[JamOfBoy]

Crafting sucks.

It's mechanically functional. You select an item and make it after a few seconds, provided you have the materials for it. But this is an RP game, where interactions between characters, big or small, develop stories. The issue with crafting is that there's very little interaction to speak of - provided you were doing everything as IC and realistic as possible, you walk up to the crafter in question, request an item, they make it in whatever timespan with however much RP, you walk away with your shiny new axe.

In the extreme cases, what I'm suggesting is what people might already do when crafting items anyway.

But what is Jam's suggestion?
Roleplayed crafting, of course! An extra option for crafting an item which is more lengthy in terms of time, but might snag you a few bonuses along the way. Here's the gist of it:

You begin crafting. You have a 5x5 square in which you can now move - going outside this boundary cancels the craft. You're making a river sword for an aspiring spellblade aquamancer who has deemed you, a budding metalworker, worthy of forging his watery blade. And so you must begin by forging the blade, shaping the metal ingots, heat treating the metal.

Then, of course, you must refine the blade. Sharpening the edges, honing it. Perhaps a fuller or two, just for fun. Now you've got the blade handled, you need...

I'll stop here, but the idea is that the words above, in bold, are little prompts you'd get in the text box or elsewhere - key words to include in your next emote. 

You begin crafting.
Words of inspiration enter your mind as work: blade, ingot, heat treatment...

Doing so progresses the crafting process. Prompt 1 had blade, ingots, and heat treating. You include these phrases in your emote, you move on to the next step of crafting. So on, until it is done.
But why oh why would you do it this way instead of the normal way, aside from wanting to roleplay?

Well, let's talk about the worth that could be bestowed to this method, starting with the simpler ones:

Taxes. No taxes on roleplayed crafting. This is simple - you are exchanging the money for your time typing out emotes.
Roleplay experience - you earn a % toward your next level from doing roleplay crafting.
More crafting exp - if you spent enough time to make twenty pages using the normal method, thereby giving you twenty alchemy exp, it is only fair you making one with the roleplay method gives you a little extra to accommodate, is it not?

A bigger incentive is an idea that crafts would have bonuses depending on if certain criteria are met; minigames. Perhaps the key words in the prompts are vague, and you'd have to guess them. Guessing correctly when making a weapon might bestow a positive modifier to it, or guessing correctly doing anything else might give you a chance to refund materials spent or double the outcome.

Since this is you likely making something for someone else, perhaps some method of involving other people in the crafting method also benefits the craft! Players in your party might be able to contribute, somehow - every good craftsman has an apprentice.

Ideally, all of these are good, but there absolutely needs to be an incentive for this method otherwise the purpose of it - that being roleplay - will be ignored in favour of convenience.


Now, of course, we have to talk about the glaring drawbacks to this suggestion.

The first and foremost is that if this is objectively better than literally anything else in any regard in terms of EXP, money, or items, people will 100% find ways to speed through it or automate the process.
Macros that have emotes that cover all possible words in prompts can and likely would be used in this situation. There are methods to impede this, but ultimately, I'm not sure there's any way you could prevent someone from doing this.

Secondly, items are boring and, for the most part, worthless in terms of roleplay. You make a potion - so what? Why RP that out? How does RPing it out benefit you or anyone else in any meaningful way, if it's just going to be the same as a potion crafted without RP? The idea behind this suggestion is to make crafting a process of the world, to incentivise you walking up to your local carpenter and getting something from them - to incentivise them making it instead of opening a menu and popping the item into reality. I'm not sure how you'd alleviate the issue that, no matter how much love you put into your longsword, it'll blend in with all the rest.

There are likely a myriad other issues, but I find these two in particular to be the biggest.

This concludes my suggestion. I just think it sucks to go up to a crafter, request a cool item, and all that it amounts to is: Crahf Turr has crafted: Iron Longsword.

i suck at formatting posts