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Monday, March 17, 2014

How much treasure do the PCs haul away?

When you run D&D-style or dungeon crawling fantasy, how much treasure do the PCs haul away?

I don't mean get, I mean take?

Do they pick through and take the choice bits, or do they haul away every possible scrap and then come back again for more if they can?

My GM Experience

In my experience players want to squeeze every coin of value out of an environment. They'll haul away captured weapons, bits of armor for scrap, every single piece of coin and piece of salable material they can get, and then sell a map to the deserted ruins as a treasure map.

Nevermind people with Portable Holes. They'd keep their life savings in that napkin and keep it folded close to their bodies wrapped in protective layers of material. And then they'd haul everything from furniture to whole dead monsters back to civilization.

In the past I had guys who would make a quick calculation - find 10,000 gp in the AD&D dragon's hoard? That's 1,000 pounds of gold! A few mules costs a fraction of that, so bring some mules or send someone to go get some. They might ignore the copper pieces at first, but come back for them later (especially if they'd cleared the dungeon entirely.) They might give them away, but only after getting the XP value out of them.

This was especially common before I changed to a smaller, lighter coinage system - in D&D clones you generally find more treasure in your first couple of adventures than you need for gear, so you have spare you can use as seed money for mules and laborers. If mules cost a handful of gold pieces but can haul hundreds, they make perfect financial sense. If gold weighs so little relative to its value that you can carry a fortune in a box, they're just an expense.

My current players have gone as far as carving the locks off of doors to sell as scrap metal. They've taken a broken dagger handle back to town as loot. Nevermind coinage - and since they only need a certain minimum of wealth to maximize their XP gain, they don't even need to do this. Buy every coin counts when you need to buy things later.

My Play Experience

As a computer RPG player, I take everything I can carry - then I come back for more. Every game starts with a real dearth of money, so I start scrounging for everything of even the smallest sale value to sell. It takes a long time to get over that once I've reached the point where I don't need the money anymore. That's true even when taking treasure has no impact on XP/leveling/etc., as is common in computer RPGs.

As a tabletop RPG gamer, it's pretty much the same. My goal is to maximize the value I get. Mirado takes everything that isn't nailed down, and invested in a crowbar in case things are nailed down. The fact that most of our XP comes from treasure only makes taking every damn coin more important to me. 20,000 cp? That's 100 XP! Carry it out. We've done what seems like SOP in my past games, too - haul treasure to a more convenient point (like, near the entrance) for a final magical examination and to ease shuttling it up to the surface.

I suspect if wandering monsters were more of an issue, we'd be a bit more cautious about it. But generally that's not the case, and if it was, I'd just consider hiring guards and more hirelings and laborers part of the cost of the treasure. Heck, give them a percentage and I'll bet they'll find a way to get even more out. Plus the wandering monsters might have some coins and salable weapons, too - unless wandering goblins and orcs oddly leave their purses at home.


So how is it with your players, or with you? Take everything they can sell? Pick and choose the choicest bits and leave the rest?


(And PS - for those of you who want to rob the adventurers on their way home . . . keep this advice in mind.)

19 comments:

  1. It may be the biggest disconnect between fantasy fiction and fantasy gaming. Sure, the dwarves and Bilbo found some magic weapons and a few chests full of treasure in the troll cave and buried it for later retrieval, but not one goblin was plundered for even coin or gems, let alone for cheap weapons or scrap armor - but that was in no small part due to the haste with which they were traveling and the destination hoard making everything else seem like small potatoes.

    Which is odd, when you consider just how greedy dwarves are supposed to be in that universe.

    Anyway, yes. Back in the day we were all about taking literally everything - and computer RPGs only reinforced that. If there was some way for us to convince the GM to abstract it all, so that there wasn't so much work involved on our part, we'd really just prefer that he put the whole of the dungeon into a juicer and skim off the cash value that floated to the top.

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    1. That said, they also loot the troll's cave and set it up for later retrieval, and then the dwarves move in on top of the treasure and don't want to share it out. Sounds like PCs. "You can share a small portion of it, or have a war!"

      "As the GM said, we're unavoidably going to war."

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    2. By the way, I love the juicer analogy.

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  2. We've had similar conversations around the gaming table. It only comes into play when the players find a great amount of coinage. The one game I GMed the players found a 6' x 3' x 3' chest full of silver. One of the guys did a quick calculation of the volume and how many coin it would take to fill it and then calculated the weight. I'm guessing, but I think he figured it to be 1.6 million coins (our silver coins are the size of a dime). Forget what the weight was.

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    1. It weighs a metric boatload, give or take 10%. ;)

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  3. CRPGs are especially prone to this because typically (Diablo excluded) money doesn't take up any inventory space or weight anything. So it makes sense to take absolutely EVERYTHING and convert it into liquid funds.

    I think this approach makes a lot of sense in DF though. Our measure of success and our motivation is how much money we make! I know the rest of these guys (especially Galen) have a lot of money and are feeling pretty secure but I feel like Galoob is one poor roll away from instant splattering. Well, I bet Vryce's player doesn't feel secure, but that's probably just all the years he's spent playing hardcore characters in rpgs. Can NEVER have enough defenses.

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    1. Part of the thing with GURPS and DF that is different than, say D&D - and is more common to CRPGs - is that you can convert money to power. The most top-end ridiculous personal gear you can buy in, say, AD&D is a suit of full plate armor. In GURPS DF, it's a highly magical suit of Fine, Dwarven, Ornate +3 Heavy Plate that costs a staggering amount. But then again, in AD&D, each 1 gp you find is getting you a bit close to name-level in XP.

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    2. Yeah, stuff starts to get really expensive, really quickly in DF it seems. I love the flexibility but man that cost is really intimidating when you're just starting out as a 250 pointer. And yes, I realize how absurd "starting out as a 250 pointer" is in GURPS...

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  4. I've seen PCs scrape gold leaf off of illuminated manuscripts that looked too heavy to carry. I'm not sure if that's super-efficient, super-greedy, or both.

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    1. I'm going to vote super-efficient! That is a great idea.

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  5. I guess I'm used to a more random encounter prevalent, heavy loot environment, with long travel times, but most of the groups I've seen tend to sift through the treasure and leave the cheap stuff behind. If it takes 5-6 days travel to get to the dungeon and the full cost of a porter is $80/day (food and guards included), anything worth less than $10-$20/lb is a net loss.

    High magical kit in GURPS is very expensive, but carting away a ton of tin at $1/lb doesn't get me closer to having the good magical gear compared to finding a $30K magical item that I don't want and can sell as vendor trash. Its the same with the random bundles of untanned hides that you find if you use the DF8 Treasure Tables: $120 at 75 lbs is not loot than anyone (in my group, anyway) cares about. We'll grab the raw spider silk in a heart beat, but if we wanted to be trappers and woodsman we wouldn't be going into holes in the ground looking for fabulous riches.

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    1. Logistics plays into it - but that's nonetheless the "take everything" approach. Just because you leave things behind that logistical concerns turns into a net loss instead of a net profit doesn't mean it is any less "strip it bare." I'm talking about people who'd sniff at something because it's just not profitable enough, and who aren't so treasure-happy they'll leave behind actual valuables for being insufficiently valuable to bother.

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  6. An old DnD game I played in, I joked that it would be absurd to "mine a defeated dungeon for treasure." The DM decided to teach me a lesson -- we recovered a payroll that -- it turned out -- had been scattered buried under about 1 inch of mud throughout the dungeon. This was going to be tough work, so we went back to town, hired guards and laborers. My paladin offered shares or double pay. The fool hirelings wanted double pay. So we brought back a fortune that they dug up for us, sobbing all the while...

    In short, thorough looting is both fun and profitable.

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    1. That's pretty cool. That kind of reminds me of... I can't remember the name, but I saw it on the G+ Tabletop Games Group. This fellow made a one page dungeon summary (with map!) out of the gigantic dung heap from a dragon. Complete with dwarven mining outpost, special crappy enemies (sorry), the whole nine. Was really cool.

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  7. My recollection of the old-school AD&D days, on a gold standard with 1.6oz coins, and a 200/20/1 cu/ag/au ratio, was that only gold, gems, and magic were considered to be worth bending over to pick up. Naturally, with the more sensible values/weights of GURPS coinage, and comparatively steep prices of basic gear, comprehensive scavenging makes more sense. I agree with qpop, though, that CRPGs with their weightless e-cash fed the "come back for the kitchen sink" mindset. I remember making repeated trips to a cleared-out cave in Morrowind to make sure I recovered every... last... empty... bottle...

    I too use a silver dollar standard, but assume a bit more precious metal in circulation and thus lower value/higher coin weight, which I thought made for more satisfyingly-sized treasure hoards -- 80sp/lb., making each silver dollar about the size and weight of a US quarter. A 100/10/1 makes a 10¢ copper piece about the same size and weight as the silver dollar, and a $10 gold piece the same weight, but about the size of a US penny.

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  8. I think there are two things required for this to happen. The value of the time spent striping the dungeon bare needs to greater than time spent doing something else (e.g. finding the big artifact, saving the world, making your liege happy) and the risk needs to be low (e.g. no king who sees an opportunity now that the dragon is dead, no elder things leaking in because of that load-bearing gold foil, no adventurers wondering who messed up their protection scheme). As long as the dungeon is both defeated and rich, it will be stripped.

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  9. I've seem players have a PC rip up tiles from a floor, pry nails out of boards. I had one orc swallow some coins to hide them from his companions once (a CP thief saw it happen), the players dissected orcs for months afterward just in case.
    Problem is you'll have PCs walking about with 20 swords, six suits of armor and 100,000 coins if you don't keep on them about encumbrance.

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  10. Rip up tiles?... you know, my initial reaction was "that's crazy" but then I thought about it and I'm pretty sure my DF group would rip up tiles if we thought they were worth enough. And while the PCs might run into some encumbrance issues sometimes, that's what we have hirelings and magic for!

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