Loot:
The way I'm planning the loot to work has a lot to do with other pillar of the gameplay I'm aiming at: crafting. So the discussion of the loot mechanics will be forced to sometimes move into the realm of the crafting and associated skills, but I won't discuss that in detail yet. :)
As mentioned in FAQ Friday #6, I'm using a generalized Danger Level system, where each recipe and material has it's own level, that roughly translates to the PC's experience level on which the recipe/material is the most popular. Each item is made according to some recipe (exactly one recipe per item) and some materials (current implementation has exactly two, but I'm planning to change this to more elastic system with 1 - 3 base materials and additional materials for adornment). There are two general ways for a player to find an item:
It can be generated on the dungeon floor (or in chest/other container, but this is generally similar). Such items are generated by taking a random1 recipe and random1 materials with target Danger Level equal to Danger Level of the place where it is found.
It can be generated in possesion of the item-possessing monsters. The items generated by them are less random: generally those items will be equipped by the monster in question, and thus will be only of classes the monster in question uses2. Targed DL of such item is DL of the monster in question3.
Now, in general, the dungeon-based generation can yield pretty much everything, making it a good way to ensure that players have access to wide variety of items, while monster-based generation can be much more targeted - if you want a spear, you go hunting for a spear-wielding enemy. This can be relatively easy (in case of common weapons) or quite hard (wands/staves etc. might be especially difficult to find, but also more exotic weapons or pieces of armor).
In both cases, you usually end up with quite substantial amount of various junk, as most of the items won't be immedietly useful for a player. But wheras the partical item can be of little use, it is composed of a few things that might be more useful: two materials and a recipe! And here is when crafting comes into play. If you have relevant skills on the high enough level (current idea is: skill at least as high as DL of the material/recipe in question; with 10 crafting skills and 6 skill points per level, you can be proficient in six out of ten crafting skills, or over-proficient in less, or under-proficient in more; each of those ways should be viable, we will see how it goes), you can dismantle the item to get some insight into the recipe used to create it or smelt4 the materials for another use.
This way, it is, at least partially, a self-balancing system. Among many items dropped on a particular level, even if there is nothing immediately useful, you will probably find at least some that might have their uses: maybe they are expensive and worth selling, maybe they have new, interesting recipe that you can learn or material that you can smelt and use? This should allow me to avoid few situations that I find particulary irritating: in ADOM, for example, it is often hard to find any weapon of a given type early on, so if you are willing to specialize in, say, maces and flails, you might waste a lot of time on finding one - and keep in mind that in the meantime you are training different weapon skill, that you won't be using, and once you find a mace, you need to keep back and farm some less interesting opponents to learn at least basic skill level in maces and flails. In many games, if you find a mithril sword, but you are mace-user, you are going to leave it behind or sell it to a vendor; I find this a waste, and often thought 'Hey, it would be great to use that mithril to forge a mace'.
This system kinda hangs on people using their crafting skills, of course, but this is the reason why 'crafting' is a different set of skills (other two being fighting5 and general skills). You can't use those skill points on anything else. But this particular part of the design is not set in stone - on one hand, I would like to have as much elasticity as possible in the character design, on the other, it might be really hard to balance crafting-heavy and non-crafting characters, and this elasticity would be lost if one of the choices would be much more useful than the other. Maybe something like a special perk: non-crafting, that would exclude all use of crafting skills, while increasing score OR number of skill points in other areas? Well, there will be some time to think more about it, that's for sure.
1) It probably won't be entirely random, as I'm planning to do themed dungeon levels; Goblin Fortress won't contain any Dwarven equipment, and Mage's Laboratory will have much lower chance of generating any weapons other than quaterstaves.
2) This might be 'class' in general, like weapon (orc berserkers don't wear armor, so it won't be generated for them, for example), or 'class' in particular, for example, polearms (royal guardians might be only using them as a weapon).
3) This should ease the process of balancing stuff out a little, as more powerful enemies will be better equipped automatically, but I can imagine some modifiers to that; for example, 'wealthy' opponent could have their equipment DL increased by 10%.
4) The word 'smelt' is used here as a placeholder; to avoid overpowering the metalsmithing, I want to make every material 'smeltable', to allow player to salvage wood, leather, fabric and stone as easily as metals. Probably some magical device. Otherwise I would feel compelled to include the differences between cast and wrought alloys, and that might be a little too geeky even for a roguelike. ;)
5) Including various forms of magic, as fighting is its main use in roguelikes.