Magic item in placement in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is naturally of a lot of interest to me. I started playing DF a bit late in the line's life - I wrote DF12 before I was able to get my first pure DF game going. I felt like I had to come up with my own approach since there was no system being handed down from above to determine treasure by level or monster type, as I had back in my AD&D and then Rolemaster days.
DF8 provides random treasure tables, which of course can place magic items. You can determine the total value of treasure to be placed used the tables in DF21 Megadungeons. The latter is what I developed out of my own thoughts on how to randomly allocate total value of treasure.
But I largely place magic items directly - either on a cost basis ($10,000 worth of enchanted items, and then I go pick) or a wing-it basis (I think these guys should guard Grimslaughter.)
I have an idea of what kinds of items I prefer to put down in the loot, too, as discussed previously.
But what about everyone else? What systems and approaches do you find works for you? What hasn't worked? Where are you at now, and where would you be if you started over again (or plan to do next time)?
I have to admit, my placement of magic items was a mix of 'what makes some sort of sense for the adventure' and 'what would be fun to see being used'. I don't think I ever even considered their factor into total value.
ReplyDeleteEither something would be 'this is actually a quest item we were supposed to find', 'this is something the bad guys are using against us', 'this is clearly something that was left here by someone who fled or died', or 'what the heck is that and why is it here?'
That, and I actively avoided placing anything that I didn't want to deal with. I hate, hate, hate intelligent weapons and the like--just another NPC for me to run, or for the PCs to run like an obedient servitor.
Those are excellent criteria - especially the final one!
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