-try every brewing ingredient combination. But that's not an automatic feature -- it had to be coded that way. I brainstormed other ways that the skill might change in the future, and I tried to make sure those changes wouldn’t mess brewers up too badly. I can't guarantee that everything will work out right -- who knows, a bug might screw everything up. But I've given it my best shot. After that, I realized the skill was way TOO random: every time you learned a new recipe, you had to start your experimentation all over again. That's fine at low level when there's not too many ingredient combinations, but by level 50 there's over a hundred brewing outcomes! If levels 50, 60, 70, 80, etc. each had 100% different random outcomes, it wouldn't make economic sense to experiment at lower levels. Instead, players would just grind as fast as they could to the highest level and experiment with only the high-dilevel recipes. That's a boring design! I needed a system that lets you "carry over" some of your brewing-experiment knowledge from mid-levels to higher levels. I've got a system that does that now -dah allows - although it might carry over a bit too much info... I'm still fiddling with things here. And in between all these revisions, I've been trying out tons of different possible buffs that could come from drinking booze. I had to answer some tricky questions, like: how many drink-effects can you have at once? If you can "stack" too many booze buffs then each individual drink would have to be weak and uninteresting. But if they don't stack at all, there's no chance to mix-and-match drink effects. After some experiments, I've decided that you can have three beers (or glasses of wine) at once, plus one drink of hard liquor, for a total of four stacking alcohol buffs. That's a lot of buffs! I'm trying to make the drink effects somewhat useful by themselves, but also make them more impressive when stacked together. It's a delicate balance. However, the specific buff effects can be changed later as balance demands, so I'm not TOO worried about this part. I've also made sure there's room for various systemic interactions later on. For instance, I was thinking it might be fun if beer brewed during the full moon is more random, with a chance to have higher or lower stats than normal. But what would it mean for a beer to be "extra effective" or "less effective" than normal? I had to work all that out too. In other words, there's lots and lots of design questions! Nothing earth-shatteringly hard, but it's been keeping me busy. === information from Citan's blog post 9 april 2017=== BrewingLet's talk about brewing! It's probably the most complex crafting skill so far, because it builds on the tech from other skills. (For instance, Cheesemaking gave us cask "technology", which brewing needs; Augmentation gave us recipes thatcan infuse items with effects, etc.) Brewing is the first skill that uses random per-player seeding. Basically, you can add certain items to your brew recipe and you'll get a specific result that's random for that character. Other characters who try the same recipe may get different results. I think this adds some fun to the crafting process, as you get to experiment on your own -- and there's no temptation to wiki the "right" brew recipes, since the recipes are unique to you! But it's not quite as trivial as "put an ingredient in a box and get a random result". It needs to be a little more fair than that: it shouldn't be the case that some players can use dirt-cheap items to get amazing brew, where others have to use extremely expensive items for the same results. I've ended up using fairly constrained recipes to avoid those cases. Here's an example: a certain testing beer requires two special items (along with the usual beer ingredients like hops and barley). In the first box, players can drop "an apple, grapes, or an orange", and in the other box, they can drop "a guava, lemon, or banana". The results of that combination are random for each player; there are 9 possible results from just those ingredients. In that example, I broke the possibilities into "low-value fruit" and "high-value fruit" to avoid some of the extremes of randomness. Nobody will get the most-amazing brew with just a couple of dirt-cheap apples, because everybody has to use one low-value and one high-value fruit. Some people will still get better random luck than others -- the availability of individual fruit fluctuates, but generally apples are easier to find than oranges, for instance, and they're both in the "low-value fruit" category -- but there's enough different random recipe sets that it evens out pretty well in the end. (And of course, not all brewing recipes use fruit! Or have such a limited number of possible ingredients...) DrinkingBrewing covers all kinds of alcoholic beverages. They're broken up into beers, wines, and hard liquors. Different kinds of brew have different effects, and they're quite broad-ranging. So you might find yourself carrying a small keg of combat-boosting beer into battle, or you might set up a tap of dance-boosting beer at a party. There's down sides to drinking too much alcohol, such as hangovers, slurred speech, or just passing out drunk. A new skill, Alcohol Tolerance, helps offset some of that. If you plan to drink in combat, perhaps as a drunken kung-fu master or a beer-rowdy tank, you'll definitely need some alcohol tolerance. Of course, no amount of alcohol tolerance prevents you from becoming an alcoholic! It just lets you be a "functional alcoholic." Just like the real-life drunken masters of yore. I assume. There's more complexity to the systems than I'll bother trying to explain here -- it's a complicated skill with lots of nooks and crannies. But I think it's turning out really well, and I'm looking forward to getting it in front of players! I mentioned above that this skill is the first that uses player-specific randomness -- and it might be the only one. The tech is being written with the idea that it might be reused for a few other craft skills, either old ones or new ones. But first I'll see how you like the system! Then we'll play it by ear with regard to future skills.
===Equipment===