When Artifacts and Monsters match

[quarague]

yeah, you would need some presort. I think dungeon crawl soup has a system with colours and adjectives like shiny that if I recall correctly give you the 4 levels: non magic, enchanted, ego, artifact. These can be seen without pick up and so sqelch should be able to sort them out. Would make the current id game somewhat easier, but not massivly so.

[Derakon]

As Angband has very good sqelch options I think it could by nice if various monsters frequently drop their standard equipment as long as it usually unentchanted.

This only works if the player doesn't have to determine the quality level of the equipment manually (i.e. if the gear doesn't need to be looked at by the player). Otherwise you're introducing a major "loot sorting" load to the game.

Once we get rune-based ID, it could be tried out.

[quarague]

Because otherwise there'd be too much junk. Same reason why we don't have orcs dropping their armor and weapon every time even though we assume they aren't traipsing through the dungeon starkers.

lorewise you can also reason that if an orc wears some leather armor and you kill him by sticking a blade into his tummy then his leather armor will have a huge hole so it wouldn't be that useful to you, it is kind of a broken leather armor. So usually monsters wear and use equipment but when you kill them, you damage the equipment beyond usefulness.

As Angband has very good sqelch options I think it could by nice if various monsters frequently drop their standard equipment as long as it usually unentchanted.

[Derakon]

Because otherwise there'd be too much junk. Same reason why we don't have orcs dropping their armor and weapon every time even though we assume they aren't traipsing through the dungeon starkers.

[tynan]

My general take on this is that it's fine for some monsters to be biased towards certain classes of drops, like archers being more likely to drop ammo (of all types, not just arrows)

Actually, if an archer is able to shoot arrows at you ("The Kobold Archer fires an arrow..."), then some kind of arrow-firing missile weapon should always drop, 100% of the time. However, most of the time they will be mundane.
Ammo should be more random, however, and not guaranteed by any means. After all, that last arrow fired from their bow might have been the last one, so by the time you did kill them, they would only drop the bow-type weapon with no ammo.
Actually, this brings up another potential point: why is the player character the only entity in the game that actually fires physical arrows that can land on the floor?

[Zireael]

My general take on this is that it's fine for some monsters to be biased towards certain classes of drops, like archers being more likely to drop ammo (of all types, not just arrows), or casters being more likely to drop spellbooks (both arcane and holy). But most monsters should not have any particular bias, and all items ought to be droppable by anything (or rather, by anything that has a drop to begin with).

Drop biases should be mostly for flavor, in other words. "Oh, yeah, that makes sense" kind of thing.

That's a great idea!

[Timo Pietilä]

Drop biases should be mostly for flavor, in other words. "Oh, yeah, that makes sense" kind of thing.

I think themed drop should go over the normal drop and be something quite mundane, but usually useful. Like priests dropping C*W potions, archer monsters dropping normal ammo, mages town spellbooks. Not always, but with probability. If you don't need those at the moment squelch them.

[Carnivean]

My general take on this is that it's fine for some monsters to be biased towards certain classes of drops, like archers being more likely to drop ammo (of all types, not just arrows), or casters being more likely to drop spellbooks (both arcane and holy). But most monsters should not have any particular bias, and all items ought to be droppable by anything (or rather, by anything that has a drop to begin with).

Drop biases should be mostly for flavor, in other words. "Oh, yeah, that makes sense" kind of thing.

I look at drops and think that we get the characters tools of trade (arrows for archers, books from mages) or supplies (potions and scrolls and food) unless we damaged them in the fight, or the monster was running low on supplies, but they might also be carrying a treasure item or many treasure items, that they found and carry with them. Thus you'd have 2 different rolls for item drops. First roll for the mundane drop, and the second for the potentially good drop.

Note that treasure to a monster doesn't mean treasure to the player. They could be carrying around a skeleton as a treasure.

[krazyhades]

Yes please.

[Derakon]

A character should never be able to find the Arkenstone at a thousand feet, for example.

Why not? I mean, it shouldn't be likely, but a huge part of roguelikes is the possibility that anything could show up anywhere. It should be theoretically possible to generate the One Ring on the floor of 50', even if the odds of it happening are trillions to one against.

[tynan]

Well, obviously Artifacts should be able to drop from anything that can drop items, as now. That should not change (perhaps the depths they can be dropped needs to be tweaked some more though). A character should never be able to find the Arkenstone at a thousand feet, for example.

[Derakon]

My general take on this is that it's fine for some monsters to be biased towards certain classes of drops, like archers being more likely to drop ammo (of all types, not just arrows), or casters being more likely to drop spellbooks (both arcane and holy). But most monsters should not have any particular bias, and all items ought to be droppable by anything (or rather, by anything that has a drop to begin with).

Drop biases should be mostly for flavor, in other words. "Oh, yeah, that makes sense" kind of thing.

[Nick]

Themed drops are something I want to be really careful not to overdo. I certainly don't want the situation you see in some MMOs, where it's only a particular monster type that drops a particular awesome suit of armour, and so the obvious thing to do is go and farm a billion of those monsters.

[tynan]

Themed drops would definitely be a good thing. Also random drops could be kept in as well, such as jellies (gel cubes, etc) dropping random stuff they oozed over.
It would also be appropriate for the flip side as well: fire-based and acid-based and to some extent elec-based creatures should never be able to drop items that can be damaged/destroyed by those elements (scrolls, non-ego/artifact armor/weapons). I don't recall what cold-base damage destroys (potions?). If so, then White dragons would never carry potions perhaps.

[Derakon]

I think themed drops are planned. Like orc archers dropping arrows and mages dropping spellbooks.

Themed drops are already in, to some extent. It's mostly limited to spellcaster "p" and "h" monsters being more likely to drop town spellbooks though. I believe the current drop-association system requires a fully-specified item. That is, you can't say "this monster is likely to drop mage spellbooks"; you have to say "this monster is more likely to drop Magic for Beginners." You can associate many items with the same monster though.