Screw the drops

[Dracos]

Long ago, in a place long removed from here, a man was designing a new game.  This game wasn't too fancy.  It was going to be in this little paper bound thing.  It wasn't on a computer, being far too soon for that.  It was something to add a bit of spice to an old game and all.  Anyhow, he came across the concept of treasure during this and decided to create a system in which treasure was randomly drawn from a table by a dice roll.  Sure, the DM could choose what was given out, but this would provide the best solution for allowing folks to quickly generate some random treasure.

   It wasn't a perfect solution, of course.  I'm sure all of us have encountered DMs who just rolled and came up with absurd things like kobolds that dropped swords of divine power, but it was pretty workable.  So, it was pretty natural that similar methods were used for the early dungeon crawler games.  This worked a little less effectively, but it was primitive, it could forgiven as a necessary step in getting the grounding mechanics in place.

   Carry on and drops were found to become a mainstay in dungeon crawlers and the spinoff console RPG genre.  They'd stick the critical stuff in quests and shops, and have drops be regular for things.  This held through the NES and SNES era, seen primarily in the DQ and FF.  Some had higher or lesser drop rates, but generally they were kept to bonus type items.  A few exceptions occasionally appeared, such as DQ6s metal babble book, droppable by the hidden boss randomly.

   The MMO genre was spinning off around the end of this era, introducing a different method of drops.  Here they'd be a way of extending gametime, provide secret items, and generally maintain a way to provide renewable resources in the game.  We also started seeing innovations in the usage of items.  Sometimes they'd be trade things.  Others you could invent with.  Items were expanded in concept and representation to cover more than 'equipment', 'one use', 'key' types.

   Now, recently I was playing Dragon Quest 8, a game rightly hailed as standing in the middle between old and new, the idea display of old school aesthetics inside of the engines and displays of modern games.  It also had a neat alchemy system...with problems.  It is this that really inspired me to consider this topic.  The alchemy system lets you take items and put them together to create other items and equipment.  It's pretty neat really and initially provides an encouragement to keep all the little knickknacks you get.  So you get a huge inventory and learn quickly to avoid selling things.  It is a bit of a problem due to middling inventory navigation, but not a huge one.  Early, you can buy most of what you need and generally get through based on strategy and what you have purchasable.  As the game progresses it becomes little more valuable with every level, but still not critical.  Then we get to the bonus dungeon and all of a sudden, it becomes pretty necessary to go ahead and get the best stuff to compete.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing itself, especially since it suddenly gives you an opportunity to do it instantly, without waiting.  That's smart, acknowledging that all of a sudden, getting everything out of this has become very important.
   It still though is dependent on getting items to put in it.  It keeps a limit on power in a way by having some items be limited and by this time, most everything is buyable.  Most everything though isn't everything, as hours of camping stuff have taught me.  I brought up MMOs earlier largely since it felt for a while like an MMO mechanic that had been copy pasted into a game.  In order to restrain the power, several critical items were not available in chests or for purchase, but had to be camped by enemies.  These enemies were sometimes strong, sometimes weak, but all held in common that they had ridiculously low drops, often requiring you to manage to kill 40-80 (100-300 battles) to get one.  This obviously got me mad and well, got me thinking.  On one hand, they could've fixed this in this case by having a couple more items buyable to cover it and spread out with different opportunities to get it.  This would've removed the issue.

   That said, the issue really though results from reliance on a primitive design concept that has been extended far beyond where it should be.  There's better ways to handle providing renewable and rare resources than randomized monster drops.  Monster drops themselves aren't a problem, but having them randomized are.  There's little need for it.  I know it's supposed to add a measure of chance in there, but I don't think it'd do any better than a mod 'x' kills system, especially when in most modern games they're keeping track of that anyway.  Want randomness?  Give each a random start number, generated at beginning of game or something.  But what about giving huge ones?  Well, the point there would be that this isn't the only tool to provide stuff and it shouldn't be.  Console RPGs aren't MMOs.  There's no benefit in having a single time waster as the only way to acquire an item.  Ideally, the goal is to maintain game balance (A player is unlikely to equip his whole team with game breaking stuff) while still making it possible get pretty much everything else in the game sensibly.

   My first thought is shops really aren't used enough.  I can't count the number of games that at a certain point I just find there's nothing I can spend my money on sensibly.  I tend to finish the Tales games with millions to spare.  The FFs aren't much better.  At the end of the game, why not have some shops cover items that used to be drop only type deals?  Furs and animal parts are very easy to explain away on that angle.  Charge ten times what they're worth and folks still won't blink much of an eye, instead being happy that they've got some use for the massive quantities of gold they've acquired.  If an item is exhaustible, it should be buyable or replaceable in some sensible way pretty much always.  Maybe not immediately, maybe not en masse, but somewhere there should be a sensible method of recovering consumable items.  You don't punish the player that experiments with the neat thing they found in their inventory by forcing them to reset because it is gone or they've wasted a one time in game item on something cheap completely unaware of its later importance (first town item syndrome).  The whole conservation shtick that gets encouraged in these games could do with a bit of stopping from this.  Folks are less likely to horde items in an environment where they don't feel it that the one elixir they've found will be irreplaceable.  Even if you charge a million, with most of the inflated economies, that'd do it.

   Quests and minigames are also great.  Yes, they take a lot more work than shops or drops, but you know, they're a lot more content too.  No one complains that they can't get an item because they can't beat a nifty boss or a hard puzzle.  Well, some do, but really, it shouldn't be taken that seriously.  In truth, it's mixing neat items with content, which almost everyone is keen on.  I can't count the number of sidequests, hard bosses, hidden things I've traveled to that have ended up giving me worthless crap instead of being nicely tied to the stuff I'd be hunting for later.  It's an opportunity that should be taken when possible.

   Really, the point comes down to the fact that there's no reason to worry about the economy and use MMO drop principles.  If something is important for the better items in the game, it shouldn't be tedium to get.  Challenging?  Go right ahead, but patience contests really should become a thing of the past.