Incline What can be done about excessive loot?

[Torus]

Infinite stash so you don't bother the player with it. Anything else relies on good design, and I don't trust anyone to do that.

 

[PapaPetro]

Giving weight and volume to items works. But then you've got the inventory metagame to deal with.

 

[Filthy Sauce]

Unpopular opinion, but stop with all of the enemies gear being lootable. Only let set piece stuff be gained.

 

[gaussgunner]

Realistically you could loot their weapons, ammo, money, food, drugs, medkits, and the bloodstained clothes off their backs. And most of it would be inferior to anything you already have or could buy in shops more easily than scavenging for it. If some idiot had a great weapon but didn't know how to use it, he already would have been killed by someone who does.

Common solution is random loot drops, one or two items, usually money/ammo/medkits/potions. Problem is when you kill an enemy who's fighting you with an awesome weapon, you don't get it. That feels very wrong.

Realistic solution is limited inventory and low resale value. It's been done, it works, some people just don't like sorting through crap and managing their inventory. But if you feel the need to gather and sell loot, it's a sign that the game lacks better reward mechanics.

Streamlined realistic solution is enemies only drop one or two items of best value to you, that they actually possess. Problem is defining "best value". Say the best handgun in the game is a .44 Magnum, you want one, the guy you just stabbed wanted one, and he was collecting .44 ammo, which is of high potential value to you. But instead the game decides to drop his shitty .38 Special that he failed to kill you with because you only have a knife, and it drops his .38 ammo because now you have that gun.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Pool of Radiance and the other gold box RPGs solved the problem ages ago. In these games even money weights.
The problem arise from players that expect every RPGs to be a loot-fest.

 

[Butter]

Pool of Radiance and the other gold box RPGs solved the problem ages ago. In these games even money weights.
The problem arise from players that expect every RPGs to be a loot-fest.

The solution is to have a fucked economy? In most of those games you end up leaving thousands of platinum on the ground because there's nowhere to spend it all.

 

[Chippy]

Melt it all down into craftable stuff. Make magical weapons and armour truly magical, then only provide basic options like big magical swords as rare as Excalibur, and if the player wants a Katana they have to craft it.

 

[Kruyurk]

Make every enemy a monk.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Pool of Radiance and the other gold box RPGs solved the problem ages ago. In these games even money weights.
The problem arise from players that expect every RPGs to be a loot-fest.

The solution is to have a fucked economy? In most of those games you end up leaving thousands of platinum on the ground because there's nowhere to spend it all.

Yeah, but a lot of that was because they were true to old AD&D rules where the gp value of treasure was the primary way you gained experience. Between that and implementing paid training halls, they also had to ensure you had enough resources to level up even if it was harder going in the beginning.

Either way, limiting what drops when you can more or less tell what the enemy is using sucks. You could possibly have some of it be destroyed or unusable from the battle, or needing repairs. If you wanted to deal with this level of minutiae, you could even have armour and weapon sizes, e.g. goblin armour isn't going to do much of anything for a human or a dwarf, but maybe a halfling or gnome could squeeze into it. Regardless, when an enemy is kicking your ass with a flaming great axe and then you beat him to have him drop like 36 sp and a rusty belt buckle, that grinds my gears.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Pool of Radiance and the other gold box RPGs solved the problem ages ago. In these games even money weights.
The problem arise from players that expect every RPGs to be a loot-fest.

The solution is to have a fucked economy? In most of those games you end up leaving thousands of platinum on the ground because there's nowhere to spend it all.

I am not speaking about the economy. Carrying too much weight is detrimental during combat and movement. You need to choose what is really useful to pick up.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

codexers: I hate when games just throw out loot everywhere because then it makes loot not feel important

also codexers:

give out less loot.

Fuck you. If somebody swings a sword at me, I bloody expect to pry it from his cold dead hands.

 

[mediocrepoet]

codexers: I hate when games just throw out loot everywhere because then it makes loot not feel important

also codexers:

give out less loot.

Fuck you. If somebody swings a sword at me, I bloody expect to pry it from his cold dead hands.

It's almost like there's more than one of us.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

This is just a random thought that popped into my head, so I've given it all of five seconds consideration: present the player with the full inventory of the thing you killed. Let the player pick one item immediately. Each subsequent item you loot takes longer. This ticks the realism box, because the mob is carrying everything it should. It lets the player pick the item or items they want the most. And it gives a disincentive to just hoovering everything up without making it impossible. If you're hard up for cash you might be willing to wait 10 seconds to loot that suit of armor to sell; if you have enough money already you might not want to waste the time.

 

[Vic]

[+10] Less loot

^ This.

The problem is not what to do with the excessive loot, it's the excessive loot itself. Bethesda uses it to hook players in on a dopamine drip feed and make them addicted to an otherwise boring and shallow gameplay loop.

You can read all about it in the Morrowind is bad thread, starting at page 16, the discussion went on for about 8 pages, so get your popcorn ready

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/why-morrowind-is-a-bad-rpg.127067/post-8226261

 

[Kabas]

There is no need to pick up excessive loot if there is no traders

 

[Radiane]

Just make it like Dungeon Siege did: let excessive loot convert directly on the battlefield into shiny and more useful golds.
Or like the later Avernum games, where your party carries some kind of trash bag with unlimited inventory, which is outside of the normal weight calculation of your chars and which gets sold directly at soon you visit the next vendor.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Pool of Radiance and the other gold box RPGs solved the problem ages ago. In these games even money weights.
The problem arise from players that expect every RPGs to be a loot-fest.

Yes, encumbrance has existed since original Dungeons & Dragons and is the proper method by which players concern themselves with what their characters are carrying and are either selective about treasure retrieval or find creative means of transporting greater weights.

The solution is to have a fucked economy? In most of those games you end up leaving thousands of platinum on the ground because there's nowhere to spend it all.

That currency should be accumulated and saved at lower to mid-levels in order to fund stronghold building at higher levels.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Betrayal at Krondor solved this thrice over. It didn't have loads of trash items. Inventory was limited. Items also required repair, and the bulkiest loot of all, armor, require cannibalizing suits to meaningfully improve damaged armors without an NPC smith.

 

[thesecret1]

Excessive loot? You're talking about weapons and armor. That's the thing that breaks the economy. Various garbage tin cans and what not don't because they're worthless, smaller valuables and consumables don't because, while their weight-to-value ratio is great, their absolute value is not, and there tends to be a limited amount of them (amount which you can fine tune if you want to actually reward the player with them). The issue is simple enough: the gear the player uses will, sooner rather than later, be pretty expensive, as that's the primary thing where all the player money goes. To stay competitive, the enemies also need expensive armor and weapons. When player overcomes them and loots all that, he can sell it for lots of money (because it's expensive).

So what's the solution? One is to tank the ratio at which vendors buy shit from you, but that affects ALL the items, not just expensive armors, which means armors and weapons will STILL be the main money source, the player will just need to loot more of them. Not a good solution [-5]. Another is to simply not award enemy weapons and armor. This is fair in some games, but others (ones that want to have every kind of stupid garbage lootable) would suffer from this arbitrary limitation [0]. Another could be making the armor and weapons cheap, which would solve this issue, but then there's two problems: one, it makes no sense from the setting standpoint for good armor to be worth as much as a loaf of bread, two, it means the player can, too, buy that shit from traders for cheap, which ruins his progression. Not a good solution either [-5]. How about having even shitty armor and weapons be competitive with high end ones, then? Even a dagger made out of copper could harm one in steel plate, which means you could have enemies wear cheap shit while the player is still buying his gear for lots of shinies. This isn't a bad solution, through it means there's going less of a power gap between the equipment – switching from bronze to iron won't feel like a leap in power, but more like a lame +10% to damage kind of thing, which makes for a very boring kind of progression [+3].

So what would be a good solution? Some of the approaches described could be combined. For example, armor you scavenge from dead enemies can be in terrible repair – because you destroyed it in order to kill them. A steel breastplate in mint condition is worth a small fortune. The same breastplate with a big hole in the middle is scrap metal, and even if the player was able to fix it up, doing so would cost so much that the profit would be negligible (but it could be worth it to him to repair that one unique set of armor to use himself, for example). An elegant [+10] solution to the armor problem.

With weapon, it's a bit trickier. While even a weapon in disrepair could be dangerous, it only makes sense for them to be in such a state when handled by bandits and the like, not enemies the player meets later in the game, such as elite knights and the like, and it's unlikely every weapon would get so damaged in a duel with you alone (especially if you kill the enemy from afar). However, the price of a weapon should, in general, be a lot lower than the price of armor (given the much lower amounts of material needed, as well as less time to forge it), and with the early game nerf in the form of shitty bandits having their weapons in disrepair, shouldn't throw a mid and later game economy out of whack – after all, by then, the player SHOULD be making a bit more money than before. But that's kind of avoiding the core issue there – if the enemy needs a strong sword to harm the player, and you have the player slaughter 20 of them in a single dungeon, it's still loot bonanza. And calls into question just how could all those enemies afford swords of adamantium or whatever. The answer in that case lies in assymetry. Have the enemy leader have a cool sword, by all means, but his underlings can make do with some cheaper variants, that are then souped up a bit so as to stay competitive – have them poisoned or specially sharpened to give them a temporary buff that will probably only last for that one encounter, and won't give a reason for the sword to skyrocket in value – after all, how much more valuable is it really if it turns into your ordinary run of the mill iron shortsword after the next two swings? This means that while the player still can make a profit from weapons, they will significantly lag behind the price of his own gear, and offer a much slower price progression than usual in these games. While not perfect, it is a good solution. [+5].

 

[deuxhero]

As I mentioned Morrowind doing earlier, just make most enemies have shit gear worth essentially nothing for the weight, especially early on, or be non-gear using animals/monsters unless they're boss creatures who pair non-repeatability with actual challenge and being strong enough to mater in more than numbers.

Another thing is what JA2 does with 1.13: Only one guy in the country, the arms dealer, will buy looted weapons from you at decent price but it's difficult to get stuff to him without just wasting time. You can also however sell anything to "locals" via menu short. You'll get pennies on the dollar for it, but it goes away without effort while giving you a bit of cash for something that would otherwise have just sat unused and (IIRC) it boosts the equipment of the local militia on your side (since that equipment filters down to locals).

 

[Bloodeyes]

If you shot someone IRL and took their clothes you wouldn't be able to sell them for much, if anything. So make it realistic. Their gun would be worth something but not a whole shitload if its a commonly available second hand gun. You also can't carry that many guns. If you left their gun and came back for it when you can carry it then someone else would probably have taken it, so just have loot despawn (excluding key quest items unless your quest design is robust enough to allow for alternative solutions).

You don't want to prevent looting. Even full loot is fine, in fact I prefer it. I hate grinding out specific drops. Its fucking boring. Just make it so there's enough good stuff you want to buy and the game is difficult enough to also require consumable use that the player can't amass enough wealth to make currency meaningless, at least until end game.

You can also allow for investment rather than spending. Base upgrades, vehicle upgrades etc. That was one of the great things about Pathfinder Kingmaker's awful kingdom management minigame. It kept you poor. You'd get loads of GP from loot and be faced with the choice of buying yourself really expensive magic gear or vastly more expensive barony/kingdom upgrades. I always upgraded the kingdom first, keeping only a little for myself, and I was always cash poor despite the abundant loot in that game. So long as the payoff from this investment is sufficiently delayed, as it is in Kingmaker, its not going to break your economy until endgame when you really want it to break anyway. Ending up stupid wealthy is the payoff for struggling with scarcity the whole game.

Another simple but effective system is having XP and GP be the same currency and making good items in shops quite expensive, as in the Dark Souls series. So unless you want to grind and buy everything (your choice) you will always face scarcity because a permanent upgrade is usually more valuable than a trinket. Also because you can lose all your money by dying twice, so saving large amounts isn't advisable.

 

[mondblut]

Realistic solution is limited inventory

That's why realistic people invented carts and porters for hire.

RPG enjoyers:

Let's have a genre where we encounter thousands of hostile people who at very least possess valuable weapons and armor, and kill them all with hardly a scratch!

Also RPG enjoyers:

Oy vey, so mych money, what do we do with economy? Maybe all those weapons and armor magically evaporate the moment their owner dies? Maybe people there haven't invented the concept of buying and selling to begin with? Maybe coins are the size of manhole and people are too stupid to invent banking? Maybe dropped items disappear the moment you look the other way, and hiring porters to carry excess loot is forbidden by religion?

 

[gaussgunner]

mondblut Yes. Grinding, excessive loot and imaginary baggage trains go hand in hand. They just gloss over the fact that enemies have porters too. Logistics isn't a part of these games.

Obviously if you're going for realism you need fewer, weaker, dumber, less well equipped enemies who players can beat in a fair fight. You need some other means of acquiring superior equipment.

 

[mondblut]

Obviously if you're going for realism you need fewer, weaker, dumber, less well equipped enemies who players can beat in a fair fight.

Yes. Bottom line, if you make me a murderhobo who gets to kill thousands of people with impunity, don't whine that I shouldn't have their stuff because muh balinse. Sensibility always trumps balinse, and if you can't design functional gameplay without resorting to retarded arbitrary restrictions, you should be out of your job.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

What can be done about excessive loot?

Sell it!

Btw, the most excessive loot is in Arcanum.
You can loot the trash bins on the street.