Foraging for all?

M

Miss Grim

Dalayan Beginner
I'd like to start off by saying that I realize, especially in a roleplay-focused environment, that many fantasy games value racial or class specific skills. That being said, I think it would be both realistic and fair to offer foraging to all characters to some extent. The reasoning that foraging is limited, I'm pretty sure, is that it is usually considered to be a nature-oriented skill, used to find food and drink in the wild that can sustain your character in a time of need. With the development of tradeskills, however, foraging became a much-needed skill used to provide many main ingredients for both bakers and brewers.

In real life (and yes, I know how many silly gaming discussions start out with "in real life", heh) I am a human that lives in a city. If I were very determined, though, I could learn to gather edibles from the land, and could make specific trips to the countryside to "forage" for fruits, nuts, vegetables, etc. to use in my baking or brewing efforts. The reason that I don't learn to forage is that "in real life" I can buy anything I need at the local grocery store, even twenty-four hours a day. My character, on the other hand, has no such access and must rely on the goodness of strangers (if there are even any available) to purchase foraged food items, often in much smaller quantities than needed. In my opinion, this would give my character more than enough incentive to put forward a great effort to learn how to forage for herself, even if she were more at home in a city.

I am certainly not proposing that this should be easy if it were to be made possible... while certain races or classes should have a natural knack for picking up local edibles, other races or classes would just as naturally have to work for it. Perhaps a difficult quest could be involved, or perhaps advancement would be especially slow? I just feel that in this sort of fantasy environment, a character that is determined to be an accomplished baker or brewer would probably have the motivation and find the means to forage some of those much-needed ingredients on their own.

Just a thought (or many)...
 
The EQ client is extremely limited about which skills it allows to be used by which races/classes - we simply cannot add a forage button to classes that the client doesn't want to have them.
 
The problem with your argument is that it can be made for any skill. A SK or Pally, having 2 arms, could learn to wield 2 weapons. However, the time that it would take to learn to dual wield (or how to forage) would take away from the time spent practicing skills specific to your base class, and thus those skills would suffer.

In D&D, this is dual/multi classing, where you can gain skills from other classes at the expense of improving your existing class.

EQ/WR doesn't have multiclassing, and I suspect it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement (for WR, not for EQ, but that certainly isn't going to happen). Besides, I don't think it would be such an easy decision to give up some of your abilities just to be able to forage. (Would you rather have the abilities of a 60 mage, or those of a 30 mage and a 30 druid for example).

Just my view...
Gui
 
To be fair, learning to fight with two weapons is vastly harder/different from learning to find food.
 
Wiz said:
To be fair, learning to fight with two weapons is vastly harder/different from learning to find food.
Click to expand...

This is what I was thinking, hehe... that's why I was using the example of myself. I figured that if *I* (as challenged as I am) could learn how to forage without severely disrupting my life, then my character could probably manage. I completely understand that it's not possible, though... just thought I'd give it a try. I always play baking rogues, and it would be nice to be able to play some of the other races, but not nice enough to give up foraging since foraged items are available in such a limited supply otherwise.

Thanks for the prompt reply, though. =D

Oh, and to do a D&D comparison, I believe that something like foraging would be a proficiency (agriculture, fishing, herbalism, snares, and hunting are listed proficiencies) as opposed to a class or race based skill (also in D&D characters are able to take up proficiencies that are limited to other classes as long as they accept the penalty incurred by practicing a skill that doesn't come to them naturally). Mind you, I'm no longer arguing my point as it would pertain to WR, just mentioning that the dual/multiclassing comparison isn't entirely accurate, either.
 
Wiz said:
To be fair, learning to fight with two weapons is vastly harder/different from learning to find food.
Click to expand...

That depends on just how toxic those poison berries you experiment with are. =P But yes, point taken, it was somewhat of an exaggerated comparison, but I believe the time-taken per skill argument is still relevant.

Gui
 
I think that if it were even implemented, it would not suit the needs you want it to. if you were starving in the forest and needed food, you would grab anything like a tree branch and eat it. You would not know that the tree may contain fruit. The forage skill doubles as an Herbalism skill you may find in D&D, higher skill yeilds more exotic items. I played a woodie bard on Live and only had a 50 (maybe even 65 i think) skill cap for forage. I usually failed to forage anything, but when i did it was either water or roots, I sometimes got lucky with some berries for dessert.

That being said I support the idea that every class to some extent should be able to pick up something edible off the ground to eat it, its instinct, but a skill cap of 10 at most would really yeild close to nothing. Any higher skill and other classes and races who normally get forage would have to be re-evaluated.
 
I was thinking what if a caster could learn to shoot a bow. I'm sure you could teach a gnome mage to hold a piece of wood and pull a string if he can conjure spells that break our commonly held beliefs of modern physics. But then I saw Gui's post and he covered it alright. :)


What if...haha,and believe me this is just purely hypothetical (office space was on last night :lol: ) players could pick a secondary profession/tradeskill when they start the game.

Thats just a line of scribbling up on a chalkboard at the moment.. I don't want to get into too much detail.
 
So, I've given it some more thought keeping in mind that it would not be possible to implement a forage ability for the other races or classes... what about at some point adding some quests to baking/shop NPCs that give foraged items for recipes as a reward? The basis for the quest could be that the said NPC needs X-item for their own recipe (something that any character can loot, perhaps) and would be willing to offer Y-item in return (something they "have an abundance of"). That way the non-foraging characters would have an alternative method for gathering those items, but it would still be easier to forage for yourself (if possible) or purchase them from other players (so that foraging players would not lose their advantage). Perhaps the quests could be started/given in the area where that specific item is foraged, which would explain why that NPC has an abundance of it but has a hard time finding their other ingredients.
 
don't think the client would allow for it and it would screw balance up pretty badly... sounds like in the right circumstances/game/whatever else it could be cool though
 
I think Miss Grims second idea of quest of basically a trade for forage exclusive items is a decent idea to be looked at.

I don't think myself that it should be an X for Y trade, but I can't think of any other means that are not basically broken down to money for items. You have to understand that these foraged items sold pretty well on live simply because of the large player base. I havn't heard any requests for roaged items in 3 days online and ive been online a large portion of those days, my biggest tip would be to make youself available, money is still precious on this server so if people know to save the roots they find, they will if the incentive is enough :)
 
Just giving everyone forage or giving them easier access to foraged items unbalances things for the classes and races that do get forage. It makes their skill not worth as much because people who need their items can get them elsewhere. Every race/class should have unique and valuable skills that people need. This takes away a valuable skill from foragers and makes their playtime less enjoyable by making it less profitable. What will end up happening is that some foragers may start to destroy certain items that they find simply because they aren't worth the time it takes to sell them or some foragers may give up on it completely in disgust. This will lead to a DECREASE in the availability of foraged items, which is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve here. Better to leave the system alone as it is.
 
I do like the idea of having a class that was passed from your family. Such as baking, fletching, brewing, etc. You could pick one of those as a family trait and start out with a 50 in that skill. Just a thought ya know =).
 
how exactly would you determine family? would you have to have the family surname?

too obscure =\
 
From what I know, a warrior could have forage, BUT, for a warrior to have forage he have to give up a other button, like kick, so when you hit kick you forage instead, because it's not possible to serverside change names of the skill buttons you have.
Sure, it would allso (prolly) be possible for a warrior to gain forage with AA's but then you have so sacrifice the clicky AA, like AE taunt or something like that and then the "forage" respawn time is the same as it is for AE Taunt (30 mins or so).
 
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