The main problem here is that it would be potentially infinite source of things that could be used in many more ways. Analogically, you might argue that a monster should always leave a corpse (if it was possible to kill someone with a sword without leaving a corpse, there would be much more unsolved murders).

If this was to be implemented, there would have to be some advantage, but not an overly large. The issue with the amount of equipment could be solved by letting the monster equipment get damaged during the fight.
How many items does a typical monster have? That's the key question. I'd say that having full set of equip on goblin is not likely. A humanoid will probably have a weapon, likely a piece of body armor, maybe a helmet or a shield, and that's probably it. Plus maybe something in a backpack. Not TOO many items to generate, but the question is whether players would like to do some dumpster diving at each step...

Maybe an option to search a corpse for items? That might work.

I agree many monsters should not cary loads of equipment (though some should) - and the non-humanoids cary nothing at all.

All the gear lying around should not per se make the player's life "too easy". Most of that stuff would be common or low quality, and after the initial stages of the game rather useless to the player.

If it's useless, why generate it in the first place? Two reasons. One, roguelikes are complex enough that you never know how a simple item lying there can suddenly help you out. Second, it's just my experience that I find it more fun to play a game in which there is some 'flavour' stuff, even if usually useless, but especially if it CAN become useful (reason one). This makes the game feel more alive.

'Dumpster diving' shouldn't be tedious is there is some highlighting of above-par items.

And yes, most monsters should also leave a corpse. How to prevent this from being too easy a source of food?
(1) butchering made hard (high failure rate and a lot of time used; unless trained of course)
(2) many corpses come with health risks
(3) alignment punishments for butchering.


I suppose the reason one ends up with loads of gear and corpses is that in roguelikes, the player character is usually 'unrealistically' (or heroically) strong, beating opponets by the hundreds, rather than occasionally and after much effort. But still, a hero needs hero gear, and most of the stuff won't be that.

I don't know about this. Most monsters in a dungeon wouldn't have access to a complete set of armour - after all, they're in a dungeon.

In my mind, the PC automatically disregards equipment that is damaged beyond repair or useless to itself. Only the useful items are noted.

Also this might be a pain for some choices of Auto_Pickup.

Well, the problem is as follows: loads of useless junk vs cases of really needing something and needing it right now, yet being denied without a reason.
For example, if the PC's only weapon is a broken rusty dagger, and he isn't really into fist-fighting, he'd use almost anything. Quite unrealistic and frustrating that none of the next 50 goblins didn't even have a pointed stick or something. Also, if the PC is starving, he'd eat just about anything, even if it's splattered all over dungeon walls. But that orc he just killed with the rest of his strength suddenly disappeared. How unfortunate.

Possible solution:
Make the loot generation dependable on the situation.

What I mean is: when a monster dies, the program goes through it's inventory. Quality things are dropped normally. Generic useless items that normally would get ignored are compared to the PC's equipment. If there is PC has nothing better, it gets generated. Else, it gets discarded. Also, such things should have 0 sell value to prevent abuse.

Similarly with corpses: if PC is (for example) in that yellow Hungry! status that was in ADoM, every monster that can leave a corpse should leave a corpse. At least if it was killed by a physical weapon, maybe not necessarily if it was incinerated or something. Already mentioned idea that corpse-eating is likely to have some unfortunate effects should prevent abuse. That also means that ordinary creatures' corpses would need to have 0 sell value and 0 sacrificial value.

I think corpses that might have a positive effect should be always generated, but come with dangers too. Eat at your own risk.

Well, perhaps instead of a preserved corpse of each monster, some sort of generic "hunk of rotten flesh" that would provide satiation but abuse stats. Zero sell value, and rots away quickly regardless, but if starving it can be a lifesaver. Otherwise I can foresee people dropping all food and getting to starving status when delivering the killing blow to enemies with useful corpses.

Let's point out an obvious thing: humans, at least, DO NOT habitually eat raw meat. Which is, basically, what corpses are. Our teeth are no longer any good for tearing hunks of raw muscle.

So maybe a possible solution would be to make finding corpses easier, but to give them very low satiation values (for most races - orcs or trolls would probably not mind raw meat, on the other hand it might be fun to have a herbivore race that is unable to digest meat and has to eat vegetarian food - of course, it could graze on moss growing on dungeon walls in the case of necessity :) ).

On the other hands, cooking could be made much more important. After all, most fantasy adventurers DO have some cooking skills, they don't eat their loot raw. In ADOM, hurthlings are (I think) the only race that starts with Cooking, so how about giving it to humans, elves, dwarves etc. too?

Another thing is that cooking could become harder to use. For example, I think that it should require lighting a fire on the floor (pretty hard in a dungeon, unless you bring your own wood or something similar).

Another concern as to monster equipment is the size. Generally, if you defeat a quickling, and he drops his armor, there is not a big chance it would fit. Another reason to filter out items - armor and helmet might only drop from monsters of similar size as yourself (unless you're, say, a skilled weaponsmith, in which case you could melt them down for metal). With weapons, it;s more tricky - a two-handed sword used by a hurthling is like a knife for a troll (the damage would be the same, but it would get to-hit penalties, as it's not used the way it was intended to).

Hmm, what would you say to this system?

When you start the game, monsters will drop everything that gets generated, including useless things you can't use. But you can go to the "junk manager" screen, and mark any particular type of items as "junk". The game will then give descriptions as following:

On the floor lies:
orcish knife
orcish robe
3 pieces of junk

You could then enter a command "junk-dive" which would force the game to give you detailed information about the junk on the floor.

You could mark items as "junk" only based on their type (not, for example, based on the bonuses they give, since you don't actually see that - you have to try the item out for that).

Should a particularly good item of "junk" category be generated, there would be a check based on your Perception, Appraising, and perhaps Detect Item Status - if successful, the item would be separated from junk and marked as "unusual", otherwise it will be included in the junk.

Could this work?

If I Recall Correctly JADE already gives monsters full inventory when they are generated. And I would like monsters dropping EVERYTHING they had, but they shouldn't normally carry very many items - a weapon or two, some armour and occasionally some other items. I would also like the game to not filter items for me - I'll just read a blessed ?oIdentify, thanks. It would make the game too boring and easy if only good stuff was visible.

And I like the current corpse behaviour in ADOM. Finding food shouldn't become some kind of a big challenge, IMO.

Exactly.

Qui, your "loot generation dependable on the situation" solution can work but I would still prefer that the game doesn't decide for me whether to make items vanish or not. Marek's system of lumping common items into a "divable junk item stack" is clever, but it would require the player to mark/unmark every item type as junk/non-junk.

How about combining these two? Something similar to an e-mail spam filter. Marek's system could be supplemented with an automated counter that keep tracks of how often the player has seen a particular item type. Once he's seen 5 short swords, for instance, the game could assume the 6th short sword is not of much interest anymore, and put it in the junk stack. It would still be there to retrieve if desired. Two remarks. (1) Different item classes would have different thresholds: e.g. the threshold for weapons should be lower than for potions than for missiles. The 500th arrow you see may very well still be useful. (2) The player should retain the option to "junk/unjunk" item types manually (say, bolts, if you only want to use arrows), just like a good spam filter lets you define exceptions to its rules.

Corpses could be sold to a butcher or a necromancer for a tiny bit of coin.
Some monsters like giant fire beetles have useful body parts (glands above eyes that stay lit even after death). I think these should be harvestable if they're not too badly damaged in a fight.

I agree that monsters should drop full inventory. Instead of generating items upon being killed, those items should be on them beforehand-I hate pickpocketing monsters who magically have new items after they're killed. Same goes for quest items: if someone gives a quest with an item as a reward, I hate when the item "disappears" if the questgiver is killed or the quest is failed.

Voted for. I think it would take some balancing to get right, but nothing should disappear.
You can only carry so much stuff. How many sets of clothes do you need?

-Brendan

Ehm TB somewhere said something like "full monster inventories ... ... ... and these things wont disappear"... check the old jade pages.

Yep, I remember reading something like that as well.

Generally speaking I'm against full inventory drops. It is nice for players, but in the long run makes things too easy. Once you figure out that monster Y always has item X, you have a guaranteed source. I've seen it ruin some MORPGs.

I do like the idea of the 'junk pile' and a skill check to find any 'diamonds in the rough'.

The usual items dropped by ordinary monsters like ogres are usually of low quality. Therefore they will only interest a newbie character. I think you shouldn't get much money by selling this crudely crafted gear. This discourages the player from picking everything up. Possibly there should also be heavier penalties for carrying lots of stuff; in reality you cannot fight or move effectively at all with 25 kg or 55 lbs in your knapsack. I think certain laws of physics prevent it even with superhuman strength. The carrying capacity of the PC probably shouldn't raise linearly with his Strength value... not at the same ratio. For example: A char has 20 Str and he can carry 600 stones. With 40 Str he could carry 900 stones. In other words only 50% more. Maybe Dex value could help alleviate some of the penalties a little considering the PC is trying to balance his massive load (not sure about this one though).

IMO the corpse of the slain foe should always "drop". However this doesn't mean the character can't die of starvation; the majority of corpses could cause sickness or they could be too tough to satiate properly since the digestive organs of the PC are not accustomed to raw meat. It also takes time and effort to tear the edible flesh from other tissue. Given the corpse always drops in my view it shouldn't be guaranteed to get the intrinsic property of the appropriate creature by eating it.

YES.


The player should Dissect the corpses in the ground to make edible chunks, and this should take around 7 o 8 turns for humanoids, maybe a bit less for rats of bats..

About the loot, everything should be dropped, but a few modifiers should tell you what *can* be useful,

"you see a runed dagger"

"or you see a glowing spear"

or

"you see a badly crafted bow"

"you see a rusty maze"

One important thing would be that guaranteed equipment like this has no chance of having prefixes/suffixes. Even in ADOM at the moment people scum orc scorchers and gnolls for ego weapons. Instead the results of this sort of thing should be like spears from spear traps - no chance of special modifiers, so people rarely banaefit from them. Also an enemy's equipment should get damaged in a fight, so by the time he keels over dead you'll have trouble making use of his butchered armour.

But obtaining the ego weapons will be harder, because fighting an orc that has a flaming orcish dagger of devastation is quite hard ;)

Unless you use missiles or spells :P

About the problem of "scumming for endless loot to sell":

1) As was mentioned, there should be progressively more taxing speed and other (especially combat) penalties to carrying more equipment. I think ideally the weight of all personally useful equipment (your basic weapons, armour, potions, tools etc.) should already be borderline too much to carry; so that there's not much room for lugging around extra "trade goods".

Companion pack animals such as mules might provide a workaround, but these should be quite expensive and not very happy to enter underground or interior locations.

2) The economic rule of "the more often you offer something, the less it is worth" should apply.

3) There should be more pressing and/or interesting things to do than scumming!

If despite these points, someone wants to "amuse" themselves by going through the drudgery of loot-scumming, that's up to them. And in fact, with the more open (than ADOM) JADE-world, perhaps there could be some fun in concentrating on trade.

This is getting off-topic, but here's one more idea. To make it hard for a trader character to be a strong fighter at the same time, perhaps fighting (and other) skills could go down if not used for a long time (e.g. while traveling to a profitable shop).

I don't personally like that idea since in real life unused skills are forgotten at a much slower rate. They could of course start degrading after a very long period of time if the skills are not used. The same kind of rules could apply to magic as well.

Marek14's idea looks good enough to me. So, this is how I see it:
Char was fighting with some orks. After fight there are ork corpses (some in 'mangled' state, which for example prevent using them at all without cooking skill and also contain much less satiation), some equipment from each ork, organized in a few >= normal quality items while everything other in 'dump' heap with 'broken/crude/generally_very_low' quality and very low cost.
Something like this system was in Titan Quest - bad quality items just weren't highlighted.
About too much items/corpses - first, I absolutelly agree with need of increase importance of Cooking skill. Maybe it could be merged with Food preservation skill? Second, dump items weigth a lot, so there won't be much use of them, at least not more than in ADOM.