It's expensive to delve in Felltower. You need to pay weekly upkeep, and then the PCs tend to spend, spend, spend on potions and spellstones and burn through them heavily.
They also expend more "mundane" thinks such as Power Item charges ($5/FP), rope, rations, Alchemist's Fire, and occasional repairs to armor and weapons.
They do so to earn enough money to reach their loot threshold.
This is an interesting emergent behavior that comes from making a delve about a specific amount of loot, not about a profit.
Let's break that down.
Loot Threshold
With a loot threshold, it only matter that you take home enough money. How much - and what - it costs to get it? Irrelevant. This is a very old-school approach. If you burn through 3000 gp worth of potions and scrolls, get a henchman you spent 1000 gp recruiting and equipping killed irrevocably, and find 10,000 gp . . . you get 10,000 xp. The cost of achieving victory isn't the important part; it's the victory.
This is how my current XP system works. You spend $5,000 each to earn everyone between $200 and $4000 depending on their thresholds? Great, 4 xp each for loot. Thrift doesn't matter, only victory does.
Profit Threshold
Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level has a profit-based system. You have to generate a profit - of any kind, even $1 - to get full XP for loot.
Cost of victory matters. You can't spend $5K to make $200 and call it a full-xp delve. You have to make each arrow, potion, scroll, and point of Power Item FP count.
These result in very different behaviors. The first encourages spending, spending, spending, regardless of how much, even if delves are mostly operated at a crushing loss.
The second encourages careful expenditure of resources. You can't take big risks for big rewards, or worse, big risks for small rewards. You need to manage your costs.
It's just an interesting result of the path I chose.
To what extent, if any, does treasure respawn in Felltower?
ReplyDeleteIf, when I restock, monster who potentially would bring loot with them are added to the dungeon, I check to see if they brought any. A few places effectively generate loot in the form of replenishment of salable resources. But that's about it. Once looted, you can generally expect an area to stay looted. To get more you need to delve further and deeper.
DeleteThe behavior differences I'd worry the most are:
ReplyDelete1. Accounting. If you just need raw loot you keep a running tally of your estimate of loot value. If you need a profit you also have to account for expenses. I prefer less bookkeeping.
2. Consumables. Net profit greatly discourages expensive consumables, which PCs tend to hoard already.
I think that's fair. We originally did profit, and people would carefully husband resources that were counted against profits, especially including consumables.
DeleteOn the other hand, once we shifted to "loot," players routinely spend themselves broke on consumables and use them at the slightest hint of need (like 300+ point characters using Speed, Dexterity, and Strength potions before fights with mook-level orcs.)
One of my players suggested that with profit-based xp Wealth is a much more necessary element of character design. You simply need to ramp up income because earning it to cover costs.