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I enjoy crafting for all sorts of reaons, many of which have already been mentioned: it's variety, it's cathartic, it's satisfying. I also really appreciate a deep, complex crafting system that will, as Sanvean points out, enable me to revel in it as a problem-solving exercise, to enjoy the experimental testing of hypotheses.
But there is another reason why a good crafting system has become an absolutely must for me when I'm appraising MUDs, regardless of whether I intend my characters to craft or not.
About the top of my list of priorities is immersiveness. I'm looking for a place where I can feel that the character I'm creating is a living, breathing person, in a living, breathing environment. I want my character to be able to interact not only the other PCs, not even only with the NPCs, but with the very world my character inhabits.
Having been treated to examples of worlds that are very immersive in this fashion over the course of my MUDding career, I now find that if my character can't take a lump of a world and fashion it in some way, I feel like my arms have been cut off. The world just feels that much more fake, that much less alive.
It's obvious that you don't personally enjoy crafting, Kallekins, and that's fine. It takes all sorts, and that's kind of the point. Crafting adds another dimension to your gameworld. Those who enjoy killing will kill. Those who enjoy trading will trade. Those who enjoy politicking will get up to all sorts of devious plotting. But I really can't see how providing a place in your world for the many, many people out there who apparently enjoy crafting can do anything but enrich the mixture of personalities there, and how can that be a bad thing?
Maia, wondering if the popularity of crafting has anything to do with the fact that few of us these days spend much time IRL working with our hands
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