A better approach (IMHO) to loot in RPG games is to give NPCs/monsters actual equipment they can use and then drop naturally. You can combine this with a trinket generator to give each one a little more flavor. Of course some mobs carry stuff they can't use themselves (for example because it is assumed they looted it off someone), that's also fine - just put it into the "character generator" function or the monster template.
I'm a huge fan of giving mobs some history and uniqueness, and that's an easy way to do it. A nice side effect is that you don't have to think about loot separately when designing the content, because it comes naturally from the design of the mob. This also means that, by definition, a mob can never drop an inappropriate item.
Recently, I re-discovered the ancient Baldur's Gate games (enhanced edition), and they do something similar. Mobs drop the actual equipment they have.
Some loot traditionally comes from the body of the monster itself, like a rat's tail or a wolf's fur which you can bring to the next merchant or quest-giver for reward. A more natural method of doing it would be solely through the skill/crafting system, instead of dropping pre-defined animal parts just because they happen to be important to some quest.
I think that's a cool idea, but in practice it doesn't seem to lead to very fun gameplay. It means a large swath of monsters: jellies, giant insects, wolves, bears, spiders, serpents, etc. wouldn't drop anything. You'd end up basically just trying to kill "monsters" that are humans. To me, that's not very fun.
> You can combine this with a trinket generator to give each one a little more flavor.
I do have that. They are "powers" and work similar to items in Diablo where they can be a prefix or suffix on the name of the item and modify its stats. So you can get a "Glimmering Stick of Wounding".
> This also means that, by definition, a mob can never drop an inappropriate item.
I did try this, but my experience was that it made killing mobs predictable and boring. "Oh, look, the wizard dropped yet another robe." I deliberately sacrificed realism (which is of limited value in my book anyway) to get a more exciting, surprising game.
> Some loot traditionally comes from the body of the monster itself, like a rat's tail or a wolf's fur which you can bring to the next merchant or quest-giver for reward. A more natural method of doing it would be solely through the skill/crafting system, instead of dropping pre-defined animal parts just because they happen to be important to some quest.
I do have that too. There is a "crucible" in the "town" where you can combine items to make new ones (again similar to Diablo). It's a fun mechanic, but I don't want to lean to heavily on it. I find games where you go into the dungeon, amass a pile of rat's tails, sell them, repeat, to be super boring.
>I did try this, but my experience was that it made killing mobs predictable and boring. "Oh, look, the wizard dropped yet another robe." I deliberately sacrificed realism (which is of limited value in my book anyway) to get a more exciting, surprising game.
My opinion is somewhere between the two. While yes, repetitive loot is boring, seeing an enemy shoot fireballs at me and knowing its because of an item he has (an item i can loot), has its own thrill. "ooo! i want that!". It makes battles more fun, knowing that you are gonna get something cool.
> It means a large swath of monsters: jellies, giant insects, wolves, bears, spiders, serpents, etc. wouldn't drop anything
Sure they would - a jelly drops a potion made from its body, the other animals have stingers, teeth and claws that are excellent weapons, and skin or plates that make armor.
A petrified dead snake makes a great wand.
A web from a spider can be used as a trap item (throw it at someone and "stun" them for a time). Make it reusable by pulling back the cord attached to it.
If going for realism, it could be argued that rare ferocious beasts, or their unique body parts could have very high trophy value (as opposed to humans).
Just witness the extinction of many real life species that are killed for perceived magical qualities of a small body part. For added realism, it makes it easy to just leave the body to rot and sell the small rhino horn to shady criminals.
For added effect, if they are rare enough, they become more valuable the more you kill them...
In contrast this was one of the things I most liked about Everquest (in its early releases).
First, most loot had a reason to be there and some logic to it. You need bone chips? You'd go whack a skeleton. You needed some beetle eyes? Go whack a beetle. Bear meat or skin? Go hunt for bears. It gave the world a cohesiveness and logic that you didn't even have to think about.
Also in the early days you could give mobs items and they would equip them. If you traded a sword and shield with a skeleton and it would drop those back to you when you killed it. This was also pretty cool, because you could tell what damage to expect from the mobs based on what the mob looked like. If it was a skeleton wielding a staff you knew you'd found a catch because those would sell for a pretty penny.
Later on, in subsequent zones that all started to break down a bit more. But overall, I think it kinda retained this in essence. Had the game had a stronger crafting mechanic behind it (instead of being broken from the get go), it would have been quite interesting.
I agree whole heartedly on the just blindly gathering 100's of rat tails or wolf pelts being boring beyond redemption. But there's some charm to being able to hunt for what you need.
The Elder Scrolls series is pretty close to implementing exactly this in practice, and they solved this conundrum in an interesting way: To enchant gear, you need souls. Normally, you can't humanoid souls for this purpose (unless you use black soul gems, which are scarce and not seen in a good light), so you basically get gear from humanoids, and alchemy/enchanting bits from monsters.
> It means a large swath of monsters: jellies, giant insects, wolves, bears, spiders, serpents, etc. wouldn't drop anything.
I guess at a fundamental level it depends on what kind of game you want to make/play. To me the allure of RPG-style games is that they can be story vehicles. Run-of-the-mill animals dropping weapons and gems has the opposite effect on me: I think it disrupts the world's integrity and as a player I always think it's a design weakness.
In any case, they do drop something - their bodies.
> You'd end up basically just trying to kill "monsters" that are humans.
Nope, at least not if we're talking standard fantasy RPGs. You could argue that all the tool-using monsters are human-like, but to me that's not very accurate. If there's a moral in-game argument in there, well, you generally don't kill Goblins because they're not human, you kill them because they're evil or they attack you first. There are generally tons of tool-using monsters in fantasy settings that aren't even humanoid. But yeah, I think it's OK to have human bad guys as well. To me, basing the distinction whether to kill some creature on whether they're human or not feels weird and questionable.
> I think that's a cool idea, but in practice it doesn't seem to lead to very fun gameplay.
Obviously, I disagree. Not every mob needs to drop riches, especially if the loot doesn't make sense within the story. Providing predictable and nonsensical short-term rewards is not a player retention strategy I'm overly fond of, I might as well just install ProgressQuest and watch that for half an hour. On the other hand, there are many games that do just that, so your view is clearly commercially viable.
> "Oh, look, the wizard dropped yet another robe."
That's only a problem if the expectation is that every lootable item is indeed loot-worthy.
> I deliberately sacrificed realism (which is of limited value in my book anyway) to get a more exciting, surprising game.
I see you're not kidding about not caring for realism. That's of course totally fine, do your thing. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. My point is that I personally think the choice between fun and realism implies a false dichotomy. Yes, dropping "realistic" loot is a bit predictable - but it's a good kind of predictability that makes the in-game world more convincing. And with just a little bit of good will and creativity you can still make them drop unique and surprising things without breaking their character.
Maybe I'm mistaken but you sound a bit defensive, which was not my intention. Once again, this is not a critique of your game. It's a very personal opinion about loot and the style of games I like to play. At the end of the day, you're the guy building something amazing and I'm just a random dude on the internet who except for the occasional abysmal LD entry never even made a real game. So: rock on :)
Sure, but this is exactly how Titan Quest (not a roguelike, but an action-RPG) works. Animals will never drop spears, but if you see an enemy with a bow, you will most likely find a bow on its corpse (or nothing).
It's also worth pointing out that all sorts of realistic history has all sorts of random stuff being carried by combatants. Organised raiding parties that are returning will be carrying loads of valuable odds and ends. Stories abound of the stuff that was initially being carried on the retreat from Moscow for instance e.g. milking stools!
In the non-humanoid space you have nesting/crow like behaviour - i.e. "shiny" things, the most famous being dragons and gold. So it's entirely possible for whole classes of creatures to generically carry certain things.
> To me the allure of RPG-style games is that they can be story vehicles.
For my game, I'm not using it as a narrative vehicle. (Or, I am, but I want the narrative to be the player's experience, and not a story the game immerses them in.)
> There are generally tons of tool-using monsters in fantasy settings that aren't even humanoid.
Sure, but if you're going for realism, that still founders on the "how come my seven foot barbarian always fits perfectly in goblin armor?" problem.
Personally, I love the general fantasy environment. Dragons, trolls, swords, wizards. I dig the whole trope. But I'm not hung up on making a detailed, coherent fantasy world. Ultimately, I'm trying to make a fun game. The fantasy stuff is just trappings on top of abstract pieces. They are hugely important because they give the player some intuition about gameplay, but if I have to pick between a fun mechanic and a realistic one, I'll pick the fun one.
Real-life members of the clergy are perfectly capable of walking due north, but no one hates on chess for being unrealistic because bishops only go diagonally.
> Not every mob needs to drop riches, especially if the loot doesn't make sense within the story.
Sure, but the rarity of loot is orthogonal to how you pick loot for the mobs that do drop something.
> so your view is clearly commercially viable
I'm not trying to make a commercial game. I'll be open sourcing it. I'm just trying to make a game that's fun for me to play.
I don't have a lot of free time now that I have kids, so huge immersive detailed games with big stories aren't that appealing to me. I don't have time for that kind of commitment anyway. I want a game where I can drop into the dungeon for ten minutes, get a guaranteed sense of accomplishment from getting some XP and maybe get some great rare loot or kill something cool.
(Of course, the irony of spending an insane amount of time creating a game that is intended to not take much of my time to play isn't lost on me... Maybe I just like coding more than playing.)
> My point is that I personally think the choice between fun and realism implies a false dichotomy.
Absolutely right. Where I can make it more realistic I do. I think realism is really important for usability. To the degree that the game world is consistent, users can predict the effects of their actions.
For example, if you get hit with a cold attack in my game, you get "frozen" and your speed is lowered until it wears off. If you take fire damage after that, it will warm you up and cancel out the cold status. I think that's a nice little bit of edge case behavior that may delight a user when they see the game world following (sort of) the real world's rules.
DCSS works exactly like this: plenty of monsters don't drop anything useful. The other mobs rarely drop anything that useful (except for ammo). Actually, it turns out to be a great game.
I agree that DCSS is a great game, but I think that its loot system leaves much to be desired. Don't get me wrong, the user interface for item and inventory management is smooth as buttered silk (if you know your history, this is in fact the reason for DCSS's ascendance in the first place), but it merely serves to make tolerable the practice of sifting through mountains of worthless garbage to get at the goodies.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that monster drops in DCSS are universally useless, with the following exceptions: corpses, artifacts dropped by unique monsters, and a few god abilities that are powered by dungeon trash (with Jiyva's being the only one that's actually interesting). Other than that, all interesting items in the player's possession will have generated either randomly or via vault loot.
Recently, I re-discovered the ancient Baldur's Gate games (enhanced edition), and they do something similar. Mobs drop the actual equipment they have.
Loved that mechanics in Fallout; the mobs (being 99% human anyway) had equipment, which included weapon(s), armours and some random stuff like money, drugs you'd expect a particular character to have. They could use all of their equipment in combat, and that's what you were taking after defeating them.
If I recall correctly, in Baldur's Gate mobs could also use the items they had. This made for some particularly fun battles when a mob had a powerful artifact that they were able to use. I imagine it also made design easier: to create an interesting new boss fight, instead of having to create a new creature, the designer could just use a common mob equipped with a powerful artifact.
This can lead to a harder balancing problem, though, as the player becomes as powerful as the sum total of all previous monster equipment. If encounters aren't done in a specific order, that can be especially problematic.
That's a good point. One potential way to handle it is to make many of the powerful monsters optional, and then have a more difficult "bonus dungeon" for players who had defeated all the optional, powerful monsters. Many JRPGs I've played did this, as did the expansion to Baldur's Gate 2.
I have had this explained by a friend in the business as, it was between you and the item; not necessarily carried or wielded by your foe.
still it does make sense to more closely align items with the mobs that your fighting. This could be weapons, armors, trinkets, and such or craft supplies where you have to skin/harvest the kill.
Final Fantasy Tactics was a lot like that -- every random enemy in every random battle had a randomly generated name, and human enemies always had an interesting mix of level-appropriate armor and spells.
>Some loot traditionally comes from the body of the monster itself, like a rat's tail or a wolf's fur which you can bring to the next merchant or quest-giver for reward
Monster hunter follows this idea as well. Almost all the loot comes from killing and carving monster. When you are on a quest you can do some stuff on the side like fishing/mining etc and you will get rewards which can be used in crafting weapons and armour.
One of the many things I love about Dark Souls - enemies drop the arms/armor that they're wearing. It is a low to very low chance per drop, sometimes requiring farming if something you want isn't carried by a merchant, but the variance is good for normal gameplay.
I'm a huge fan of giving mobs some history and uniqueness, and that's an easy way to do it. A nice side effect is that you don't have to think about loot separately when designing the content, because it comes naturally from the design of the mob. This also means that, by definition, a mob can never drop an inappropriate item.
Recently, I re-discovered the ancient Baldur's Gate games (enhanced edition), and they do something similar. Mobs drop the actual equipment they have.
Some loot traditionally comes from the body of the monster itself, like a rat's tail or a wolf's fur which you can bring to the next merchant or quest-giver for reward. A more natural method of doing it would be solely through the skill/crafting system, instead of dropping pre-defined animal parts just because they happen to be important to some quest.