Secondary attributes for crafting materials

[Potjeh]

I just got The Witcher (yes, I in fact live in 2007) and it's an amazing game. The coolest thing in it is the alchemy system, more specifically secondary substances. If you haven't played the game, here's a brief explanation: recipes for potions need various substances which can be found in ingredients (herbs, monster parts, etc.), but most of these ingredients also have secondary substances in them. If all of your ingredients have the same secondary substance, you get a bonus to your potion (reduced toxicity, damage increase or health regeneration).

I think something similar would be neat in H&H. Not just for alchemy, but for all crafting. It would go well with Jackard's generic recipes suggestion, and would add another layer of strategy to my LP replacement suggestion (crafting stuff to raise skills). It would also be an easy way to make various trees different, or to add multiple types of clay and have differences beyond cosmetic (something Loftar mentioned wanting to do).

I've been thinking about using stuff like brittleness, tensile and compressive strength etc., but none of these descriptors work very well for all the materials in the game. So, a simple colours system would work the best, and would be easiest to integrate into the interface (add a colour dot on the item or change it's mouseover text colour or something). So, you take a red branch and a red stone and make a red stone axe, or you take a red branch and a blue stone and make a plain stone axe.

Now, on to the benefits of colours. The simplest option is to just give a boost to the craft's quality if all the colours are the same. A bit more complex is to make item subtypes if you match the colours (all green stone axe becomes woodsman's axe, all red becomes butcher's axe), and give these subtypes a quality bonus when they're being used for a specific purpose (woodsman's axe gets quality bonus when doing carpentry with it, butcher's axe when you butcher animals). The most complex option would be to do away with using one colour for everything and make hidden recipes for subtypes that call for specific colour combos (red branch and blue stone etc.), and have invalid combos produce the common variety (plain stone axe in our example).

I think this would promote trade, and would be a nice way to make that feeling of discovery last longer. Thoughts?

[Gauteamus]

If Murray Gell-Mann an Quantum Mechanics says our universe has an underlying RGB-structure, why shouldn't Haven and Hearth? I will have to draw some diagrams before commenting more on this.

[sabinati]

sound pretty cool

[Sever]

If Murray Gell-Mann an Quantum Mechanics says our universe has an underlying RGB-structure, why shouldn't Haven and Hearth? I will have to draw some diagrams before commenting more on this.

Just to clarify, the interactions involved in color charges are not classified as having or being any color, that's just what they call the three different charges involved in subatomic interactions, where three quarks are required to make a proton/neutron and the other particles.

[Gauteamus]

The idiot physicists, unable to come up with any wonderful Greek words anymore, call this type of polarization by the unfortunate name of 'color,' which has nothing to do with color in the normal sense

Hehe, I see the need for a clarification - what I meant was that even though the different quality colours in Potjeh's suggestion may seem arbitrarily decided, they must be looked upon as a means of categorization of something we either do not fully understand, or willingly choose to abstract.

Somewhat like the quark colour charges of QCD?

(and yes, I am on thin ice here

[Sever]

Up quarks are blue,
Down quarks are red,
They picked all these colors,
to mess with your head.

[Gauteamus]

I am sorry about my off topic posts earlier.
I think the idea sounds good, but maybe abit vague. I associated onwards and have tried to marry the idea with an idea I have wanted to incorporate in a game myself:
I once played a silly flash tower defence game where your keep was attacked by bugs of different colours, and you had to defend yourself by smashing them with bombs (also of a variety in colours and damage). If you smashed a green bug with a green bomb, the bug would have some resistance, but if you smashed it with a complimentary red bomb, it would soon be dead.
Of course the colours are just another way (but a rather handsome one) to destribe a vector angle.

Now you could have a system where every item and resource, instead of having a quality value, would have a quality value + hue (vector length + angle).
The crafting formulae could be cept pretty much as they are, but instead of them being weighted scalar averages, they would be vector sums.

The picture below shows a Branch of quality (100, hue yellow) and a Bone of quality (200, hue green), being crafted into a sort of Yellow-Green Bone saw of quality around 105. I believe the current formula for bone saw quality is (5 x Branch + 1 x Bone) / 6

400px-HSV_triangle_and_cone.png

EDIT: I should have removed the coordinate system - you'll just have to take my word that the vectors are of length 100 and 200 respectively

Different regions (large or small scale) could show different distributions in the Hues of raw materials, and hermit and village alike would have to face the desicion of specializing in a certain hue, or splitting their efforts and resources between different hues when crafting.

This is pretty neat so far, but the clog in the loom is of course the question: what on earth are colours supposed to represent, and what is ultimately the difference between a red q100 soldier sword and a green one?

I havent got a clue, but it could have something to do with resistances/vulnerabilities in combat, ancestors wanting sacrifices within a specific hue range, different special effects connected to the different hue realms (oh deer, this stinks of magic ), or just for collection value.

[Chakravanti]

that's not right. Bone more heavily influences the saw formula than the stick.

Also, I think this will add uneeded complexity to a future system that will not be simple anyway.

[Asmodeus]

An axe made with pine handle is going to suck anal grit compared to an axe with an oak handle. Now we just need Yew trees for the rangers bow.

[Jackard]

fun alchemy stuff

anything to make crafting more interesting and varied. its dull right now. this reminds me of the suffix/prefix part of the Generic Recipes proposal that made crafting super-customizable

sounds like the new system might just be more specific recipes that you have to discover before using, which (if true) isnt really as attractive