Recipes

My house is within five miles of four large supermarkets. The bread in the first one is too doughy; the bread in the second is too crusty; the bread in the third is too soft; the bread in the fourth is perfect (a shame the rest of the stuff they sell is so rubbish). Bread has been manufactured for thousands of years, but even today bakers use different recipes.

To make crafting more palatable to non-socializers, some virtual worlds have introduced explorative or competitive elements to it. One favored technique is to have multiple recipes for the same basic object (or, commonly, spell—this can be applied to more than just manufacture), some of which will endow the resulting creation with different properties than others. A recipe typically consists of a set of ingredients; these will often have to be explicitly arranged in some (usually linear) sequence, but in some implementations the “use recipe” action will do it implicitly.

This is one of those suggestions that sounds reasonable until you think about it. Unfortunately, it is frequently implemented without being thought about.

The idea is that players should be rewarded for experimentation. If you sit around mixing reagents and come up with a recipe for a steel that is more hard-wearing than regular steel without being any more brittle, you should be able to profit from your experiment. This is fair enough: If people discover through use that your swords are better than Joe NPC’s, they’ll come to you next time they need a new one. This is, of course, until some helpful soul puts a ton of sword recipes on their web site with a description of the precise effect of each one.

To counter this possibility, designers will usually try one of two approaches. The first of these is to allow characters to patent a recipe if they discover it first; subsequent use of this recipe by any other crafter will result in a royalty for the patent holder. This is fine for those who start playing the virtual world early, but it’s no use to those who come along six months later.

The second solution is to individualize recipes, so that the proportions of ingredients that you need to make the perfect sword are different to the ones that I need. This is unrealistic when applied to mundane object creation, but works for things like magical artifacts. Asheron’s Call allows for spell experimentation through different ordered combinations of “spell components,” and incorporated a random taper to make these unique to every character. These yielded easily to brute-force cracking methods, though. AC did have a back-up mechanism to discourage spell recipes from becoming commonly known, in that the more often a spell was used the weaker it grew. Mages who knew the recipe were thus disinclined to tell others what it was. Unfortunately, it only takes one recipe-holder to break ranks (for example, an explorer who doesn’t care if a spell loses its potency) and anyone who wants to find out can.

The root of the problem is that players don’t like having personal recipes. They want recipes to be global, so they don’t have to figure them out in advance. Designers may want to convince them otherwise, but it’s not going to happen. Like any other discovery in virtual worlds, once a recipe is unearthed it rapidly becomes common knowledge.

Ironically, although recipes are typically conceived to help crafters, it’s adventurers who are most likely to end up using them. There is some scope for using recipes in directly competitive situations—that is, as combat scripts. There, the efficacy of your recipe is directly dependent on the recipe your opponent is using. Co-operative recipes, where I do this while you do that, are also possible; however, they’re not going to make manufacture any more fun.