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.<p>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.<p>Recently, I re-discovered the ancient Baldur's Gate games (enhanced edition), and they do something similar. Mobs drop the actual equipment they have.<p>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.
Interesting, my $0.02:<p>Initially some of the drops are specified using percentages. My advice is to never use percentages when selecting chances to pick an item from an arbitrary list of items. Instead, use numbers which loosely correlate to ratios. Here is an example list of items:<p>1, 1, 2, 2<p>the chance of picking the first item is 1/(1+1+2+2) or 1:6. The chance of picking the last item is 2:6. Using this method, you can add arbitrary odds to the list and it will automatically total up the odds for you. For example:<p>1, 1, 2, 2, 3<p>The first is a 1:9 chance, the last is a 3:9 chance. The numbers still maintain relative chance next to one another - i.e. you are 3 times more likely to get the last item than the first.<p>This is better than using percentages because you can add items without having to recalculate the percentages so that everything adds up to one hundred percent (yes you could normalize the percentage but this still makes it tougher to understand the chance of each item relative to one another. If you want to make a high chance of dropping nothing, simply add a null item to the list with a really high chance, i.e.:<p>(null) 99, (diamond) 1<p>This results in a 99/100 chance of dropping nothing, and a 1/100 chance of dropping a diamond.
> It made it impossible for the player to seek certain items. Let’s say you’ve got a good kit of armor except you really could use some high quality boots. How do you fill in that gap?<p>In many games, believe it or not, is a actually intended. Once certain mobs start dropping certain items, people start camping only those mobs and ignoring everything else causing a large bottle neck for the population (in the case of multiplayer only obviously).<p>Additionally, say you give a mob 0.01% chance to drop The Sword of a Thousand Truths. And of course everyone wants the The Sword of a Thousand Truths. So every day you go out and farm these kobolds until your fingers are numb rather than exploring the world.<p>Finally, by providing a clear path to getting what you want, you will likely max out sooner and stop playing until the next content patch, which in turn means less revenue for your game
Did you look at Nethack? Certain monsters have set loot. Dwarves have a high chance of carrying a pickaxe, noble variants have a high chance of having dwarven mithril, shield, iron shoes. Same with Elves. Soldiers carry K- and C-rations. Paper golems leave piles of blank scrolls!<p>Monsters will pick up items. If you are in the dwarves mines and there's a mining dwarf about, gnomes and other creatures will pick up the piles of rocks they leave behind.<p>Additionally monsters with the right flag set will often use items. This can reveal their blessed/uncursed/cursed status ("The dagger welds itself to the goblin's hand!") or identify the item - which is sometimes a real pain, when a consumable you needed is used. ("The gnome zaps a wand of lightning! You die...")
Neat idea! I am constantly impressed by the number of different and interesting things that Bob works on. All of his game programming work, and his several (if prototypical) programming languages, each exploring some unique idea. <a href="https://github.com/munificent?tab=repositories" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/munificent?tab=repositories</a><p>I've always wanted to write a roguelike. I wrote a woefully incomplete MUD a long time ago. It had the interesting (to me) property of representing items and features as .NET assemblies. Servers could link so that a doorway could move players, with their items and effects, seamlessly onto another. If I recall correctly .NET even had the security model to (nominally) support it safely, where all items may invoke only approved engine APIs, and where trusted assemblies might be loaded while untrusted items and their consumers pass through to be loaded again later on another server. The idea was to enable a sort of open web of interconnected MUD worlds. Only ever made it to the tech demo stage; I recall spending a long time on that system, event handling, and other engine features (classic game dev mistake) and never got around to game content! I don't regret the time: it was primarily a project of exploration and the act if building just the engine was its own reward. (Tomorrow I might try to dig up my old source for the MUD but I suspect it will be like <a href="http://www.xkcd.com/1360/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xkcd.com/1360/</a> )<p>Anyway, could anyone recommend a good OSS roguelike that's accessible and easy to hack on? Looks like Angband is OSS, and of course there's NetHack, which if I remember correctly is written in C. Stone Soup's site appears to be down.
> I learned the hard way that a huge part of the fun of roguelikes is the “lottery effect”. Every time you kill a monster there should be a small chance of getting something really amazing.<p>That's one way to handle item drops, but it's not the only way, even considering only Angband variants. The other popular loot system has you making your own stuff -- instead of "dragons always drop dragon scale mail" (boring?), you'd have something like "dragons always drop scales, and you can use them to forge dragon scale mail".
In the paper and pencil RPG world, if you want to generate a reasonable level 5 sorcerer player character or whatever, there are (usually) extensive systems to go direct to lvl 5 and skip the earlier levels. So just generate your NPCs / Monsters the same way. Obviously all paper and pencil RPGs have a "system" for generating level 1 PCs, and randomly simulating in a computer the lifespan of a character as it levels up doesn't sound all that hard or time consuming.<p>I fooled around with this idea in the 80s and it wasn't feasible computationally at the time, but it would work now. One funny problem I ran into is a stereotypical adventure eating monster tends to accumulate a lot of lower level adventurer cruft, not as much good stuff as you might hope for. Lets be realistic, a dragon is going to have to spend a large part of its lifespan eating unlucky dwarves if you hope to catch it with a cache of exotic gems harvested from those dwarves. A gang of thieves would on the surface have "harvested" lots of loot from peasants and occasional nobles over the years, but over the years most of that has drained out due to simple weight and need to eat. So thieves were another disappointment. As I recall corpse robber monsters tended to accumulate the best loot over time. Also nest type monsters, due to inability to move / spend anything they get, killer trees got the best loot. This can't be an original idea? I think this is how dwarf fortress generates people but I'm not sure?<p>For pathfinder, although I can't recall the name, there is an entire book (article? chapter?) just on custom NPC/Monster design techniques. Actually using a OGL licensed scheme might have issues. But the existence of one solution does imply the problem is solvable in at least one situation (LOL).
Great read!<p>"In Angband, any monster that drops stuff can drop pretty much anything. Monsters have a level, and if they drop loot, it just randomly picks any item near the monsters level."<p>-> (RPG related) I felt like this was an issue with Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2. You basically just had to mash around in D3 grinding the top-level monsters and hoping... whereas in Diablo 2 you could make conscious choices over where to farm if your goal was to find a certain item (albeit the drop chances were extremely low, so most people just did Meph runs or Baal runs and traded their way up). Here though the author is doing drops way more realistic than either of those games heh, so that's quite an awesome feat.<p>Itemization seems really tricky; analyzing Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 can actually provide some interesting insight into how item systems affect gameplay etc... maybe those devs even tried doing it realistically at some point but found it didn't pan out gameplay-wise?
Back when I played adventure/RPG games...the one thing that broke me out of the suspension of disbelief in most games was how, after defeating an enemy who was clearly using some amazing equipment, your party wouldn't bother picking it up and instead, pick up a few GP and maybe a "Short Sword"<p>Of course, I realize now that that was a reasonable constraint of game design and balance. So it's not coincidental that my favorite RPG of all time, Ultima 7, had a famously in-depth inventory system, and yet also was so unbalanced that combat was mostly pointless.
Folks who enjoyed this article might also like the book Game Programming Patterns: <a href="http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/</a> - also written by the author Bob Nystrom.
The article is basically describing leveled lists, which is what Fallout and the Elder Scrolls games use: <a href="http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Leveled_Lists" rel="nofollow">http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Leveled_Lists</a>
[meta]<p>The title mangling introduced a case of RAS syndrome. RPG games is redundant since the G stands for game.<p>The original title of this article is just "Dropping Loot". If you're going to mangle the title, at least mangle it in a way that doesn't introduce a new error!
OK, so this increases realism, but at the cost of making balancing much harder. If you decide you want the player to get healing potions at a certain rate, you now don't have a single place where you could specify that.
I recommend having a listen through some of the <a href="http://www.roguelikeradio.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.roguelikeradio.com/</a> podcasts. They focus heavily on roguelike design and development topics. I don't believe they have featured a podcast specifically on loot but it has featured as a topic in several of them.
It would be quite neat to extend this with an evolutionary algorithm for picking starting positions in the hierarchy and probabilities based upon some proxies of enjoy-ability or play-ability.