Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
- How do you hold a controller?
- What's the first game you remember finishing?
- What's your favorite podcast game?
You kill things, you take their stuff. That's the law of games. It's barely worth saving a village from goblins if you don't dig through the lint in their pockets and find four gold coins.
Our weekend question is: What loot would you drop? On the day you finally ragdoll, what will a party of adventurers find in your pockets? Five dollars and some tissues? The crafting materials to make a Razer DeathAdder? Wet wipes and a +1 longsword? Just snacks—so many snacks?
It doesn't have to literally be whatever's in your pockets right now if you want to get creative. Here are our answers, plus a few from our forum.
James Davenport: Coconut flavored La Croix and a joint. I hit 30 recently so the most interesting thing about me is that I smoke weed. My old hobbies, like skateboarding and kissing, will kill me now. Age is here. If a rain cloud appears my bones rattle and pulse. All that's left inside is ballooning dread and my latent willpower to overcome it supplanted by a nightly ritual of smoking and watching trash television (anime is how I feel now) or playing JRPGs on easy and getting mad about turn-based combat. And now my body inflates if I eat anything that tastes good, so instead I drink water that hurts to swallow and tastes like lotion. If I concentrate, I imagine the scented bubbles rolling down my ever-contracting throat (anxiety) are a luxurious dessert. This water keeps me alive. I'm very grateful.
Andy Chalk: A beat-up pocket knife with a broken blade, a few coins that at first glance look like gold but are definitely not, and no tea.
Jody Macgregor: A handkerchief. If you roll a 1 on a d4 it's allergy season and that thing is mostly snot.
Tim Clark: I'm an old man with no children or a car so I would say a moderate amount of gold and some blue rarity trousers.
Morgan Park: One fidget cube and an energy drink (half empty).
Since I'm nearly cool enough to do recreational drugs on a regular basis (seriously James, where is weed?), the only things that'd pop out of my corpse upon death are the fidget cube I carry around and whatever energy drink I had in my hand at the time. That may not sound like high-tier loot, but you should know I only fidget with name brand cubes. These babies feature impact-resistant clicky buttons, rotating cogs with the utmost snap, and analog sticks that can handle hours of fiddling at a time. They're the Cadillac of $10 toys that help me not bite my nails.
Andy Kelly: An old paperback.
One of my current vices is buying old books. I had to get an entire new shelf recently just to house them all. And whenever I go anywhere (well, in the old world, when I went places) I have one stuffed in my inside jacket pocket. I'm particularly fond of old sci-fi novels from the '70s with wild Chris Foss-esque cover art, which almost never reflects the actual content of the story. So if a band of adventurers were to kill me, they'd probably find a well-thumbed copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama, or something similar, lying next to a very small pile of gold. And if it was The Witcher, probably a chicken sandwich too.
Christopher Livingston: No need to kill me, I already drop loot! On a daily basis I drop my phone, my vape, my headphones, and several remote controls. Frankly, more video game enemies should drop loot without having to kill them first, or without even having to target their limbs. Bring on clumsiness in AI, I say.
From our forum
McStabStab: They'd find my Steam Controller (+1 to dexterity, +1 to intelligence), a roll of clear hockey tape (+1 to agility), and a box of Sour Patch Kids (-10 to HP, +1 to happiness).
OsaX Nymloth: A "nothing really matters, void welcomes all" note. Would probably give whoever picks it up a -3 to all dice rolls, Depression debuff and have a 30% chance of turning the poor soul into nihilistic vangaurd of dread.
I Will Haunt You: My 6" pewter ankh pendant. Adds +2 to all charisma rolls with the "goth" and "wiccan" factions and a +2 to all intimidate rolls against "normies" (+4 vs Catholics). Has the side effect of causing people in game stores and comic book shops to ask "Do you play Vampire?"
Frindis: One sweaty t-shirt (-5 charisma), a Star Citizen keychain (+5 ambition), an expired credit card (-10 luck), a shopping note (-5 agility).
Rensje: I'm fairly certain I'd drop two keyrings (+5 lockpicking each), a small sack of coins, a fancy dress shirt (+1 charisma) and some breath mints (+5 speech).
Mazer: A fork. One fork. The final fork I have to give.
