Al Fabet

[player1]

Personally, what I do not like with current loot system is a tedium of managing resources. The time it takes to move from place to place in order to do trading tasks.

What I do like is removal of instant gratification of get everything *now*, sell everything *now*, which is so simplistic and bland.

I like managing inventory optimally.
I also like that I need to keep stashes of stuff to pawn later (just like pirates). Feels more immersive.

But it would be nice if it could be automated to some level. After player gets rich, why not have helpers that would do the menial tasks for them?

[Elhazzared]

It may be simplistic, but that's what's good about it. You do what you have to do and you are rewarded for it... Do you know why simple is often good? Because it works!

inventory management has a time and place. that is in rogue likes where you don't have the option to sell things. One exaple. Sword of the stars: the pit. There you have to manage your inventory because it is part of the difficulty.

In this game inventory management is not part of the dificulty, it's part of the tedium of having to sell stuff and waiting for merchants to reset. This is not immersive, this is just plain boring.

[player1]

Inventory management is as old as RPG genre itself.

Heck, in PnP no way that Game Master would allow us to loot bunch of metal armors from dead guards in the middle of mission. Common sense logic...

Loot, loot, sell, sell has more in common with H&S dungeon crawling cRPGs then immersive roleplaying RPGs, since there whole game revolves around looting and killing.

[chimaera]

Chimera - Looting is the main mechanic of games like fallout and underrail and such RPGs. Loot = money and money = a stronger character. This creates the sense of improvement throughout the game alongside the leveling. Many players will still play this game with this system, but the truth is, given a choice between this system and the old I have no doubts the majority would prefer the old.

In any game the most important thing are it's mechanics. You can have a beautiful lore, interesting NPCs and so on. If the game mechanics are not good, the game isn't good. A game is an interactive experience and thus each player will create his own story based in his own interactions. However if the interactions are bad because the mechanics don't support it well enough, it just won't work.

Whether talking Underrail, Fallout, or cRPGs with actually broken game mechanics (Arcanum, Morrowind), I doubt that the majority of players were as obsessed with money-making as you seem to be. Backstory, feats, perks, skills etc. and how those allow a character to interact with the game world, this is what I'd consider far more important in roleplaying games, and what makes them stand apart from action games with rp flavor like Diablo.

Also, even without paying much attention to loot, my character managed to get so much money in the first playthrough, that it sat in her inventory basically wasted. Underrail is not a game where money is a problem; choosing the wrong skills, feats and attributes is far more likely to screw up character progression.

[Elhazzared]

Player1 - In PnP (and I am playing 2 games of D&D, one of savage worlds, going to join soon anotehr of savage worlds and one of warhammer fantasy roleplay 2ed) you have something called a party through which you distribute the weight of items and can carry everything. More to the point, you get to a town, go to the proper store (and there always is a proper store) and sell everything and they will buy everything.

Let's add to that the fact that walking to a shop in PnP games is as simple as saying. I'll go look for the store, it doesn't takes you minutes walking around in real time.

Yes usually there is inventory management, but the weights are never like it is in UR. You can always carry a ton of weapons and armor and other random stuff. More to the point you can always sell everything to the merchants. Now let's add that most RPGs allow you to have companions to carry even more stuff and what you end up with in reality is a carry weight that it's there just cause. They know that those things are boring and do not benefict the game in any way so they include them and make them not a problem just so that the small group that likes hardcore realism shuts up.

Chimaera - It's not about how much money you can even make. It's about not feeling rewarded to do things. I know that I could go through the game, take only half a douzen guns to sll per place I go to and I'll still earn more money than I need. It's the fact that looting isn't fun that ruins the game for me. Even if I'm getting more money than I can spend I don't care, I still count that money as power and I still want it. I still want the reward for the things I do otherwise the gameplay just isn't fun.

[Juri]

Elhazzared every game has a weight/slot cap on inventory, I really really don't see the issue with whats in the game currently. Styg has mentioned in interviews that the system is specifically designed so you can't just loot and sell everything, you need to choose what you want to take carefully and that adds to the feel of the world. What I would say back to you, reading over your posts in this thread, is that the inventory space and merchant system is fine. I'm currently playing an smg character with 3 strength and I can carry all my gear +~6 weapons +a few sets of armor +other loot like bullets, meds and craftables which is more than enough loot. The quests and rewards from quests should make you enough money to not worry about selling everything. If you really want to loot and sell everything then get the salesman and pack rathound perk (seems like a fun playthrough) or just edit the game to your liking.

[Elhazzared]

it's not like I have the know how to edit this game otherwise I'd have done that a long time ago and made it playable.

You might not mind this but to me not being able to loot and sell everything makes this game completly unplayable to me. I tried doing it several times and I just can't, I just quit in disgust. it bother me beyond believe and sucks out all the fun.

[chimaera]

And I can understand that, but that you consider looting to be the most important mechanics in a cRPGS, doesn't mean it is so for most players.  When my character does quests, it is because I am interested in seeing the outcome, and how it can influence the NPCs, locations or even the storyline - this is what I meant by a character interacting with the game world. I don't consider gathering and selling loot important, because cRPGS (that I know of, including Underrail) don't have realistic economies; your money buys you very little influence over the gaming world.

[Elhazzared]

But you will be interested in the outcome of a quest once. After you've done it then what will it do for other playthroughs? If you know there is no point in doing a quest because you are not getting anything you want and you already know what the quest is all about and the dialogues. There is no point.

How do most games avoid making it pointless? The loot is worth it!

[chimaera]

You avoid making it pointless by having multiple quest outcomes or by having mutually exclusive quest lines, or, in case of "kill them" quests, by making battles interesting. I dont care about loot as quest rewards at all.

edit: A somewhat extreme example: my character has destroyed a certain location in Underrail, including all the  merchants there, because it was the only way for her to free a certain NPC, which I really liked. A simple reason that has nothing to do with loot (in fact you lose all shopping opportunities and some quests that way).

[Elhazzared]

After seeying the wust once there is no reason to do a quest. Maybe you want to do it cause you like to waste time. it is your perogative, the majority of people will not bother to do something if they don't stand to gain anything from it.

[chimaera]

Funny, because I consider your approach to playing a cRPG a waste of time. Like I wrote before, if I want to play a buying & selling game, I'll play Monopoly.

[Elhazzared]

Is it. Let's look at it this way. You do a quest to gain absolutly nothing. I look to do a quest to gain something. This counting that you had already done it in the past at least once to see the outcome so simply seeing the outcome of a quest is no longer the issue here.

In my case I am doing it to gain something thus I've not wasted my time.

In your case you are doing because you can do it but there is no reward (we'll assume you throw the reward away and that this is not underrail but a game with a proper economy system) for doing so thus you've wasted your time.

Now, you may be one rare case that considers that doing something for nothing in a game it's no waste of time and if that's what gets you going then more power to you, but doing quests for no reward is for the majority of people a waste of time. So is exploring and getting no rewards.

[Fenix]

With that approach better play diabloids...

[Elhazzared]

No, you do things in the game to get better. Be it more money to buy more stuff, be it XP or any other kind of reward, anything that advances your character in some way or another.

To put into another terms, even if this doesn't exactly compares to PnP. You are not going to save a town from a bunch of trolls just to get a smile and a thanks. You better be getting paid for putting your life on a line.

This goes for any RPG, you do something in order to gain something it doesn't means that you won't do something just cause you can and felt like it of course. For example I always liked to exterminate the slavers in the den after I joined those anti-slaver group in the new california republic. But that is just a one thing I'd do because I could. I general I don't do anything if I don't get a reward. Even then wiping them out would yield me money in the form of loot and of course XP so it wasn't a total waste of time though the money for it is bad.

A player has to be rewarded for what he does or punished for what he does (it goes both ways of course since for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). However a player's time should never be wasted.