Item generation in generic dungeon crawler.

ID:152934
 
Jul 5 2005, 1:27 am
I've been writing up a fairly generic dungeon crawler thingy over the past two months or so, and I'm slightly stumped as to how I'm going to handle one particular thing, which is, as the title of this topic suggests, random item generation. Including magical attributes.

The best method I can think of so far is to assign all items a rarity value, and give them a list of magical enhancements (or... reductionments? For cursed items). These magical enhancements modify stuff, including the rarity, can be referenced in other procedures (for, say, the slaying property) and are datums. When generating items for a monster/level, I generate a list of so many items, to be determined by testing, and then pick the one which has a rarity closest to the dungeon level/monster level. It should keep items to appropriate levels, while still managing to make sure that there is a fair amount of randomness.

A possible problem is that it means that most of the items in lower floors (lower in the dungeon. Higher floor number) will be high level items. Characters will expect that the long sword lying on the ground has some magical modifiers, and that might not be a good thing. A possible addition would be to generate a few items via this method, then just scatter a few generic low-level items around the dungeon.

Any particular thoughts?
Jul 5 2005, 7:06 am
In a RL I am working on, I use 2 functions, Set_Level and Rarify. Set_Level makes sure that the item is an appropriate "basic" item for the difficulty (IE a level 40 sword is better than a level 5). Then, there is a chance to Rarify, which can add powers based on a passed value that determines likelihood of powers and magnitude of powers. That way, you can have appropriate items litter the floor, but little chance that they are very special. But powerful monsters can be guaranteed to carry good stuff if you wish.
Jul 5 2005, 8:36 am
Yeah. I would -always- make mundane items outnumber rare ones for any level/floor of a dungeon crawl. The way to keep players guessing is to make deeper levels increase way more in -magnitude- of special items than in frequency of such.

Like, the specially modified longsword you find in level 2 of the dungeon would just be of exceptional quality with a +1 to parry. The specially modified longsword you find in level 50 can be a vampiric vorpal sword +17... but most swords you find on either level should just be swords.

Among other things, this helps avoid rampant inflation at higher levels (the "too much gold to know what to do with" problem)... if you've got rare items increasing both in frequency and spectacularness, every trip into the dungeon becomes a winning lottery tickets.

Tailoring this approach to what you described... what you -could- do is make it so that rather than picking the item that closely matches in rarity level the difficulty level of the encounter, make it randomly pick an item that -does not exceed- that. To oversimplify your formula... on level 1, you'd get level 1 items. On level 2, you'd get level 1-2 items. On level 10, you'd get level 1-10 items.

If you want to make the curve even less generous, you could make it so that, for insance if you're on level 3, there's a 3 in 6 in chance you'll get a level 1 item, a 2 in 6 chance you'll get a level 2, and a 1 in 6 chance you'll get a level 3 item.