Isn''t the more valuble item determined by the kind of character, afterall what is thief trudging through a dungeon going to find more useful a badge showing that he''s a dungeon guard, or the dead guards 150 pound magic hammer of giant crushing?

But think of it not as a class based descison but a skill based one.

ie, the dead monster has a bottle of foul smelling white liquid on it. Depending your chemisty skill the character well deceided that A)[low chemist skill] is must some kind of potion and takes it. or B)[moderate or better skill] its bottle of expired milk and completely worthless so I''ll leave it here.

another example: your character has good techincal and assessment skill, so he knows that the seemingly dull tarnished knife on the dead monster is infact made of silver and can easily be restored. While anyone else who think it was a piece of junk and leave it there.

Someone mentioned something about varying the time a search takes, ive always thought this was a great idea, an easy way to do it is to have each item have a value for how much it increases time to remove this item from an enemy, (maybe have different places to loot from a la x-com''s inventory screen, with a multiplier or + - to that time value)

As far as the jacket with wholes in it etc. (damaged goods) This game called the Unreal World (very cool indy rpg/survival game) had a system where armor (and sometimes weapons) and clothes and such were degraded based on how hard and how often the places the armor covered was hit. It handled it all with % such as a leather cuirass might end up 77% after a fight, and thus would only give 77% its normal bonus/price/what have you.

As for looting and selling, the exile/avernum games (others as well im sure) have it so that stealing an item puts a little [stolen] tag in its descrip. shopkeepers won''t even touvh the things after that so just add in hard-to-find blackmarket folks who will buy it at a much lower rate.

Fastjack

Fastjack@hackermail.com

A lot of it depends on how seriously you want to take the game itself.
For me, working on a ''serious'' RPG, I''d leave looting corpses as a tolerable, but chaotic(aberrant, evil, anti-karmic, whatever) act. Mostly due to my predjudice against such actions in pnp roleplaying. There is nothing more annoying to me than after winning a fight, having a team immediately start scrounging up the dead bodies.

In allowing looting, however, you have to worry about the difference between balance and ''logic''. Whereas if you manage to take down the marine with Power Armor and a chaingun, balance would dictate that you can''t just let the player have /everything/ on the corpse, but logic would dictate that it makes no sense that the player couldn''t just grab the armor. If that makes any sense.

Personally, I''d like to see a system put in place whereas corpse-looting isn''t necessarily required to survive as much as it is in modern games. In some sense, you really don''t see soldiers of today taking down an enemy, and then spending a couple of minutes rooting through pockets for more equipment, do you?

- It''s a life''s work
-ryan@lecherousjester.com

I must admit that I haven''t read all the other posts in this thread, so sorry if I''m repeating something someone else just said =)

One thing that annoys me a bit, is that it some RPG''s, you can attack and kill merchants and people that you can trade hundreds of items with. But when you loot the corpse, they only carry like 100 gold pieces or whatever.

Where are the goods?
Although I understand why it isn''t there, if you speak of game design, it certainly removes some of the realism in the game.

That''s just my thoughts, though.
What I feel is that a merchant should carry much less goods, and be as difficult to kill as the worth of the goods he''s carrying, and still have at least most of the goods, when he''s dead...

I think it could be balanced in a way, if someone would give it a try =)

Hellsp4wn
-----------

I''''m having deja-vu and amnesia at the same time. It''''s like I think I''''ve forgotten this before.

quote: Original post by Run_The_Shadows

Personally, I''d like to see a system put in place whereas corpse-looting isn''t necessarily required to survive as much as it is in modern games. In some sense, you really don''t see soldiers of today taking down an enemy, and then spending a couple of minutes rooting through pockets for more equipment, do you?

I really depends. For regular army, yes. But lets suppose you are a fighter pilot who just ejected. Lets say you''ve drawn attention and an enemy soldier came to investigate(alone? hmmm, ok, lets have two). You manage to kill them, now I bet if you don''t see any more enemies, you''re going to loot them for everything they''ve got. Probably better weapons(I assume a pilot has a pistol), ammo, food and other goodies that will help you to survive. Maybe even their uniforms.

"A lot of it depends on how seriously you want to take the game itself.
For me, working on a ''serious'' RPG, I''d leave looting corpses as a tolerable, but chaotic(aberrant, evil, anti-karmic, whatever) act. Mostly due to my predjudice against such actions in pnp roleplaying. There is nothing more annoying to me than after winning a fight, having a team immediately start scrounging up the dead bodies."

IMO, it''s now about how seriously you take the game, it''s all about setting, situation, the surviving charactacters, and the dead ones.

For example, in a game such as Fallout (setting: a century after a nuclear war, everyone is trying to build up a life and cities. it''s not going too good. situation), you could end up in a situation where you are attacked by raiders in the middle of the desert. if you kill them, would you NOT loot them for their stuff? I mean, in this world you really DO need to survive...

But then of course, you may also find yourself between some raiders and some merchants. Noone will think you''re a bad person for looting the raiders, but maybe you should suffer some kind of karmaloss?


"In allowing looting, however, you have to worry about the difference between balance and ''logic''. Whereas if you manage to take down the marine with Power Armor and a chaingun, balance would dictate that you can''t just let the player have /everything/ on the corpse, but logic would dictate that it makes no sense that the player couldn''t just grab the armor. If that makes any sense."

Yep, that''s a difficult issue. If the whole encounter was scripted, you could have a huge boulder fall from the sky, crushing him

Or, I guess he could say on his radio "I need backu......." before dying, and you hear the response "Roger that, be there in 5 minutes". Would you stick around? Even if they didn''t come for an hour, would you still take the armor, possibly risking getting arrested in the next town?


"Personally, I''d like to see a system put in place whereas corpse-looting isn''t necessarily required to survive as much as it is in modern games. In some sense, you really don''t see soldiers of today taking down an enemy, and then spending a couple of minutes rooting through pockets for more equipment, do you? "

Like explained above (not only by me), you are not often a soldier in some kind of major war. And, let''s say you were, and had just killed some other soldier, and realized you just had 20 bullets left..... would you get some of his? Probably, unless there was a very safe way to get home.


"Kaka e gott" - Me

I think one important thing is to include time and realism in looting. For instance if you kill a marine wearing a suit of self contained power armor. Its not really going to be possible to loot it on the battle field. afterall it may take special equipment just to get the suit on and off.

I''ve thought this out before and after reading everyone rather well thought our post on the subject I remembered it.

The problem is not looting.

The problem is burden/inventory.

It simply is not possible for a person to cary more than one set of armor. (maybe a few pieces of a set in a backpack but that is it). Likewise You can only carry one or two swords without seriously being weighed down.

IMO a well designed / rather realistic burden/inventory system would solve the looting problem as well (ie let them loot what they want, but they prolly ownt be able to carry much of it).

I guess a lot of my bias towards corpselooting comes partly from an EGG-ideal, and partly from pnp experiences.
In nearly every RPG I played with my old group, after /every/ battle all my players immediately demanded to search all the corpses for goods. EVERY TIME. Happily, we usually played Shadowrun, so I could simply declare that the weapons and ammo were biometrically keyed to the cooling body, and it was relatively useless to try.

As far as the EGG(old thread acronym) ideal, I just feel that it''s sad that the only way we see to reward players in most CRPGs these days is to give them better equipment for slaughtering all their opponents. Our creativity for rewarding players is still at a low point.

- It''s a life''s work
-ryan@lecherousjester.com