Nightingale Community Portal
Basically, all the creatures I have traded with so far (Harpies, Holt Eotens, and Grendel Druids) have been disappointing, frustrating, and/or exploitable: it is simply more rewarding or time-efficient to kill them, or occasionally to trade with them and then kill them anyway.
I will use Harpies as my primary example because they exhibit three problems that make trade unrewarding. First, the "Alchemical Ink (Harpy)" item is outright inferior to "Meat (Harpy)" for several reasons: the Tier 3 Harpies in Magwytch give Tier 1 Ink as opposed to Tier 3 Hides/Meat/Bones (with a chance for the Fabled variants!), so the stat boost from the traded item is far worse than what you get from killing them. Moreover, Harpy meat or Fabled Harpy meat can be turned into Refined Pigment and then into Ink, which gives the player the option to use Glass of their choice to boost the stats of the Ink further, whereas the Ink traded by Harpies has no Glass component at all. For trading with them to be on par with killing them, they should probably give some raw material that the player cannot craft from meat/hides/bones. For refined materials every crafting ingredient that was "skipped" (the missing Glass in this case) makes the material worse than what the player could have made themselves, and refined materials are also less flexible than raw ones (they have less opportunites to be part of a final product: raw meat could become ink or fibre/thread/cloth, which is advantageous compared to something that can only fill one of those roles). Perhaps they could give a raw gem or stone block with the "Harpy/Fabled Harpy" stats, since we can't craft those things from animal products and it would be a really good reason to trade instead.
Second, they appear to leave a single ink vial even if they take an entire item stack, which creates needless micromanagement for the player and makes getting significant quantities of ink way more time-consuming than getting the hides/bones/meats. And third, you can trade with them, and then kill them anyway to get their drops and take your stuff back. To fix these two issues, I would suggest that a Harpy takes a stack of up to, say, 10 items, deposits up to 10 items in exchange, and then immediately flies away (basically, it despawns for a while so you can't kill it).
For Grendels and Holt Eotens, the actual trade rewards seem good (as opposed to the Harpy Ink), but the second two points are still problems: The trading process is extremely slow (especially for Grendels, could we please just trade items for potions like 10 at a time so that we see those beautiful but slow animations once?), and players can betray them and kill them after trading with no disincentive or long-term penalty for doing so.
I don't mean to sound too negative, because I really love the idea of trading with the mystical creatures rather than always fighting them. I just wish it were not so tedious or suboptimal.
| Category Tags | Resources, Creatures/Enemies |
| Mode | Offline |
| Sentiment | Critical |
An idea for betrayal (if we want to talk punishments for a moment): Killing these things after peacefully dealing with them could deliver a number of unclearable debuffs to a player. Harpies might curse you, as could Grendels, with their dying breath. Eotens could send out grasping roots that wind around and stay on a player, slowing them for an amount of time. Even the Automaton Bishops could have some sort of safety reaction, where attacking them after trading with them could have them hitting the player with a tool debuff (basically, narratively "rusting" the player's tools for a certain amount of time, mechanically causing all their tools to break incredibly fast and do less damage).
Now, the better option, I think, is to in fact have a potential trading creature trade and then as stated here, just despawn more or less instantly. But if there needs to be a mechanical disincentive to attack a being we've just traded with, well, then if the target doesn't disappear too fast to be attacked, they should be able to punish the player for their actions. And when players complain and say that it's "not fair", remind them that they were the ones that decided to go murderhobo on the peaceful trading partner.