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There was a thread a few days back involving the player economy and making it possible for players to be able to make a profit from running a vendor. As someone pointed out at the moment the only skills that are able to turn much in the way of a profit are inscription (scrolls), lumberjacking (blank scrolls) and to a lesser degree alchemy (potions and mana stones).

For the most part mining can be done at 60 well enough to get the required ingots for repairs, blacksmithing and tailoring may make the odd sale for a benson potion. Woodworking is pretty much out in the cold aside from the odd person looking for something specific to decorate a home. I am uncertain as to wether or not there is much of a market for tinkered bottles.

For tailoring there is no joy in this post.

We have this nifty new ammunition available for missile weapons, and possibly this can lead to even more cool thinks, such as:

Silvering: right now, the silver property of archery items is attached to the bow and not to the ammunition, which really doesn't make a lot of sense, it would be better to have silver ammunition I would think. So ...

First some joy for miners, at a high skill check, something similar to that which you need for ruby/bluesteel you can dig up silver ore and smelt to ingots. If it were me, I would make available in limited locations only, Famine(1) or Fire(2) would work well and encourage but not make mandatory that miners band togeather for mutual defence, but just anyplace mining can be done is workable as well. I suspect said silver ingots will have a fair resale value on the player market because ...

Enter the tinker (or blacksmith, tinkering is fairly powerful now given that it can repair anything). Who can at a 90 skill check (50% chance) make a silver ingot into 100 (or some other suitable number) of arrowheads (any suitable graphic for these if not maybe an arrowhead kit), which would probably have a fair resale value or ...

Enter the woodworker. It takes a good eye and a deft hand to balance and hone silver arrowheads at a 90 skill check (50% chance) a woodworker can properly fit the arrowheads to shafts.

Enter the blacksmith (y'all thought I'd forgotten about them hadn't you). At a 90 skill check (50% chance) can make a silver laminating kit, which anyone can use to apply a coating of silver oil along the business end of a melee weapon. This coating gives 100 charges of extra damage to undead the same way silver works now. Wether a charges are burnt on every hit (logical consequence) or only on a hit to an undead type (better play balance) is debatable.

Silver as a permanent property of weapons would have to go away for all this to have the desired effect.

(1) The vampires moved in as an effort to prevent people from getting at the silver.

(2) The dragons moved in because they like to be close to valuable mineral deposits.

you forgot cooking in that post, cooking does pretty well for me, between cooking and scrolls, just gate scrolls, i made an even 90K in just a few short weeks

I like it. It sounds like it could potentially be a fair amount of work to script in all the details and check for loopholes and bugs... but nothing too technically difficult as far as I can see at the moment.

I wonder if you couldn't do something similar with gems too? Make the more valuable gems only available via mining (or only very rarely as loot from mobs such as Elementals and Wisps). That way tinkers and other crafters (and druids?) would need to buy supplies from skilled miners.

I also remember a time when treasure maps were found more often while mining. These days it is far easier to get them from Fishing (don't know if they were always frequent fishing loot). What if that loot group was shifted back more to the miner? Fishermen already get mibs and tons of loot besides the Tmaps, and I think Miners could benefit from another potential income source and/or something else to sell.

Those two options (gems and Tmaps) might not involve quite as much scripting work. Not that I want to detract from your ideas Eldric. I like them. They just stimulated a couple other ideas.

No more carrying two bows plus another reason to use your tradeskill? I'm go!

I don't much like doing away with silver weapons for something you have to reaply every 100 hits. If I want to do that, I'll play the assassin. I really wouldn't see much, if any market for the laminating of weapons in silver. One because the material is very hard to come by for a miner if going by your locations, and would thus be insanely priced. Secondly, the amount of silver kits floating around on the shard would just be insane when people have to stock up in large amounts to keep their weapon coated.

I do however like the silver arrow head idea, but I think the bows/xbows should remain silver and have a small bonus when using silver arrows with them. In general you're giving extra but not robbing anything at the same time.

Silver plating melee weapons might be a little over the top (though silver is a must for fighting the really bad undead), but I'm behind it if we're voting. Now that freeze and frost arrows are in place, silver would be a nice addition since they fit into the shard fiction.

The bit about being able to mine silver ingots only in certain dungeons is a great idea. Maybe the ingots can't be used for laminating armor or anything, but it's a great idea to use them for making consumable or temporary silver weapons. On the other hand, I'd say the silver ore would have to be pretty darn rare and/or really hard to smelt.

I was thinking about this a while ago. What about a change to the smelting code so that when you're smelting rubysteel or bluesteel, there's a tiny chance that the forge slag turns out to be sometehing useful. What I mean is this: say you've dug up 50 bluesteel ores. You smelt them into ingots at the forge and by some stroke of luck you end up with 50 bluesteel ingots and one silver ingot (or gold bar or something else special). Actually, I was thinking all ores could be eliminated replaced with plain iron ore, and the only way to get special ingots would be through these happy accidents in the forge.

Mining silver (or gold, I'm begging here) gives mining a pretty hefty boost, and it's already a pretty popular thing to do. Still, there's danger to mining already (cf Bayn's fantastic miner tales), and a small tweak to the mining script could increase the danger a lot. Maybe every time you pull up a rubysteel or bluesteel ore, you'd have a chance of waking up a granite elemental or causing a landslde which damages you (and anyone else within 3 tiles) for say 10-100 HP. A healthy dose of danger could balance these wealth-producing mining changes.

I asked for gold plating a while back (actually it was a LONG time ago). For some reason, the idea wasn't very popular.

The main reason that players can't make silver weapons is that not everyone and his brother is supposed to be running around with silver weapons. Of course, everyone and his brother is already running around with silver weapons, so I guess that doesn't mean much....

Actually, I suppose it might not be bad if players could only make normal (well, exceptional) silver weapon, not just put a coating of silver on existing weapons. That would make silver weapons of power and destruction far too common, instead of the extremely rare and expensive items that they currently are.

Silver arrows defintely make sense, but I'm not sure where that would leave silver bows. They'd be kind of useless...

Once man's useless is another man's collector's item.

Instead of making craftable items, why not do something more along the lines of poison ?

Basically, "silver oxide" potions of a sort. They would cost more to craft than deadly poison because no skill check would be required to coat the weapon, but the solution would only last a specific number of hits and then need to be reapplied. This would give people the option to silver coat their weapons but it would be extremely costly to always have your weapon coated in this solution, so for those people who don't have 6 Silver weapons of destruction it would give them something they could carry around, and convert their weapon to silver for a short time before confronting the undead hoards?

Accomplishes the same thing, still keeps the number of true silver weapons down and allows players a little extra umph against undead when they need it?

Additionally, it's yet another gold sink, and another item for PC Alchemists to sell helping to make pc vendors more useful?

And if you really want to be mean, you could make it so weapons while coated in the silver take slightly more damage than they normally would ? (Might not be a bad idea for poison either) Continuously coating a weapon with any form of liquid should overtime weaken the weapon.

Roderick, Master Doodad

Roderick wrote:And if you really want to be mean, you could make it so weapons while coated in the silver take slightly more damage than they normally would ? (Might not be a bad idea for poison either) Continuously coating a weapon with any form of liquid should overtime weaken the weapon.

Roderick, Master Doodad

I like most of your ideas but I don't think poisoning is so bad that it needs to be nerfed. You have to spec a slot for it that could otherwise be used for better tank skills.

i like the idea of a temporary fix for silver weapons. if the potion was limited to player made wpns. then you could leave the permanent magic ones in the game though reducing their frequency somewhat would be a reasonable enough idea. the tougher undead are something of a handful to deal with if you don't have silver weapons.

Roderick wrote:Additionally, it's yet another gold sink, and another item for PC Alchemists to sell helping to make pc vendors more useful?

This is a decent implementation as well though I think it would be better to skew new consumables toward those crafting skills that don't already have them, hence my silver laminating kits that provide X charges of silver damage and then wearing off.

Alchemists already have a fair number of consumables that sell fairly well (I think, I admit I havn't really been watching the market all that much), blacksmiths and miners could use something of a boost in this regard and woodworkers even more so.

Drocket wrote:The main reason that players can't make silver weapons is that not everyone and his brother is supposed to be running around with silver weapons. Of course, everyone and his brother is already running around with silver weapons, so I guess that doesn't mean much....

Actually, I suppose it might not be bad if players could only make normal (well, exceptional) silver weapon, not just put a coating of silver on existing weapons. That would make silver weapons of power and destruction far too common, instead of the extremely rare and expensive items that they currently are.

Silver arrows defintely make sense, but I'm not sure where that would leave silver bows. They'd be kind of useless...

Well, fire bows are useless now, Drocket. I don't think anyone lost too much sleep or shed many tears over that wonderful change.

Maybe it could be an option? If you use a silver bow with silver tipped arrows, you do a little more damage vs. undead than if you use your normal bow with silver tipped arrows? Not a BIG difference, something along the line of 5-10%? That would be enough of an incentive for some to keep their silver bows of power, and give those of us with silver bows of quality the ability to use silver-tipped arrows with our good bows.

I don't like the idea of "silver coating" on weapons because I see a balance issue. Instead of finding the occasional, rare silver desty weapon, EVERYONE would have silver desty weapons.

And I agree with Roderick that if you continue pouring a liquid (like poison) on a weapon, that weapon should wear faster. Iron rusts when wet, right?

Atei wrote:And I agree with Roderick that if you continue pouring a liquid (like poison) on a weapon, that weapon should wear faster. Iron rusts when wet, right?

Our weapons get coated with blood pretty regular like, this could be bad ...