I suppose that could work, but it kinda sounds more like a band-aid, to me.
It’s very doable, though, for sure.
But honestly, I’d rather be able to get rid of the RNG aspect altogether and just make it all about “Do you have the components? Ok then here you go!”.
So here’s a crazy crazy idea :
Let’s say you apply a gum. To take your example, it’s the Special Gum. You apply a second gum, the Effect gum. It changes the buff in the list of buffs from “Special buff” to “Area of Effect buff”.
If there is a buff that can be obtained from Special+Effect+something else, then you can apply it.
If there is no known combination, the UI would say “you cannot add this gum to the mix” or if the devs are monsters, adding the wrong gum would instead do something bad like adding quirk/defect points or something…
But you can also stop there, put some compound, gain some boon points, and you’ll have something like 90-100% chance to apply that buff as a boon.
Then you put a catalyst to transform the buff into vigor/something else and you start over with new gums.
If you have a buff-combination that only gives one boon, and you max-out that boon, then maybe the mixed-gum-buff can automatically be removed and replaced by a nice amount of vigor/stability. Like a way to say “hey, nice job, we’re done with that, neeeeext gums please!”.
I’m just spit-balling, there, of course. What I just wrote seems overly complicated even to me. It would make it impossible to use all your gums at the start of forging, and you’d have to switch more often while forging.
But I don’t know, I think I could like this more. There wouldn’t be as much RNG anymore.
In any case, I would also love to have something in-game that mirrors this thread because I keep looking at it everytime I need to make some big batches of forged tools. I even tried to put which gum = which boons I often use on a modular sign to always have it on hand.
Doesn’t feel good in term of game-design, when your players feel the need to have notes or online-bookmarks to be able to handle a gameplay, IMHO.^^