Fearabbit

I'm in the "need more information" camp. But yeah I'm a little worried. Things I'm wondering about: Can I always use the same distribution of attributes for all my characters if I want to? Will the attribute scores represent my physical and mental capabilities in any way? How many different variables are even used in combat, and shouldn't these "attributes" be called correspondingly instead? "Health", "Stamina", "Damage", "Accuracy", maybe "Speed" and "Focus"... what else? And isn't that a bit bland? These stats tell me nothing about my character's personality! (And if the attributes are actually named as usual, i.e. STR, INT etc., which is which? And why? What if I want a focused fighter who is dumb as bread, but the ability to stay focused in combat is tied to the attribute that's called "Intelligence"?) My problem with this system is that I actually do want "dump stats" in a way. It's just that I want to be rewarded for taking them. And I think this is a very different way of approaching the problem that you always have "best builds" for certain classes. (My mage shouldn't choose to put points into the STR-equivalent because it increases the damage of his spells, he should do so because more STR means he can wear heavier armor and is better protected, or something like that. Unless you have lore where strong magic also needs a strong body to contain it, but that sounds like a fantasy world I'm not really interested in. I can already see the Warhammer-like cover art.) When I create a character, I don't want to think about his damage output etc. right from the start. First I actually want to have a picture in my head. Is he strong? Okay, put points in STR. Is he dashing? Okay, put some points in CHR. But he's a bit clumsy, so he has a low DEX. I want to create a character first, and then I hope that the RPG I'm playing makes playing this character with all his strengths and weaknesses as viable as I imagine him to be.

I think all of those images are artwork. Look at them in full size, the interiors have a very painted look (in contrast to the ones we saw earlier) and the countryside images are a very weird blend of blurry sprites, blurry grass, blurry water, painted-looking bits and detailed ruins.

Checked the first 5 answers and "content with one starting location". I think the story should start with a common event, and I believe that's what Obsidian wanted to do anyway. There's some sort of incident at some location, and (for whatever reason) you are in the midst of it. Simple and effective to get the story going. But I actually want lots and lots of customization at the beginning. Why am I at this location, how'd I get there? Who am I? I want to be able to give my character a past and various character traits. That doesn't mean that I want to experience living in that town or arriving in that ship and then going off on an adventure. The game itself can set in with the event that starts the story, I don't need any prologue. As always, Arcanum is a good example. It starts with a bang, quite literally. You wake up on the crash site of your blimp, some guy says mysterious stuff of utmost importance, then another guy hails you as the Chosen One. This is the same for every character, but it's a very short sequence (in contrast to the, in my opinion, way too long opening dungeons of PS:T and BG2) and just like that you know what you can/should do. And before that, you can choose one of the many character backgrounds, some of which even mention where you're from and why you're on that blimp. It's quite atmospheric, really. Too bad that it was of limited scope and the background isn't considered at all in the game itself; even though the blimp started from Caladon, you don't know where it is on your map until you discover it, for example, and not once are you able to say "hey, I'm 35 years old, yes I know about the marvels of technology".

Pretty much what everybody's thinking about this discussion right now, I reckon. I think there are certain people whose opinions are now known, and there are still plenty of people who didn't voice theirs, so maybe give them some room instead of filling the thread with endless bickering.

Nice interview, thanks. Ah, guess we were all wrong when we said it was either a wyrm, a wurm, a dragon, or a thestral.

Specialized merchants give you better deals because they're actually interested in the items your selling and do not want to buy them from other merchants. If a merchant mainly buys/sells spices, while the merchant next to him buys/sells everything, then adventurers would most likely sell all their stuff at the second merchant because it's less of a hassle. In order to get these spices then, the first merchant would have to buy them from the other merchant and he'd make a net loss compared to giving you a better price. (Also what jamoecw said. A general trader cannot be sure if the item will sell quickly or if it'll wind up collecting dust in a corner.) But of course, technically it doesn't make sense for any merchants other than pawnbrokers and more shady dealers to want to buy stuff from you unless there's a crisis. They should have their own connections and networks to keep them supplied and wouldn't trust somebody who waltzes into their shops with what might be stolen goods or bad quality goods. If anything, they might say "I'll do you a favor and buy those items from you, for a small price". And you're right of course that smiths wouldn't want to buy swords. In my opinion the only logical "specialized merchant" that would buy and sell swords in large quantities would be something like a specialized second hand store for adventurer's gear. You know, Ye Olde Adventurer's Shoppe. How that would realistically affect smiths I cannot say. (Just sayin', would've been great if durability was still in. If those "second hand traders" only sold damaged items, that could've balanced things. But in a world where you have a thriving second hand market for swords and armor, I cannot imagine why somebody would decide to become a smith.)

For me, selling my stuff is one of the more boring aspects of an RPG, so I'd like a very simple system. I want different types of merchants who specialize in different items and give you different prices for them, and maybe a bit of regional fluctuation to keep things interesting. I think it's also intuitive that if you've insulted a merchant in some way, he'll give you worse prices for your items. And maybe there could be a trait or perk that gives you better prices in general. But I don't want a bartering skill that you have to raise or large regional differences in pricing (large meaning "enough to make me go to a different town to sell my stuff") or complex disposition systems with individual merchants. I also don't want to do something to my items to make them more valuable, like enchanting them. Simply because I find no joy in doing these things. I do find joy in completing a quest for a merchant so that he gives me better prices and generally building up relationships through quests.

Bhazor, have we been playing the same Arcanum? I did have 6 party members whose items needed maintenance. And yes, in Arcanum that was annoying, but only because there wasn't a simple menu for it. (Which would've been easy. Show all items that are held by the party, but filter out the ones that don't have durability and the ones that are at 100%, offer the option to mark the ones that should be repaired and have a "Repair All" button with the gold cost for that next to it.) Durability wouldn't have been the issue people make it out to be. "I'll be constantly thinking about it!", "It will completely ruin the fun!"... funny to see hardcore roleplayers whine about this while constantly fearing that the gameplay will be "dumbed down for casual players" in areas that are important to them. Well congratulations, you've just dumbed down the weapons and armor system because you thought a mechanic that a kind-of-casual RPG player like me enjoyed was too hardcore for you. Yes it did.

Well, I'm sad now. I hope you're all happy!!! Seriously, this was a feature that was very important to me. I knew how easy it is to screw it up, but I believed that they could do it, because of everything else they have shown me so far. I can understand people who wanted something else, but in my case, I've grown up mostly with RPGs that had durability (Morrowind, Fallout, Arcanum... IE games came later). I've seen that at the end of the day, I didn't mind and in fact enjoyed the features for the little nuances they offered. For the "I'll stick with my good old warhammer because it's durable" and the "I'll let him keep a backup weapon just to be sure". Project Eternity is bound to be a great RPG, but I really hope that not too many features will be scrapped in favor of more "tried and tested" designs that worked in a very specific way that people are now accustomed to, but that didn't actually work for people new to the system.

And I agree that there are semantical difficulties here. I actually said so in my first post directed at you: By which I meant exactly what you're saying right now. So we're actually in agreement. The actions your character takes can be labeled "evil" by the world, but the character's motivation shouldn't be "It's because I am evil" and the player shouldn't think about his character's motivation that way either. In the end, the phrasing of the OP wasn't perfect, but I think we've worked out what he meant by it and that it is indeed a good idea to offer the player more complex motivations than just being evil for evil's sake, which is juvenile. (And whatever the player's motivations are when playing his character, when the quests don't accomodate them, then this complex character cannot be played out, so it is something the game has to give to the player, not something that solely depends on the player's intent.)

Obviously for you it's a big problem that people use the word "evil" to describe what they mean. For me it's a bigger problem to keep having to debate the meaning of that word when we actually all know what each other's talking about. The OP contrasts normal RPG evil to a more complex evil, and we (at least, I) know that basically he just wants to play some guy doing things that many people would call evil, but he wants to have reasons for it. Not necessarily somebody who is defined as evil by some agreed-upon philosophical standard. Imagine playing a Jew in Judea during Roman occupation. The Romans came into your homeland, raided farms, killed your people, and now they forbid you from practicing your religion openly and want you to convert to their heathen gods. (Let's all assume the Romans did that and ignore how bad I am at history.) Among your people, the Romans are seen as evil. You know there are groups in the underground that try to free the country. But for whatever reason, you'd rather join the Romans and help them. So you betray these conspirators: you lead the Romans to them, tell them who the leader is. The conspirators are massacred, the leader is taken as a prisoner. Later, you are in charge of torturing him (the Romans want to see if you're really on their side or something). To prove that you want to be on their side, you go completely overboard with the torture, you get every last bit of information out of the prisoner and then you leave him to die. The Romans are pleased, and this is just the beginning. You quickly rise in their ranks and eventually you become the Prefect of Judea. Nevermind your motivations. Nevermind morality, ethical dilemmas and all that stuff. 90% of Judea's population would see you as an evil character. You'd be the villain. To them, it may even look like you're being gratuitously evil. The important question for the OP in this scenario is: When I betray the conspirators, is my only dialogue option when giving a reason for it that "I've always wanted to watch a person die with their guts hanging out of their belly" or are there dialogue options like "Forgive me God, I know it seems horrible, but it's for the best of my beloved Judea" and "I'm only doing this because I like aqueducts and hospitals"? These different motivations don't change the general opinion about you as an evil villain. They might change the minds of certain key characters and provide a more interesting storyline for you, but all in all it's still the "evil path" you're taking. I hope I've answered the latter question with the Judea example. As for the others: Seems like you overlooked the part in my last post where I explained that I don't know if these complaints are true, don't care if they're true and basically just provided a service to the discussion by summarizing them so that we may talk about their implications for Project Eternity. They're common complaints, that's what I know. I've had these complaints myself for certain games, that's what I know as well. Actually, I don't think it's important whether they're moral or ethical or metaethical. What's important is that the player sometimes finds himself in interesting dilemmas. The whole philosophical stuff under the surface should become important when players discuss about what they did in that situation afterwards. ("You chose to kill X? But he was your friend! How immoral!" "Well if I hadn't, a whole village would've burned down! How unethical!" etc.) The classical utiliarian dilemma is killing one person for the sake of saving 100 people. Which one is the ethically correct choice? Utilitarians answer: That which maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering, so you should kill the one person for the greater good. But, well, if it only were that simple. The question is always interesting, and it is never easy, because it's an ethical dilemma, one where neither of the choices makes you a "good" person. The important point is, however, that these dilemmas are very ethical while not having a "moral contrast", as you say. It didn't cease to be ethical, it became ethical. Anyone can follow a moral code, but choosing one side in a dilemma such as this one is the kind of thing that defines you. So I would really like to see some of these dilemmas in the game. Aaaand I just realized that your avatar most likely tricked me into talking about Judea.

It's a crutch for designers who want to give the players huge rewards, but in the same time want to keep the rewards meaningless. How so? That sentence doesn't seem to make any sense. I'd say that the huge rewards are more important if selling items isn't worth anything. What about an economy where you get 0 gold pieces for it, because the merchant simply won't buy from you? Ever tried walking into a store and selling them the laptop you just bought? Everything in the scenario you're describing is less believable than the fact that you can't sell the swords for more than 1 gp. What about the fact that you just killed 10 evil knights all by yourself, even though they were all equipped with "masterwork items"? In reality, that would have been one knight at most. Only one masterwork sword then. Or the city watch quickly claimed the bodies, as they would do. If you're at war, you wouldn't have time to loot the bodies. And on and on. Literally everything is an abstraction in the game, and the only question one should ask is: Does it work mechanically while still being believable? Does selling a sword for a higher price work mechanically? No. Is selling it at a very low price still believable? Well, if you'd put the same amount of detail into answering all other questions regarding believability as you'd have to put into this one in order to come out with a "no", the whole genre would be an unbelievable mess. Blacksmiths earned their money by making swords. They were not interested in swords themselves. Other merchants wouldn't buy swords unless they needed them for themselves. The easiest and most believable abstraction of medieval trade from the perspective of an "adventurer" (i.e. someone NOT a smith or merchant and most likely a nobleman) would be to restrict you from selling anything at all. However, we have D&D and the people who made that sadly decided that fantasy economies should completely rely on bartering, and so it shall be for eternity. :/ The calculation is very simple, by the way. You buy equipment for X gold. You kill Y people with that equipment. The total equipment you gain from that should roughly be worth X gold if you don't want to cause balancing issues (after all, you do get quest rewards in addition to that), so the amount of gold you should get for one set of equipment should be X divided by Y. The enemies should be a challenge, so they'll have roughly the same equipment as you. That means you can sell the equipment you just bought for X gold for X/Y gold back to the same merchant. (Yeah I know, this is oversimplified. But these kind of calculations or estimations are essential when talking about economy in games.)

I'd like to add that crafting unique technological items in Arcanum must have been my favorite feature ever. And it was a natural money sink. It went like this: You leveled up one of your Technology trees and got a new recipe, or you found a recipe and thought it looked and sounded awesome. You noticed that you don't have any of the necessary items. You spent days going from shop to shop, hoping that the items would turn up. You buy the items at a very high price (much higher than what you'll get if you sell the crafted item). You build the item, excited to find out what it does (this is the point where you also find out that Arcanum has horrible balancing and the recipe you gained two levels earlier was actually better than this one, but nevermind) You use the item proudly and with the knowledge that not only is it unique, it is also a unique item that you have created. You cackle maniacally while feeling truly powerful for the first time in your life. So for half of the unique items, this would be the perfect compromise. You don't buy them in the store, but you buy the ingredients in the store (or occasionally find them, but who's patient enough for that?), and you get the ability to build them at a certain level. In this case, the items wouldn't be technological, but magical. Which is not much of a difference except that the maniacal laughter will be even louder. Of course most of the unique items should still be loot. But that feeling in Arcanum where you actually felt like you had created something... I want to feel that again.

Are you talking about the Crafting skill? Well, it does also make any equipment you wear more durable. So it's only half wasted if a companion has it as well. Plus, if it's done in the way I hope it'll be done (similar to Arcanum), then it'll be possible to learn different recipes... but I doubt they'll do that as Crafting probably won't be as important in P:E as it was in Arcanum for tech characters.

I want to spend money on: Crafting. I liked spending money on ingredients and parts in Arcanum, for example. Repairs. (I like the durability feature.) Standard equipment. If most of my equipment is unique, the game has a completely different problem than a lack of money sinks! Companions? I kind of like the idea of paying my companions for their services in addition to giving them equipment. I do not want to spend money on: Unique items. I want to craft them myself or find them instead. Player Fortress. (I mean I will do it, but I don't think that's a great money sink) I do not want to be able to sell: Equipment found on monsters (for example rusty swords with bits of rotten flesh still dangling from them or centuries-old armor - what kind of merchant would buy that?) Some crafted stuff - basically Crafting should not be a money source, it should be a money sink Recipes, herbs, ingredients in general except maybe the rare ones And I think that's it. Give me enough reason to buy standard equipment, and limit the ways how I can make money mostly to quests. In recent playthroughs of old RPGs I restricted myself to similar rules, and found that I often ran out of money (and yet I always had enough).

No, I understood you just fine. But you said pl1982 wished for a more serious "gratuitous evil" approach (and that this didn't make any sense), which I wasn't sure about. As I said, the most common complaints are actually that being the "bad guy" means being gratuitously evil, doing something that doesn't really fit into the storyline and/or not being rewarded well enough. And like I said, my opinion in this is that I just don't know. I can remember many situations in RPGs where I wanted to say something that seemed obvious to me, but wasn't available; where the only choices were "ridiculously monstrous", "materialistic as hell" and "holier than Jesus". And I know that I don't want to see choices like that in the game, but I don't know if most RPGs actually were constructed in such a way or if my memory is playing tricks on me. What I said concerning this was, "does it matter?". I'm mainly trying to discuss what I want to see in Project Eternity. So my point about those three complaints was not whether they are valid for old games or not, but how these complaints can/should be adressed in order to create a better P:E. My point about Game of Thrones wasn't Grey and Grey Morality, either. I actually emphasized the difference between The Witcher 2 and GoT by saying that the latter did not have a Grey and Grey Morality where all you do is choose the lesser of two evils (at least if you ask me, but I guess this is highly subjective). And anyway that wasn't my point, my point was that while knowing they're the bad guys, you can see where the bad guys in GoT are coming from. And that they wouldn't call themselves evil. That has nothing to do with Grey and Grey Morality. Altruism is yet another point. I don't mind if there are choices where I can be altruistic from time to time. But moral choices shouldn't always be designed around altruism or selfishness. There are moral dilemmas that are so big that it doesn't matter whether you chose altruistic or not. (A little bit of utilitarianism never hurt a narrative.)

Okay, so Arcanum had durability that was pretty much exactly as described in Update #58. And it wasn't tedious and boring at all. (The only thing I didn't like was that the item broke at 100% damage and they took that out for P:E.) Yes, it's something you have to get accustomed to. But there are a couple of things that make a game better without being "fun" themselves. You have a completely different mindset when you know that your equipment is going to get bad once in a while. In most RPGs, my characters had one weapon each. As soon as a weapon was outdated, I sold it. That wasn't the case in Arcanum. All my characters had backup weapons. Because I didn't want them to take up too much space, they were usually daggers or small swords that I bought from the blacksmith. I also often thought "should I really spend that much money on a fragile enchanted armor, or should I go for the more robust unenchanted one?" That's such a simple thing but I think it added so much. It made me go to blacksmiths and buy weapons on a regular basis. It made my characters carry small backup weapons, like they would in real life. Of course, I would regularly repair my equipment as well. When I started playing Arcanum, I hated the idea of having to do all that. But in the game I actually enjoyed it, because it enhanced my roleplaying experience immensely. Also, by the end of the game, many of my characters actually used weapons (or had weapons in their inventory) that could be bought from blacksmiths right from the start - just your usual Caladon Sword, the usual Steel Axe... because they were robust, did decent damage, and were cheap and available. I'm not saying all of this is desirable. Personally, I enjoyed it even though the system in Arcanum was flawed. But the main point is, it changes your gameplay in more ways than being "tedious and boring", and if done right it can be a very satisfying experience.

What an Arcanum-esque update. Crafting was my favorite part of that game and it sounds as if it'll be even more fun in Project Eternity. (I do hope that Crafting will allow me to create some unique stuff once I get the right recipes, as it did in Arcanum.) Oh, and I actually like durability as well. I especially like it the way it's done here, where you don't lose the item if it's fully damaged and where the damage doesn't gradually make the item worse. That way it won't be annoying, but it will feel more realistic (and also I like the little roleplaying of "do I go to the blacksmith or do I do it myself?"). Very cool. I just hope there will be an easy menu for selecting the items that should be repaired. In Arcanum, I had to transfer all my companions' broken items over to my main character's inventory, get them repaired and sort them back in the various inventories. That was annoying as hell. But yeah, one thing that's been discussed in the forums a lot is the price of crafted items. I think it would be best if they didn't have any value at all (or rather, I think it would be best if the player couldn't sell stuff at all, but I realize that I'm in the minority here). Crafting items already eliminates the need to buy things at all, even services like repairs can be done by yourself... but not only destroying one money sink, but actually turning it into a money source, by allowing you to sell crafted items, that would be too much.

mcmanusaur, I think there are three common complaints about RPGs and their way of handling morality: 1) Moral choices are as shallow as you describe them, i.e. "gratuitous evil", "materialistic neutral", "altruistic good". 2) Quests are often designed in a way that make the "altruistic good" option the preferred one, the one that flows from the narrative. 3) The altruistic characters usually get something anyway, so that their altruism does not hinder them in any way. Each point is a problem on its own, and the first one especially is one that affects all alignments. Now, are these complaints valid? I can't say. I can say that I remember feeling exactly like that in various RPGs, while only a few have managed to avoid this problem (for isometric party-based RPGs, only Arcanum comes to mind). Anyway, the important question isn't whether old RPGs had boring morality systems, but how to avoid such a boring morality for P:E. Talking about the "evil path" might be the wrong way to go about that, because the term is already assuming a black and white morality. To reference my Three Common Complaints above, saying that you want a well-crafted evil path means that you want the devs to avoid Problem 2 and Problem 3 while embracing Problem 1. In my opinion, Game of Thrones is very interesting in this regard. Just like The Witcher 2 it has many rivaling factions, but unlike that game the show always has me rooting for a certain faction to win over another one. There are the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and yet I know that the good guys actually aren't very good sometimes, and I know that once I see the story from the perspective of the bad guys, I'll understand their motivations. The point is that I have a very clear image who the good guys are, while these characters themselves would disagree. And this is the situation we need in an RPG. The one where you go down the "evil path" without even noticing, because it all makes so much sense. I think moral questions where you have to decide between selfishness and altruism are so last century. Let's have a world where everybody is selfish and then find moral dilemmas in that one. It's much more interesting.

New Vegas avoided the pitfall of having a typical save-the-world storyline, but... what was the story of that game? I never understood (and didn't finish it). I was very interested in trying to find out what happened to me and what my role in that big power struggle would be, but once I got to New Vegas it was just... oh yeah this one guy wanted to kill you because you had some MacGuffin item, but never mind that. Here are the different sides you can support in the fight for New Vegas and Hoover Dam. Choose one side each, then win New Vegas and Hoover Dam for them. End of the game. And while I'm sure there was a bit more to it, that's what it felt like to me, and it really didn't motivate me to keep playing. And that's the problem with storylines that are too broad. The Witcher 2 had the same problem. I mean I love that game for so many reasons, but in the end... what was I fighting for? There wasn't anything that motivated me really, because they avoided all possible motivations. Why should I hunt down the Kingslayer? Why should I even consider helping either Iorveth or that king dude? By the time we stepped on the scene, the Kingslayer wasn't a threat anymore. The damage was already done, and the one remaining king was a horrible person that I actually killed myself in the end. The ending had me sharing a drink and then shaking hands with the Kingslayer. I didn't get closer to Yennefer, didn't get closer to finding out about my past, couldn't stop the war between the kings... and Nilfgaard wins no matter what. It's a good game but it's essentially about nothing, because that's what you get when you avoid being about anything (redundancy, yeah!).

In my opinion: 1. You can take just about everything, but you can't sell most of it. Merchants sell stuff, you buy it - not the other way around. 2. Each character has his own limited inventory, but there is a "virtual pack mule" that can store anything you want it to. 3. Bosses give you the good stuff or you can have it custom-made in a smithy or an enchanter's shop or something. They rarely have it just lying around in their shops. The legendary stuff shouldn't be available at all except through special quests. 4. Gold doesn't have weight, because that would be annoying. The beauty of this system is that obsessive-compulsive behavior isn't awarded at all, and therefore it is a much better abstraction of reality. It's also easier to balance because you don't have to take into account people who never loot bodies and those who loot every single item, therefore opening up the option of making money important again. Equipment is only useful if it is better than your own (or maybe if you can break it down and craft something new from it), which is a lot more intuitive for new players as well. If something doesn't seem useful to you, then it isn't. Concerning the really good equipment: I'd prefer it if there was almost no legendary stuff to be found at all. 90% of the good loot should be something that you could have gotten from a shop if you had paid the smith or the enchanter a lot of money. Excalibur and the One Ring are items that are unique and there shouldn't be more than a dozen of those in the whole game - all of them tied to a specific quest. Basically, I'm tired of many conventions of the RPG genre. I don't think they work. There are too many rewards, you never actually need the money you earn, and it all becomes shallow and boring. It also doesn't depict a world that is anywhere close to realistic, with me dropping off 20 blades of the enemies I just killed single-handedly and paying my new sword with that. How does the smith make a living if his swords are paid in swords? Make money important again. If I get money for a quest, I should be overjoyed, because now I can tell the smith to sharpen my Rapier+1 to a Rapier+3 and then the enchanter to put a new enchantment on it (oh yeah by the way, I think enchantments should wear off). If you give me the ability to craft things, don't let me earn money with that. Don't even make these crafted items as good as the ones I buy from the smith, because that would break the game. (Crafting should be something that helps me in the dungeon, when I need to improvise - it shouldn't help me earn a living.)

Except, you know, they can only learn 50% of all spells (and you have no idea how useful those will be) and they can only memorize another 50% of those. And for each additional Magic Missile you need, you have to give up one of your other cool effects. And all the managing of spells in the spellbook was annoying as hell, so that I usually left the combat spells in there and never used the other spells. D&D isn't popular in Germany and I only know it from the cRPGs. So when I first played Neverwinter Nights, I was completely out of my depth. I had played Morrowind before and loved playing a wizard there, so I decided to create a wizard. It was hell. I read the manual a thousand times to try and understand how this is supposed to work. Eventually I had some luck playing as a Sorcerer, which is much more intuitive. But in general, I just gave up on magic classes in D&D games. (Which also means that I have very little experience with them. Maybe they become awesome when they are at a higher level, that's what everyone says - but to me they're just no fun at all.)

Pink and purple are like any other colors. Except... ...they're also the colors of "real magic".

Nah, it's a dragon.

That's how RPGs usually do it. It never works, people always come back for the extra loot. And it is tedious as hell. Which is why Obsidian decided for a different kind of inventory that doesn't have size or weight limits, but is for the most part out of reach (until you reach a camp or an inn or something). Just... trust them on this one.