NPC Item drops

[Vendrin]

Lol?

We can't actually drop full kits used by NPCs because they're worth too much money. Are we actually going to re-open the wealth guidelines debate here?

Full kits I agree are over rated. But when I kill a bandit wearing chain mail, who shoots me first with a longbow, then switches to sword and shield, then drops none of it when dead.... I can certainly see that some equipment may be piss poor and ruined during combat, but to routinely get nothing?

And I see no need to re-open the wealth guidelines, I'd just rather people abusing the system and farming spawns to go past wealth guidelines be punished, and for those who aren't to actually be able to recoup losses from adventuring without having to go run 10 mail drops or gather herbs for 20 hours to cover a CMW potion.

[Castano]

I for one would like npcs to actually start dropping the stuff they are obviously carrying.

They drop the valuable stuff they are carrying, we RP that their non valuable stuff is left by the looter on the body. Our experience with junk drops is that they are left behind by players as litter or the players OOC campfire them, breaking immersion.

Really cause my experience is that killing bandits and orcs, they don't drop anything.

What level is your PC, perhaps there's a dimrets issue here? First I have heard that the loot is not being dropped on MS in 2012 (we had issues at live, but I assume you mean recently).

The only complaints I get about ALFA's controls are from certain high levels who don't receive any XP when they nuke CR 0.5 zombies while not partied (and while protecting lowbies buddies who are getting XP) Thankfully I have mellowed with age, the old Castano would have deducted XP

[Zelknolf]

What's dropping now was our best attempt at trying to nudge people along toward reasonable / expected wealth when we wrote the systems-- and that means that often (very often, in fact) you'll fight that guy in maille using a sword and shield after firing a longbow without getting any of it-- because that guy is worth 2 xp, which means that you need to average making somewhere between 3 and 20 gold (actually, over here in Plausibleopolis, 3 - 5 gold) off of kills like it to keep on track, but a longsword is worth 30 gold; a heavy shield is worth 50; chain armor and longbows go for 150 each. Even if you're in that level 17-20 bracket that should get 10x as much gold as XP (no one in ALFA2 is or ever has been-- the current record is level 15), you can't routinely get even the cheapest item in that kit. If we respond to where most of ALFA's population is, we can't even commonly drop any of it, even if we count on looters selling everything they find (and actually netting half the item's worth). The math just isn't there to support.

[t-ice]

We don't have any events to work with to spot you doing that. Gotta tool killable stuff with the gear you expect them to use or drop-- because otherwise things become much much less predictable.

The droppable flag actually has nothing to do with monster loot, mind you. We sniff for it in parts of the ACR to see if people set it (and I believe Bioware did the same, so their recycled creature events probably do too), assuming that they meant monster loot, but that flag's actual function more closely resembles a Stone of Weight, and you can't rely on it inherently.

Okay, thanks Zelk, I guess this answers most of the question. The "droppable" flag in an item blueprint means "can a PC drop this item?". Thus, there's no way to set by default on an item blueprint that "this item should never be left behind for PCs"?

The "droppable" flag in a creature blueprint inventory, however, does mean "is this item left behind when creature is killed", doesn't it? So the question is, is there a way to set that on the DM client, should I want to slap my critter with an item that I don't want to drop? Since by default this seems to be on for items spawned on the creator.

You can also force a drop by setting the "plot" flag on, as I understand. This you can do on the DM client. The question is, can you do the opposite, force an item to be "not drop". And if it's not possible now, would it be a feasible addition, using some mechanic?

I for one would like npcs to actually start dropping the stuff they are obviously carrying.

I think the loot system does do this, for items that are flagged as drops in the creature blueprint. But if the value of those drops supercede what that CR should drop, then they are cut off (which is good). And if there's not enough drops, random stuff is created instead. Though for what it's worth, the additional stuff dropped seems to be rather bat-shit insane for the creature. "You killed a dire rat. Here, have a katana". Just dropping gold or gems as the random stuff, probably valued in with a factor (eg. 1 full plate (1500gp) = 500gp coins = 1000gp in gems) oughta do.

Also armed mobs being disarmable by default so the feat isn't useless.

Not only totally out-of-topic, but also absoutely not. The AI is unable to respond to disarm in the reasonable way (lost my turn to attack since I have to pick up my weapon and rearm). Rather the AI proceeds to suicide by attacking you with fists. Disarm would be a massively unbalanced one-click-cripple against all armed mobs due to AI limitations.

Coding the AI to be able to handle disarm might be possible, but not very much bang for buck, as I see it. Until then disarm should just be banned as a feat. Because disarm either does nothing or is uber-powerful exploit of an oversight in creating the blueprint.

[Zelknolf]

So the question is, is there a way to set that on the DM client, should I want to slap my critter with an item that I don't want to drop? Since by default this seems to be on for items spawned on the creator.

You can also force a drop by setting the "plot" flag on, as I understand. This you can do on the DM client. The question is, can you do the opposite, force an item to be "not drop". And if it's not possible now, would it be a feasible addition, using some mechanic?

We can probably find a way to specify a "ignore everything else; don't drop this item" flag, sure. Right now, you're just stuck keeping an eye on any creature that you've tweaked post-spawning, with only a marginal assurance that the supplies carried might maybe not drop if they're expensive enough (but in practice, this isn't terribly reliable, and you should really keep an eye on things handled this way).

[t-ice]

Thanks Zelk. I count this as question answered and system understood.

I would suggest to make for double use of the existing "droppable" flag in the loot scripts so that "droppable OFF" items are never dropped by mobs. Even if with PCs it means something completely different. I mean in the high-probability case that a mob really needs to drop a "stone of weight" -like object without a DM having active hands on in the situation, having the Plot tag set ON can override the droppable OFF. So nothing lost by having that tag serve double purpose as I see it.

[Brokenbone]

Sorry, to summarize what "droppable" meant, I always had the impression it was a condition that was about whether an item could ever leave a living creature's inventory. If ticked "droppable", fine, you can put that knife or beer or whatever on the ground or in a chest or barter it. As could a goblin NPC.

Once a creature is dead, it's just got a remains baggie, which could include lots of items with or without the droppable ticked off on it.

That right? I may be completely wrong. And don't want to get sidetracked into how ACR Loot scripts also start to "reconsider" whether certain things should appear in remains/corpses, or if too high value, whether cheap substitute items should appear.

[Zelknolf]

Droppable is, if operated in complete isolation from everything else, specifically PCs; if an NPC is doing that kind of inventory manipulation, a DM or a script is ordering it, and it works fine-- and there are already checks to not drop things set as non droppable, and you're adding those things to the creature's inventory after we've checked (the OE design is check first, then spawn potential loot into the creature's inventory-- such that when it dies, the loot drops, and may be non-droppable to the PC if so desired; it can't tell the difference when a DM does that manually, as it's all just "inventory fiddling happening after spawning" to the creature).

[Brokenbone]

So "if using the droppable flag, this really only matters once an item gets into PC hands, which may not mean what people may have thought it meant when gearing up a goblin."

Flagging a goblin club as "droppable" doesn't impact whether goblin drops it on dying. It Impacts whether a PC who loots it, will ever be able to get rid of it. Typically we'd want the IC ability to drop an old stick on the ground, hah. It's almost more like a flag for cursed* things, as indicated with the loadstone joke.

*cursed also meaning possible OOC items asked to never get rid of, like DMFI ring.

[Zelknolf]

So "if using the droppable flag, this really only matters if the item is in an NPC's possession when it is spawned or once an item gets into PC hands, which may not mean what people may have thought it meant when gearing up a goblin manually, after the spawn event."

Like this.

// Edit
To summarize: the non-droppable flag works just fine in purely-static content; the use case here is narrow to human intervention and rearrangement. The moral of the story is a short one-liner:
"If you modify an NPC after spawning it, watch that NPC until it despawns or dies, because we can no longer garauntee or feasibly support all specific behaviors."

[t-ice]

"If you modify an NPC after spawning it, watch that NPC until it despawns or dies, because we can no longer garauntee or feasibly support all specific behaviors."

Well that would be the sure and safe way, but we all know DMs like to set up encounters they leave behind for PCs to find later. And arming those mobs with something non-vanilla, in the best case throwing a curve ball the player's way, is a big part why those DM-left-behind encounters are more exciting than purely static content. Saying "please don't do that" kills lots of our game, doesn't it?

So sorry if I'm being bull-headed, but my question remains this:
Could we edit the loot drop mechanic in such a way that the "droppable" item flag works opposite to the "plot" flag? In that like the "plot ON" items always drop by our scripts, "droppable OFF" items are never dropped? That would, in my assessment, be a good DM tool, and for what I can guesstimate, a relatively easy addition.

Of course if there's an easier way to the same end, all the better, but to me that seems the simplest, as the flag is already there, and doesn't have overlapping use. Plus it's intuitive what "droppable" usually means in context of items a mob carries.

[Zelknolf]

I'd meant to more clarify the current state of things than saying how you should expect it to work forever and ever. There's a lot of silly wizardry going on with creature events (so probably an easy change to make, but a hard change to find), and a steadily-less-appealing path to change the old ones as the new ones get their footing (no one likes doing development with the knowledge that it's going to be obsolete soon-- especially if it means writing it twice).

We can make that happen, sure-- but from the perspective of saying what we do and don't support, we're on some flimsy territory here. It's possible for DMs to do a lot (obviously) but not always very easy to tell that they have, and it leaves a lot of grey territory that I'm hesitant to make promises about, as our best case scenario is identifying and responding to individual use cases and trying to correct for them, which will be risky development, on account of it being difficult to tell if DMs are responsible for things.

[t-ice]

Okay. I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying there (re-writing the loot drop logic will happen as part of the AI project?). But I certainly trust your judgement about making it or not. For now I'll just try to remember to be aware that all items I create on mobs might well drop to PC hands.

[Zelknolf]

(re-writing the loot drop logic will happen as part of the AI project?).

Slowly, yes. Creature loot actually lives in the AI, and we'd like to minimize the amount of that running in NWScript, as the NWScript stuff is not going to be able to be aware of the information which C# is gathering (or, more precisely, the work required to make it aware is likely to be greater than the work of redoing it better in the new language).

[Cast_No_Shadow]

Am I mistaken in thinking you can add your own variables to items?

If that is the case, and you can add them, is it not possible to set a variable on all should never be in PC hands items and then knock up a DM item that simply checks PC inventories for items with that variable?

Obviously, this wont be retro-active, unless there has been a standardised use of a pre-existing flag\variable but it is a quick and dirty way to check now and then to make sure things are existing as they should, or shouldn't as the case may be.

Given how obtuse NWN can be, I'm also assuming you cannot manually set gold values, as again, it'd cut down on worry if you could just set them to have a value of 0.