Sil: Smithing (observations)

[Patashu]

This has probably been suggested before, but I think it would be neat to be able to improve forged items. You wouldn't necessarily be able to improve found items, but stuff you'd originally forged could be improved at a forge at normal smithing cost, as if the improved item had been created from scratch. That way, as your smithing score improves, you could add bonuses to your forged items and they could grow with you. I think that would be neat.

What would be the advantage of reforging an item you already made over forging a copy?
-Lower skill requirement?
-Not using a forge charge?
-No 'advantages', just adds sentimental value?

[BlueFish]

Smithing skill cost would be identical but experience point cost would only apply for the new stuff. Mithril cost would also be zero for a mithril item.

This would allow a low level smith to craft for instance a lore master crown and then someday add another swap skill like song of freedom or eye for detail.

If this was found to be overpowered, the "improve item" function at forges could come at some flat smithing cost.

[Scatha]

The reforging of items (or at least of swords) has a prominent place in Tolkien's writings, and we plan to add it to the game in some future version. The idea is to arrange it so that there is often a mild advantage over creating a new item when you have something close to what you want.

[half]

The reforging of items (or at least of swords) has a prominent place in Tolkien's writings, and we plan to add it to the game in some future version. The idea is to arrange it so that there is often a mild advantage over creating a new item when you have something close to what you want.

And BlueFish's suggestion does offer such an advantage. I think his idea is to subtract off all features of the original item when calculating the costs (experience, stat points etc) of the item, in the same way that we don't charge you for the fire resistance on a special dwarf mask you are making. This sounds pretty well defined, simple, and easy to code. This is a great step forward.

I don't know if it also needs to be better than this in some respect. e.g. do we want people re-forging great weapons that they couldn't forge to begin with, because this rule won't produce that.

[half]

Oh, I suppose it already does in some cases. If you find an excellent long sword, but want to use an axe instead, you might be able to make a weapon from that is worse overall, but at least is an axe.

I'm not totally sure about such changes in the item type and sub-type though. Turning a long sword into a short sword sounds fine to me (in fact I'd like to allow this). The reverse sounds OK, but a bit problematic. Turning a mail corslet into a great sword (and only keeping powers that swords can have) sounds OK, but a bit problematic. Turning leather armour into a mail corslet sounds wrong. So in game terms it might be simplest to just not allow changes in t_val and s_val (item type and subtype).

[taptap]

I understand how you could add a new enchantment to an item but it completely escapes me how you add 2d2 armour to your mail corslet or a produce a sudden increase in attack, defence and damage to your sword or turn the 6 lb battle axe into a 3 lb battle axe upon taking momentum. Afaik reforging swords happens to broken swords and to my knowledge nobody broke a fine sword just for the fun of it or as a means of powering it up.

Smithing got nerfed from edition to edition for a good reason, I would be very careful that no power is added back with such a feature. (Every increase in maximum level of smithing tends to lead to a nerf for all smiths even those who didn't exploit this particular mechanism after all.)

Say, if you add an enchantment smithing cost should be the sum of ALL modifiers on the item even those already present and the base smithing cost - this would limit the benefit to saved XP for repeating an enchantment or inventory management. However, I would then find it somewhat unintuitive when I could improve my self-smithed equipment but not normal equipment.

[half]

I understand how you could add a new enchantment to an item but it completely escapes me how you add 2d2 armour to your mail corslet or a produce a sudden increase in attack, defence and damage to your sword or turn the 6 lb battle axe into a 3 lb battle axe upon taking momentum.

I don't find this so unrealistic. Re-forging could include things from merely heating, hammering, and enchanting something, all the way to melting it down and attaching it to a new wooden haft. In Sil it is not clear whether the bonuses for fine items are magical or not. Indeed for many things it is not clear whether or not they are magical. We like this, and a side effect is that it lets us be a bit flexible with these things.

In the rather extreme sword -> corslet case, I'm imagining finding a sword that grants cold resistance and orc slaying and melting it down and mixing the metal with a lot of additional metal and creating armour with cold resistance without having to lose a point of Con in doing so. This strikes me as something a smith of old might do and fun and interesting. My main concern is finding rules that allow this, but not turning a sword into a glove, or something else silly like that.

Afaik reforging swords happens to broken swords and to my knowledge nobody broke a fine sword just for the fun of it or as a means of powering it up.

Good point. Does anyone know of exceptions?

Smithing got nerfed from edition to edition for a good reason, I would be very careful that no power is added back with such a feature. (Every increase in maximum level of smithing tends to lead to a nerf for all smiths even those who didn't exploit this particular mechanism after all.)

Our current thinking is that Smithing is slightly too weak, but we're not sure. The fact that it can still be very strong at the end game, and that people are still encouraging (+2) ring of accuracy starts and Artistry starts suggests it is still pretty good at the start too. We are stopping people using hand-and-a-half weapons in their off-hand in the next version, which will stop some of the more crazy smithing, and might allow us to reduce some of the general difficulty requirements a bit.

Say, if you add an enchantment smithing cost should be the sum of ALL modifiers on the item even those already present and the base smithing cost - this would limit the benefit to saved XP for repeating an enchantment or inventory management. However, I would then find it somewhat unintuitive when I could improve my self-smithed equipment but not normal equipment.

I think this is compatible with BlueFish's proposal. He said the difficulty of the item should be unchanged by the fact it is a reforging of something else, it is just that you don't have to pay the 'costs' again. i.e. the points of Str, or the experience. I also imagine that you could do this with found items, both special and artefact. You want to make an artefact helm with brightness? Start with a helm of brilliance to save yourself that point of Grace.

[Nick]

Good point. Does anyone know of exceptions?

When Turin came to Nargothrond "The sword Anglachel was forged anew for him by the cunning smiths of Nargothrond, and though ever black its edges shone with pale fire." Turin then called it Gurthang.

This was probably done because (a) "it was heavy and strong and had great power; but its blade was black and dull and its edges blunt" and (b) Turin had just killed Beleg with it and felt kind of bad.

This probably qualifies as for the fun of it and as a means of powering it up. I can't think of any other reforgings apart from Narsil to Anduril.

If you want to go to a non-Tolkien source, there's an example in the "Game of Thrones" books of a sword melted down and remade into two swords because it's of rare "Valyrian steel".

[half]

Thanks Nick!

If you want to go to a non-Tolkien source, there's an example in the "Game of Thrones" books of a sword melted down and remade into two swords because it's of rare "Valyrian steel".

This case of changing one item to two is also cool, as would be merging two items into one. Quite possibly too complex to add to Sil. I'm not sure. The latter doesn't sound impossible. The former is somewhat modelled when you melt down a mithril greatsword to make a feanorian lamp and a mithril longsword or whatever.

Indeed, for the (fictional) history buffs, this is the only way mithril corslets could exist at the time of Sil. No mithril had yet been discovered in Middle-earth (was not yet found in Moria), so all mithril in Beleriand came from Valinor. However in Valinor no-one knew how to make corslets (it was a dwarvish invention). My theory was that it is still possible to have it in Sil if someone (possibly the player character) were to melt down several Valinorian mithril items to make it. Since it is the most famous Tolkenian armour, I decided to let it be generated in the dungeon, but made it super rare.

[taptap]

Well, good luck on making this possible with clear and simple rules. It would certainly help inventory management as a smith (put a new enchantment on feanorian lamp, re-artificing the lore-master crown etc.). And I am very happy that off-hand smithing hammers become history - avoided it since a long time (smells like exploit) and my genuine smiths peak a bit below 30 (incl. Aule and 2 smithing items) which is strong, but not insane. I never made a masterpiece.

Artistry start works regardless of changes to smithing at least for houses that get smithing bonus and start with a bit of grace as you only ever change a few modifiers per item (and initial difficulties for the item itself are low). But simply having +1 evasion on all your early armour and a little bit more protection matters a lot before you start to find similar quality items in midgame.

Melting already exists - I have produced a mithril corslet like this before. They are awesome. For all else, I can't see how this can work out without defining the materials and the amount of material for everything etc. definitely not as "KISS" as the rest of Sil. Also a lot of artefacts have enchantments that aren't possible to the player and I wonder what the calculated modifiers of these would be also it shouldn't allow to stack enchantments on items that wouldn't otherwise permit them. Anyway, if it were possible I would instantly try to make a Galvorn armour artefact (the only metal even more awesome than Mithril) as soon as I find one - in fact I was hoping for this possibility a long time. And... well, a balanced black-bladed shortsword what else would I wish for (happily melt Anglachel or a Galvorn armour for that).

I believe naming weapons is very common not only in fantasy. That it is more often than not swords probably is due to the fact that in the (dark age) times (and literary sources) that inspired Tolkien swords were rare and precious items (due to lack of proper steel). In fact I wonder whether there are unnamed swords in Beowulf and similar texts. This flavour is a bit lost when swords are regular common weapons as in any more high/late medieval setting.

[Scatha]

I spent some time on a train today thinking about this and writing a post. I now see Nick has beaten me to pointing out Gurthang! So we have one example of either type (broken and not). Anyhow, here's a way I imagine the rule working.

You need an ability to reforge items. It has Artifice as a pre-requisite.

If reforging an item X into Y, start with X as effectively a base type for your forging. So there are no new experience or stat costs for properties already on X, and you can't take properties away from X. I'd probably say you can't change the type of X, partly for the reasons half outlined but also because I feel more outlandish type changes violate my sense of it being the same object. I'd be happy, though, with some versions which allowed limited changes like longsword -> shortsword (and I'd have an exception for reforging broken swords).

What should the difficulty of this be? When you begin with an appropriate X, I'd like it be easier than making Y from scratch. I think the entire story of reforging feels more exciting and epic if it allows you to make a greater item than otherwise possible, at the cost of consuming a good one, rather than just giving you a buy-out of the flavourful extra costs.

If d(X) is the standard difficulty that would be required to make X from new, the base difficulty of reforging X is two-thirds of d(X). So you get a discount on account of the effort and skill that went into creating the original item. Then if D is the standard difficulty of the modifiers that are applied to X to get to Y, the difficulty of applying these modifiers is three-halves of D. So it's harder to work powers into an existing object than a fresh one.

The results of this are appealing:
- An amateur cannot improve the work of a master. If you dabble in smithing, you'll never be able to make Glamdring better.
- A master benefits from good materials. Want a great sword? You'll do better re-forging Narsil than starting anew.
- Nobody can ever make something harder than 3/2 of their smithing score (and this hard limit can only be approached).
- It's not always best to reforge. It's only worth it if the source item is over 60% of the usual difficulty of the final product.
- With Smithing 20, you could re-work a difficulty 18 item into a difficulty 23 one (with all of the original properties).

Note that while these numbers feel about right to me, we'd want to check them and the precise ratios could easily be adjusted.

Also I should warn that I think this is on the complicated side, and I'd prefer to have something slightly simpler. On the other hand the rules for Smithing difficulties are already somewhat complex, and I think a lot of people deal with them by just experimenting in the menu, so complexity is not such a high cost as usual, and I'd be happy with this rule if we couldn't find something simpler which played almost as well or better by the time we wanted to put reforging in.

In general half and I have pretty similar judgements about which rules are good, wanting both simplicity and good behaviour. I've noticed, though, that we take slightly different approaches towards finding them. I tend to think about what behaviour I'd like, then design a rule which gives that behaviour. After that I'll try to find ways to simplify it, taking away unneeded components and finding a clean form which still does what was wanted. My impression is that half spends more time exploring very simple rules and looking for ones with good behaviour. I'm not sure which method is more effective, but I think we may be well served by the diversity of approaches allowing us to find more good solutions than either of us would alone. (Of course this observation is a caricature of actual behaviour, and we both engage in both approaches, but I thought it was interesting.)

[taptap]

My personal fear is that such a system in the hand of psi will make smithing harder for everyone (after smithing gets nerfed because of that).

I.e. thinking about exploiting the mechanism I would wonder about chain reforging. With 30 max skill I could make a 30 difficulty weapon and reforge it to a 40 difficulty weapon in the next steps, to 43 in three steps in total (more is unlikely due to the amount of forges available I guess). At quite a high cost in forges you would get a boost to smithing equal to a one-time masterpiece. Single reforging would improve many already strong artefacts in the game a smith would tend to discard in favour of his own, only slightly better or different items otherwise.

[Scatha]

My personal fear is that such a system in the hand of psi will make smithing harder for everyone (after smithing gets nerfed because of that).

I think it would be quite possible to balance the reforging separately from the rest of smithing.

Actually here's a possible simplification already: replace the "two-thirds" and "three halves" of my proposal with "half" and "double" respectively. It's simpler and probably cooler in terms of more often giving characters the opportunity to make an upgrade of an already awesome item, without letting them get too powerful (because it's using up their forge uses; the asymptotics as forge uses become unlimited are very strong).

[Scatha]

I.e. thinking about exploiting the mechanism I would wonder about chain reforging. With 30 max skill I could make a 30 difficulty weapon and reforge it to a 40 difficulty weapon in the next steps, to 43 in three steps in total (more is unlikely due to the amount of forges available I guess). At quite a high cost in forges you would get a boost to smithing equal to a one-time masterpiece. Single reforging would improve many already strong artefacts in the game a smith would tend to discard in favour of his own, only slightly better or different items otherwise.

With Smithing 30 and a difficulty 30 weapon, you'd be able to get it to 36 in one step: 30 * 2/3 = 20, which gives you 10 to upgrade with, but your upgrades are also costly, and 10 * 2/3 = 6.

With the half/double rule instead, you'd take 30 * 1/2 = 15, so 15 to play with, but 15 * 1/2 = 7, so you could get to 37 in one step.

[taptap]

With Smithing 30 and a difficulty 30 weapon, you'd be able to get it to 36 in one step: 30 * 2/3 = 20, which gives you 10 to upgrade with, but your upgrades are also costly, and 10 * 2/3 = 6.

With the half/double rule instead, you'd take 30 * 1/2 = 15, so 15 to play with, but 15 * 1/2 = 7, so you could get to 37 in one step.

Sounds quite simple that way, additional benefit that it would cut a possible additional masterpiece bonus on top of that in half and it also would limit reforges to minor modifications because you can't add sharpness or any similar large modifier in the 2nd step.