Proposal
It's an open secret that alchemists, herbalists, tinkers, and cooks made heavy use of the Playing Cards packs for crafting. With those items no longer usable in crafting, I propose the creation of themed packs of consumables to take the place of cards. This would both enable crafters to engage with these systems at a rate that isn't (even more) soul-crushing, and do so with ingredients that are appropriately represented in the fiction: no more smashing cards together until you get a sourdough.
Example: A cook goes to Sparrowbroth and purchases a pack of "Cooking Essentials." The item's description tells us that the pack contains the essentials any cook might want: flour, salt, common spices, etc. The pack contains 50 charges which, when used, add a unit of of "Staple Cooking Ingredients" to inventory, which are valid components for Cooking recipes.
Similar packs would exist for Alchemy, Herbalism, and Tinkering: "Alchemical Fundamentals," "Assorted Herbs," "Sack of Parts," etc., for which I'm happy to write the text. This also opens up the possibility for future expansions: rare-drop or purchasable-but-expensive packs that provide a bonus to a relevant skill until consumed, or whose products provide some intrinsic bonus to the crafting calculation, perhaps.
Why Is This Beneficial?
In short: to alleviate a massive burden of carrying capacity, so that people will continue to engage with the crafting systems.
Speaking as a successful EFU:R alchemist and current EFU:COR cook and alchemist: crafting beyond the very basic combinations is a character-defining endeavor. While it's possible for almost anyone to dabble in crafting and get a result or two, going beyond those basics requires:
• 10-20 EFUSS points
• A dozen pounds or more and at least a full page of inventory devoted to reagents
• A full set of skill-boosting gear, which is often rare and expensive
• Literally hundreds of hours of experimentation and careful note-taking
This is a difficult, tedious, immensely time- and resource-consuming endeavor that pays off only to people whose brains are wired to enjoy filling in spreadsheets. I spreadsheet for a living and enjoy EVE Online, so I have a relatively high tolerance for this sort of thing, but even then, shortcuts and efficient research paths are required to keep it manageable.
Cards have been the go-to because they were a solid base to work from, a way to fill out recipe slots while having "only" a couple dozen pounds and a page and a half of inventory space devoted to other crafting reagents – not counting the full set of skill-enhancing gear which is required for more-than-basic crafting. In this way, cards allowed something approaching a reasonable rate of discovery: you could, for example, relatively easily discover the fundamental crafting recipes in Cooking with a hundred GP and a week of evenings devoted to it. Going any deeper requires exponentially more engagement, at a direct cost in effectiveness in other areas due to carrying capacity requirements. Here's an example:
Say we want to find new cooking recipes. In my experience and in the experience of other crafters I've asked this chapter, the rate of discovery for new recipes is around 25-35%: that is, one in every three or four attempts will yield a viable recipe, rather than an invalid combination. It won't necessarily be one that's new to you, mind – the odds are good that a successful combination will be another way to make something you've already discovered, unless you're working in a new branch of your craft. Let's say for simplicity's sake that each combination we try has a 33% chance of being a valid recipe. What do we need to carry to have a productive cooking session?
Assuming we're cooking in one of the branches, and not looking for new ways to make dough or what-have-you, we need to carry a "primer" item like a Raw Chicken, and at least three other valid "combinatory items" to combine with it. But! In any given branch of a crafting skill, you will rapidly run out of permutations which "only" take four items, and will do most of your work in the 5-item range or higher. Primers are usually about 0.5lbs and take up 1, 2, or 4 inventory slots, and valid objects tend to be 0.3 to 0.5 lbs and take up 1 or 2 slots each; we'll assume the low end and say 1.5 lbs and 5 inventory slots per combination. On average, to find a valid recipe, we'll need to commit 5 * (1.5lbs and 5 slots) = 7.5 lbs and 25 inventory slots until we're ready to head to the oven, per recipe we hope to find. That's over a third of an inventory page, and a huge chunk of weight, for a single recipe. Ideally you'd want to only carry the primers and then buy all of your combinatory items immediately before you go crafting, but given the difficulty and time involved in reaching crafting locations, most PCs are going to struggle with this, especially with combinatory items that you can't purchase.
What this means in practice is that people who are serious about crafting are going to be carrying around 20+ lbs of combinatory items and primers, and occupying at least a full inventory page, at all times – and probably quite a bit more, even before you factor your crafting gear set. Cards lessened this burden by making it possible to carry around about 33-50% fewer combinatory items, although they did nothing for the all-important (heavy, bulky, often rare) primers. Blood is no substitute: even leaving aside how deeply weird it is in the fiction, the requirements for syringes, healing-and-resting, and so on made them at best a useful add-on for card combinations. A crafter with cards (or card-like themed packs) is able to keep their committed weight and inventory slots down to something manageable with effort and sacrifice; the alternative is onerous in the extreme, and is going to result in a significant decrease in the number of people willing to engage with the crafting systems.
In Conclusion
EFU's crafting is a neat system, but the burdens it places on people who want to engage with it are substantial: even with cards or card-like objects, you really have to want it and be wiling to put in the hours, be diligent, take good notes, and make the mechanical sacrifices. This is actual work, and many people are not going to be interested in Doing Work in their leisure hours. It's a small subset of the population who considered this worthwhile, with the tools they had until this week. Lacking one of those tools isn't going to kill crafting dead – there will always be some people willing to go to any lengths to scratch the particular itch that only filling a spreadsheet with entries like "Syrup" and "Summoning Scales" can fulfill. But it will make it much, much more onerous. Considering how much time and effort has gone into making crafting available to us again, it seems a shame to cut down even further on the number of people who will find it accessible.
To that end, I propose a flavorful but functionally identical counterpart to cards, with descriptions tailored to the crafting systems they facilitate.
It's an open secret that alchemists, herbalists, tinkers, and cooks made heavy use of the Playing Cards packs for crafting. With those items no longer usable in crafting, I propose the creation of themed packs of consumables to take the place of cards. This would both enable crafters to engage with these systems at a rate that isn't (even more) soul-crushing, and do so with ingredients that are appropriately represented in the fiction: no more smashing cards together until you get a sourdough.
Example: A cook goes to Sparrowbroth and purchases a pack of "Cooking Essentials." The item's description tells us that the pack contains the essentials any cook might want: flour, salt, common spices, etc. The pack contains 50 charges which, when used, add a unit of of "Staple Cooking Ingredients" to inventory, which are valid components for Cooking recipes.
Similar packs would exist for Alchemy, Herbalism, and Tinkering: "Alchemical Fundamentals," "Assorted Herbs," "Sack of Parts," etc., for which I'm happy to write the text. This also opens up the possibility for future expansions: rare-drop or purchasable-but-expensive packs that provide a bonus to a relevant skill until consumed, or whose products provide some intrinsic bonus to the crafting calculation, perhaps.
Why Is This Beneficial?
In short: to alleviate a massive burden of carrying capacity, so that people will continue to engage with the crafting systems.
Speaking as a successful EFU:R alchemist and current EFU:COR cook and alchemist: crafting beyond the very basic combinations is a character-defining endeavor. While it's possible for almost anyone to dabble in crafting and get a result or two, going beyond those basics requires:
• 10-20 EFUSS points
• A dozen pounds or more and at least a full page of inventory devoted to reagents
• A full set of skill-boosting gear, which is often rare and expensive
• Literally hundreds of hours of experimentation and careful note-taking
This is a difficult, tedious, immensely time- and resource-consuming endeavor that pays off only to people whose brains are wired to enjoy filling in spreadsheets. I spreadsheet for a living and enjoy EVE Online, so I have a relatively high tolerance for this sort of thing, but even then, shortcuts and efficient research paths are required to keep it manageable.
Cards have been the go-to because they were a solid base to work from, a way to fill out recipe slots while having "only" a couple dozen pounds and a page and a half of inventory space devoted to other crafting reagents – not counting the full set of skill-enhancing gear which is required for more-than-basic crafting. In this way, cards allowed something approaching a reasonable rate of discovery: you could, for example, relatively easily discover the fundamental crafting recipes in Cooking with a hundred GP and a week of evenings devoted to it. Going any deeper requires exponentially more engagement, at a direct cost in effectiveness in other areas due to carrying capacity requirements. Here's an example:
Say we want to find new cooking recipes. In my experience and in the experience of other crafters I've asked this chapter, the rate of discovery for new recipes is around 25-35%: that is, one in every three or four attempts will yield a viable recipe, rather than an invalid combination. It won't necessarily be one that's new to you, mind – the odds are good that a successful combination will be another way to make something you've already discovered, unless you're working in a new branch of your craft. Let's say for simplicity's sake that each combination we try has a 33% chance of being a valid recipe. What do we need to carry to have a productive cooking session?
Assuming we're cooking in one of the branches, and not looking for new ways to make dough or what-have-you, we need to carry a "primer" item like a Raw Chicken, and at least three other valid "combinatory items" to combine with it. But! In any given branch of a crafting skill, you will rapidly run out of permutations which "only" take four items, and will do most of your work in the 5-item range or higher. Primers are usually about 0.5lbs and take up 1, 2, or 4 inventory slots, and valid objects tend to be 0.3 to 0.5 lbs and take up 1 or 2 slots each; we'll assume the low end and say 1.5 lbs and 5 inventory slots per combination. On average, to find a valid recipe, we'll need to commit 5 * (1.5lbs and 5 slots) = 7.5 lbs and 25 inventory slots until we're ready to head to the oven, per recipe we hope to find. That's over a third of an inventory page, and a huge chunk of weight, for a single recipe. Ideally you'd want to only carry the primers and then buy all of your combinatory items immediately before you go crafting, but given the difficulty and time involved in reaching crafting locations, most PCs are going to struggle with this, especially with combinatory items that you can't purchase.
What this means in practice is that people who are serious about crafting are going to be carrying around 20+ lbs of combinatory items and primers, and occupying at least a full inventory page, at all times – and probably quite a bit more, even before you factor your crafting gear set. Cards lessened this burden by making it possible to carry around about 33-50% fewer combinatory items, although they did nothing for the all-important (heavy, bulky, often rare) primers. Blood is no substitute: even leaving aside how deeply weird it is in the fiction, the requirements for syringes, healing-and-resting, and so on made them at best a useful add-on for card combinations. A crafter with cards (or card-like themed packs) is able to keep their committed weight and inventory slots down to something manageable with effort and sacrifice; the alternative is onerous in the extreme, and is going to result in a significant decrease in the number of people willing to engage with the crafting systems.
In Conclusion
EFU's crafting is a neat system, but the burdens it places on people who want to engage with it are substantial: even with cards or card-like objects, you really have to want it and be wiling to put in the hours, be diligent, take good notes, and make the mechanical sacrifices. This is actual work, and many people are not going to be interested in Doing Work in their leisure hours. It's a small subset of the population who considered this worthwhile, with the tools they had until this week. Lacking one of those tools isn't going to kill crafting dead – there will always be some people willing to go to any lengths to scratch the particular itch that only filling a spreadsheet with entries like "Syrup" and "Summoning Scales" can fulfill. But it will make it much, much more onerous. Considering how much time and effort has gone into making crafting available to us again, it seems a shame to cut down even further on the number of people who will find it accessible.
To that end, I propose a flavorful but functionally identical counterpart to cards, with descriptions tailored to the crafting systems they facilitate.
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