Dragon Quest IV -- #43. The Numbers Game
0Nobody said running a business would require counting skills...
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Okay, I swear, the time of frittering away our lives on that silly JRPG nonsense is nearly at an end... because... it's no place for a middle-aged man of means like Torneko to toil away. He's fulfilled his dream, and now he needs to make the most of it!
...it's still a very hard impulse to shake, given the kind of game we're actually playing and the unusually lucrative rewards you get without even trying by beating up worms and platypuses and the like, though. It's the gambler's fallacy and all, you know, because those earlier successes are just traps you lay for yourself, dreaming of those that are just on the horizon...
And yet, the cruel reality is that you're simply at the mercy of a pseudorandom number generator. The only reason those earlier successes exist and stand out so sharply is because of the sheer number of repetitions until they finally happened. That, and at its earliest stages ANY item you got of abnormal value would suffice as seed money for further enterprises.
Indeed, the item drop table can be overly simplified just generating high-value equipment at random, which just so happens to include our targets... and perhaps a little bit of favoritism towards the steel broadsword, as the highest value mundane object we can procure for sales.
For the record, there IS apparently one better, but you have to go through some weird hoops and allow for a totally different kind of random grind, so it's of even less interest to our immediate purposes than bashing critters in a damp cave...
Anyway, even the most fanatical JRPG enthusiast should finally see the light and admit that we've accumulated enough material wealth, we just need to wring our fortune free from it. Eventually. See the light, I mean, the fortune is actually closer than it might appear.
The only other thing about having so many items that serve us no real purpose besides selling them off is that you have to be careful not to sell the ones you actually still have some need for... although even that wouldn't be a terrible loss in the grand scheme of things.
You'll see. You'll all see!