Battlers aren't always made of money...

[- Z - 30]

My topic relates to something I've been thinking about for the past week.

 

The most common way to get money from ANY RPG was to kill enemies.

Spiders, demons, zombies, bats, fishs, lions, thieves, <insert enemy>.

Each and every enemy in anywhere had at least some currency on them

when they breathe their last breath.

 

I find this to be an easy way to import money gain in a game. However, I

seen literally countless of Rpgs use this system.

 

Some enemies do fit with gaining money from defeating them

thieves, knights, zombies, anything human, basically).

 

Some, however, not so much. (I killed a Wild Cactus Monster Thing that had as

much money as my yearly salary)

 

I don't hate this way of gaining money, on contraire. I like getting money this way.

But i want a different way to incoporate money gain into Rpgs. I want to try

something new, something unique...

 

Here are some alternate ways of getting money I thought up.

• From remains of battlers (wolf fur, lion fang, knight's armor, etc), you can sell them off to gain money.
• By working on side missions, you gain money, and maybe even treasures to sell off for more money!
• By searching the land and dungeons, you sell rare items/minerals/etc and gain money.

 

I guess my main question of this topic is:

Will you be comfortable with a new way of getting money, or will you miss the

old, hack and slash for cash way?

 

Sorry I typed so much, but go on ahead and express your opinions on this. I want to know!

[+ Dark Influence 251]

I prefer multiple ways not just mindless slaughter for currency, personally the interest switch in my head would turn off pretty quickly if I only had one way to gain currency in a game, it would happen even quicker if that one way were mindless slaughter.

 

Quests, Side Quests, Dungeons, Specific Enemies, Treasure Maps, Professions, Crafting, Battle Trophies, Treasure Chests, Gathering and Gambling are all viable options for currency gain.

 

Explore every possibility you can think of and you'll have plenty of ways to deal with this potential issue.

 

You now have my opinion, take it or leave it as you will.

[Galv 1,387]

I used the 'sell remains from enemies' method but that is still pretty much slash for cash. I do think changing it up is a great idea and if you can think of something really unique, even better.

Trying new things to see if they work I say is always good

 

I think the common slash for cash is because battles are a common and required part of most RPG's and the progression of gaining levels and new equipment is all balanced by them. Multiple ways for the player to improve their equipment couldn't hurt

[Darkanine 116]

I never cared for the "Kill enemy,get no gold but get items to sell",I find RPGs that do this make the sell-gold rate to be really low and bogs it down.

[Tsukihime 1,489]

Will you be comfortable with a new way of getting money, or will you miss the old, hack and slash for cash way?

I like that mechanic because if I had to choose between running back to town every 5 minutes, or just skipping the whole visiting process and getting the money directly, I would opt for the latter even if it is less "realistic" (whatever that's supposed to mean)

 

If there was some purpose behind going to town and selling stuff then it wouldn't be too bad...until I'm doing it for everything I need to sell, and they don't have a "sell all junk" option or anything to speed up the process.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Tsukihime

[Dmariin 22]

If you do it right, your idea sounds great

Final Fantasy XII did a pretty good job of this

Killing mobs got you loot, which was usually pretty cheap

But if you killed, say, 20 of the same mob in a row, you'd get better loot from them (wolf fangs -> wolf pelts)

If you could find a way to implement something like that system, it would be a lot better than just gold from everything

[HumanNinja 144]

I agree with tsukihime. If you're only dropping loot that has to be sold, you're just making the player take an extra step to get paid.

 

If you made a few minigames that paid out (like jobs in fable3) then that could be fun. But just dropping loot to sell has been done countless times and its always boring and redundant.

 

I agree with tsukihime. If you're only dropping loot that has to be sold, you're just making the player take an extra step to get paid.

 

If you made a few minigames that paid out (like jobs in fable3) then that could be fun. But just dropping loot to sell has been done countless times and its always boring and redundant.

[EternalShadow 28]

Zendir 1 did have a lot of reliance on the selling loot method, though enemies did tend to drop a little bit of coin too. The treasure method would fit hunting-type games, but as others said, it's just an extra step. It can be awesome though if there are like, rare item drops.

[Maliki 33]

In my game, very few enemies drop money.

Most of them drop sellable items which can be used for cash, traded for items (usually rare or powerful), or used to get skills.

Also, I'm planning to utilize an encyclopidia script and would like to have several different drops per enemy for questing and completeness.  So while it may be a slight inconvenience, having enemies drop items works for my game.

 

(Well, I'll see if it really works once I get some real beta testing going.)

 

♫ You're a squirrel, who somehow has money...♫ 

Edited August 29, 2013 by Maliki

[O.P. Wilkituska 32]

I don't like the traditional "kill enemies, get gold" system, I don't see how on earth can a wild wolf be carrying money.

In my game (which is, basically, how I think that things should be), the vast majority of enemies DON'T drop anything, not even loot. Only innocent peasants and other humanoids drop a few coins, but that's not profitable for the player, since I made murder a crime (i.e., you kill a peasant and get 12 coins, but the guards start chasing you demanding for a fine of 1000 coins or jail).

The best way to get money is to do an "actual" job: buying items at low prices and selling them at higher prices, playing the lute to get random tips. forging weapons, collecting plants and selling them or using them to craft something more valuable, making clothes, killing certain farm animals to sell their meat, making quests for the guild, winning tournaments, gambling, finding treasures at optional dungeons, begging to peasants, and, if you're evil, robbing, stealing, falsifying documents, kidnapping and selling people as slaves, etc.

That's the way I do it.

[Rizrazzle 96]

I do a mix of both. Although it is slightly weird to find coin on birds and fishes you kill I’m not quite ready to break all the way from tradition.

Because older games got away with it fine and battles are a large aspect of most RPG’s it is ‘easy’ to slip into the monster-mangling-millionaire fashion.

But slaying the savages doesn’t get you far in my game money-wise. Ever tried going out there, killing the first hawk you see and slinging it over your general store counter? They’d give you the crazy look and they’re very right about that.

That merchant in-game doesn’t have the skill to make something out of it either, he’d have to go through all the trouble of getting the parts to places that could use it and expect to make profit. So when you convert it into direct cash gotten after the battle it wouldn’t be fair if it got you very far. That’s the amount you’d get in battle. Even from bandits - they are trying to physically rob you, would his pockets be stuffed full of gold? I don’t think so.

 

So if battling is the slug-speed of growing your money tree, where’s the money in my games at?

I personally like rewarding players a lot for exploration and using special skills. Treasures in places non-linear to the path you're following are usually a reward for going the longer way around and enjoying the game locations.  And by using skills featured in my games you can create expensive end-products from raw materials dropped by enemies and gathered on the map. Get out there and learn to catch your tuna before making/selling  good quality sashimi. Or fight lizards to gather those scales until you have enough to make a nice bracelet yourself. Now that’s the sort of stuff merchants are interested in buying from you. Those are the largest roads to riches in my games, if you don't mind selling some items that could be useful to yourself that is.

 

Some of these processing skills require you to be in town, but so does training (mixing) new magic for your characters, joining guilds and their activities, continuing quests and so forth.

And there are plenty of towns in my world so you never have to travel back. That's just a way of designing the world to fit in with the story and travelling.

 

If you want to be ‘lazy’ in my games, play it in a linear way and earn cash through treating baddies like fun piñatas, you can go ahead.

But that does mean saving up will be far more tedious, and you may have to sell some of your materials and directly useful goods for that shiny new sword only the hard-working blacksmith can craft because you can’t/won’t. 

[Darkanine 116]

There was a odd NES RPG that took place in the middle east,I think it was called Rainbow silk road or something,anyway the main gimmick of the game was that you didn't just get loot to sell,you got trade able items valuable to the worlds fictional economy such as Soy,Salt and more,it was quite nice sense items sold in different cities for more gold for example,if you bought salt in Muscat,you could sell it for a ton of gold in Baghdad.

If you make the system more like that,it be pretty great!

[Riff 62]

That's pretty much the system implemented in SilkRoad a MMORPG about the... silkroad 

When you're high levele enough (20) to chose a job, instead of having crafting jobs you get to be a trader, a thief or a hunter.

The trader buys in one city and sell in another, the farer the merrier (you even got exchange rates).

The thief, well robs from the trader and sell it at the black market.

The hunter is like a bodyguard for trader (so that the latter stay on his mount and just keep healing it) and earns his life by expecting a tip from the trader.

 

That's the first MMO I ever played so I'm a bit biaised but never have I found another MMO with a job system this entertaining.

But where gettting a little bit too far

That kind of system would be so cool if implemented (of course when you choose a job all the other players would have to be AI mobs) 

[Terra-tani 35]

The game I'm working on is going to be fairly craft dependent, so I'm going to have materials drop from all monsters, even human enemies wouldn't have tonnes of money and a "battered breastplate" would be more likely loot. I think treasure chests could be found with money, but the main thing would be to sell things you make, and anything made would be greater than the sum of it's parts but I'd need to database that properly. The gain money from encounters option is EASY, but in my game I actually really want the players to feel a little of that need for materials, and not have money be something to throw around lightly. And the fact that I want a "lay low or there'll be trouble" thing going on, the fact that one of the main characters is a crafter and can use all the materials dropped off monsters will be a larger feature, so it's not even "sell stuff for cash" it's "find stuff to make what you need". FFXIII was a little like that, but it was so annoying because your development was limited by story progressions so you could only develop so far and upgrade so much... I'm going to try and find a decent balance.

[Tsarmina 2,612]

I like this new way of earning money as well. I've gotten so tired of earning money by pressing Enter to attack all the time, so I've recently been implementing market systems in my games so the players can sell "stuff" to get money instead. Personally, I don't even like battles, so the old method becomes repetitive and boring to me. Or maybe it's just my attention span ^^" Of course, as has been mentioned before, it's a pain to run back to the market, so I'm searching for a script to "sell" directly from the inventory. (I think I may have found one, but I don't remember the name, sorry.) :\ Still, as long as it makes sense your enemy has money, I think it's perfectly reasonable to use the slash for cash method...

[OnyxTanuki 10]

I'm a fan of the "trash loot" method myself. It's pretty versatile since it can be expanded easily into a trade goods or crafting system, and makes logical sense. The downside, of course, is that it makes losing gold a penalty for certain things such as running from or losing battles, as you could simply choose to hang onto your trash loot to insure yourself against said penalty until you actually need to buy something.

 

One thing you could do is make the trash loot drops into actual trade currency. Like for example, if you wish to buy a potion, instead of selling two wolf fangs to the shop for 30 G then using the gold to buy the potion, you'd just directly trade those two wolf fangs for a potion. If you've got a random battle system this'll obviously get annoying, but with most other encounter systems - especially those where you know what you're going to fight before actually fighting it - it should work fairly well since a player would then be able to farm that specific monster reliably. I think biggest downside here is that you do have to farm a specific monster type to gain the items needed to purchase certain things, and the cost for items might have to change between areas if they don't have enemies in common.

 

Another thing you could do is, as was mentioned above, have certain loot items more expensive in one area than another. For example, those Rabbit Pelts are going to be damn near useless to those living in the tropical island you killed the rabbits on, so you might get 10-20 G per pelt, but in the frozen tundra you passed through a few chapters ago they'd be worth a good 80 G a pop. Then you can take the Eternal Ice you looted off of the frost demons there and sell it for a huge profit in the desert region, then sell the Desert Roses from the cacti mobs there in the large city where they're seen as a status symbol, then trade the Angel Statues you get from killing thieves in the area to the savages on that tropical isle where they're worshiped as idols. And so on, and so on. This would work much better in a game where there's no free or cheap means of fast travel though, and if there is, profits would be fairly low to the point that it's not worth it to go all the way to the desert to sell that Eternal Ice if you'll only make an extra 3 G versus what those in the tundra would buy it for. If profits are high, you'll either have to slog through long walks to make that extra money or pay enough money for a round trip on an airship that the profits are severely reduced.

 

You could also go the same route Earthbound did, where instead of earning money directly from battles, it gets deposited into a bank account for you. While the end result is still that you get more money by fighting more enemies, you won't actually have crows and snakes and UFOs and living street signs dropping money; it's just being given to you by some benefactor. This would work great if your hero's a bounty hunter, especially in a modern or futuristic setting where his boss can monitor his battles via a psychic link or visual feed, or he can synch up with something that'd read his battle data and reward him accordingly. Downsides here are similar to the first example I gave, in that gold penalties are pointless since you will be keeping all your earned money in the bank besides what you're using anyway, but at least you won't need to worry about balancing the price of a potion in the hero's quaint beginner village with the cost in the mystic crystal forest kingdom a few scant kilometers away from the final boss's dungeon.

 

But all of those are essentially just variations on killing mobs for money. You could remove the money component from battle entirely if you like, having it exclusively come from quests and chests. However, unless you include repeatable quests, you'll probably have a specific limit to how much Gold the party can earn within the game (not counting them selling any enemy drops, which without a trash loot system would probably be something worth keeping or too rare to reliably farm), and it'll give the player less reason to fight enemies at all, resulting in them potentially having to grind for levels because they ran from all the battles up to the point where they're now suddenly stuck. I'd definitely pair this with something that gives a player incentive to fight, such as a skill advancement system, as well as making one or two repeatable quests in every hub town so the player can still grind for Gold if they so wish.

[Bunni89 85]

Personally I prefer games where money-gaining is almost completely separate from battles. I really like the idea of your character having a JOB- there'd be minigames/sidequests to get money while battling is purely for the sake of exp and useful item drops. I've had a few various ideas about how this could be implimented in different styles of game:

 

* Treasure hunter! You're an adventurer/archaologist in employ of the crown. The game goes in "missions" where you have to track down a certain ruin/forest/cave/whatever and then explore it as fully as possible. You get paid at the end of the mission depending on various factors such as how much of the map you explore, how damaged you are at the end (unscratched = looks like you didn't even do the job, beaten up = looks incompetant), how you do in various events... for example lets say there's a moment where you trigger a trap that's about to destroy some priceless artifact, if you manage to complete a lil quicktime event then you rescue it and find that your fame score just multiplied by three!!

You could also take various side-jobs from different NPCs, such as trying to encounter every monster on the map to gather research data for a scientist. Or a hunter might want certain item drops. Or a furniture enthusiast might want to to aquire some ancient chair and smuggle it out from under the nose of the queen. These could give cash, but they could also give other more interesting rewards and even open up mini quests.

And you could take handicaps for each mission to entertain the queen and add more payout- maybe it'll give her a belly laugh to hear how you fought a dragon while completely buck naked? XD

 

* Vigilante! In this concept you hunt bounties for a living... it would drive the plot as well as providing the cash! I'm thinking similar to FFXII's marks board. You could track down bandits and monsters alike, and even do some private investigator work on the side- is Mrs Garcia really cheating on her husband with the mailman? XD

 

* Salaryman! in this concept you work at a certain job... or maybe various jobs? It could be cool to let the player customize how they want to make thier career! You could use the drops from monsters, trees, mines etc to craft certain items, or do some sort of minigame to provide a service (for example rhythm game = dancing and perhaps some sort of simulated battle for hairdressing? Fight those stubborn knots! XD) Or maybe you could even become a travelling merchant and make a career out of buying and selling in different regions?

This idea would be great in an open world sort of game, and maybe pull a Princess Maker and give different endings depending on how much exp you have with each kind of job?

 

* Monster Keeper! You own a farm where you keep various rare and exotic creatures, and you make money by raising them up and selling thier honey/milk/etc, shipping them off to become meat, or training them to become good pets~ Of course for the last one you'd have to work to market your three headed fire breathing hydra as man's best friend XD Battling would be all about levelling up your mons to raise thier value, and searching for new eggs and stuff within dungeons.

This is a cool idea that I wish I could do but I don't have the programming skills. I'm seeing if I can pull it off with eventing...

[MerlinCross 2]

I don't mind the "wolf having money" method myself. Encounters are something we have to deal with anyway so why not pay the player? Sure you can have other ways of earning cash, but if it's not broke why throw it out completely? 

 

-Junk/Crafting items-

 

Etrian Odyssey games do this, with kinda mixed success. Said items take up a slot in your 60 limit inventory, and said items had a tendency of being quite random. So the gold progression was slow and randomized.

 

-Quests-

 

Depends on how they function/set up. Giving players a quest or two could help out, but too many and they might just blow it off or worse(from a balance vein) complete them all. This makes them stay in an area longer and thus get stronger, leading them to completely wiping out the next few areas without meaning to.

 

-Gather spots-

 

SMT 4 tried something like this. But again it was kinda slow, randomized progression given that each spot gave up one of 3 items usually. That and the time it took for the gather spot to respawn(Not realistic you ransack a shop for stuff it should stay ransacked, what is this?!?), made from some boring hours of running around. 

 

 

I'm not opposed to making new ways of getting gold/mecca/zenny/cash/money/stopthismadness/etc. But I really don't see why just dropping old way is supposed to be an automatic improvement. 

Edited September 20, 2013 by MerlinCross

[OnyxTanuki 10]

I don't mind the "wolf having money" method myself. Encounters are something we have to deal with anyway so why not pay the player? Sure you can have other ways of earning cash, but if it's not broke why throw it out completely? 

 

-Junk/Crafting items-

 

Etrian Odyssey games do this, with kinda mixed success. Said items take up a slot in your 60 limit inventory, and said items had a tendency of being quite random. So the gold progression was slow and randomized.

 

-Quests-

 

Depends on how they function/set up. Giving players a quest or two could help out, but too many and they might just blow it off or worse(from a balance vein) complete them all. This makes them stay in an area longer and thus get stronger, leading them to completely wiping out the next few areas without meaning to.

 

-Gather spots-

 

SMT 4 tried something like this. But again it was kinda slow, randomized progression given that each spot gave up one of 3 items usually. That and the time it took for the gather spot to respawn(Not realistic you ransack a shop for stuff it should stay ransacked, what is this?!?), made from some boring hours of running around. 

 

 

I'm not opposed to making new ways of getting gold/mecca/zenny/cash/money/stopthismadness/etc. But I really don't see why just dropping old way is supposed to be an automatic improvement. 

 

I somewhat agree with your negatives on the loot system in the case of having a limited inventory. With MMOs it makes more sense because often you'll be able to buy bags to increase your inventory size, allowing you to go longer without returning to your current hub to sell off trash loot and unneeded equipment. Now if you wanna have a system like that, it shouldn't be a huge issue so long as your trash loot stacks, but in a more traditional RPG it's probably better to just leave the player with infinite inventory space.

 

The reason you gave for the questing is why I suggested each town have two or three repeatable quests. The game could be balanced so that quests can give you maybe half the gold you'd need to buy what's needed, so once old and unneeded equips are sold that might make for enough to either fully equip most of your party or get them partially upgraded along with buying a small handful of sundries. Repeatable quests likely wouldn't have high enough rewards to merit spamming them while above the level you expect someone to be at, and you could further discourage the player from excessive grinding by reducing mobs' EXP if the player is a higher level than the monsters. With little money to be had in town once the quests are done and no EXP gained from local mobs, even "kill X mobs" quests can become more trouble than they're worth, and the player should be encouraged to simply move on to the next town.

 

As for the gather spots? Well, that makes sense in the same way it does to get loot from a treasure chest or from trash gained while collecting materials. That actually might be a good way to help supplement a crafting system that includes gathering mats. However, this IMO should NOT be your sole source of income, since as you said it can be pretty boring to just run from gathering spawn point to gathering spawn point, and if gathering points don't respawn then the amount of money you can get in a game hits a hard limit.

 

To be honest, so long as it involves battles, any system you include is just going to be a workaround of the traditional method of wolves and fire hydrants and flying rock elementals from another dimension carrying currency on their person. Repeatable quests - at least those of the "kill X mobs" or "collect X items from mobs" ilk - just put a definite value on multiples of mobs rather than on individuals. Trash loot gives mobs a value matching what their drops can sell for. Even with the bank system I was talking about above from Earthbound, you still earn money from fighting, it just goes into an account instead of being directly picked up off of mobs. All of these methods actually do nothing more than add flavor and explain why you earn a certain amount of money when you bash a warthog's skull in, so if you just wanna have every warthog in an area happen to carry 32 gold in its rolls of fat or have a mysterious invisible entity that nobody acknowledges drop from the sky and leave a sack of money on top of your enemies' corpses when it's safe enough that the entity won't get hit by a stray tusk or firebolt, then by all means, go ahead and do so. It makes just as much sense as a party carrying 99 bottles each of about twelve different potions, along with seventy swords, twenty-two sets of armor, sixteen to twenty of four varieties of bombs, nineteen books, and three mysterious gemstones of power, and still have room for 901443 gold coins, and not even be weighed down in the least.

 

At the end of the day, you're just explaining why something is, and you don't necessarily need to do that for everything in your game, especially the things that aren't especially relevant to story progression.

[MerlinCross 2]

At the end of the day, you're just explaining why something is, and you don't necessarily need to do that for everything in your game, especially the things that aren't especially relevant to story progression.

 

Probably the biggest thing I'd like people to remember actually. It's fantasy, make-believe, etc. Why does everything in games as of late have to 'make sense' or need detailed explanations? But this is more a complaint about some games as a whole rather than just -Z-'s ideas. 

[INDOJIN 70]

It's just a game mechanic to reward the player. EXP alone isn't going to motivate the player to put in the effort.

 

However, the loot method makes sense as well, as it is more in tune with reality and sometimes it's the little things that count.

Edited September 21, 2013 by INDOJIN

[Pandamonius 2]

Seems like there were plenty of well thought out points already made.  Let me just add one thought to those:

 

Money dropped by non-humanoids can be viewed as what you received for selling their teeth, pelts, furs, or whatever.  Just pretend that you took that extra step of running back to town, finding a merchant, and convincing him to actually pay you for it.

[Skylar1146 11]

I like the idea of going on a big dungeon delve to get a treasure at the end which is where you get your profit!

[flarify 128]

I have a soft spot for FF12's system for loot drops - only humanoid enemies would drop cash and other enemies would either drop consumables that make at least moderate sense and trash loot. Trash loot, when sold, was filtered into a Bazaar system that would unlock packages of vaguely-described goods. So selling 10 wolf pelts would unlock a "Rough Leather Vest", which when bought, turned out to be the armor Leather Brigandine. Sometimes buying the Bazaar item would be cheaper than getting the item directly from a store, sometimes it would be more expensive (possibly offset by the money gained from trash loot).

 

However, it was downright confusing at times and lead to using a guide to see what you could make. It was not very transparent in what you could get and what quantities of items you needed to make other stuff, and when you started getting into some of the harder-to-get items it became downright frustrating. And then there was the issue with selling any trash over what was needed didn't feed into the next available item...

 

Anyways, to summarize: I prefer trash loot to pure money drops when money doesn't make sense to drop. Especially if the trash has a separate use other than to sell.

[Neverward 210]

Well I suppose there are pro's and con's to each. Realism is always my first choice in any game. And the most realistic way to do it is to combine all the things you said. Naturally precious objects found around would be able to be sold, and likewise enemies who would realistically have money would likely drop money, and you would be able to seel furs and whatnot as well because that's also realistic I think of it sort of like the Skyrim system, you don't necessarily have to do all of those as the player, but you have a choice which way you prefer to make money, which I suppose would also lend options for how you'd like to play the game. Maybe some people don't want to go into a thieves den to get money, they would rather hunt wolves or something because they like to think their a hunter?

 

However that can be a whole ton of work so I'd say if you're going for one system altogether, the easiest fastest way, I'd say make it so that certain enemies drop money, and you also can sell items you find around. That's the most commonly seen method I've seen.

 

Hope that opinion helps a bit