Artisan Archive
Thread: A Crafters Dungeon?
What if the high-end dungeons were aimed at crafters as well as combatants? Either by having different dungeons for combatants and non-combatants, or by making new dungeons possible to complete with 'only combat', 'minimal combat' or a mixture of the two. How would this work? Lets take the Corellian Corvette dungeon as an example (I haven't seen it, this is just an example of what it COULD be like).
Your group of crafters and combatants enter the Corvette. At some point you meet a group of battered looking defenders (NPC's). A couple of corridors away you can see a large group of aggressive MOBs. You could try and fight your way through them, but you're not convinced you'd make it, so you decide to talk to the NPC defenders. You find out that their weapons are drained and their armour has been shot to pieces, but hey - that's OK. You have a weaponsmith and an armoursmith with you. They quickly craft the required types of armour and weapons (which should be different each time so that people can't just take supplies of armour and weapons with them - perhaps a new temporary schematic you get given?) and give them to the NPC defenders. The defenders then run down the corridor and dispatch the aggressive MOBs for you.
Later on you find a worried group of technicians standing around a piece of equipment. There's been a toxic gas leak in the next compartment. It's locked down, but you can't go through that way and the only other way round would require you to fight through another group of MOBs. The technicians have an atmospheric cleanser with them, put the power core has blown. If only you could replace the power core then they could use the atmospheric cleanser to clear the toxic gas from the next room, and you could get through without fighting. Up steps your architect.
There are many more ways that the crafters could get involved, and I don't think every situation should be a craft-or-fight situation. Some should be a craft-or-fail situation (for a small sub-mission, not the overall mission). Some should be fight-or-craft-and-fight-fewer enemies situations.
One major requirement for this scheme to work would be that the required items should not be pre-craftable. You'd need to stock up on resources before travelling to the Corvette so you were ready to craft just about anything that might be needed. Some items might be found on the Corvette (you might be able to salvage some metal from a piece of broken equipment - easily handled by the loot system).
What do people think? Feasible? Desirable? Room for improvement?
EnigmaBSc
I think this is a really good idea, it would also help that the crafting class can go on these missions, but I'm not sure how you would specify what was needed in the crafting class, so not everyone would pickup novice artisan,etc.
This would make this missions much better and not just go in there and shoot everything.
Even the most basic crafting terminal missions are pointless because your contact gives you everything you need to assemble the item.
If crafting missions required just a little bit of raw resources or low-level parts made by a PC, then there would be a basis for including this type of operation in a dungeon.
Maybe in the situation described above, fixing the atmospheric cleanser requires combining the parts they give you, with one stolen by a MOB (thus some fighting is required) and some raw resources. Click on the cleanser and it pops up a crafting station just as if you'd clicked on your crafting tool.
Very goodsuggestion here, Enigma!
Maybe they could make it so someone who has a moderately high crafting level (like perhaps some Artisan thing lvl4, to prevent an influx of fighter novice artisans) could have to craft a key or somesuch, and only that would work to open the dungeon, which would have lower-level combat creatures that dedicated crafters could kill, not necessarily very easily, but not very difficult either (ie not droidekas or rancors or whatever :/). Then at the end, the crafter could get some sort of cool schematic.
It could serve a double purpose: The crafters would have a new fun thing to do, and also they could sell the keys so that the fighters could get in, but the artisan'd get some cash for their trouble (make it require a good amount of resources so we don't feel bad for charging lots to craft lol).
Nice idea indeed!