I understand what you wish to accomplish but if you don't create something like I described previously (with tables and multipliers to compute the items' final price automatically) you do risk yourself creating unbalanced items, i. e. creating cheaper items that might be more powerful that expensive ones.
Yes. But seriously, there are plenty of more important balance issues in my project than the item price.
Thanks again, but it's time for me to take a break. I'll work on some artwork and let the game design things rest. Usually artwork is fairly relaxing.
And no, the captain obvious part was earlier in the discussion. E.g.
"The important thing is to offer interesting choices. If people can buy everything they want when they want it, your system is a failure."
I wonder how stupid I must have appeared if someone thinks that this will help me
The sentance sure is right, but it's the basics of game design - interesting choices. And of course, put challenges to the player.
But it's alright. My projects use to get nowhere actually, but in the past it was fun to talk about design issues. This project is intended to become a long lasting sandbox sort of project for me - it's clearly too big for a single person, but I wanted to start on it anyways, and then see how far I can get.
Maybe I'll ask about design questions again, but my other question about where an evil overlord would hide items ran dry also - it seems no one is interested in sharing such thoughts, or it's deemed something uninteresting.
If someone knows about a forum, specifically about game design (not program design, and not graphics design), please let me know. Today I had bad luck with questions in two forums, but somewhere the people who are interested in game design talk must have a place, too. In the past the roguelike crowd was a good place to ask, since these games live from game design more than other genres. But maybe it's just me, and I ask the wrong questions, ask the wrong way, and can't deal with the answers.
The idea with the table is fine. I used that in a former project, and it worked. The tricky part is to work out proper multiplicators, and in some cases it should'nt be multiplicators to the base price but fixed sums added per level of the mod.
But I can't work on that before I have more of the game. E.g. I have no item materials at the moment. And I don't intend materials to play a big role. There is only one attack type, acid, which will be modified by material, and actually the items don't need a material for that, just an "ignore acid", or "resist acid" flag.
But I have some distrust in such table, too. They are too mechanic, and I think there should be some "hand crafted" exceptions, which will result from game testing ... but that I can only do if I have much more of the game. At the moment I only have a walkaround demo, some map generators, and a very incomplete list of "proof of concept" items, to check if inventory handing and item creation works.
Coppers are the lowest currency in this project. I must take care that cheap items will be a few copper coins, I want to avoid that all minor items cost 1 copper without any distinction.
Problem is, I have no simple items yet. But an arow, or a pebble, something like that should be among the lowest. From there I'll try to set prices for the weapons, which is the biggest group of items at the moment. Then implement shops and do some playtesting - I also have no idea yet what and how much my monster will drop. Item and treasure drops would have been one of the next design questions to post. But at least I can then collect some treasure and go shopping, and I'll see if the item relation are sensible, or if better weapons are unproportionally expensive.
Further question is how to compare armor to weapons, in some games armors are way more expensive but no so much more useful.
I had hope that people would start talking about such. Where to start, how to handle cheap items, junk items, how to set price relations between items or item groups (food, weapons, armor, ammo, light sources, misc. items), and finally when all that is set, think about magic item mods, or purely magic items which do not have any base functionality but the magic that they do, e.g. magic rings and amulets, also wands, scrolls and the like. There is also the question ho to set the ratio of selling used items to the prices of new items. E.g. if it's good if the player find one lucky valuable armor, which he can trade for a lot of other equipment. Maybe it's fine if such is possible, maybe it's not. Some games have limits how much gold a shopkeeper will pay out, but then there is other sillyness like all high lvel armor yielding the same 5000 gold or whatever the limit is from the shopkeeper, regardless of their real value.
This discussion didn't scratch any of such issues so far.
"The classical 5000gp bread. It could be interesting to make weapons so rare that they actually would cost more than a bread"
I wonder how this slipped in here. And from which game that is. Angband had fairly cheap food. And I wonder if this was meant as serious advice, since I would never have imagined to make a leaf of bread more expensive than a sword.
But I'm not sure if I want to add food to my game. It usually only adds hassle and no fun for the player. I mean there usually are no (see above) "interesting choices" in food, just to have food in order not to starve.
The project is too big already, I think food will not be on my design list till very late, or unless I get a real good idea of interestin things to do with food in a RGG.
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