Hey,

The question is in the title; How do you handle loot tables and drop chances?

The way I'm currently handling them can be seen in the link below within the getNextDrop method. It seems like a pretty bad way to do loot tables/drop chances but it works for the moment.
https://github.com/Valkryst/Project_02/blob/master/src/main/java/valkryst/systems/Drops.java

What I mean is how do you, whoever is reading, go about creating a bunch of drop tables, fill them with items and drop chances and then figure out which items to draw in your games.

The way I do it is above in the github link but I basically fill an int array with the itemIDs and a double array with the drop chances. Then send those into a method to set everything up. Then to figure out what items to drop I create a random float between 0.0 and 1.0 then multiply the float by 100 and any items with drop chances higher than the float will be dropped.

Here is how we did it some years ago - This was for a game with lots of items

We had a Webinterface on which we could add items to a Boss / Mob. The Lootable could be exported and looked kind of like this:

[bossID].table

tdID	lnItemID	tdDropChance
0	1262	0.01
1	1337	0.50

Every time a boss was loaded (start of level) , a random number between 1 and 100 was drawn for each item on the list.
DropChance was multiplied by the random number. If it was >= 1 we added it to a Collection.

Every Boss/Mobb had a chance to drop say 3 -6 items.
We would than randomly pick (random.nextInt(3) + 3) items from that Collection and wait for the boss to go down.

In the loottable were always enough dropChance = 1.0  items to guarantee something would drop.

Crazy times...

i guess you should loop trough all droppable items.
Each item gets checked against its own random value.
This way not all items with > 30% drop when the number is 30;

Like this:
Chance / CurrentRandom / Item
.01    .0324    1
.10    .1243    2
.22    .3679    3

So this pass only item 1 drops, while the other items had a bigger chance.