Gear: Find it, Buy it, Steal it or Make it?

making shit has the advantage of not having to go to a specific place every time you need a certain item, or the ridiculousness of just because you have reached a certain level, now suddenly the store in your home town stores ultrapotions despite the fact that the monsters around said town are still level 2.

i dont really care how i obtain things, because the way i play rpgs means that i always have plenty of money and other items, and i am always stealing/grinding to maximise the amount of equipment i can get.

i will say that i find the slightly randomised method of making weapons from random loot in ffta2 less preferable than just giving me predetermined weapons for story fights, and letting me buy the other ones at new towns (as was the case with ffta). in one play through i get 4 thief abilities (and therefore unlock ninja) almost straight away, whereas another time it might take forever. this is annoying.

You could just not waste taxpayer's money and not print things out? Get a notebook and write the good shit down, or download it to your phone somehow?

I'm not really bothered as long as it's executed in a way that makes me feel like I'm not being led by the nose and/or forced to play roulette.

I usually hate making shit in games but in Oblivion making potions and enchanting items has been fun as hell. I think it's because the shit you can make is actually pretty good, and the menus make it straightforward to figure out what does what without printing or buying anything else.

making stuff in games just seems like a bottomless abyss of busywork.

I don't like the "broken binoculars + acorn + simple cloak = missile launcher" school of video games AT ALL, god what could be dumber and more boring and frustrating, but I like endless branching mods of weapons better than practically anything in video games and so-o-o-o much preferable to endless options of slightly different weapons to the same effect.

I'm not a big fan of having huge lists of monster collection, amassing insane stores of cooking ingredients, or what-have-you. Simple equipment trees are better, so far. The main problem is for most games that let you make things, you have to grab and fill bags and bags of inventory junk FOREVER. This is probably a fixable issue, to be fair.

Does this exist in anything other than RpG games, which I don't really play? I can only think of the Wally games from days of old, combining items to make new items (i was shit at that, and found it rubbish)

Also resident evil, combining herbs to make new herbs. Kinda distracted from the flow of things for me personally.

making shit has the advantage of not having to go to a specific place every time you need a certain item

This is kind of why I've never really taken up Blacksmithing in WoW. Also my terrible memory means I'd end up thinking "Oh shit I meant to go to the forge but I'm half-way across the continent!"

Where did this start? Did pen and paper RPGs incorporate this kind of thing? It feels like it probably came from AD&D.

Anyway, in general I do tend to avoid it, and thankfully I don't think I've come across a game yet where that wasn't an option. The exception for me was KOTOR though - I did tinker with my lightsaber quite a bit in there.

TMI

I am glad the taxes I don't earn enough to have to pay are going to printing out gamefaqs.

SRSLY if the "pork barrel spending" people complained about consisted of people printing out video came guides, I would be so fucking happy. For the world. Because it would clearly be a great place.

forced to play roulette.

aha, this happened to me the other evening.
I am very good at roulette now.