HeWhoShallNotBeNamed
Member
Okay, so the project I'm working on involves a lot of crafting of items. There are various skills related to this, and levelling up these skills allows you to make better versions of items. This is fairly straightforward for most things: a piece of armor made by a more skilled smith will provide higher defense, magic-based items are stronger as your enchanting skill grows, etc. For certain potions created with the alchemy skill, this will also work, as healing potions can provide more of a boost if mixed by skilled alchemists. Where I'm having trouble coming up with a solution is in making potions that remove status effects. If a potion removes poison, for example, what is the benefit of a well-made potion over a poorly made one? Both remove the poison effect. I've had a few ideas about this, but I'm not really fully enthused about any of them, so I thought I'd run some of them past brighter minds than mine, or see if any of you have any ideas I haven't thought of. Here are solutions I've already entertained:
1) Players with a higher alchemy skill can make multiple potions at once. I don't want to do this because the plan is to include the bottle/flask as one of the crafting components, and it doesn't make sense to get three bottles worth of potion when you only use one empty bottle to start with. I'd be willing to ditch the bottle-as-component thing if I can't come up with a better solution, but I'd rather come up with something else.
2) Have each potion have certain odds of working, i.e. a poorly made potion has a one in ten chance of actually curing the status effect its supposed to cure, whereas a well-made potion will work every time. I think this could work in some games, but mine isn't meant to be extremely difficult.
3) Similar to #2, you could have it where a poorly made potion actually has a chance to harm the user. This makes a certain amount of logical sense, but that leads back to the same difficulty issue. Killing yourself with a badly made potion seems a little Dark Souls-y. Not a bad thing, but not what I'm going for.
4) Better-made potions could be so potent that you need to use less of them to get the same effect, i.e. a badly made potion could be a one-use item, while a well-made potion could be used multiple times. I don't necessarily want to add a "how many uses are left" variable to an inventory system that already has to keep track of the same items with different levels of quality, but this could be avoided by downgrading the quality of the potion (use a "great" potion, and it becomes a "good" potion, a "good" potion becomes a "poor" potion, and a "poor" potion simply disappears from the player's inventory). I may go with this idea, but I'm not thrilled by it.
5) Better made potions provide buffs, not only removing a status effect but making you more resistant to it in the future. Which is not a bad idea...
6) Potions that remove a status effect just remove a status effect, regardless of the skill of the alchemist that made it. If I'm remembering correctly, I believe that this is how Skyrim did things.
If any of you out there have any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Which of these ideas makes the most sense to you, or do you have some other idea I haven't thought of? Thank you all in advance!
1) Players with a higher alchemy skill can make multiple potions at once. I don't want to do this because the plan is to include the bottle/flask as one of the crafting components, and it doesn't make sense to get three bottles worth of potion when you only use one empty bottle to start with. I'd be willing to ditch the bottle-as-component thing if I can't come up with a better solution, but I'd rather come up with something else.
2) Have each potion have certain odds of working, i.e. a poorly made potion has a one in ten chance of actually curing the status effect its supposed to cure, whereas a well-made potion will work every time. I think this could work in some games, but mine isn't meant to be extremely difficult.
3) Similar to #2, you could have it where a poorly made potion actually has a chance to harm the user. This makes a certain amount of logical sense, but that leads back to the same difficulty issue. Killing yourself with a badly made potion seems a little Dark Souls-y. Not a bad thing, but not what I'm going for.
4) Better-made potions could be so potent that you need to use less of them to get the same effect, i.e. a badly made potion could be a one-use item, while a well-made potion could be used multiple times. I don't necessarily want to add a "how many uses are left" variable to an inventory system that already has to keep track of the same items with different levels of quality, but this could be avoided by downgrading the quality of the potion (use a "great" potion, and it becomes a "good" potion, a "good" potion becomes a "poor" potion, and a "poor" potion simply disappears from the player's inventory). I may go with this idea, but I'm not thrilled by it.
5) Better made potions provide buffs, not only removing a status effect but making you more resistant to it in the future. Which is not a bad idea...
6) Potions that remove a status effect just remove a status effect, regardless of the skill of the alchemist that made it. If I'm remembering correctly, I believe that this is how Skyrim did things.
If any of you out there have any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Which of these ideas makes the most sense to you, or do you have some other idea I haven't thought of? Thank you all in advance!