Tracking Group Resources

When your group gets treasure, how do you keep track of it? Do you split everything immediately, or does one person keep track of the "group treasure" until you decide to do something with it? What sorts of tools do you use to keep track of items/gold/treasure?

Our group currently keeps all of the unsplit group treasure on one excel spreadsheet. When we get to a place where we can sell/split up things, that's when we go through and do a major inventory.

We keep a list of things and when we get them identified we usually pass them out. We aren't that organized about it as I would like and I'm pretty sure that has caused our characters to lose things.

Usually we start out very careful and meticulous, and then eventually, we just start dividing up things when we get the chance and letting everyone who cares keep track of it.

Usually there is at least one accountant in the group who wants to take care of all that.

One or two people scribble stuff down on scraps of paper. Often they overlap, sometimes they miss something altogether. Very chaotic and the GM is often consulted. (Which, of course, he hates!)

One of the players (to whom the others seem to defer as party leader) writes things down as they are taken, unless someone else speaks up and claims something.

I work with the players to keep a relatively up-to-date list of what the group has (and who's carrying what within the group). I've got it all cataloged in an excel spreadsheet, currently; it almost-automatically calculates the values for every item the group possesses.

Having a unified list is a huge DM aid for me (what do they have that can make a cool fight against a monster or NPC? Do I need to give them more treasure overall? Less? etc.), and it's also proved to be a boon for busy players. When a player is gone but the character is still present, it's nice to know how many potions of _____ the missing player has with them!

It's also an idea I got from the OP herself (who, once upon a time, put in a good deal of work to make sure one of my previous games had a similar unified loot list)!

As for general distribution strategies, I encourage players to adopt a fairly "communistic" style - give items to the PC who can best make use of them, and trust the odds (or the DM) to ensure that each character will get some cool stuff as the game progresses. Incidentally, the unified loot list also lets me, as the DM, know when the odds have failed to make that happen (so the next batch of treasure has something useful for the under-equipped).

Erm, put my players down for the "scraps of paper" method. Excel spreadsheets, I wish!

In my pirates game, the player who is running the captain records all of the loot by scrawling in the margins of her character sheet and so on. Nightmare!

Cheers


Richard

Just written down on a piece of paper as an unsorted list.

When the items are identified, or are usable without identification already. Whoever wants them / needs them most gets them, keeping an eye on a somewhat reasonably fair distribution overall.

Bye
Thanee

DM has a list and gives the PCs the infos they find out. PCs make notes...

We always have at least 1 person who keeps track of everything we don't divide up as soon as we find it.
Sometimes they are pretty busy helping everyone remember what they have