I'm glad this one was a little controversial.
Taipion wrote:Crafting inspirational books (besides "written" books) is a nice idea, but a little too much work for what it does as you described it.
If anything this mechanic seems more OP to me than too much effort for that value. I personally feel what makes this suggestion meaningful and worthwhile for the effort is precisely the ability to buy the book, not the crafting of it. Buying the book gives you an exact copy of the book and all its uses and gives players to essentially ability to convert silver into proficiency points.
Here's another example, you take 100 Sand, put in all the other bookmarks so you end up with a 25,000 Natural Philosophy Inspirational Book, lets say you get 2x bonus uses at crafting. Now you go buy 10 of those books, the cost increase is probably not too bad at that point, or you could use other players or accounts. 3 x 25,000 x 10 = 750,000 Natural Philosophy for just the cost of digging 100 sand and silver.
The overall idea is that it can turn any inspirational into a perfect efficiency inspirational, or be tailored towards certain goals, ie like having a book collection that can be used towards getting an alt to the place you want it without having to have a ton of inspirationals lying around.
I have like 20 books I've collect of found an if some broke into my claim and dropped them all in the river I wouldn't bat an eye. That's how trolly and pointless most of these player written books are. I do think we should keep track of these too, and actually encourage them more, but I am still trying to figure out how, I would like to have a written book leader board, but I was going to move that off of Nobleman Barnes and put an NPC in the library, sort of Nobleman Barnes was for Selling and the Library NPC for reading and collecting.
Taipion wrote:- There should be no leaderboard at all for "inspirational books", full stop, this just does not make sense.
Instead, these inspirational books could be used unlock a specific skill, yea, really!
- The unlocked skill can not be named or selected directly.
- The unlocked skill requirements need to be surpassed by the books inspiration points for each profession that the skill requires respectively.
- The unlocked skill is chosen, also considering the statement above, to be that one skill that is closest to the inspiration points (for each profession) of the book.
- To read a book that unlocks a skill, the reader needs to have literacy (!) and 80% average profession levels of what the skill requires. (or maybe another % of the prof lvls, just a question of balancing)
- Certain skills (like, basically only cain & abel, or what else...?) are either exempt from being directly unlocked by books, or have severe side effects that need to be high enough to offset the "shortcut" like adding (several) madness lvls, whereas it is possible (albeit rare) to gain so many that you'd instantly die.
- There may be a general side effect of reading books in general, higher for higher end skills, like: sudden loss (or gain!) of inspiration, madness lvls or black bile, directly triggering madness episodes or other things...
I do like some of these ideas, and I have a second part to books called Human Leather Bound Books, which I will post in 2 days after I do Human Leather today, which I might make use of some of these ideas.
reeper_aut wrote:not sure how you copy those books so you get into leaderboard. do you require all the materials? Currently # of books sold drops if the book is consumed (contracts, dropped on water, etc). Guess that's different here?
Yeah, you would buy an exact copy of the book and the leaderboard would keep track of books sold, not books in existence. It pushes some of the value away from the book existing and onto the book being worth buying, although just like in real life the best selling can be inflated buy one person buying a lot of the same book, however the cost goes up per account to reduce spam. The way I see if is that any book can be purchase a bunch of times by the same person and that will mostly likely be reflected in the hot titles list, but for a book to get into the best selling it will most likely need to be a useful book that appeals to a large number of players.
reeper_aut wrote:i take it that those leaderboards also feed into status?
Being on any leader board affects status, however only the best selling list and all time best sellers will count as leaderboards, the others are simply there for buying purposes.