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Monty Haul
AlBQuirky
Member EpicPosts: 7,432
Reading through another thread, I had a flashback to D&D. Anyone ever hear of a style of DMing called "Monty Haul?" That was a style that gave players lots of loot every time they defeated a monster or cleared a dungeon. These kinds of DMs had fun creating nifty magical items for the players to find and wanted to give the players these items they took the time to create.
I think back to my EQ days and recall not getting a magical anything as a loot reward before my levels were in the teens. Wait, I take that back. If a player played in Qeynos, they could delve into the sewers around level 5-8 and camp Cubert to try and get an earring that gave +3 INT through a quest. Heck, I was running around in my original starter tunic for quite a number of levels, or upgrading to regular cloth armor drops from some monsters, before I could craft my own (non-magical) patchwork leather armor. It was usually fairly easy to upgrade a weapon to a "rusty" one from a drop and smith it to "tarnished", but magical? No.
I had to save up money (~40PP) and buy a Combine Longsword from the merchants in North Karana or the Oasis of Marr. That was only listed as "magic" with no stat bonuses, but it allowed for wisp hunting at around level 8 or so.
No, loot was rarely vendor trash. Most was useful in some way or another whether it be for crafting or equipment upgrades or quest items. A lot was sold to NPC vendors, but most of it had some kind of use in game besides giving a player more money.
Flash forward to WoW after Burning Crusade (when I played it for more than a month). I was going through item upgrades so fast, that I never equipped BoE items. And this was from the start. From the very first quests, players were given "magical items" that enhanced their character. Green drops and rewards were so common place that a player usually needed a "blue drop" to put on the auction house in order for it to sell. I was astounded that "magic items" were considered vendor trash, coming from EQ.
I see most new MMOs coming out have this "Monty Haul" vibe to them. Most of them cannot give you a magical item quick enough. This cheapens magical items when acquired and dilutes the "wonder of magic", in my opinion. It makes magic common place as if every NPC should be walking around fully equipped in magical items. And they do! I have gotten magical weapons and armor from low level animals as loot in some MMOs. Gone are the Mobs that required magic items to hit. No need for them anymore as every player has a magical weapon very early on in their career.
Have other players felt this way?
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Comments
I think it goes back to the whole Skinner Box design thing, these games try to keep you playing by throwing magical gear and such at you for doing the most menial things and making you feel awesome I guess.
I do agree that the idea/value of magical weapons and such is largely gone, and it is disheartening.
I could not agree more. Not sure if Vanguard was monty haul due to the WoWification that occurred prior to launch, or if it was always intended. But, every time I blinked, I got an item with a bunch of stats on it. Every item in the game seemed to have a bunch of stats. As a result, my eyes just glazed over from the get go and I can't remember one single piece of loot.
In EQ, I can vividly remember at level 8, making a new friend who created patchwork armor for free; wasn't wearing anything prior to that. I loved how rare magic was; it made the items feel, well, magical.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
oh sure. And I would agree. I would prefer to have "special" items to be rare. I'm ok with people not having special items and having to either buy them from players or go through the long processes to make them.
Incidentally "Monty Hall" is where "Monty Haul" came from. He was the host of a show called "let's make a deal" where lots of "fabulous prizes" were handed out each week.
Used to watch it as a kid.
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It's not really Monty Haul to have functional, interesting items in a game. So unless you're nitpicking over the aesthetic of calling them magic (as opposed to "superior" or "masterwork") there's not much to criticize.
The main weakness is if it compromises game challenge, which it doesn't. And if it did, you'd want to increase mob stats and the harshness of not dealing with mob-specific abilities -- not nerf gear.
But yeah, overall if it makes you feel better just do a mental remap in your head:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I understand what you're saying, Axe. I guess for me, the way my brain works is if it gives +stats or "magical damage/protection", it is magical. An item's workmanship will not make the user stronger or smarter without some touch of magic of to it. The item may do more damage or give better defense, for sure based on workmanship.
Maybe some of today's games use the contestants outlandish outfits/costumes as the basis of their armor designs? LOL
Of course, the lore of the game may factor in, but that might be a stretch for my own personal believability.
@Sovrath:
I knew about the "Monty Hall" connection as I, too, used to watch that game show if I was home, or sick from school
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
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I really couldn't care less if my next item is better due to, quality of craftmanship, magic or technology. Its just fiction. The abundance of loot creates this whole new attraction/addiction which Blizzard discovered first with Diablo. It is fun to get loot: the sound when a ring drops floods your brain with endorphins.
And talking about DMing in D&D, the selection of mundane loot was fairly narrow and dull: a handful of special materials from which weapons and armor could be made from plus their masterwork counterparts. Also, the DM guide had these tables of recommended rewards for encounters in gold, so to come even close to those amounts in mundane loot there would have to be a whole pile of trash at the end of every encounter/adventure. An amount players would have to bring an oxcart to haul it all out - not very "heroic".
In other words, players got magic items fairly quickly in D&D too. It was pretty standard.
Oh, and if you give the rewards in golds, gems etc. you then have to deal with shopping. What is available? What if a character saves up money, or the players pool their money to buy something overpowered? Do you allow that? Should they invest their wealth and what kind of returns should they expect? All that stuff...
At the same time, the non-magical classes (fighters and such) were very gear dependant, so you have to give them something to keep up with the magical classes.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Not sure you're remembering D&D exactly right.
Even low-magic settings like Krynn gave out magical items fairly early on. It was just a different scale. The world-changing NPC's in Krynn were typically about lvl 15 with +3 items, in the campaign books. That's pretty weak compared to Faerun's big players, but you still started to get your first taste of enchanted items fairly early on. The game was balanced around them. Some characters really needed them to scale with levels (particularly fighters).
Not really sure what kind of game your DM was running, but if you didn't get any magical items until you were into your teens, you were well below the DM recommendations for even the lowest-magic settings. I'm not even sure how your group kept alive, unless your DM was watering down encounters too. Was he running a near-zero-magic custom setting?
Also, games like EQ and UO also had the possiblity of losing all of your gear through normal gameplay. It made sense not to hand out phat loot commonly, and to instead force players to rely on more common playermade item or refined versions of common drops.
I do have complaints about games where shinier gear is the primary driver. Mostly because that's often part and parcel with other cynical systems. As in, it doesn't entertain me to run X raid 50 times to get a 2% more powerful ring with a 5% drop chance.
But that really speaks to a broader problem. People want progression. In general, that comes from two places: levels or gears. Either you make leveling a painful grind at the high-levels, or you throw in a gear grind to keep people hooked. Only real alternative is to accept one of those or get out of the genre and play something more gameplay-oriented, like an action or strategy game.
With drop rate on magic items lately in games, your endorphins must be running non-stop
I remember a few cartoons about D&D players needing mules and carts to haul their loot from a dungone run. I had a DM one time who evilly said, "You found 10,000GP. How're you gonna get it out of here?" D&D did have weight values to their loot, which MMOs just don't have any more.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
D&D is played very differently by different people. My DMs gave out magic sparingly. Did we have a +1 weapon by level 5? Probably (it's been 31 years since I have played those campaigns). Most of the DMs I have played with didn't give magic items every fight, every other fight, or even every dungeon.
Also remember that gaining levels took time, too. In most MMOs today, a player will have a magic item within 1-3 hours of starting the game. I sure hope your DM did not have that kind of rate of magic drop.
Progression can be done in so many varied ways. Magical items seems to be the easiest path to follow, it seems. Even later editions of D&D had varying quality of normal weapons and armor. EverQuest had differing qualities of weapons and armor, too. Rusty, tarnished, and steel were three weapon qualities they had. You could upgrade from patchwork armor to leather armor for better protection without sticking magic bonuses to the item to "progress" in that way.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Resists are the only thing really challenging to rationalize (but if we're talking WOW items they don't really ever show up anymore anyway.)
Stats it's easy to think of in terms of item efficiency. Gandalf doesn't magically become stupider when he picks up a walking stick (compared with his normal staff.) But with his staff he's more empowered to channel his innate magic. (Actually I flunked Middle Earth History, so I'm not sure if that's even how Tolkien's magic system works. It's actually how Name of the Wind's magic system works though, and it's a great read if you haven't checked it out yet.) So your character's True Intellect is 100 and your old staff was 1% efficient (+1 intellect) while your new staff is 2% efficient (+2 intellect) allowing more of your actual magic potential to shine through (exactly like any sports player's gear.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Nice, couldn't be more appropriate to the discussion too!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yeah, I guess. I've been both playing and DM'ing RPG's a while (not just D&D, though it's one of my faves, especially Dragonlance, which was coincidentally a low-magic setting). Not as long of a history as you, though. I guess I got my start about a dozen years ago?
You are right that, in any incarnation of D&D, leveling was a lot bigger of an event. It was different. I think for the better, though it had its drawbacks.
Frankly, I was never really a fan of D&D's leveling system. The game was kinda broken at the really early levels. You had to come at players with a whiffle bat early on because of the inherent absurdity of a one or two hit dice "hero," who could get killed in two turns in a lvl 4 encounter. It made no sense to me that players had no "baseline" level of survivability. And some of the stupidities of the game's RNG elements. Sometimes things didn't even out. If you had a player who rolled 10's for HP a few levels in a row as a warrior, or you had a wizard with all 1's and 2's, it was really hard to keep them balanced. You either had to throw all your guys at them to even scare them, or you had to hold way back to avoid killing them every encounter. Same with rolling the dice for stats, especially for classes which needed at least 2-3 decent scores. I actually far preferred a game like Shadowrun, for those reasons.
A character out of chargen in SR was already a skilled professional. Not great at everything, but they definitely did their job on the "pro" level for that game world. From there, Shadowrun was open-ended. You simply got points (called Karma). You wanted to be smarter? Buy a knowledge skill. Wanted to get better at doing something? Buy an active skill. Wanted to boost your magic power. Buy a point of magic. It was more complicated in practice, of course, requiring things like justifications (I'm buying lessons with Bob the Street Doc to boost my Biotech).
Then again, one of the four or five metagames within SR is about as complicated as the entire ruleset of D&D, which is why it got a lot less play, so everything has its drawbacks.
Don't get me wrong. I'm on the same page as you. I think holding things back a little more would be nice.
But I do think a wide dispersion of magical gear does have major benefits to gameplay beyond the cynical carrot-on-a-stick garbage it's associated with. Sometimes magical gear allows for much better customization of a character.
Where it can really go wrong is when you get stuck in a WoW-style gear grind, where the general stat allocation of one "tier" of gear is the same as the next, just a little bit higher, and you're required to climb the ladder as you advance content. Never was a fan of that at all.
I've definitely felt it, but I also feel magic has become a little too common in many fantasy worlds not just in games, but in literature as well.
I like having a Tolkien-like approach to magic, one where magic isn't exactly spread around everwhere and yet in another sense it is; it is in a way more subtle, and more powerful spells are rarely seen.
Drifting away from magic in fantasy, I think gearing up in MMORPGs has been in a way watered down, well, to an extent. A thing about itemization I don't like are items perfectly tailored for a certain class: the problem with this is that when all items of a certain proficiency fit you well, all you look at is the "item level". This is poison for theorycrafting as you no longer need to make complex calculations to figure out which item actually would be best for a certain slot.
Well, I guess I got totally drifted away there, but it was related to having magical and non-magical items separate in the sense that I would like to see items actually vary in stats, a lot, so that making gear choices would become more interesting.
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When a low level character picks up a weapon, for example, and their stats increase (stronger, smarter, more healthy), to me that is magic. There is no "crafting" that can accomplish this. Crafting can make a weapon lighter (faster), more sharp (more damage), or more durable. Anything else strikes me as "magic."
Looking at armor, there is a little more leeway. Having a stamina or endurance boost can be thought of as the armor being made lighter than usual. I do agree with the resistances being probably the only "magic" that happens, unless they go to stat bonuses like +intelligence or +strength for example.
Let me say, magic items are not bad. Quite the contrary! I like magical items as much as the next guy (or gal). I just feel that when they become "normal" they lose their "magic" touch. When a player gets magic items, their first thought is not usually, "Cool! Magic!" It is more than likely, "What stats!" followed closely by, "Can I sell it in the Auction House?" Again, this is just a personal "thingie."
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
After that 3 years of heavy playing, I hardly played anymore, trying 2nd Edition when it came out a few times along with 3, 3.5, and 4 when those editions came out and my friends and my paths crossed
Shadow Run sounds interesting. I am sorry I missed out on it. Yea, 1 player doing 25k of damage every second kind of blows my mind. Players with hundreds of thousands or even millions of hit points or health blows my mind, too. I must not be a big enough dreamer- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I'm not trolling here when I say this (you'd know if I was trolling, you can check my post history if you want to compare) but I started playing RPGs waaay after PnP RPGs weren't the biggest thing, (my first RPG was FF8). I've never done any kind of PnP roleplaying (i've wanted to, but until ive come to college its not been an option since I lived in rural Georgia). I don't really see an immersion problem for me with all the "magical" items out there. its just not a big deal for me.
I always thought it was weird that people needed justification for it, but I mean after reading about it i can see how it can be immersion breaking, its just not for me. I've grown up in a roleplaying environment where stats can be on gear; in some games i've played, even non-magical items give like +strengh, +int, +vit, etc. just items that were considered basic gear like "leather trousers" or something.
I play MMOs for the Forum PVP
My DMs usually created magic items specifically for the character's playing. These were more powerful than the usual items, but made them special. Each one had a story to uncover for each item which involved the group as a whole. Yes, we did find "lesser" magic from time to time, like a +1 sword or bow, maybe +2 chainmail, but even those were not every, or every other fight. Finding platemail in a chest made our fighter-types happy
WoW and GW2 come to my mind when I think about the overabundance of magic in MMOs today. I guess it is all part of the gear grind that I never really got into. That plane never landed in my airfield
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
For me, magic was introduced to me as being "special" and not common. It has lost that "special" feeling for me in games now. Magic has become common and mundane for me.
I was just curious if I am, yet again, weird in my feelings
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I'll need to ponder this a bit more and see if I can wrap my head around it
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR