Green fingers - improving the concept of foraging

Just a warning.  This post is more notes to myself than any particular statement about the popular MMO profession (and less popular P&P skill).

When WoW came along (sorry, limited by my own experience there may have been other games that did it sooner) - people thought, wow! (please excuse pun) - I can pick plants and those plants can be used to make potions!  How amazing!  This is now commonplace.  Time for the concept to evolve.

In the vast majority of instances (although this has generally improved a little over the evolution of the genre) foraging typically involves the collection of naturally occurring botanicals.  Quite often these botanicals are stand-alone plants growing out in the planes, but I think the skill would benefit from being a little more complex.

Firstly, what should the botanicals be?  Well, just a plant is not good enough, we should talk in terms of flowers, stems, roots and thorns.  And then we should also have mosses, bark and fungi.  In this way a single specimen may yield a variety of different components which can be used as the ingredients of different apothecary recipes.

Secondly, where these botanicals grow is important, as it can add a dimension of realism to the proceedings.  Rather than every plant be stand-alone, some should have more interesting locations.  A certain type of creeper could grow on trees for example (may be even high up, and require a decent climb skill to reach).  Bark, grows on trees, obviously, and some mosses and fungi could also grow on trees, cliffs, down the inside of wells and even on some buildings.  Essentially what I'm saying is lets make the distribution of these botanicals a little more interesting than a rather obvious shrub out on its own somewhere.

The next element to consider is the region / type of terrain the botanicals are bested suited to.  Thus we should also consider, woodland plants, desert shrubs, mountain creepers, etc. So that these essential botanicals appear in the correct location.  What I mean by this is, on the same continent at least, and in some cases spanning continents, a woodland plant can be found in virtually any woodland environment.  This allows players to develop a realistic botanical sense of distribution across environments.  This concept should also go toward defeating that unrealistic notion of supplying increasingly harder to forage plants at higher levels.  Why one plant requires a forage skill of 300 and another of 1 makes very little sense.  Yes you can argue in some cases that a delicate flower requires a higher skill to successfully forage - I'm willing to go with that - on occassion - but I'd rather see different plant elements (roots, stalks etc.) become available at differing skills - and higher skill allows for faster foraging, and reaps more quantity and more variety.

I'd also like to see seasonal botanicals.  Like the Wilderberry is only available in the height of summer.  Luna's Tears only available under the full moon.  This way we not only encourage players to play longer (have to wait till summer till they can harvest that crop, and make that potion (or poison) it also makes for some interesting marketplace dynamics - where the guy that harvested a ton of Wilderberries last summer, releases his stock onto the Auction House the subsequent mid-winter at a higher price.

And finally, herb gardens.  Allow players to ultimately seed and grow their own herb gardens, probably as an advanced feature of a guild.  And this is where real forage skill comes in - its relatively easy to pick your own botanicals.  But growing your own, is a different matter.  And a well-funded, well-stocked and well-maintained herb garden would be an invaluable feature to many guilds.

One could still restrict the growth of very special plants which require very special climates.

And one could even provide basic herb gardens in major cities which players may use, for a price, within a certain time limit.  i.e. 10 gold gets you 1 minute in the garden - pick what you can.

Thanks good night, I'm just sewing seeds here - you do what you can.

The green-fingered pilch.

Addendum: O yes, and I just thought of it.  Subtle variants of the same botanicals.  So you could have Coastal Glory, a standard ingredient in healing based potions... but if you get the rarer Mountain Glory, your recipes are twice as effective!

Plus, you can also have, in some cases, plants that do a little something sans apothecary.  i.e. you can chew the stalks of Coastal Glory for an instant 10% of your health back over 6 seconds.  But boil up them stems and distil 'em, and that makes a minor healing tonic - 20% back.  Mix it with a little Mountain Dew (40% back) use Moutain Glory instead in the recipe - 80% back.  Use it with Cactus Jack the principle accelerant, and thats 80% over 3 seconds.  This is how apothecary stuff should work.  This means that Coastal Glory will always be useful, but it creates a situation where the more experienced forager / apothecary can make more useful products and thus gain a deeper satisfaction from their skill - and the game.