Regarding Wavinator''s post:

I can relate. The first time I played Half-life, I was in constant danger of running out of ammo because I just wasn''t very conservative with it. But the second time I played, I was ready for this problem. You wouldn''t believe how many headshots I scored just to keep my bullets stocked. Incidentally, I was nowhere near running out of ammo by the time I got mugged and stripped of equipment.

Sometimes hoarding certain types of items can provide a relief from regular gameplay. I still place Daggerfall on the highest altar of role-playing games. Despite its bugs and short-comings, it remains the greatest and most ambitious RPG of all time. I collected all sorts of things in that game: books, gems, roses, souls. I even gathered a full suit of Daedric armor once just for the sake of doing it. I bought a house and a boat. Why? Because I could.

That''s all the reason you need.

I like the expendature thing... Players don''t earn a helluva lot of money, so make them more likely to find what they are looking for out doing what they do... And don''t let them get extremely wealthy. If they start to stockpile, get some theive to go and rob some of their stuff (Maybe I am just vindictive and twisted sometimes )

But I would like to reiterate my perishables idea... What if most things had an expiry date? Well... potions and food are obvious... but what if keeping metallic items (weapons and armour) caused them to rust slowly over time... Hoarding things would become an expense...

?

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - The future of RPGs
Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche

To be fair, I dont think hoarding is entirely a design problem. Its a player choice. You can use up your potion of invulnerability to fight the big bad guy, or you can die, reload, die, reload, die reload until you eventually get lucky, and finish the game with three million unused potions. Perhaps if you couldnt reload the game then you might use your potions a bit more, but thats a different topic...

Edited by - Sandman on April 24, 2001 1:10:11 PM

I think that one of the biggest problems here (stated earlier) is that players don''t know how valuable certain items are. They don''t know when is a good time to use them, or if it will be their only one.

To solve this, we could simply tell our players when to use certain items. Think of Final Fantasy...up against a fairly large boss...you could Throw one of your old swords at it doing a lot of damage, but you think that you might want to save all of your swords for the very final boss (where the character with the throwing ability might not even be present!). So a dialogue window pops up at the begining of the fight and says, "Try using Amarants''s throw ability." or "The Big Nasty Dragon fears Alexandrite. (Don''t you have and extra Alexandrite sword laying about?).

Some may think that this is to straight forward. You could have a character in the game supply to info... or have Amarant himself say, "Hey, I should throw that sword!"

There are lots of items in RPG''s that aren''t used properly or at all because of hording. Informing the player will allow them to use more of these and even add more value to character abilities (like throw).

Players need to know that by the time they use up that wand of magic missles, they''ll have a new wand of fireballs.

Information is key here.


-Jason

One sure way to get around the problem of hoarding money is to give them lots, and lots, and lots of ways to spend it. Buy a house. Buy several, and rent them out to NPCs. Buy a town election , purchase a trading barge, purchase a war galleon to protect their trading barge, buy a rather large catapult to sit of the maindeck of their trading bargge to surprise the NPC pirates who come in for an easy kill .

Of course, that just adds to item hoarding. On the flip side, however, if the player owns a lot of visible assets, they must have a lot of money. Thus they get more attention from NPC thieves and assassins...



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