Looter Players

The looting is their story.

Granted it wont be a complicated story if they have no moral boundaries in regards too looting.

Your problem as GM is thinking the only story there is is the story you wrote before the game (or the module you bought)

No, the players are making a story.

They aren't interested in your story because they are interested in the story they are making by their characters actions.

Which I think is a way people instinctively play (when new to roleplay) and by that measure, the right way to play.

A more complicated story from their actions would come if they have various scruples, moral principles, NPC's they care about, etc. Sometimes the looter PC has these, you just don't see it. Sometimes the player can add these to the PC after play has started, if you talk about it.

The players are not like book readers and you a book author - you are not a book author trying to get your book reading audience to care about the story. The players are authors of the story themselves - every time they have their PC's act, they write some story.

The question is, how do they get YOU to care about their story?

I'm guessing hard rejection of this premise - because you only asked about how to make them care about your story. That's all that matters to you. So they wont be getting you to care about their story any time soon, I guess?

Originally posted by me, here

Fight Cycle Design Diary: How to do loot distribution

Fight Cycle

Right now - well, I've never really designed a gear system/loot distribution system before so I'm figuring one. (note: I first posted this over at Fight Cycles indie-resource discussion thread)

I'm thinking I'll have some lists of item hand made (as in their data is hand typed!) by me, at a common, green, blue, purple sort of distribution. Each comes from a tier, which determines the level of skill required to wield the weapon/wear the armour. Basically in units of 100 - so you maybe need 0 skill, 100 skill, 200 skill, etc, to use a particular weapon or armour.

I'm thinking you have a loot roll that has a certain percentage for common, green, blue, purple (that latter ones having a lower chance) from your own tier. So if you are skill 255, then that loot roll is for tier 200 skill items.

You also have before tha an overall roll before that, where you have a small chance of getting lower tier items and an even smaller chance of getting an item from one tier above you.

That's my idea, anyway. I was stuck before because I thought that if it was a straight roll within your tier, then if I put in alot of common items, you'd have more chance of getting a common item - which seems a sucky result and not at all why I would be putting in more common items (I'd be doing it for variety, not to incrementally make you have to have common items more often).

Not sure if anyone is tracking this (perhaps X, who plays in Driftwurld as well, might be checking out this discussion thread), since I'm not ultra fast at implementing stuff (particularly stuff that I have no feel for whether its anything that thrills people), but I thought it'd be good to give an update.

I'm really hoping to overall finish this game. I might keep adding new touches/items as they come to me, for years to come. But for the overall structure, I'm really hoping to just finish this - it's proving harder than I thought, and that's when I chose what I thought was a more conservative design!

Searching nooks and crannies for loot

If you've ever played fallout 3, you've probably done alot of nosing around, searching various spots and places for loot. Really this originates in table top play - so how do we return it to there without writing up every little thing?

Well, here's a couple of charts. The first gives a general idea of where to look. You might actually want to roll on it a few times to produce some dead ends that have no loot, then combine all that's there into one description (which makes it harder to search than if you read out each spot to search in an itemised fashion).
1. Large, Thick Trunked Tree
2. Steeply Sloping Ground
3. Thorns
4. Shady Trees
5. Trickling Creek
6. Black Stump
7. Strata (this is strata!)
8. Boulders

The next step is determining the sub locations one could search. You need atleast two rolls, or even more (the more there are, the harder it gets). Then from one of the results, decide that is where some loot is hidden/some loot was lost there/some loot was left behind there after a battle. The players challenge is to figure out which option is the most likely to be hiding something of worth. And here's the thing that breaks this into gamist rather than simulationist gaming - if there's some loot in the tall grass, but they look under the pile of branches, well that's it, they've missed their chance. Even if they then say they look in the tall grass, they've missed the loot (feel free to tell them the stakes and that they got one try and missed the mark - indeed, you may need to!)

1. Tall grass
2. Pile of branches
3. Hollow in a tree/log
4. Old rabbit hole
5. Leaf litter
6. Old log
7. Rusted out car body
8. Rocks

And that should fill the locations of your world with places to poke and pry for a little bit of something good!

Collecting loot isn't about lore? But sans lore, isn't it collecting database entries?

Wrath of the fuzzy screenshot marked a downhill trend in expansions...

Over at Tesh's blog, a comment by Syl made me ponder...

WoW is goal-focused, or rather: loot-focused. it’s not about identity or lore as much as it’s about the means to get what you’d like to collect.

That prompts me to think - The weird thing about that is that isn’t the very idea of ‘loot’ lore based? I mean, it’s ascribing the lore of ‘this is ye old weapon’ to a set of database entries. Can someone say they aren’t about the lore, when they set about collecting ‘loot’?