In other words, does gold-loot in a RPG game breaks the immersion ?
A simple example, you slay a snake and loot a bag full of gold coins. This sounds not really realistic, still you might encounter it in your beloved
RPG game. The question is, is it ok or an immersion killer ?
From a game design view you want to reward the player for defeating a challenge.
The more realistic way would be, to kill the snake, get its valueable skin and sell it in a local store for the same money. Yet it is a burden for the designer (you need to design all this loot-for-just-some-gold-coins items) and a burden for the player, because he needs to manage all this items in his inventory and he never really knows if this is just a gold-making item in his inventory and he needs to distinguish between gold and useful items (quest or crafting items).
In this way looting gold coins is a strong abstraction of the skin-selling way. Sometimes you encounter hybrids, eg gold-loot items are always stackable, they are tagged as such (trophies) and sometimes you have a special,endless inventory space for such items. Still it gets unrealistic at some point and the question is, is it worth to do it this way ?
What are your thoughts ?
The acceptance of gold loot in RPGs
My thought is that it isn't very fun to do choirs like having to go back to some store to empty your pockets to be able to continue playing.
Also, huge inventories filled will crap quickly becomes quite "not fun" too. You really don't care if its a "boars head" or a "shiny snake skin" or whatnot.
Sure, you could have "auto sell" buttons and town portals and whatnot, but then its not that big of stretch to say "sure, you go back to town to sell sometimes, but its boring to show, and its unnecessary to force you to press a button, so here is just the cash you would get straight up"
Imo a bag of coins in a snake is at least more realistic then the snake having a legendary armor and a broadsword in its stomach...
Bottom line, don't let realism get in the way of fun. It's a game after all, and it is not supposed to be 100% realistic.
Absolutely not. You kill monsters, you get gold & exp, that's the way it is supposed to work :D
Fantasy and Historical are different genres and have completely different desirability of realism.
I like getting unique items or crafting materials over gold, although it's all a bunch more development work. I've often commented on the same thing to my wife, especially when human NPCs were broke but monsters had coins and swords.
If you're worried about immersion and realism, you should question whether a mighty warrior on an important quest would stop to search the body of a snake at all ;-)
If you're worried about immersion and realism, you should question whether a mighty warrior on an important quest would stop to search the body of a snake at all ;-)
More importantly, you should question why every snake and every bird has nothing better to do than attack your mighty warrior. 
But on a more serious note, I don't particularly like those gold drops, especially when they don't make the least sense. You destroy an animated skeleton, and get gold coins and a rare sword. Where did the skeleton keep those coins and why didn't it attack you with the sword of soul stealing?
One game which got drops right in my opinion was the totally unsuccessful Ryzom. No gold, no items, all you got was some body parts (a skin, a tail, a claw...). These didn't have any particular value either (would sell at ridiculously low prices, hardly worth doing at all), but could be used for crafting items. Crafting, on the other hand, would give you very valuable equipment whereas every piece of equipment that you could buy in a shop was utter rubbish.
Insofar, drops weren't worthless at all (especially since the crafting system had it that using only the "best" ingredients did not give the best overall weapons/armour, putting in a particular "bad" ingredient would sometimes result in a vastly superior item, and you had to experiment to find out what to use, which was very cool).
Games tend to work better as fake than realistic. So to me, you want the immersion to be killed. Not necessarily for the average player, who doesn't question immersion much, but just in general.
Immersion gets killed all the time in games. Take Tomb Raider for example. Lara Croft survives every jump, or dies and restarts. In realism, the game is over forever the moment she dies. Real-life doesn't have a restart button.
I don't think immersion really means "realism".
It means you accept the world, as described, you feel that it is consistent enough that you can feel like a part of it.
If the world has means to magically transform snake corpses to gold coins so be it... if you can explain how and why in terms of the world you have build, you can increase immersion.
I prefer gold drops. Hell, I even prefer that snake to have the chance at dropping a full set of platemail, 35 different potions and a massive claymore of impossible strength.
If a drop is ultimately reducible to "gold" (in-game currency) then making it drop as something else is only valuable insofar as it contributes to immersion.
Consider grey drops in World of Warcraft or the Alien Food in XCOM:EU...in both cases, the combat event gives you in-game currency...but also something that's reducible to in-game currency. Certainly it's there to contribute to "realism" and immersion. In XCOM:EU, many of the "drops" - especially when you're tackling an alien asset, like a UFO or their base - are not monetary...but are easily transformable into currency at a button press...whereas in WoW you need to find a vendor to sell your stuff or you need to junk it. There's a lot going on here...also consider that, in WoW, carrying space (bag space) is a resource you need to manage, where in XCOM:EU storage space isn't a consideration at all; it's effectively infinite. "Do I carry these Withered Gizzards back to the vendor to sell? Or do I dump them in favor of these High Quality Withered Gizzards I just found?"
Note that I've omitted the otherwise useful drops in both cases; i.e. drops with functions beyond selling for currency, like crafting assets. UFO Flight Computers sell for big bank but also can be turned into Firestorms (the upgraded Interceptor model). These particular drops didn't seem to be on the table, but I can't really disregard them; they contribute to immersion in both a purely thematic sense ("Look, I found a fancy alien computer instead of a box of dollars") as well as a functional sense ("I can use this fancy alien computer to make cool stuff OR I can sell it for boxes of dollars").
