The Loot Sicko's Dilemma

Today Clayton of Explorers Design released an incredible article about an issue that's been living rent free in my brain and I finally have a word for: Dominant Mechanics - "...rules that cannot co-exist in a system without monopolizing play and overriding other rules." The type of mechanics whose simple presence pulls so much attention that one begins to attempt to "solve" the game through it at every pass. For example, if you have HP now the combat mini-game will be almost exclusively thought of in terms of maximizing HP damage rather than interacting with a more puzzle-y aspect of a boss (unless you institute immune phases or HP bloat and now we're back to the 1 HP Dragon and 2500 HP Dragons as band-aids over the same oozing wart[*1]). Dominant Mechanics can become especially cumbersome in otherwise more freeform games that involve various "number-go-up" systems, especially those with loot [See also Marcia struggling with this in keeping Cinco light]. But what if I really love numbers go up? What if the chase is a core aspect of gameplay I look for? What if I want a titanic shopping list of weird and interesting gear? How does one accomplish this without gear itself becoming an oppressive Dominant Mechanic?

Enter The Loot Sicko's Dilemma:

Some background you can skip: Back in June of 2014 (over a decade ago ugh) I was invited to play in the Destiny alpha playtest - Destiny (and it's sequel) is a critically acclaimed and publicly lauded live service "looter shooter" (one with a story and soundtrack that gives me chills to this day[*0.5]) where enemies have a chance to pop into a firework of currency and occasionally drop pentagonal prisms of woe called Engrams. I played this game for 10 years, got a raid jacket and everything, and I still have mixed feelings about Engrams. When you pick them up (or eventually decrypt them), you have a random chance of getting any of a number of guns or armors with any number of perks and most importantly a Light Level (a number-go-up mechanic that will literally prevent you from dealing damage if your overall Light Level is too low). So the meta followed that the game was about grinding as many (and later the best) Engrams as you could as quickly as you could, throwing out 95% of the lovingly crafted guns you got because inevitably the only thing that mattered was pumping your DPS (Damage Per Second). For all this nuance and looting, the Dominant Mechanic of Destiny was still HP - Most Raid bosses had incredibly complex mechanics that needed to be solved in order to deal damage to them, thus most Raid groups required that you have tremendous DPS so you only needed to do those mechanics once or twice. No room for gear expression, no room for experimentation, just learn the one mechanic then everyone slap on Izanagi's Burden get the Well Cycle going and let's try to kill this in one phase or we wipe.[*0.7] You see some variation of this in most looters like Diablo, Path of Exile or even post-game Borderlands where the ultimate pursuit of "number go up" overshadows the loot's own variety.

But there was also something kind of magical about engrams. That bright sound effect that plays when you pick one up. The excitement of seeing if the new perk combos you got would fit with your current build [in casual play, because there was always a "god roll" you were supposed to be chasing for end game content] - Heck one of my favorite parts of the Forsaken expansion was the sheer number of guns they added and getting to play with each and feel how different they were! It added color, variety, novelty. It gave me a reason to keep hopping into Gambit to collect a full set of armor, incentive to keep running Strikes in the hopes of getting their unique weapons. Dungeons and Raids and Secret Missions all had lovingly crafted unique guns to chase down. There were items I chased just to read their lore description! Loving the hateful Engram and Destiny's loot system is how I truly knew I was a Loot Sicko, even if the Dominant Mechanic that loot played into was my least favorite part of the game.

The Loot Sicko's Dilemma is as follows:

Loot offers item variety that can flesh out a world and open new avenues of play. They also provide an incentive to pursue certain activities that may otherwise be risky, challenging or time consuming. This acts as a dominant mechanic, where the acquisition of loot, and the maximizing of the "best loot", takes precedence over other forms of play.

Is it better for games to include loot even if it dominates play? Or should loot be abandoned altogether so it doesn't hog the game?

As a die-hard Loot sicko, I can't stand the idea of letting go of my fun accumulation mini-game, so here-in I propose three solutions to make the inclusion of Loot more palatable despite it absolutely being a Dominant Mechanic.

Solution 1 : The +1 Sword Logic

Most games rely on some degree of numbers/math to operate - How much damage a sword deals, what is your chance to hit, the number of spaces a chess piece can move. These are by and large implemented to create interesting decision points, but rapidly funnel a game into an optimization problem - What sword has the best odds? Which piece on the board can be traded? Sometimes this optimization can be fun (in the instance of Chess where the optimal move between losing a Rook or Bishop is highly situational, thus the optimization problem requires you to optimize reactively), sometimes it's really boring (see also every complaint ever about the +1 Sword[*2]). This isn't just a tabletop problem! Ask anyone participating in modern fighting games about frame data and patch culture and you'll quickly learn that what was once an athletic test of skill and reflex has been boiled to a clinical miserable science that is constantly being mathematically patched in the name of fairness.

This means loot can very quickly exacerbate the issue (as per our Destiny example), as loot acquisition becomes a vapid skinner box[*3] that is required in order to keep up with a game's most demanding challenges. Part of this can be fixed on the back-end (as per literally every discussion of to-hit rolls and damage etc) and some people attempt to fix this on the front end of loot with a very Sword Logic[*4] solution: Simply have only a handful of pieces of loot/weapons in the game.

You see this a lot in OSR and in some Skirmish games. This is your Light/Medium/Heavy Armor that can be found anywhere, have small standardized bonuses/trade-offs and allow the player/GM to flavor them however they want. It's been recently on my mind as I've been building a squad for Steve Hupfer's excellent rules-lite mecha skirmish game Flames of Orion, and finding my Loot Sicko brain a bit disappointed. I don't even mean this as a critique per-say because it's probably the best decision for games that like to highlight player creativity and de-emphasize the otherwise dominant mechanic of Loot while still having a degree of mechanical customization, number crunching and random gear acquisition. It's fine and is certainly its own answer to the Loot Sicko's Dilemma.

It works best for systems where lives are fragile and loot is easily lost. A +1 Sword may be boring in the context of a heroic campaign, but quite exciting in a tense deadly OSE campaign where it might get melted by a rust monster next session. It also allows more "unique" pieces of Loot (like a sword of undead slaying, or a wetted blade) to stick out more and breathe in a more free-form play-space. By keeping the back-end mechanically simple, the front-end loot can be interesting, nuanced and prompt creative utility. However it also means that most swords, whether you find them in an ancient depths or a glimmering city, will simply feel, behave and be stated the same beyond the fluff.

So what if I want some deeper but standardized variety? What if I want non-magical weapons to still feel unique and different from each other? What if I want all that mechanical crunch and "gamey-ness"? What if I want tons of Loot to build-craft with without it all feeling so vapid?

Solution 2 : Sicko's Lagoon

Racing Lagoon is a 1999 Squaresoft CaRPG about Yokohama street racers. It involves random battles (1-on-1 races), melodramatic plot and LOTS of car customization. I've been watching one of my good friends play through it and what struck me is how much of a car sicko this game really is, and the ways it shows that with its loot. After each street race "battle" you can steal one part from your opponent to further customize your ride - The detail ranges from obvious customization like body, paint and weight reduction all the way down to low-compression pistons and super-chargers that run better when paired with a turbo. It's absolutely a looty "numbers go up" game, but it's put so much thought and detail into its varied loot that while certain "combos" will be objectively better than others, what's rewarded most is car (and game) knowledge and knowing whether you want your car to faster off the line, better at turning or have a high acceleration - all interesting and loot derived choices to be making. This is then further bolstered by the game's own focus on "game feel" - where all of these little choices stack up to a car that feels different to drive.

Racing Lagoon also benefits from loot being somewhat rarer - You're generally at the mercy of whatever parts you happen upon and you have the very real chance of losing an essential part if you lose a race. It's a system that (despite its dominant and ever present looting mechanics) encourages experimentation, thought and improvisation; The loot isn't taking center stage, the cars (which are made of loot) are.

Doing this well in any game takes a lot of playtesting, a good mechanical base with varied game-feel and a LOT of legwork. For all my misgivings about Steel Hearts (my mecha game with well over 150 unique parts with their own descriptions, quirks and interactions), this is the one thing I really think I did well. There was plenty of room for build variety and while "number go up" was still the meta, there were any number of ways to go about it (from speed builds, to synergy batteries, to basic attack builds, the variety of player expression at the high end of play was honestly a triumph). And players would often experiment with different comparably good builds simply because the game would feel different to play, and the novelty of making different kinds of choices during combat as a result was rewarding.

Aside from the actual hundreds of hours of work, a primary way I achieved this was making sure the base systems had enough going on to support that variety, which is both a blessing and a curse, especially in tabletop games. Racing Lagoon remains semi-accessible to a non-car sicko because a computer is handling all the mechanics, interactions and jargon. Conversely the cognitive load of a mechanically "crunchy" game can overwhelm players, especially when the juice isn't worth the squeeze[*8]. I wouldn't blame someone who bounces off of Steel Hearts very grid/trad approach to combat as a separate little game from the melodrama (much like Racing Lagoon's races are separate from its cut-scenes), especially those looking for a more freeform game.

This is further exacerbated by this method putting a lot of responsibility on the GM to understand these systems well and being decidedly not-hacking friendly. Having a carefully balanced catalog of cool loot pieces is great until a GM adds one piece that accidentally lets some builds get a run-away lead. This isn't even really about balanced so much as consistency - About maintaining multiple viable solutions vs Destiny's final shape of "the meta."

So if we don't want to cut loot down to just the unique stuff and we don't want a giant sicko catalog of carefully balanced items what remains?

Solution 3 : Looting the Doll House

At launch Animal Crossing: New Horizons had well over 1800 items (or legitimately random "loot") to collect, use and display, all acquire by interacting with the game's various villagers, cycles, shops and events. There's only ~5 tools of note to collect and use, each with some very basic variation (You can think of of a Golden Shovel as a +2 Shovel in this context). So what is all that other loot good for? That's where the Doll House comes in.

When working on EXCOM, my conspirator Sovran was worried that players (all world leaders during a crisis) didn't have enough things to spend money on. My advice was simply "give them vanity items to put in the doll house" -  Flashy cars, secure bunkers, etc. And it worked wonders! It turns out if you give players who are bought into playing in a fictional world a fictional shopping list of luxuries, they (much like people in the real world) will want to accumulate some luxuries!

Solution 3 combines elements from the previous approaches for something that is decidedly rules-lite but still has a cornucopia of loot to chase: Simply add fun doll house vanity items. Your pirate game might treat a Cutlass and a Rapier as both being "Sword (d6)" but that doesn't stop you from having a long list of plunder like "fine hat plume" or "buxom figurehead" or "dragon fossil" or "monkey" or even "Golden Engraved Cutlass (Stats as Sword)" ~ Nor does this stop players from using their Doll House items in creative ways to solve problems (which is earnestly one of my favorite activities in OSR-esc games; Using mundane items to MacGyver solutions). Cyberpunk 2020 goes one step further having both a wide assortment of both mechanically varied weapons to shop from and a large selection of vanity items from fashion to cybermods. 

The drawback here is that, once again, this typically requires a lot of legwork and prep. Blorbing the Doll House if you will ~

Sick Dilemme

Loot isn't going to be right for every game. Even with these solutions loot remains a dominant focal mechanic that can and will steal attention from nearly every other part of the game. So what's the real solve? Unfortunately like most philosophical dilemmas the answer is "it depends, and it's really up to you."

Sometimes the solution is as simple as killing your darlings and saying "yeah this game shouldn't have loot." In the FitD-esc Vampire game I'm working on I'd originally drafted a trifold full of "looty" weapons for players to collect and invest in, but am frankly considering cutting both that and retooling combat all-together to reduce its dominance in a game predominantly about being a magic-imbued stalker of the night.

Sometimes the solution is understanding that the loot is dominant and you have to go full tilt with it, putting in the legwork, adding descriptions, tables, mechanics. You have to get yourself thoroughly entrenched in the weeds of the weedy dominance of loot. I'm likely doing this in Inheritors to the effect of having a whole shopping zine literally called "Stiltskin's Big Book of Fuck-Off Guns".

There's an ancient martial arts text called "The Karate Kid" (maybe you've seen it) that has an excellent line from Master Miyagi to this effect:

"Walk on road, hm? Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later... get the squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do "yes" or karate do "no." You karate do "guess so" - squish - just like grape. Understand?"

Either abandon or commit to the bit of loot. Otherwise you'll watch your game stumble through the same mistakes Destiny has been making for 12 years. Understand?

Epilogue - Item Descriptions

There's a sub-problem in these problems - One that I think is part of what bugs me about Solution 1's brevity, but also makes the element of surprise challenging in Solutions 2 and 3: Item Descriptions. Solution 1 sacrifices specificity for player creativity which is a fine design choice, but even the names of weapons can help add to a setting. For instance if Flames of Orion had weapons called "Super Fist" or "Galaxy Beam" it'd have a very different vibe than "AX-37 Rail Rifle" or "Dynamic Arms Flamer" - Loot is a huge way to shape the lore of a world, and item descriptions (while they take even more legwork) can go even further.

The sub dilemma here is that by having a shopping list double as a gazetteer you kill the sense of discovery and improv that can make Solutions 2 & 3 sing - A solution I've been toying with for this is "loot cards" but this requires even more legwork (both as designer to make them fit in both booklet and print-n-play alike and for the GM to cut them out) so time will tell ~ But I figured this was all worth a small little shout-out.

Also special thanks to Clayton for giving me some graphic design tips for the main graphic at the top!!

[*0.5 - You can't play this story BTW - They've sunset a lot of content, and the full story was literally one that could only be experienced if you were there every step of the way - I played the game through the arc of its first decade and frankly don't regret it, but never looked back from leaving once that chapter closed - There's lots of good long lore videos about it, but I don't think anything will capture the magic of the first time you touch down on the dreadnaught, puzzling out the dreaming city, uncovering Presage, saying goodbye to old friends one last time, watching heroes through their greatest and weakest moments... It was jank. It was magic. I'm happy I got to experience it and am sad there's not a way for others to.]

[*0.7 - This was further exacerbated by actual DPS checks - Some Bosses would only give you 3 chances to deal DMG before they instant-killed the team - Meanwhile others would have phases where if you didn't deal enough damage in a small amount of time it'd also insta-kill the team. These were, in my opinion, awful. It took the already dominant mechanic of "get HP down" and really made it more important than gun-play, coordination and maneuvering. It was just tragic design IMO - That game deserved better.]

[*1 - I think I've also realized I like 2500 HP Dragons more because it essentially concedes the ground to the dominant mechanic and attempts to achieve its goals while working in its world - The players don't have to reframe how they think about HP, they need to reframe how they think about the scale of the world.]

[*2 - The +1 Sword is just a sword that deals +1 DMG (older games at least have the fun bonus of meaning these are a magic items that can hit ghost and such)]

[*3 - Gosh I hate how this video was made before the Battle Pass became the ubiquitous skinner box to keep people playing... Video games really did get worse in some areas over the past decade]

[*4 - In Destiny the Sword Logic is essentially the idea that the perfect universe is one that has been cut and honed into its simplest most deadly shape. It's often an analogy for conformity, militarism, etc, but also a more universal entropy when you get into the weeds.]

[*8 - I need to write this article eventually but what I mean by this is "If a game turn takes 5 minutes it should be providing me with interesting varied decisions and immediate interesting game feedback for what I'm doing"]