Goblin Squad Member
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The sneak peek thread was turning into a loot thread so here is your loot thread.
What I don't mean by logical loot is, "Hey I killed this deer and it had a magic scroll and +2 chainmail on it!"
Goblins and ogres could have some coins made of precious metal and armor that we can't use but can refine into player crafted armor. Deer, bears, and the like may not have anything but the parts (pelts/eyes/etc.) that trained hunters can salvage with a skill in the same vein as extracting materials from the ground. A web or nest might have stuff but make us look there instead of on the critter's corpse.
Also if an enemy is going to have loot they can use like a potion or weapon or armor can they maybe use it while they fight us? I don't know if it's too much server stress to know what items a unit has before it's looted but that's on my wishlist.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suppose I started that in the other thread...
When I said that I would like to see greater relative monetary rewards for low-level players, I was once again miscommunicating. What I meant are valuables, whether in the form of money, a usable weapon (where applicable), consumables, or other valuable items. I hope the players receive less "vendor junk" and more items that other players will pay for.
I don't think it's out of line to increase rewards in this way, as long as the difficulty of average PvE encounters is heightened. And by the looks of things, that'll be the case.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If they have it, and use it, wouldn't it be gone then?
(in line with Potions and Scrolls, Not weapons and armor)
There's a chance of it. But I'm tired of defeating something and finding 3 healing potions and thinking why did you let me kill you so fast without even trying to use those?
And if there is a special weapon or armor I'd like to see them using something that looks different as they fight and gain the bonuses of it. Why would you keep the +2 short sword in your pack and use a crappy rusty short sword in fights?
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Goblin Squad Member
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It doesn't seem likely useable weapons or armor will drop as loot, just armor and weapon-like material for refining. Everything from GW indicates players will be crafting that above a very beginner level of gear from NPC vendors.
Most of what I talked about was not finding bears carrying chain mail around the woods and a wish that if potions and scrolls are going to drop (we haven't heard), let things that can use them try to use them on us like if they were trying to win.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If newbies stumble upon sword that other want, they under cut the crafters and there will be unsanctioned PvP on them.
As long as looted gear is significantly worse than basic crafted gear in some way, I don't think that undercuts the market. Goblins make a cobbled-together weapon called a "dogslicer" (Golarion goblins tend to hate & fear dogs). It's generally sized for a small creature, and that alone makes it an inferior weapon unless you're a gnome or halfling. Add to that the fact that they tend to break on 5% of swings and it will soon go from inferior to scrap. Still, if your other option is punching zombies without an Unarmed Strike skill, it may be worth using the crappy blade until you have a bit of coin for something more serviceable. There has to be a way for someone to recover from a death in which they lose everything, and looting or scrounging a dogslicer or club may be enough.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If they have it, and use it, wouldn't it be gone then?
(in line with Potions and Scrolls, Not weapons and armor)There's a chance of it. But I'm tired of defeating something and finding 3 healing potions and thinking why did you let me kill you so fast without even trying to use those?
Maybe he had 4 and they were on cool down?
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Creature rewards are primarily crafting components, and we've been trying very hard to keep them things that make sense for the creature that generates them. Any non-component items that drop off of creatures will always follow the agenda of making the crafting system cooler or providing something it doesn't, rather than supplanting crafting.
There is no vendor trash. If treasure is meant to be financial, we presently expect that it will be in the form of coin, rather than something that has no purpose other than being turned into coin at an NPC.
Admittedly, that loses us some illusionism. For example, if you get a bunch of coin off an animal, hopefully you'll think, "I found easily fungible but crafting-unsuitable trade goods," rather than, "Why did this animal have a stack of gold pieces?" Our coins are somewhat of an abstraction anyway, and may very well represent more than just metal currency. I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .
Admittedly, that loses us some illusionism. For example, if you get a bunch of coin off an animal, hopefully you'll think, "I found easily fungible but crafting-unsuitable trade goods," rather than, "Why did this animal have a stack of gold pieces?" Our coins are somewhat of an abstraction anyway, and may very well represent more than just metal currency. I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .
Or... This fox I just killed must've eaten a traveler, and swallowed his bag of coins.
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Goblin Squad Member
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[silly post]
How about some magical realism in the loot?
World's finest MMORPG web comic
[/silly post]
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Goblin Squad Member
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I suppose some sort of drip-feed or "ker-ching" is important?
I was thinking skinning & butchering (clothing/food) skill to then take back to settlement and auto gain coin? Could argue also simply "defusing the danger to the people" too is always paid work to be had for adventurers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If you give coins weight, and do not do the auto-exchange of copper -> silver -> gold that happens in many other games, then you can easily get the effect of filling inventory with weight, to a lesser degree. Giving copper through animal drops would cause folks out farming animals to burn through carry capacity. If you farm out 500 cp (not sure how reasonable it is, but simple math) then in order to turn your 10 pounds of coin into .1 pound of coin you will have to return to a town and find a bank.
Not sure if it is needed, but it would be a mid-point in the realism.
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Goblin Squad Member
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"Defusing the danger to people" sounds dangerously like a kill 10 rats quest. While theoretically plausible the gaming industry might not miss it either but PFO has escalations to fill that role.
I feel fine with not getting coin from critters that don't use financial systems. A skill to gather meat or pelts is good, and a way to gather mundane to exotic crafting ingredients (separate skill or higher levels of the original) is all I would expect of corpses from rabbits to dragons. Nests are a different story.
As much as we're concerned with realism the true bottom line of a game is fun and to that end I think we're all understanding if there are 2 or 3 core believabilities we need to suspend whose benefits ripple put to the rest of the game. Access to coin would be the first on my list. Who wants to role play storing and moving heavy trunks of metal around instead of doing other things with game time?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Speaking of 10 rats quest, I'd rather get rat tails as loot than gold, if rat tails are a component in some alchemical recipes. Or if rat predation affects farming POIs, perhaps the owners of the POIs need some number of rat tails every week to keep their farm at full capacity; they might pay for tails.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The escalation starts with an increase in rats. As the number of rats increase characters start getting ill (and NPCs vanish with illness?). Goblins are planting specially enchanted rat food around the town at night to make the rats more dangerous. Acting on the orders of ogre mages or necromancers somewhere outside the town. Left uncured the illness turns those it kills into zombies. Skeletons exposed to the rats rise from the ground and forgotten subterranean catacombs. Tourism revenues go down 20% due to visitors being eaten by the undead*. Inside the catacombs there's evidence it's really a mid-level wight manipulating it all. The rats' entrails are the only way to craft talismans that negate the affects (debuffs) of the illness and lead back and allow entry to the wight's magically obfuscated center of operations.
That's a kill 10 rats I can get behind.
AND NONE OF THEM DROPPED GOLD!!!
*- The settlement's DI might be dropping due to prevalence of illness. How's that for a plot twist? Maybe an NPC settlement to stay fair to players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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"Defusing the danger to people" sounds dangerously like a kill 10 rats quest. While theoretically plausible the gaming industry might not miss it either but PFO has escalations to fill that role.
I mean if the question: "Why is this mob (now it's dead) laying gold coin?", then you could have every newbie going to a town and signing a magical contract that they kill mobs to make the place safer, the "magic" will do it's work and debit their account with gc. Solves the conundrum Stephen mentioned. The only thing is you could add some sort of intermediary step that eg "rat tails are proof" of rat-catching eg? Perhaps "essence of rat" is used in various commodities "perfume, spice powder, chicken feed etc". :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .
I wouldn't call it a demand, but I would prefer it if mobs that didn't use Coin didn't drop Coin.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't think it matters to me if every mob drops coin, if when you loot a mob the amount is just automatically added to players coin stash without any extra clicks and maybe the loot window doesn't even show the amount of coin the mob had.
Actually, if there's no "ka-ching" sound when Coins are added after killing a rat and if I don't have to click them to add them, I don't think I'd care either.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The biggest issue with above concerns is reconciling "mobs that don't use coin shouldn't drop it" and "we aren't going to have vendor trash". Not that it's an irreconcilable issue; it merely takes more thought and planning when assigning drops compared to the usual themepark.
I for one am okay with animal mobs having a pile of coin on their body, with the understanding that it's in various useful parts of the body and the coin is just an abstraction. It's fine to me to skip the middle step of double clicking a bunch of items in your inventory to give them to an NPC.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .I wouldn't call it a demand, but I would prefer it if mobs that didn't use Coin didn't drop Coin.
Would it be more realistic to have a nebulous bag represent "vendor trash" looted from a mob to be sold? We do not really want to spend valuable artist time coming up with inventory representations for vendor trash, do we?
I fully support eliminating the concept of vendor trash and using an abstraction that reaches the same end. Alternatively, we could just remove financial gain of any kind from most animal kills aside from what crafting / spell materials could be salvaged from them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As another alternative, make the animals much more rare then your typical MMO (not just standing around in big groups waiting to be killed, but roaming the countryside in sparse and spread out populations). Give them more value as a result, and maybe implement a tracking skill which can vaguely point you toward the nearest of a generic animal type (for example, nearest bear, but whether it's a young brown bear or a dire grizzly is unknown).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Alternatively, we could just remove financial gain of any kind from most animal kills aside from what crafting / spell materials could be salvaged from them.
That's more along the lines of what I was thinking.
I don't care for it when I get resources like Bones or Teeth or Hides as loot drops off of mobs. It seems like there ought to be a Skill I need to have in order to get those, and if I don't have that Skill then I don't see those resources. I think it bothers me from an RP perspective that the game is forcing my character to have yanked loose teeth out of the rat skull.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As another alternative, make the animals much more rare then your typical MMO (not just standing around in big groups waiting to be killed, but roaming the countryside in sparse and spread out populations).
I really, really liked the way DarkFall had static Monster Spawn areas rather than a countryside densely packed with mobs.
I've always hated the standard MMO practice of making you wade (or evade) through a sea of mobs in order to get from one side of a zone to the other.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I'm with the "loot that makes sense" crowd. Make everyone able to collect the very basic stuff (rat tails), somewhat more advanced stuff with the Survival skill (field-dressed venison), and specialized materials with an appropriate specific Profession skill (tanner, furrier, butcher, etc).
The stuff being sold for bounty (vendor trash) could have value as spell components and the like, so either you take your rat tails to town and sell them, or if you have the Profession to recognize and collect components yourself, you could convert them into generic 'components' which could be used to create or refill a component pouch.
I also don't think we should have inventory 'slots' like WoW. Either make the UI a catchall like UO does, or make a virtual slot system which just adds slots as necessary and only tracks the encumbrance, not the UI space. 40 suits of armour and 40 differently-coloured skeins of yarn should not take up the same amount of backpack space because of the UI design.
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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I support abstracting vendor trash into notional cash. The minor added verisimilitude from gathering scraps of meat from animals and selling them isn't worth the added inventory management or added art development. If my sense of immersion demands it then I'll just imagine it happening behind the scenes.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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It seems like there is a fundamental concept missing from the discussion of how killing animals creates coin. Some solutions call for the dead animal to spawn coin directly, some call for the dead animal to spawn tokens and those tokens to be destroyed to spawn coin, and some solutions call for certain classes of creature to not be a coin faucet at all.
I suspect the missing context lies in a paradigm shift to a space where killing creatures is not the major source of coin, but rather something that is part of the process of creating coin; you don't kill things to create coin, you kill things as part of the process of doing the thing that creates coin.
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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@Decius: Such as what? Remember that crafting, settlement building, warfare, banditry, and most other player activities do not generate coin. They simply move coin between players. So while your paradigm shift is interesting in terms of an individual character acquiring coin, it doesn't make much sense as a coin font for the game as a whole.
The basic fonts are:
1 direct coin drops
2 drops of items sellable to NPCs for cash (potentially via some layer of processing or trade but remember it doesn't generate new coin until it's sold to an NPC)
3 some equivalent to quest rewards (kill 10 rats, and complex versions thereof)
4 some variation of insurance
I don't particularly prefer options 2 & 3 over option 1. They amount to the same thing, you're just making the player jump through hoops in the name of verisimilitude. Which is fine if the hoops are fun, but often they're not, and they typically don't encourage meaningful player interaction.
What am I missing?
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Goblin Squad Member
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...I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .
If the accumulation of such coin is not easily noticeable (it simply adds value to your existing purse) then it would be much less objectionable than the sound of an old fashioned cash register accompanied by floaty dollar signs.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Will Cooper: I don't think you're missing much. Font 2 (vendor trash) has been closed off up-thread by Cheney; Font 3 (quest rewards) is supposed to be sort of minimal in a player-dominated sandbox. So the primary coin source almost has to be direct drops.
I would say that farm, manor house or other POIs might/could be a possible faucet for coin, the rents collected from commoner NPCs. Players would basically be building a less useful structure for the rents rather than a POI with a more direct role in the settlement crafting economy. That idea's totally out of my hat, though.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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NPC rents don't make sense as the major coin faucet, because NPC wages are a major coin sink.
However, I think that coin and/or art items make perfect sense as things to be found in ruins and dungeons. Fighting monsters is part of exploring those locations, but fighting more monsters is not the best way to find more treasure.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I'm with the "loot that makes sense" crowd. Make everyone able to collect the very basic stuff (rat tails), somewhat more advanced stuff with the Survival skill (field-dressed venison), and specialized materials with an appropriate specific Profession skill (tanner, furrier, butcher, etc).
The stuff being sold for bounty (vendor trash) could have value as spell components and the like, so either you take your rat tails to town and sell them, or if you have the Profession to recognize and collect components yourself, you could convert them into generic 'components' which could be used to create or refill a component pouch.I also don't think we should have inventory 'slots' like WoW. Either make the UI a catchall like UO does, or make a virtual slot system which just adds slots as necessary and only tracks the encumbrance, not the UI space. 40 suits of armour and 40 differently-coloured skeins of yarn should not take up the same amount of backpack space because of the UI design.
You've picked ideas from my rp daydreams. :) Really nice ideas.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm hopeful that npcs/monsters and loot types can be tied into crafting, alignment and reputation.
For instance perhaps certain potions or poisons require collecting body parts which may be an evil act to collect, craft from, and use. Maybe elf hearts or unicorn horns. Would create more variety in random encounter wandering 'monsters', and lead to players having to make choices rather than taking the approach of killing anything that moves. 'good' alchemical ingredients might come from good outsiders, but the act of killing their owner would presumably be an evil act. Could lead to trade and/or moral choices.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .I wouldn't call it a demand, but I would prefer it if mobs that didn't use Coin didn't drop Coin.
This would be my stance as well.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This would be my stance as well.I am curious whether that'll be jarring for enough people that a demand for some kind of intermediary step that explains why a dead monster turns into currency will ultimately be demanded :) .I wouldn't call it a demand, but I would prefer it if mobs that didn't use Coin didn't drop Coin.
Stephen, leave it as you have it for now... Waste time making it more "real" once we hit some EE point where you are looking for something to do.
Everyone... seriously, stop asking them to do stupid pointless things... Who cares if a bear drops a few gp for now. That can work that stuff in later...
That is the point of having an EE, and building the game over time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Vendor trash and animals dropping coins are generally just bad.
Using our rats example. It doesn't really make sense for rats to carry money. It also doesn't really make sense for a vendor to just give you money for rat parts. At a glance it almost looks like it is pointless to have rats outside of maybe them dropping alchemical components.
But we can give a role for rats that involves the money system. Rats would logically be eating food supplies in a settlement. If this is handled by the rat population increasing the rate at which a "food" stat for a settlement is consumed, or just a penalty to development index representing lost food and disease spreading in the settlement.
This means having rats costs somebody money, and it might be a good idea for settlements to keep a small standing bounty on rats to encourage players to deal with their rat problems, and it probably would serve as a more logical and natural source for the classic newbie quest.
Other animals could produce more directly profitable results. The use of a settlements "food" stat would encourage the collection of meats, so would an actual cooking skill. Hides are good raw material for crafting. Etc. It's not vendor trash but stuff that has actual in game value and somebody would be willing to give money for.
As for NPC loot drop. Few things are more immersion breaking than not being able to pick up the sword and armor of the guy I just killed. There are a few tricks to keeping this from disrupting the economy. The easy way is to have any loot dropped by an NPC be in poor condition so that it will break after only a short period of use. More advanced techniques could involve NPC's occasionally buying off surplus good, or track gear lost by players when they die, and the game actually hands those goods out to the NPC's in place of 'useless' newbie gear or near broken equipment. In this way your NPC loot can also have a player source. Also if gear appearance can be customized by the crafter it would be really cool to see an NPC rolling around with a piece of gear you crafted.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Everyone... seriously, stop asking them to do stupid pointless things... Who cares if a bear drops a few gp for now. That can work that stuff in later...
That is the point of having an EE, and building the game over time!
It is something that should be examined now. If mobs that do not use coin will not drop coin then Decius' observation that chests and troves will be needed then that must be provided for now, while the databases, mechanisms, and art are being created, not later when their inclusion will be more problematic.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It is something they can work through during EE, and they can keep it as it is for now...
As for the Faucet vs Sink nonsense... It will be worked out through time as well.
The other thing I was talking about is Armor Dies... which is just ignorant to expect before OE.
Proxima - The only reason I say to save it for later... Is that if it is discussed now then people will expect things to be changed now. And maybe even demand it changed before we even hit Alpha.
Vendor trash and animals dropping coins are generally just bad.
Using our rats example. It doesn't really make sense for rats to carry money. It also doesn't really make sense for a vendor to just give you money for rat parts. At a glance it almost looks like it is pointless to have rats outside of maybe them dropping alchemical components.
But we can give a role for rats that involves the money system. Rats would logically be eating food supplies in a settlement. If this is handled by the rat population increasing the rate at which a "food" stat for a settlement is consumed, or just a penalty to development index representing lost food and disease spreading in the settlement.
In the real world payment for rat parts has indeed happened. I would love it if in Pathfinder we could use similar tactics to those described to maximise our rodent income
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Goblin Squad Member
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It is something they can work through during EE, and they can keep it as it is for now...
As for the Faucet vs Sink nonsense... It will be worked out through time as well.
The other thing I was talking about is Armor Dies... which is just ignorant to expect before OE.
Proxima - The only reason I say to save it for later... Is that if it is discussed now then people will expect things to be changed now. And maybe even demand it changed before we even hit Alpha.
We should have no such expectations whatsoever, which renders your objection irrelevant. Nor is it ignorant to recommend that the database model needs to be detailed in the meta before it is finalized. It most certainly should be finalized in design prior to OE.
To aver that those who suggest their ideas are ignorant is a disservice to the game and to the community. Very few may rightly impugn me as ignorant, Xeen. I doubt you are one such. You may well have a preference on the outcome, but your preference does not render different preferences ignorant.
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Goblin Squad Member
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We are going to be playing in EE.
The reason for EE is to have a solid playable game, but develop everything else like proper loot drops, armor dyes, and etc during that time.
Right now we need to help them focus on making the game playable... That right there is the whole concept of crowdforging and Early Enrollment.
Crowdforging will come, but they have not implemented that yet as they are trying to make the game playable.