Do you prefer loot heavy RPGs?

[Hrymr]

After defeating an enemy I should be able to take all his stuff, equip his weapons and put on his armor.

 

[Lilura]

Diablo 2 loot system is enjoyable if you are an elite player (like a pker or an LLDer).

LLD equipment comes together to create build-changing masterpieces. No other game gives that feeling.

 

[Riddler]

I believe DnD was designed first at low- and medium-level, and then at high- and epic-level, so that explains why the traditional range of weapons is so "limited".

But a +5 weapon is pretty fearsome and potentially game-breaking should you give it away happily to your players at lower levels. I know because I played some campaigns with unfair characters played by people associating with each other, and man was it crap.

Which is my point. DnD doesn't have the range to have really loot heavy campaigns. You simply cannot have weapons above +1 before a certain level or you are basically creating walks in the park for the players. That is why Monty Haul campaigns tend to end up being hilariously broken most times.

And that is before 3.x introduced the wealth-by-level mechanic, which really restricted what you can or cannot do without upseting the whole CR/XP system.

What are you talking about? It is really easy to create interesting and varied items in DnD.

Create items with bonuses against certain creature types, odds to cast spells on specific die rolls, material specific resistances etc.

Only a piss poor DM could fail to create varied loot in 3.x e.

The wealth-by-level restricts your choices in 3.x. Technically, you are not even supposed to get a +1 weapon until level 4 or 5. You want to tell me how you make a varied weapon based on that?

You are supposed to start at lvl 3, 1-3 is for learning the basics mechanics of the game.

But there are things you can do with weapon quality and things like cold iron weapons. A lot depends on the DM providing interesting enemies for the players at those lvls though. Rando human fighters are probably not that interesting as enemies.

There are also things such as accessories, limited use items (alch fire, magical ammo, wands etc) that you can use as loot without giving away +1 items.

 

[cherry blossom]

I used to think that I loved heavy looting. In principle, I like the idea of finding loot and that everything I see on an enemy can be looted but I absolutely hate it when I have to haul all of that shit and the kitchen sink. At least 1/3 of the time I sank into loot-heavy games are... just managing and hauling the fucking loot. It gets to a point where Loot start playing YOU.

Funny enough, the games where I had the best loot experiences were quite picky with what they gave you instead of going WYSIWYG. Jagged Alliance 2 1.12 in particular had a lot of such moments. In comparison, dealing with loot in 1.13 was a lot like playing Overworked Accountant On The Edge of Suicide simulator.

I think a good compromise for loot heavy games could be in-game economic-conservatism. The moment you, an outsider, start flooding the market with a trillion trinkets, it should draw attention of certain factions. Maybe a Trader's Guild or the local authority takes issues with your unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, freelancing free-market experiment. The vendors stop buying shit from you, not because they ran out of money to pay you or because they weren't interested in your goods (Underrail) but because they don't want some asshole, who is neither running a shop nor paying taxes for her unregistered trading, to screw the local businesses with her influx of unregulated goods.

Such that as a player, you don't even want to deal with loot unless you think it's really useful or otherwise good, or you just want to impersonate, disguise as a certain class by equipping their stuff.

Then again, it is a question of trying to balance certain players' OCD tendencies.

 

[Hrymr]

I used to think that I loved heavy looting. In principle, I like the idea of finding loot and that everything I see on an enemy can be looted but I absolutely hate it when I have to haul all of that shit and the kitchen sink. At least 1/3 of the time I sank into loot-heavy games are... just managing and hauling the fucking loot. It gets to a point where Loot start playing YOU.

Is the loot system the cause of this problem? Or just the trash mob spam and overall lack of encounter design?

 

[Covenant]

Not much can turn me off an RPG, or any game in fact, faster than being inundated with shitty loot. I tried Grim Dawn a while back for some mindless hack and slash fun (not an RPG, I know), and it was alright at first, but now I can't bear to boot it up because I find so much loot so quickly and it's so goddamn annoying going through each item and checking if I should save it for one of my other characters. I had a similar experience with Path of Exile, but many times worse. I wanted to be killing shit, not spending half my time in trade channels or reading about the obtuse 'crafting' system.

Similarly, I've been playing XPiratez, and it's good fun, but I'm invariably finding that despite there being about 50 different supposedly viable weapon paths I could go down, the optimal thing at any one time is still pretty much equipping the whole squad with the baseline Heavy Plasma/earlier equivalent. So all these Heat Rays and Plasma Destroyers and Future Bows and Hellguns look really cool, but in the end they're pointless next to my Snuffies, Heavy Plasmas and a couple of Force Blades. That's a wider issue though; the thing where a game gives you a bunch of different ways to build your character (traps, poisons, etc), that never end up being used because it's faster, more reliable, and at least equally effective to just use the 'standard' approach.*

Anyway, as far as just the loot goes I can't think of anything that I'd really say handles it well. I don't recall Baldur's Gate II being particularly objectionable, but then again I was a kid when I played it and a lot more tolerant of bullshit design decisions. The roguelike Angband, back when I last played it, managed to keep the loot system interesting for the first half of the game. On the first ten levels or so, finding a cloak or pair of gloves with a few + to defence is a neat and exciting find that actually makes some real difference to your survivability. These quickly get eclipsed by ego items, which in turn give way to artifacts. But the system falls apart around the time that artifacts start dropping in high numbers - they go from a rare find that is a big upgrade to whatever ego item you have in your slot to instead becoming expected windfalls that spill out of enemies like candy from a pinata. Finding artifacts isn't exciting anymore; you know you could spend another hour or so killing dragons and before long you'd likely have every artifact in the game. By that point, I've lost any sense of excitement and wonder and just want the game to end. Its successor ToME has similar problems in its own late-game, but I don't think it handles the early-game part as well as Angband did.

Dungeon Rats had some decent ideas; you weren't inundated with loot, but inferior gear was both quickly obvious yet also still possibly useful, in that you could smelt it down for its metal. A steel scimitar might be a downgrade compared to my skymetal gladius, but at least I can use it to make some more steel crossbow bolts. That was neat, balanced, and fit with its setting. Still, I can't deny that after finding yet another slightly different non-magical spear or armour variant with a new tacky Roman name I was yearning for a Ring of the Ram or some Gloves of Archery.

I guess all I can say is that I don't think I've ever seen loot handled as well as I would hope it to be, and that roguelikes like Angband or Crawl seem to come the closest to the ideal. And even these have serious flaws.

Spoiler

*To be completely fair to XPiratez, it clearly tries to avert this with resistances, different technological paths, etc, and throughout the game I have needed to use a somewhat wide variety of weapons. So it does much more than most to avert this trope - perhaps it's just unavoidable falling into it as a game approaches the end, similar to the Angband example.

 

[Strange Fellow]

I used to think that I loved heavy looting. In principle, I like the idea of finding loot and that everything I see on an enemy can be looted but I absolutely hate it when I have to haul all of that shit and the kitchen sink. At least 1/3 of the time I sank into loot-heavy games are... just managing and hauling the fucking loot. It gets to a point where Loot start playing YOU.

Is the loot system the cause of this problem? Or just the trash mob spam and overall lack of encounter design?

It's actually hidden option C: people who compulsively hoard every piece of shit equipment they find.
But of the two first options the loot system is the problem. Fuck the "trash"-mob haters.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Not much can turn me off an RPG faster than being inundated with shitty loot. I tried Grim Dawn a while back for some mindless hack and slash fun (not an RPG, I know), and it was alright at first, but now I can't bear to boot it up because I find so much loot so quickly and it's so goddamn annoying going through each item and checking if I should save it for one of my other characters. I had a similar experience with Path of Exile, but many times worse. I wanted to be killing shit, not spending half my time in trade channels or reading about the obtuse 'crafting' system.

This.

Grim Dawn's loot system is why I quit playing it. Feels designed as if there was an active multiplayer trading community in a non-dedicated server game most people play solo.
There's 56 class combinations and each drop is either tailored to a specific single class or a dual class combo. It's absurd, I got tired of getting junk ""legendary"" items that get sold to a vendor and uninstalled.

 

[Gregz]

Good itemization can be great (Diablo II, Borderlands)

Bad itemization can have the opposite effect.

Like most things (gameplay, graphics, story, music, inventory, controls, UI), it all depends on how it's implemented.

 

[Carrion]

I want looting to include meaningful decision-making. Usually that works best when a game has a relatively small inventory size and goes for quality over quantity with unique/special items, but with good and creative itemization you can make almost any kind of a system work. The worst combination is a high amount of trash loot and an unlimited inventory. Being a human(oid) vacuum cleaner sucks and is nothing but a waste of time.

 

[typical user]

I do not like loot-based RPGs. They ruin the pace and serve as filler content. I liked Fallout 1 and 2 in that regard. All weapons and armor were cool and after you collected a new piece you were left with it for a while to enjoy it but not for long to get bored of it. The loot progressed with the game. Having ability to strip dead enemies of their armor - sure it is realistic but it is not enjoyable to hoard all that gear to get few coins or a fortune to leave you without motivation to do future quests. Either way the gameplay suffers. Loot should be a reward not something like in Bethesda games where you are swimming in it and just amass fortune you can't really spend. And if you can then it will force players to grind for bonuses that either are too good to pass or are not worth it at all.

 

[ItsChon]

Depends. The IE games or UnderRail for example were examples of good loot drops.

 

[Carrion]

Having ability to strip dead enemies of their armor - sure it is realistic but it is not enjoyable to hoard all that gear to get few coins or a fortune to leave you without motivation to do future quests.

The problem isn't really that you can pick everything up, it's that many games actively encourage you to do so. There should be no reason and no way to run around carrying hundreds of iron shortswords and metric tons of chainmail.

 

[Kalin]

Loot is life. Life is loot.

 

[Squid]

Really depends but I'd say less loot is better generally speaking. Getting worthless loot is just that. It's really annoying when it's not worth taking it all back to a merchant/shop. Sure there are those lootfest games like Diablo and Borderlands but it still sucks being stacked out or close to it and see low tier weapons drop.
Also, items that never have a use like Bethesda games. I thought it was cool when I pick up a cup and take it somewhere else and set it down how I want the first time I saw that. But that didn't last long at all and it's not worth their time to make sure I can pick up a cup and take it home and set down upside down right beside my fireplace just how I like it. What's the point? Or is the point to be a Sims game?

 

[Shadenuat]

The last thing you want in your, let's call it "standard party rpg", is every enemy "realistically" dropping everything they carry. Players may whine and demand and but muhh realism, but it murders any economy or sense of getting new good stuff quickly.

Equipment should feel like a viable upgrade of your character. So where you would be turned to bloody paste on the wall before, you push through due to meticulously scrapped together weapons, armor and consumables.

It differs from game to game, but generally when enemies begin to drop full plates worth thousand of gold by the dozen, you know the good part of the game is over.

One type of loot I believe games could use more is broken equipment or its parts which could be reforged later, parts of armor which can be put on top of your basic armor for more protection and stuff like that. Not like, gems/runes/diabloesque shit, but more like you gotten broken cuirass, you can fix it later and put on top of your mail to get good defence.

 

[Safav Hamon]

I do not like loot-based RPGs. They ruin the pace and serve as filler content. I liked Fallout 1 and 2 in that regard. All weapons and armor were cool and after you collected a new piece you were left with it for a while to enjoy it but not for long to get bored of it. The loot progressed with the game. .

Fallout is my favorite equipment progression as well. I like the feeling of slowly gaining access to greater technology the further you progress into the game.

I also like how Fallout: New Vegas balanced advanced equipment. You could find energy weapons early in the game, but wouldn't have steady ammunition or the means to repair them until later in the game, when you had access to better vendors and advanced enemies.

 

[Shadenuat]

F1 loot progression is pretty basic and does not give you much choice (better armor is better, period), but it worked like a charm in the arms race against the constant rising threat by the enemies in the narrative, as you went from shooting raider gangs to monsters and mutants.

 

[Lurker47]

I love loot because I have a tiny, weird bugmen brain.

 

[DraQ]

What is loot heavy?

• When you can strip everything off your fallen enemies up to and including their skivvies, and use it?
  
• When every other enemy pukes rainbows of colored name items when killed?
• When shit tier and divine tier items differ by many orders of magnitude in their base stats?

The former is great, the other two are shit.

And no, everything you can see on characters being reflected by their inventory does not automatically mean repeatedly wheelbarrowing mountains of crappy gear back to the merchant.
Good mechanics will prevent it by a combination of:

• Limited inventory capacity.
• Dynamic or threshold based economy (high supply drops prices, merchants may not be interested in sufficiently crappy garbage).
• Dropped items not persisting when leaving the area (with possible exceptions) - explainable by combination of scavengers and elements.
  
• Lack of item stats inflation so that you can have threatening enemies without ludicrously attractive gear.
  
• Costly logistics.
• Costly repairs.

 

[Shadenuat]

And no, everything you can see on characters being reflected by their inventory does not automatically mean repeatedly wheelbarrowing mountains of crappy gear back to the merchant.

In practice it does 99% of the time.

Good mechanics will prevent it

6 different mechanics working together would prevent 1 thing which would be easier to prevent by simply not doing it. And if something requires prevention, why just not do it to begin with? Just make enemies drop actual meaningful loot instead of trash.

Also, 99% of RPGs don't have even 2 of these things.

Also "costly logistics", lol, holy shit, what does that even mean and what RPGs ever had it?

TheoryDraQ at his usual, demanding his realism which would keep player entertained for maybe first few loot events.

The former is great

Cause muh immersion.

 

[Carrion]

6 different mechanics working together would prevent 1 thing which would be easier to prevent by simply not doing it.

A simple fix would be merchants simply not wanting to buy all of your shit. Why would an average shopkeeper want to buy a thousand used swords in the first place? I liked Underrail's system, for example, where merchants were only looking to buy specific items, so there was no point in collecting obscene amounts of trash items (although you did still end up with a lot of crap largely because of how important the crafting system was). Deus Ex didn't allow you to sell anything unless you count bribing a couple of NPCs with candy bars or vials of zyme, so you simply didn't need to bother with anything you didn't actually need.

 

[hello friend]

Eh, Diablos were pretty smooth. It popularised the decline, but it had one of the tightest loot heavy systems out there. With exceptions, all nonmagical items can be ignored. When you fill up your inventory, it's just a cheap tp to base, book ensures you never run out. If you cba, just fire off a few identify's and toss the shit you don't want and that has a bad price-to-space ratio. Only thing missing is an item highlight toggle, to save you holding down Alt have the time. Pretty much all cases inspired by the Diablo system got it wrong, D:OS2 and Expeditions:Viking were rage inducing.

In general, though, loot heavy is cancerous by nature and should be avoided. New shit should give you new options.

Crafting is cancer too.

 

[Cael]

You are supposed to start at lvl 3, 1-3 is for learning the basics mechanics of the game.

But there are things you can do with weapon quality and things like cold iron weapons. A lot depends on the DM providing interesting enemies for the players at those lvls though. Rando human fighters are probably not that interesting as enemies.

There are also things such as accessories, limited use items (alch fire, magical ammo, wands etc) that you can use as loot without giving away +1 items.

Let me guess, you only played the Neverwinter games and therefore got the idea that level 3 is where you are supposed to start. It is different in PnP.

The rest of the post is you moving the goalpost. Your initial post stated that you can make interesting and varied WEAPONS (which was the thing in my post) using the 3.x system. Stick with that.

 

[Shadenuat]

Why would an average shopkeeper want to buy a thousand used swords in the first place

- make enemies drop 1000 used swords
- do not make anyone buy them, thus making 1000 swords useless
why add 1000 swords of loot to begin with?

To answer the question why someone would buy: to sell them later at the fair to a merchant who was buying weapons for some lord's military campaign, for example.

If weapons & armor are good, to really sell well; or you can scrap gold parts of expensive arms and weapons and take that gold.

If you looted 50 halberds, sell them to traveling jew marketender who probably is following an army with his whores and booze for some of that booze. He then sells them to a dude arming a squad of mercenaries into new campaign/crusade on better terms. Profit.

So sure, you won't sell all that anywhere and at any time, but looting was always a thing.

And in a setting where adventurers are constantly fighting monsters?

That would be a whole different economy, since the amount of 1st level adventurers entering the game and dying terribly to unlucky crits should be incredibly big, having 1000 swords to sell to them is great idea. then they all die, other adventurers loot dead adventurers, sell you swords back, you re-sell them, infinite money

You want realism and immersion?
Then average bandit group should drop 1 old sword, 1 pair of boots (changed wearers 7 times) and a 0.03% Korean chance of a 1 gold tooth.
And after that if you get more shit, your average adventuring party should be holding barony at that point, having their own levies; not killing rats in sewers.

Funny enough, Witcher was one series of games which could have avoided loot problem as you mostly fight monsters... and ended with Geralt killing hundreds of bandits who all drop swords and plate armor, lmao.