Loot Tables and Rarity

Loot, drops, treasure, spoils, gear, booty. Regardless of how it is referred to, it is often the primary subject of the most intense gameplay found in MUDs or modern MMOs.

MUD loot experienced an interesting evolution over the course of time. There has, however, consistently been three different popular means of acquiring loot directly from the average MUD. (Specifically, the acquisition of items, absent game mechanics involving other player characters.) These three methods are:

• Loot retrieved directly from a room or other object that loads the object
• Loot dropping from a defeated mob or monster
• Loot received as the reward from the completion of a quest

Rarity was largely determined through a combination of supply, demand, and the gaming meta. Unwanted, useless, or misunderstood items would be rare due to players not collecting them. Usually those items that had the highest demand invariably produced the greatest supply.

This seems counter-intuitive until you think about how drops were mostly acquired. If players that used wands knew that a particularly coveted wand would drop from the grey wizard in the dark tower, then sure enough, adventurers would find themselves battling that wizard and winning the wand.

The same principle applied to popular quest rewards or items that could simply be found or reached (such as one in a treasure chest). As long as you knew how the gear could be acquired, there was little stopping anyone from getting it.

In theory more powerful gear required more powerful adventurers or parties of adventurers, however, that was little deterrent for the determined and the patient.

There were some particularly obscure (and powerful) pieces of loot on MUDs (especially when new zones or areas were introduced) that maintained their rarity, sometimes for years. This was usually a combination of a builder’s ingenuity, and lucky players keeping the secret to themselves.

Some gods managed to come up with interesting solutions to the rarity situation. I recall playing on this one MUD, a Diku derivative, where access to what was one of the most powerful swords in the game (known as the “Sword of Fat”), was extremely limited. It was both rare and powerful. Only an immortal who was at least the rank of a Lesser God was able to manifest a copy of this mighty weapon. One day upon completing and winning a high place in a special event, I was granted one “wish” from the god running the event. I asked for, and received, the great “Sword of Fat” to my great pleasure. While a very fun and rewarding style of implementing rarity in loot, it was certainly not very practical.

There was an interesting phenomenon that began to crop up in 1997, shortly after the release of the PC game Diablo. Many MUDs (especially those based in the Diablo world), began to implement randomized loot tables. The idea never seemed to make its way into one of the major open-source codebases, however, I do recall a snippet or two that ended up floating around to implement that mechanic if you didn’t want to do the work yourself.
Some were halfway measures, providing a combination between the regular loot system and the option of having a random loot table. Regardless of the MUD's specific implementation, the idea largely resembled what would become a staple in MMORPGs. Some might think it presumptuous, however, I posit that it was the original Diablo that is responsible for having made this loot system so prominent.

While there were some MUDs that incorporated different loot systems, or employed item rarity in other ways, the most popular codebases mainly kept the same old system they always did.

Those virtual worlds which did employ rarity did not necessarily follow any specific ratio of random chance either. Each monster, or class of mob, or even an entire area could have a loot table where the drop chance of any given item would significantly differ from loot table to loot table. Often in the basic systems, drop chances were a simple percentage (i.e. so many chances out of a hundred). Other, arguably more sophisticated systems, had actual categories of rarity. Although there were simpler systems as well, with perhaps only Common, Uncommon, and Rare chances of dropping. There were undoubtably also some that introduced even lower levels (e.g. Vendor Trash) or higher (e.g. Legendary).

Whether or not one system (or a combination of the two) is better would probably be highly subjective. Personally, I rather like the idea of increasingly rare loot or gear. The idea that there are items (with great utility) that could be only ever discovered by a handful of players, or a single player, or possibly even never through the cruel twist of fate (or rather a cruel random number generator), that seems exhilarating.

  Belisarius Smith