Monster Hunter

[Gungnir]

Me and my friend were tossing around the idea of porting Monster Hunter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Hunter) to a tabletop setting, in our case Exalted, but the general concept could be applied to D&D as well.

In the game, on advance by doing missions which generally involve aiding giant dragon-like wyverns along to their inevitable bucket-kicking. You carve items off their carcasses and use them to make progressively better armor and weapons, with different effects. Every character has the exact same hp, stamina, attack speed/strength, base armor, everything; the only dividing factor is what type and which weapons they use (and occasionally what their cats cook for them, but that's neither here nor there).

Now my question are these: How do you handle the harvesting of materials like this as a method of improvement and prevent repetitiveness? Hunting a certain type of creature gets old after a while, and with our large party, it wouldn't make sense for everyone to get Armor X after killing a single Creature X. And how would you divide the items you did get? Surely, to make the best items, you need the rarest items, so what decides who gets the rares?

[Poison_Fish]

Hmm.. well, for Exalted in particular, I think trying to standardized everyone is a bad idea. The bonus of Exalted comes from having different abilities and being able to be awesome, not everyone using the same daiklave with the same melee charms. A difference does create uniqueness.

As for what people receive, I guess for D&D's case, it has a random item table for loot. For Exalted, magical items are each their own little special magical artifact. They don't come by the bucket load, unless you work for Lookshy. Usually it comes down to someone finding a use to it or if they have had first age dibs on it.

Though, a good crafter should be able to make nearly anything. Hmm.. a go out and slay evil things sounds like it would work well with a Dragon Blooded game, since that can be their roll.

Well anyway, artifact distribution in Exalted tends to just go who might get the most use out of it. Seeing as artifacts take up commitment though, constant itemization doesn't work to well like it does in D&D.

For preventing repetitiveness, for exalted, a change of scenery does a lot of it. Since combat is still very stunt based, having different objects/plants/people to use/jump off of/abuse can make no two fights the same. As well as how the abilities of different characters interact with different terrain. An Ebon Shadow User will approach a T-Rex rampaging through a town different then a Solar Melee user.

Those are most of my thoughts for now. I'm sure you can appropriate something like that in Exalted, just will be a bit difficult, since Exalted isn't quite built for the dungeon crawl monster slaying loot and divide type of games.