[DIS] Items - Drops

[Rotonen]

So, the essential part of every MMO: what do monsters drop.

Two first things to agree upon:

1) Do monsters drop money?
2) Do monsters drop equipment?

My proposition: 1) Yes 2) Yes.

I'm willing to swing the other way on 1) rather easily if you come up with a counter proposition where 99% of the stuff dropped is not NPC crap to have as a money source once you bother to sell it just adding an unnecessary and annoying extra step to this.

More advanced of a topic: how often mobs drop stuff?

This is a drop chances guideline I'd like every mob to at least loosely follow. Each mob should have a "drops something at chance x" distribution of something like as follows:

100%
60%
20%
5%
1%
0,1%
0,01%

So, something they always drop and a few common things to drop. Always having something rare and always having something ultra rare. Off chances of ultra rares on everything make things interesting. Stuff dropped should somehow be in relation to the hardness to kill of the thing dropping it. The rarer something is to drop, obviously the better it should be. Of course what they drop at those chances is not to be discussed here in detail, but rather just the basics of how we're going to build this.

Most likely a lot of stuff will be considered crap to be sold to NPCs even if they have some use somewhere. Also in CR1 we probably will not have a use for most non-equippable things beyond being NPC crap.

So in my scheme we should figure out about 7 things (can be 0, can be unsigned 64bit int) for every monster to have a chance to drop. Some of these can be easily filled with body parts of the monsters. More fragile parts of monsters would have more chance of breaking in battle and hence would not be the 100% drop. Etc.

[ElvenProgrammer]

1) Usually I think monsters dropping money it's quite a bad idea as having them drop a plate armor. They should really only drop some of their parts, raw materials (wood and leaves for plants, iron ores for golems?).
I do agree though that collecting useless stuff only to be sold is quite a boring step, so in the end, I surrender to the fact killing monster = money.
What I'd like to see is that you earn money while killing a monster instead of having money as a drop. This can be easily explained as a social service, the more monsters you kill, the more you help the community and so you're rewarded.

2) Related equipments yes, but a fluffy dropping a knife it's not a good idea. They could drop fluffy hats, boots or whatever else, kinves should be dropped only by monsters able to use a weapon.

3) Frequency of drop: I'm all against 100% (except special cases) drops for 2 reasons: first, we will always have something on the ground which could result in a mess and second, I don't like something to be certain.

[Crush]

I am a fan of the vendortrash-approach to making money.

It gives you a feeling of accomplishment when you return from a dungeon crawl with your inventory full of loot.

[Rotonen]

With the vendor trash approach the 100% drops make sense to secure basic income.

Also I've yet to see a game where everything would be actually usable somewhere.

After mulling a while over this, I guess the vendor trash approach is going to be the route we'll take unless someone overrules this with something new and ingenious we've not thought about.

Then, the big issue already raised by Elven: Realistic drops versus gameplay balanced drops. I'm going to support unrealistic (maggots dropping armor type of) drops. This allows us more control of what kinds of equipment players potentially have access to in a certain level range.