Here's something that comes up in rather a lot of video games: There is an association of good loot to scarcity; common loot is made undesirable by design while desirable loot is made rare. That design pattern appears to claim generation of motive toward acquiring a thing, and creates hardship and obstacles against acquisition. It sets itself up for a finish line condition of got that thing, at which time the game is over. That becomes a battleground for and against completion. If you're reading this then you probably have some familiarity with loot drop tables, so let's take a good hard look at that finish line with the eyes of a designer. Let's add a new weapon to the game, a gnome training camp. It's a place-able object that when activated periodically spawns gnomes that go marching off to war. And it can be found as a loot drop in gnome towns. How 'rare' a thing is describes when it will be dropped by the random number generator. If we want to break ten gnome houses to get a gnome training camp then we have stated the frequency as 10 loot drops for every 1 camp. To get the probability, flip the fraction over. frequency = 10 drops/1 camp probability = 1 camp/10 drops = 1/10 camp/drops
