
Dropping Loot - alphabetam
http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/07/05/dropping-loot/
======
Udo
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.

~~~
munificent
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.

~~~
Udo
_> 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 :)

~~~
voronoff
You do realize this is a loot system for a roguelike, right? Not a story
driven CRPG.

~~~
mercurial
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).

------
gavanwoolery
Interesting, my $0.02:

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:

1, 1, 2, 2

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:

1, 1, 2, 2, 3

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.

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.:

(null) 99, (diamond) 1

This results in a 99/100 chance of dropping nothing, and a 1/100 chance of
dropping a diamond.

~~~
munificent
Oh, great comment! I've gone back and forth on exactly this a number of times.
I'm not a big fan of percents for exactly the reason you specify. The reason
I'm still doing it instead of automatically totalling the odds is because it
makes it easier to specify the chances of not dropping anything at all.

> 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.:

Brilliant. I'm going to change my code and do that. Thank you!

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Check out
[http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Item_Generation_Tutorial](http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Item_Generation_Tutorial)
for a slightly more complex system that IMO is a lot more flexible and can
give some truly astronomical drop rates on exceptionally rare items (i.e. Zod
runes, Tyrael's Might sacred armor).

The trick D2 uses is using a table similar to this:

    
    
        TreasureClass    Item1    Prob1    Item2    Prob2    Item3    Prob3    ...
        runes23          zod      1        runes22  5000
        runes22          cham     1        runes21  5000
        runes21          jah      1        ber      1        runes20  5000
        ...
    

As you can see, some of the items are actually TreasureClasses, which have
their own entries. Whenever the item picker lands on a TreasureClass, it drops
to the corresponding table row and "rolls the dice" again, so to speak. This
is repeated until the item picker lands on an actual item.

If you look at TreasureClassEx.txt from Diablo II, you'll see that they
further use this system to calculate nodrop rates, item generation per act/per
difficulty, etc. Pretty cool once you wrap your head around it!

~~~
gavanwoolery
That's a good idea and probably what I'd do if I were to take it one step
further - in particular if you went with null item drops, it would be great to
"subclass" that so that its ratio does not interfere with the rest of your
calculations. I.e. - 1:20 chance of dropping an item, 1:6 chance that it is
item type XYZ.

+1 for Diablo 2, the game that destroyed my grades in school. :)

------
rschmitty
> 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?

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).

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.

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

~~~
thaumasiotes
What does this have to do with a single-player roguelike? I can sort of see

> 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

but playing for such a duration is already a massive design failure.

~~~
logicchains
In most of the roguelikes I've played mobs don't continuously respawn like
that anyway. If you stay in a dungeon too long, either they'll be no more mobs
and you'll starve, or higher level mobs will randomly start popping in.

------
aeberbach
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!

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.

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...")

~~~
r00fus
^ This.

Nethack is still unparalleled in how dangerous a monster can be with "your"
loot (think you kill a monster with a magic missile, it drops loot, but before
you can get to it another one dives into the pile, and quaffs the potion of
invisibility/healing you desperately needed).

------
jcrites
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.
[https://github.com/munificent?tab=repositories](https://github.com/munificent?tab=repositories)

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 [http://www.xkcd.com/1360/](http://www.xkcd.com/1360/) )

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.

~~~
munificent
> Anyway, could anyone recommend a good OSS roguelike that's accessible and
> easy to hack on?

As soon as I get around to open-sourcing mine, I'd recommend it. :)

It's a pretty clean, small codebase. I've spent a _ton_ of time designing it
to have a clean extensible architecture. It's written in Dart and runs on the
web, which is nice.

I just need to check with work, but that should be fine and I'll put it online
soon.

If you like C#, the previous incarnation of my game is already online:
[https://bitbucket.org/munificent/amaranth](https://bitbucket.org/munificent/amaranth)

I've pretty much abandoned it, but you're welcome to do with it as you like.

------
thaumasiotes
> 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.

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".

~~~
craigching
He addresses all of these points in the blog post.

~~~
thaumasiotes
...um, no he doesn't? I've made one "all of these points", and it's not
addressed. Where does he talk about making items?

~~~
craigching
ugh, apologies, I must've read someone's comment above and attributed it to
the post. Sorry about that, I'll upvote you.

------
VLM
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.

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?

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).

------
cclogg
Great read!

"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."

-> (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.

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?

~~~
ordinary
Having played both games extensively, I feel the most interesting thing to
analyze about in which parts of the game are randomized, and how that
randomization impacts gameplay. Let me pick 2 examples.

In Diablo 2, areas were randomized internally but externally consistent: the
individual makeup of areas would be different every game, but the connections
between different areas would remain the same.[1] This means that repeatedly
exploring the same area remains entertaining for a relatively long time in
Diablo 2. This is important, because as you say, items have a higher chance of
dropping from certain monsters than from others. If you "have to" keep farming
the same area over and over, it helps prevent boredom if that map is different
every time.

In Diablo 3, the internal layout for each outdoor area is always the same, and
even indoor areas are relatively static, compared to Diablo 2's. After a
while, you know the best way to maximize efficiency, which encourages people
to repeatedly farm one area, but this is a double edged sword: once you know
what the most profitable way of playing the game is, playing any other is much
less attractive. This actually reduces the range of (rational) possible
actions in the game, inducing boredom more quickly. In addition, some of the
best areas to farm in Diablo 3 are the dungeons. These are (smaller and
optional) sub-levels within areas. Each area had fixed dungeons in Diablo 2.
In Diablo 3 areas can often spawn 5 or 6 different special events, while it
has only 2 or 3 (fixed, just like the areas themselves) spots for such events.
This adds another layer of randomization: you need to be lucky twice: once to
find the dungeon and once again to find the item in the dungeon.[2]

Something else that changed between Diablo 2 and 3 is the way item affixes are
randomized. In both games, magical items can spawn with certain properties,
and those properties have stat ranges. You might find a Short Sword with the
Red prefix, giving +1 or +2 damage. In Diablo 2, the best items (Uniques, Sets
and Runewords) had fixed affixes with random stat ranges: you might find a
Tyrael's Might with anything between +20 Str and +30 Str (in addition to have
a dozen other affixes), but that it would get a significant +Str roll was
guaranteed. Even the worst Tyrael's Might was a great find. Relatively casual
players would be happy with any stat rolls, while true Diablo 2 addicts would
make do with nothing less than a +30 roll. Such a perfect roll could (and
still can) increase the value of an item by a factor of 10 to 1000+,[3] even
if the objective difference between a random roll and a perfect roll is fairly
small in the grand scheme of things.

In Diablo 3, this was thrown out the window. Legendary and Set items get
_some_ fixed affixes, but even if you got the best item in the game and
perfect rolls on the fixed affixes, you still need 1-3 other affixes to get a
genuinely good item. In addition, the stat ranges were much wider. Immortal
King's Tribal Binding could get +30 or +200 Str, and with the right random
affix, all the way to +300 Str.[4] This makes the relation between gear cost
and power fairly linear. You might have to find half a dozen Tribal Bindings
before you got one worth using. In addition to finding the dungeon, and then
the item, you also need to get good affixes on the item, then get good rolls
on your affixes. Finally, in some slots, the best items in the game were not
Legendaries, with their half-random setup, but Rares, with fully random
affixes, which instead of 1-3 good affixes, need 5 or 6. It is no wonder then
that players were unable to find their own items, and were forced to turn to
an auction house, where they were primarily supplied by bots and gold farmers
(unknowingly, but still).

Blizzard tried to address some of these issues in the Reaper of Souls
expansion. Here's a few examples relating to the above points:

* Enchanting was added: allows you to replace one of each item's affixes with a different one (only one affix per item, but you can repeatedly change the same affix until you get one you like), reducing the impact of random affixes.

* Rifts were introduced: random dungeons with random monsters and a random boss at the end, which are generally slightly more efficient than just farming normal areas.

* The auction house was removed, reducing the impact of bots and farmers, allowing an increase in the drop rate. Trading in general was removed as well, making it impossible to turn to third-party trading sites (as was common in Diablo 2).

* The stat ranges on affixes were reduced, lessening the dependence on highly random items. Many Legendary items got unique Legendary-only affixes that (when combined in clever ways) make them far better than fully random Rare items.

Overall, this has significantly improved the game, but having played Diablo 2,
Diablo 3 and Diablo 3 after the Reaper of Souls expansion, I can't help but
feel like these are in the end just patches on a fundamentally flawed design,
and that some of those patches actively prevent it from becoming better.
Diablo 2, on release, was a bad implementation of a great design. This allowed
it to be improved over the course of almost a decade (sporadically by modern
standards, but impressive at the time). Diablo 3, on release, was a mediocre
implementation of a bad design. Blizzard improved the implementation (at
significant cost, to the point of forcing them to postpone the expansion), and
details of the design, but it is still only a good implementation of a
mediocre design, and improving it much further strikes me as uneconomical, to
put it mildly.

_____

[1] For example:
[http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/maps/act1.shtml](http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/maps/act1.shtml)

[2] It's worth pointing out the two different types of randomization in games.
One is the type the player can influence, like which area to farm and whether
to play solo or in groups. The other is forced upon players, like what affixes
your drops have or whether a dungeon spawns in a given area. Players tolerate
the latter to much higher degree than the former.

[3] Filled with jargon, but:
[http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=59979863&f=52](http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=59979863&f=52).
Look at Hellfire Torches for a typical desireable item, and Black Hades for an
extreme example.

[4] These are the post-expansion stats, but it illustrates the principle,
which is much reduced, but still very much alive:
[https://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/immortal-kings-tribal-
bindi...](https://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/immortal-kings-tribal-binding).

~~~
tks2103
Play Path of Exile. It's a much better game than Diablo 3.

Whether or not Rares or Uniques are best in slot items is a matter of
designers taste when it comes to Action RPGs. You can tune the item drop
tables however you want. I would argue its nicer to have rares be BiS items,
as its more fun when you see item diversity in the top builds. Seeing everyone
walk around with the same Uniques is boring.

Diablo 3 fails because it does not provide enough ways to customize a
character's build. There are a handful of stats that are important, and they
mostly scale linearly. The skills are all unlocked, and you can change them at
will.

If you do not have enough ways to customize your character, the item drop
tables are moot. You can't drop items that are interesting if there are no
interesting stats.

Path of Exile is the true successor to Diablo 2. The options for customization
are endless, so every item that drops has the potential to be interesting. You
should check that out if you are interested in ARPGs, especially something
like Diablo 2. And if you are really interested in game analysis, their
systems are really unmatched in today's game marketplace.

Diablo 3 is not a game in the Diablo genre. D3 is closer to something like
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, or the X-Men Legends games.

Edit: I focused on the itemization part of your post, but I totally missed the
map part of your post.

I'm not sure map randomness was relevant at all in Diablo 2. That game was
pretty much all Meph runs, and then Baal runs. The maps didn't really matter,
you just teleported to the boss and hoped for good drops.

~~~
ordinary
I've played Path of Exile a little, but while I'm don't usually care much
about graphics in game, the style in PoE was an incredible turnoff for me.
It's a real shame, because the game design indeed has some very interesting
ideas, and I would've loved to explore them in more depth.

I agree with your point on maps. Diablo 2's focus on bosses over general
farming was one of its weak points. The map structure would've been more
important if Blizzard had made boss runs and general farming rewarding in
distinct ways.

There are other things that I feel Diablo 3 did wrong, but my comment was
getting dangerously long as it was: lack of build permanence (you touched on
this), non-existent social features (slightly improved in the expansion),
uninspired items (less so since the expansion) and badly tuned reward
structure (I appear to be alone in feeling the expansion has not improved this
aspect).

------
danso
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"

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.

~~~
vidarh
Some of that could be "worked around" by having said enemy's amazing equipment
breaking during the fight.

~~~
xerophtye
Halo 1 actually does that. The Covenant Elites have neregy swords that
dissipate once you kill them, and the grunts had plasma cannons that would
just explode when the grunt was killed. That's why it was so epic when they
made those weapons pick-able in Halo 2

(And Tartarus's Gravity Hammer in Halo 3!!)

Still waiting to be able to pick up Hunter's built-in arm weapons though....

------
jcrites
Folks who enjoyed this article might also like the book Game Programming
Patterns:
[http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/) \-
also written by the author Bob Nystrom.

------
dbbolton
The article is basically describing leveled lists, which is what Fallout and
the Elder Scrolls games use:
[http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Leveled_Lists](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Leveled_Lists)

------
nathanb
[meta]

The title mangling introduced a case of RAS syndrome. RPG games is redundant
since the G stands for game.

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!

~~~
judk
Redundancy is an important part of communication and error- robustness I both
human and computer languages.

RAS Syndrome is a sweet spot trading off economy of characters/syllables vs
clarity of message. As with most things humans gravitate to, it is a rational
act, not a stupid one.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

~~~
nathanb
Nope, completely disagree. It is not a rational act, it indicates
thoughtlessness in language. And much as I like the Emerson quote, it does not
apply here. The question isn't consistency, it's accuracy and clarity. The
redundancy does not add anything -- your assertion that it adds error
robustness makes no sense because the communication medium is not lossy.

Even if in the general case redundancy can be useful -- I don't correct
others' spoken conversation so long as I can understand what's being
communicated any more than you do -- in this case it detracts and distracts.

------
brazzy
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Just for once I'd love to play a game that emphasizes realism at the cost of
game balance. Because constant focus on the latter in pretty much every game
makes for a lot of ridiculous and suspension-of-disbelief-killing situations
like a group of soldiers with chainguns shooting down from the sky an armoured
FTL-capable Battlecruiser, or small bats dropping swords and a metric ton of
gold from their "inventory".

Realism is unbalanced, but guess what, the real world is also unbalanced. I
want to play a game reflecting that.

~~~
brazzy
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to play that game for long. If you want the
real world, you know where to find it. People play games to have fun. To some
degree (but much smaller than most people think), realism increases fun, but
when it makes the game frustrating, boring and unwinnable, it's bad.

~~~
mercurial
But you can make great games with more emphasis on simulation. For instance,
Operation Flashpoint/ARMA(?) or the original Rainbow 6, where firefights are
absolutely deadly.

------
anakha
I recommend having a listen through some of the
[http://www.roguelikeradio.com/](http://www.roguelikeradio.com/) 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.

------
itamarhaber
I used to NetHack... any item was obtainable with the Wand of Wishing :)

~~~
TophWells
And it was always blessed greased +2 grey dragon scale mail.

~~~
aeberbach
L - a swirly potion

If you spelled it "grey", you didn't get your wish!

~~~
lmm
That's now fixed.

------
nmrm
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.

------
rasz_pl
I only play with "drop all"* checked

* [http://ja2v113.pbworks.com/](http://ja2v113.pbworks.com/)

------
percentcer
In which tougher monsters drop better quality loot.

~~~
nmrm
Well, yes. But I think this undersells it.

This is probably the best TL;DR: The author created a nice way of specifying
loot dropping behavior such that (begin quote): _" Any monster has a chance of
dropping almost any item, so you have that pleasant anticipation. At the time
time, the probabilities are weighted so that each monster still has a unique
“feel” to their drops, and you can seek out monsters that are more likely to
drop what you want."_

And the author achieved this with a concise but clear DSL in which you specify
the probability of starting at a particular point in the equipment hierarchy,
and then an object is chosen by traversing (probabilistically) the equipment
hierarchy.

