Loot-drop paradoxes: when RPG monsters (don’t) drop loot

RPG fans, gather round. We’re going to nitpick a topic to death. (And you know nitpicking is one of RPG fans’ favorite hobbies.)

Paradox #1: monsters that don’t drop loot. This article was spawned by an article over at WOW Insider that asked why is it when you have a mission to collect ogre brains, few ogres actually drop brains. The world of Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft is full of liverless boars, brainless ogres, and bloodless orcs.

Paradox #2: monsters drop nonsense loot. Remember how dragons in the first Neverwinter Nights dropped their blood in handy little bottles (complete with decorative covers)?

(Warrior: And with this last arrow I kill you. Dragon: Hang on a sec. Let me bottle up my blood first. You got a needle and tube handy?)

RPG fans have gotten used to the fact that every creature (from blind cave fish to rabid rodents to sea turtles lazing on a beach) carry gold in little bags and elixirs in standard-sized bottle. Some animals even drop swords!

And we spend so much energy to defend our favorite RPG and explain why this is the case, when we could be spending that energy writing feedback to our favorite developer to tell them to put more thought and design into their next RPG.

Is loot-dropping realism too much to ask? “It’s a game; it’s not supposed to be realistic!” exclaim the echoes. Really? Then what’s with the effort to make good scenery, characters that look alive, and amazing storylines that pull you into the story so you’ll forget that “it’s just a game”? By the way, if you follow those backlinks, you’ll see that many new RPG games have evolved to take advantage of new technology, so maybe it’s time to universally change the way item drops are done in other “traditional” RPGs?

We have a few ideas to deal with the drop rate paradoxes. [This is just the short version of this article. Click on the “Full Article” below to Jump to the “Full Article.”]

Solution #1: bring in hunter skills. We propose incorporating automatic hunter skill parameters in RPGs. [More about this solution in the Full Article.]

Solution #2: bring in battle finesse. Your character is a better fighter at higher levels, right? So you aim and attack better. So there should be less battle damage done to loot. Therefore, the higher the level of your character, the higher the chances of getting dropped loot. Besides, you need more loot at higher levels because weapons and armor is more expensive, right?

And that’s all for now. We could keep nitpicking more things and throwing out more ideas – and there are a lot more RPGs we could mention for their good points and bad points (Dungeon Siege Throne of Agony, Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy XI…), but you get the main points. What do you guys think? Anybody care to share their ideas about loot-drop paradoxes?

RPG fans, gather round. We’re going to nitpick a topic to death. (And you know nitpicking is one of RPG fans’ favorite hobbies.)

Paradox #1: monsters that don’t drop loot. This article was spawned by an article over at WOW Insider that asked why is it when you have a mission to collect ogre brains, few ogres actually drop brains. The world of Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft is full of liverless boars, brainless ogres, and bloodless orcs.

Paradox #2: monsters drop nonsense loot. Remember how dragons in the first Neverwinter Nights dropped their blood in handy little bottles (complete with decorative covers)?

(Warrior: And with this last arrow I kill you. Dragon: Hang on a sec. Let me bottle up my blood first. You got a needle and tube handy?)

RPG fans have gotten used to the fact that every creature (from blind cave fish to rabid rodents to sea turtles lazing on a beach) carry gold in little bags and elixirs in standard-sized bottle. Some animals even drop swords!

And we spend so much energy to defend our favorite RPG and explain why this is the case, when we could be spending that energy writing feedback to our favorite developer to tell them to put more thought and design into their next RPG.

Is loot-dropping realism too much to ask? “It’s a game; it’s not supposed to be realistic!” exclaim the echoes. Really? Then what’s with the effort to make good scenery, characters that look alive, and amazing storylines that pull you into the story so you’ll forget that “it’s just a game”? By the way, if you follow those backlinks, you’ll see that many new RPG games have evolved to take advantage of new technology, so maybe it’s time to universally change the way item drops are done in other “traditional” RPGs?

In Square Enix‘s Final Fantasy XII for the PS2, for example, monsters do not drop money (called “gil” in the FF universe), but humanoid bad guys do. That’s realistic: humans carry wallets while bunny rabbits don’t. But there’s still the paradox of monsters that don’t drop loot – there are fish that don’t have scales and rats that don’t have fur.

We have a few ideas to deal with the drop rate paradoxes.

• RPG tradition tells us that loot isn’t dropped if it’s been damaged in the battle (WOW Insider tried this track). That explains why there are wolves that don’t drop pelts and bats that don’t drop wings.
• Game developers could also put more thought into which monsters drop which items. They could make a game where animals only drop their body parts (wolves do not have halberds hidden somewhere in their bodies).
• Game developers could also stop making monsters that die and leave behind a tidy bottle of blood. We RPG fans expect good story-telling and interesting (but short) sidequests, so why not throw in content in the form of a story arc? First, you get the special bottle, then you get the siphon, and finally, you collect the blood from the monster.
• In the book “Neverwhere” by Neil Gaiman, a giant boar has spears, knives, arrows stuck into its body, left behind by the many hunters who have tried to kill the boar. That’s an example of an animal that will drop weapons. That makes sense. In other words, if you kill Moby-Dick in your RPG, the whale drops harpoons (at least those that aren’t rusty or battle-damaged).

Solution #1: bring in hunter skills. We propose incorporating automatic hunter skill parameters in RPGs. By hunter skills we mean “tracking,” “avoiding,” and “harvesting.” If a character has encountered a type of monster, the character has “experience” with that type of monster, and if you make that character the party leader, the party can “track” or “avoid” the monster. “Tracking” increases the chances of encountering the monster type, while “avoiding” lowers encounter rates for that monster type. Characters can only track and avoid monsters they have encountered before. The more you encounter a creature, the better you get at “tracking” and “avoiding” that creature.

Of course, in this proposal, some characters or classes are better at “tracking” and “avoiding” than others (e.g., your main character is a career soldier but is only an average hunter, the love interest you meet in Act I is a scholar and terrible hunter, the wizard from the small forest village in Act II is a great hunter).

If your party has characters with good “harvesting” skills, you are able to get more out of a monster than others (e.g., you’re good at removing skins from dead monsters). This minimizes the battle damage done to loot, so you have higher drop rates.

Solution #2: bring in battle finesse. Your character is a better fighter at higher levels, right? So you aim and attack better. So there should be less battle damage done to loot. Therefore, the higher the level of your character, the higher the chances of getting dropped loot. Besides, you need more loot at higher levels because weapons and armor is more expensive, right?

And that’s all for now. We could keep nitpicking more things and throwing out more ideas – and there are a lot more RPGs we could mention for their good points and bad points (like the PSP’s Dungeon Siege Throne of Agony, the Xbox 360’s Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy XI…), but you get the main points. What do you guys think? Anybody care to share their ideas about loot-drop paradoxes?