ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Is it just me or is the game's code skewed toward generating items that do not match the players class? Play Beserkers and you get more one handers than two, play Bullwark and its the other way round. Very few daggers when you're a rogue but tons otherwise, that kind of thing. I thought at first it was just rng being the rng, but it seems a little too prevalent for that, makes me think something sneaky is going on.

Nope. DarkGod is not THAT mean

It's just bad luck combined with the simple fact that most classes can only use a small subset of items anyway.

Also the negativity factor. Most of the time you go: "nope, nothing, not for me, nope.." and when you finally find something you go: "it was about time"
Turn your mindset around to go either: "maybe next time" in the first scenario or: "Good good, what is RNG treating me next?" In the latter.

I think there were once serious proposal(perhaps only by me though? Can't remember) of an option to have the *opposite*, but only for (rand)artifacts.

Basically, bias towards generating arts useful to the player class. That might be interesting to see in play and might reduce frustration...

Since there are three different power stats and 12 different damage elements, the loot really is biased towards being unuseful for you.
Nothing more than random chance though.

The thing is, all humans are inherently incredibly bad observers. So the OP's question gets asked probably in all roguelikeforums. Actually, the question, or some version of it, probably gets asked every time a new version is out in DCSS forums .

But I feel your pain! I just quitted a skeleton mindslayer character after only one death because I was so annoyed not just because I had killed my character in such an early stage of the game but also because of the incredible antimagic drops I was getting. I was going the mindstarless melee route and had found Nature's Vengeance, Spelldrinker and other nice non-weapon antimagic equipment too before Tempest Peak. But hey, this is what you get with roguelikes!

Cool, just checking. I tried to look for myself but can't find the code where base objects are generated. I found the bits that assign properties and generate randarts etc and that all seemed pure rng based. (which fit my observations) The only part of it I noticed being stacked oddly was the base objects themselves.

There is a sort of-kind of bias in the generation due to a quirk of item generation.

If enemies have an artifact equipped, they will drop it upon death(I believe this applies to both fixed and randomized artifacts).

This means that certain areas effectively have biases; For example, undead heavy areas will tend to have stuff like non-knife weapons and staves for random artifact drops, since there's more skeleton mages and warriors there.

Due to this effect, there is a (small) bias in drops. The most effected items are probably knives and mindstars overall(as there's less enemies that use those than other gear), but as there's still full dungeons with enemies that equip these, it's a fairly small bias overall.