Loot Table Ideas

Right I had the idea of shamelessly stealing D&D's loot table system. Imagine you find lvl 1 loot (according to mob difficulty, say you fight an average joe on the streets of firewatch and after you beat the snot out of him, you search him for goodies like any decent adventurer would do).

lvl 1 would be, say, Chitin/Bonemold/Iron/Steel only. Roll a d4, result is 3.

So you got an Iron something. Next table would be if it's a weapon, piece of armor, utility item or junk (utility would be lockpicks and probes etc, junk would be FORKS AND SPOONS and other misc. vendortrash). Roll a d4, result is 1.

An Iron Weapon. Next table is what type of weapon it is. Spear/Axe/Long Blade/Short Blade yadayada you get the picture. you roll a die according to how many (I don't think we've finished squishing some skills together have we?).

Say we get an Iron Axe. Now we roll a die to see what school of enchantment it's enchanted with (or unenchanted. Think 1-9 are schools but 0 is plain ol' iron). Then you roll a die for what EFFECT it is enchanted with (imagine you get destruction, you get to roll to see if it's fire, shock yada yada).

Then you roll AGAIN for the magnitude of the effect (I think it's best we combine range/duration/magnitude in the same table else the table amounts will get stupid if they aren't already).

Finally (I REALLY want to see this implemented) is rolling to see if it's cast on use, strike or constant effect. So yes, you can roll all that for an Iron Axe with 50 points of fire damage every second and then having it end up booby trapped. I think this would add a pretty great amount of RP potential (like keeping a few of these items for assassinations) as well as amusing cockblocks for gamers.

There are two problems, one aesthetical, the other mechanical.

Aesthetically, trouncing Fargoth only to find three left socks and a chitin halberd in his pockets would be either hilarious or creepy, depending on your bravery score.

Mechanically, since our game doesn't have levels, we've no obvious way to track character power and tie a table to it. Furthermore, because there is no forced character advancement inherent in the level-based system, we can have parties that have been together from the first day and yet be of wildly disparate capabilities. On which character do we base the table? I understand that the Scroll Keeper could track the number of character points given to characters, but as I already said, that's largely meaningless.

Rather, we should have context-based tables. What would a commoner normally have? Roll the commoner table. If he's going to collect muck sponge, on 1-90 add a muck ladle. Is he rich? Add money, a nice clothing item, and a steel weapon. Maybe he also knows a spell or two. It will be more compact and less random than making a huge table for everything.

Technically, I'm okay with the magic item generation part. As every ass with a few week's training can go out, capture a soul, and then enchant something with it, it makes sense that there'd be a lot of unique magic gear out there. However. Axe that heals your target? Knickers that continuously poison you? A claymore with such an enchantment that it simply instagibs most normal opponents, rolled as the party's first magic item? Things like that will happen, and be simply stupid. We'll need a power table, split into minor, moderate and major power, by material, then the same for enchantments. And then a lot more for things that aren't weapons or armor or whatever. Lots of work for a petty benefit.

Wouldn't the overpoweredness be countered by just tying the loot tables to enemy "difficulty rating" kinda like D&D?

Finding a claymore like you described is very possible, but it would only be spawned by a high level NPC or chest. These can't be accessible by any low-level schmuck y'know? And then the rest I believe can be taken care of via Scrollkeeper discretion.

D&D challenge rating was demonstrably useless up until 4e, which adopted an approach which is effectively opposite to what we are going for. In a system with no standardized character advancement, and no single clear power criterion, determining a character's strength is like tossing a five-dimensional coin that sometimes stays in the air.

Second, as there is no clear power criterion to adhere to, we can't determine what "overpowered" is without applying our own arbitrary standards of power progression. If a green character stumbles upon a dremora with 1 hit point and walks out of it with a daedric weapon, he's going to be exceedingly dangerous, not because he's breaking the XP table, but because he's a guy with a daedric weapon. He doesn't stand a greater or a smaller chance of finding a daedric weapon than a stronger, more experienced character. He's just less likely to survive an ordeal of acquiring the item.

If my babbling wasn't coherent enough, I'm against leveled item tables in general. They are exceedingly difficult to make, they won' work in our system without massive eyeballing, and they make no sense outside of a video game.

Hmm, I see your point now. That WOULD be a very breakable system.

Then how about first we make a clear power criterion? That way we could be better able to plan progression and loot. Perhaps a sum of the character stats divided by 10 to get a 1-100 rating in terms of how much of a threat the character is to anyone stupid enough to piss them off. And in killing stronger beings you get stronger loot.

That was not my point. My point was that the system cannot be broken because it does not, in fact, exist, that leveled loot tables cannot be done for our game, and that leveled loot tables make no sense in practice. I'm sober and rested at the moment, so I'll try to explain.

About breaking the system - there is no system. There is no concept of character levels, so there is no concept of expected character power at each level, therefore there is no way to clearly assay a number that tells you everything you need to know about a character. A social shark will get raped, killed and raped again by a weapons master. A battlemage will blow the house up. An illusionist thief will stab all three in the mouth while they sleep. A well-rounded jack-of-all-trades won't have a direct advantage over anyone, but won't have glaring weaknesses either. How do you find one single criterion by which you can judge performance of wildly different character is wildly different situations? You don't. Rewards also have no relation to character power. Rewards should be tied to luck and risk. As I said before, a 30 point character and a 300 point character shouldn't have a different chance of finding something when they open a chest; it makes no sense outside of a video game. The only difference is that a 300 point character will be able to undertake much more ambitious quests, and hence obtain greater rewards. But if a 30 pointer manages the same quest, he gets the same reward.

And in killing stronger beings you get stronger loot.

Keep leveled item drops from my tabletop, please.

I see. Pardon I didn't get the point before but now I do. Unfortunately I am stumped as to how we can actually make loot work then. Ok sure, D&D sucked at it but is there any other tabletop system that made it well? I'm not knowledgeable in any other system bar 3.5 D&D and WoD unfortunately.

This is just another brainstorming thread anyway. I want to hear any ideas you have Slotha. I'm sure we can make SOMETHING to fit in with our tabletop that is fairly solid and makes sense.