Custom Smithing / Tailoring

[Ralzar]

I am betting most of us have experienced this: You have an allmost complete set of armour, you are just missing one piece. You keep looking and looking and looking but they never drop or appear in any shops.
Can't you just put in a special order with the smith? If you work as a smith and a guy walks into your smithy with enough money to buy half of Daggerfall and all he wants is an ebony helmet and he is willing to pay whatever it takes... you are going to get him that ebony helmet.

It would be really nice to have some shops have a second NPC who had a "Custom Order" function. Where you could simply select item and material, pay an inflated price for the item and then come pick it up at a later date.

This could also work very naturally with tailors. Why do tailors even have a "sell" function? Are tailors really interested in the clothes you stripped off a bandit you killed in a dirty dungeon? It would feel really natural to custom order clothes from a tailor instead of just browsing through a set of randomly spawned items.

[Firebrand]

Excellent ideas

[Hazelnut]

I agree, will think on this a bit. I think they should probably be rare and hard to find. Quite how to lead the player there though?

[Ralzar]

I was thinking, perhaps only setting them up in one shop in each capitol. Do all capitols have a city-center ring of shops? In that case, that would be the most natural place to put the NPCs to have the player naturally discover them. Perhaps using the normal general store or banker NPC graphic to indicate that this is a shopping-NPC while not simply cloning the smith-npc.

[Ommamar]

I could see tying this in with the Knight Orders or Fighters guild or at least have them offer a reduction in price based on your standing with the guild.

[Ralzar]

I could see tying this in with the Knight Orders or Fighters guild or at least have them offer a reduction in price based on your standing with the guild.

Hm, that would actually be a really nice thing to have as a high-rank perk for Fighters Guilds and Knights Orders. At the moment they are a bit underwhelming. And it makes sense for those organizations to have access to custom smithing.

[Jay_H]

Perhaps knightly orders could randomly give out powerful, rare armors as they already do for mundane materials, and the Fighters Guild would have the crafting types.

[Ralzar]

Knight Orders give a random armour part each time you rank up right? I allways thought that was the right theme but a really poor way of representing it. Really, it would be nice if most (or all) of the Knight Quests allways gave an armour piece as a reward. Or that at each rank you were given a complete set of armour in a specified material.


Taking a look at the knightly order and fighters guild services: Both allready have a smith service that is pretty underwhelming. Fighters guild has the better repair and knightly orders smith just gives out a random item at rank up. It wouldn't be much of a sacrifice to replace these with the possiblity of creating items. Perhaps of material based on rank. So, for example at rank 6 member can order Dwarf armour, a rank 7 Mithril etc.

[BansheeXYZ]

This could also work very naturally with tailors. Why do tailors even have a "sell" function? Are tailors really interested in the clothes you stripped off a bandit you killed in a dirty dungeon? It would feel really natural to custom order clothes from a tailor instead of just browsing through a set of randomly spawned items.

Shopkeepers who sell clothing aren't tailors. Most RPGs will let you sell back food and clothing so you don't have to litter the ground with unsellable stuff. And it's not entirely unrealistic in a medieval setting where all clothing had to be made by hand without modern machinery. Good clothes were not the omnipresent throwaway items they are today.

Minor realism mechanics across games varies wildly. Some RPG vendors have a limited amount of gold with which to buy your loot. Some RPGs have hunger management. Daggerfall doesn't. Most RPGs don't bother with hunger and hygiene and make them implied offscreen events. Fantasy games are a kind of escapism, after all, and any tedium you keep in the game can't overly impact play. Finding nothing but sized apparel and armor that usually doesn't fit you enters the realm of bad reality. Being able to buy loot you can't find ruins the loot discovery system. Being able to custom enchant everything because you can't find it reflects a bad loot system.

[Ralzar]

Shopkeepers who sell clothing aren't tailors. Most RPGs will let you sell back food and clothing so you don't have to litter the ground with unsellable stuff. And it's not entirely unrealistic in a medieval setting where all clothing had to be made by hand without modern machinery. Good clothes were not the omnipresent throwaway items they are today.

Many of the clothing stores literally have "tailor" in the name. Littering isn't really a problem in Daggerfall, since dropped items get wiped when leave the area. I agree that it's realistic that someone would want to buy your clothes, but its honestly such a small part of the game with so small amounts of profit that it seemed like the most natural place to stick in the tailoring mechanic without having to implement extra NPC etc.

Minor realism mechanics across games varies wildly. Some RPG vendors have a limited amount of gold with which to buy your loot. Some RPGs have hunger management. Daggerfall doesn't. Most RPGs don't bother with hunger and hygiene and make them implied offscreen events. Fantasy games are a kind of escapism, after all, and any tedium you keep in the game can't overly impact play. Finding nothing but sized apparel and armor that usually doesn't fit you enters the realm of bad reality. Being able to buy loot you can't find ruins the loot discovery system. Being able to custom enchant everything because you can't find it reflects a bad loot system.

True, but fixing the loot system seemed like a much bigger job, and it might ruin the feel of the game if you started getting too lucky. In addition, with how easily you break the economy of the game, this would be a nice money sink. Buying custom made deadric armour should cost a really extravagant amount of money.

Alternatively, you would need some other items in order to make the armour. So it worked more like alchemy. You'd have to find "Lump Of Dwarven Metal" to use for making one Dwarven item. But then you allmost have a crafting system and I sort of hate those. Nothing makes an RPG more of a lootcentric grind than implementing a crafting system.