I'll skin you alive!

Well, that got your attention.

The thing that annoys me about skinning / butchery in MMOs is this: the type of skin you get off your beast is based on the level of the beast, not what the beast is.  Which is quite frankly preposterous.  I've posted before (I think) about how beasts / critters should be handled, so I won't dwell on that aspect here, but what I will do is spend a moment talking about skinning.

Essentially, skinning should be based on the type of beast being skun. :-) NOT the level.  Shark skin is different to bear skin is different to cow skin is different to the delicate leather obtained from elven children.

Most MMOs take the route they take for the sake of simplicity.  They don't want low level characters getting access to high-level skins and leathers required for making high level recipes.  But quite frankly its all a lot of overly simplified nonsense, and we the sophisticated gamer - or I the self-proclaimed voice of the sophisticated gamer demand more!  Even if it means I have to make the damn game myself.

In the Mother of all (fantasy) MMOs skinning will be handled more like this:

Different skins will be required for different recipes.  And different skins will also apply a slight magickal bonus (with the right recipe) to enable different crafters to make subtley different variants of their recipes.

For example:  A backpack which warps space so that it looks like a small bag on the outside, but provides the player with 32 slots - or vast amounts of storage space, or whatever unit of measurement takes your fancy - requires the skin of a particular demon.  By hooking the recipe to such a specific creature, we as game designers can restrict who can make the item, to a certain extent.  The demon itself might be rare, may only spawn in certain locations, or may require someone to summon it, and will be of sufficient level to ensure that not many people can easily slay them, making the bags quite rare.

We can also make standard item creation a little more interesting by providing certain skins with the capability of imbuing small bonuses to the items they go toward making.  Make a cloak from wolfksin and gain a non-magickal  +1 to armour, endurance and charisma.  That kind of thing.  But provide some rationale behind it.  Something which is all too often missing.

Delicate leather (that obtained from humans or elves or something similar) may confer a small magickal bonus when used in the creation of spellbooks for certain types of dark spellcraft (demonology / necromancy, for example).

Basically ensure some cognisance goes into skinning.  Heavier leathers are obtained from heavier beasts.  More than one 'piece' of leather is obtained from larger beasts.  Certain beasts convey certain bonuses, and so on and so forth.

All this dovetails very nicely with my post on crafting... which I'm just about to write...

Now!