"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 19:30 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Quote: I still think complaining that something you are making is overcomplicated is not giving the 'umble masses the right impression at all. If anything he should be saying 'look at all this neat data we implemented just for you guys cos you are all so great!' Not 'its not fair, my own item tables that I wrote I made too complicated to manage properly'.

No, what I'm saying is, "Someone went through an inordinate amount of effort to create and maintain this, and all players can do is complain about it, why make it so complicated?" 99% of those complaining players would spin their eyes in wonder if the list was 1/3 the size but produced more balanced results.

Look at that table. You would have the play through the game about... I'll just throw out a figure here... one hundred million billion times, in order to exhaust all of the random item possibilities. Who's going to play through the game one hundred million billion times? No one. Most players don't even finish RPGs once, let alone multiple times. If we have three to five options for each random drop, with a limited number of drops, that should be more than enough for all but 0.001% of the people who buy our game. Those 99.999% are the same body of players who don't notice thinks like walking up a ladder in the Athkatla sewers and ending up in a level of Durlag's Tower, you know?

Quote: Um, thats not our problem JE.

Sorry, but it isnt.

That looks like a lot of code but thats why you employ people to write it. Innovation is hard sometimes.

I'd like to back up a moment to address this.

Random treasure isn't innovative. At all. And your frequently described issues with treasure disbursement would be much more easily solved with smaller, more controlled tables.