How does your group divide up the treasure?

[Skaros]

I'm with you there. I wouldn't expect to buy the item at cost since the wizard is blowing exp and time making me the item, but full price, screw you for not using some teamwork. ets see how you like it. Though I probably wouldn't let him get killed, just banged up a bit too make my point.

I tend to agree, but then again how you react to the wizard charging full price is going to depend pretty heavily on your character's personality and knowledge.

If your character knows nothing of magic items, and doesn't know how to network well enough to figure out what "full price" is, then the wizard can quote more or less any figure, and you wouldn't know if it was a discount or not.

If your character is a rogue, knowledgable in the street value of valuable items, he would be much more inclined to haggle, I'm guessing

-Skaros

 

[Magius del Cotto]

Cursed items help those types be a little more charitable.

Heh. That's the truth. One character in my old group kept using the classic method of finding out what the rings did by putting them on. Thing is, he put on a cursed ring that made him think he was a rat, and, well, things just went from there. 'Course, he's short a hand now, but he no longer thinks he's a rat.
As to the main topic, the way we've done things in my gaming career is the group pool method, with magic items being divided among the group on a needs basis, and the rest of the treasure being held until we needed it. Which, actually, almost never happened. Fancy that...

 

[Shard O'Glase]

I tend to agree, but then again how you react to the wizard charging full price is going to depend pretty heavily on your character's personality and knowledge.

If your character knows nothing of magic items, and doesn't know how to network well enough to figure out what "full price" is, then the wizard can quote more or less any figure, and you wouldn't know if it was a discount or not.

If your character is a rogue, knowledgable in the street value of valuable items, he would be much more inclined to haggle, I'm guessing

-Skaros

As long as out of game knowledge isn't forced to be not known to stuipid level I agree with this. We had one rogue on a group who we knew was stealing out of character.(OOC) In game we caught him once, basically the DM made the ruling that we couldn't make the leaps of logic in game that this wasn't the 1st time and liekly wouldn't be the last, but had to basically assume that we caught him the one and only time he tried to pocket an item. Why, because we knew OOC and could we really prove we weren't coming to the conclusion he was screwing us over left and right because we knew it OOC, and not ebcause of what we knew in game.

 

[Velenne]

I get EXTREMELY frustrated at my group who insists on looking up the DMG price for every magic item, totaling up the value of all art, gems, and gold collected, then dividing it up by gp value assuming we go to a city with an economic system large enough to buy the goods from us at 1/2 price.

THEN we can spend another few hours of game-time digging through our books for items our characters might want to buy from this massive city with our newly aquired loot. Some people figure it out right off (or, ingeniusly use the weeks between games to figure it out instead of doing it right there at the table), other insist on checking every splat-book and non-WoTC source material for some obscure item that might help them. Or even making it from scratch. THEN we've got to know if the city even has this item somewhere for sale.....sigh....

GODS FORBID someone actually wants something from the pile, because then it has to be taken out of his "share" and the group's mathemetician spends 3 hours doing all of this while the rest of us sit around wondering when we can get back to playing D&D.

Whatever you do, don't do it like we do. It's ridiculously cumbersome and utterly detracts from any semblance of gameplay. You can basically kiss an entire session goodbye.

That said, I've become so frustrated by this activity that I've taken the reigns in another of our campaigns. My character is looked on as the leader of the group, so he takes it upon himself to do the work of dividing treasure when they've got time. He also takes some off the top for 'party usage' like protecting their mobile base and getting useful items for everyone. It works out much easier this way.

 

[radferth]

Most large groups I have played in divide all monetary treasure evenly and dice for who gets first pick on magic items, although many times the magic could be given to the most appropriate user. If the players are good role-players and not greedy, having a "leader" divide the treasure works quite well. I like this method because it actually makes treasure division seem like part of the game, rather than adding up minature golf scores or settling a restaraunt tab.

 

[Pax]

The group I last played in, we never really divvied up mid-session. In fact, we'd haul around a collective "loot bag" (eventually it was several chests in our wagon), until IC, we decided to divvy up what we'd collected.

Mid-session, if we identified an item, we'd hand it to the character who could make it the most useful for the party, on a temporary basis. IOW, a Wand of Cure Light Wounds would go to the cleric or (more often) the Bard ... where it would do the group the most benefit. Magic arrows would be held onto by the archer(s) of the group, to be used as a last resort. And so on.

Once we got to the point of a permanent division of the fruits of our labor, we would then (yes) total the value of every item, at 1/2 market price. We would divide that into shares -- with the "group treasury" getting a full share. IOW, if we numbered 6 PCs, we'd divide into 7 shares. "remainder" coinage would go to the group treasury, which paid for food, travel expenses, possibly emergency healing, group-useful items (Potions of Healing, for example), and so on.

Magic items were sent to wherever they would do the most good, with the sale value coming out of that person's share of the treasure. Unclaimed / unwanted items (a rarity for miscellanea, but common for weapons, as our GM had a distressing tendency to almost NEVER give magical weapons of types we *gasp* actually used ...) were sold for coin, unless the party voted on their being kept as a "group item" (like aforementioned Wand of Cure Light Wounds), in which case the item woudl be held "in trust" by the person most able to use it to group benefit.

It took time yes, but we'd always do the division either at the end of one session, or the beginning of another. Noneof us ever complained about the time involved (but then, we didn't do so in the MIDDLE of a session, if we could help it).

 

[howlingwolf]

We have had much the same problems in our group as well. I play the Wizard, so my value has been running almost twice that of the lowest party member, a half-orc barbarian. This has caused some friction and we have yet to settle out on it yet. One way I will remedy some of the discrepancy is by making items for the barbarian. He will pay the monetary cost, but I will lose EXP and he effectively doubles his money in terms of wealth (nice investment if you ask me.)
The big problem with not allowing the wizard to have higher wealth (this is a party of 4: wizard, barbarian, cleric, rogue) is that many of the items found, which would benefit the party, are only usable by the wizard. That means either the party must sell the item or the wizard never has cash to write spells, unless you allow for his wealth to be greater than everyone else and you don't count the item against him. Sadly, there aren't too many good ways around this.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Whatever you do, don't do it like we do. It's ridiculously cumbersome and utterly detracts from any semblance of gameplay. You can basically kiss an entire session goodbye.

It is not necessarily the treasure division technique, but shooping angle that is slowing things down.

I was the party treasury for a small division for ~7 PCs using the PHB method and it took all of 25 minutes, only 10 of which was taken from gametime because I could do my final calculations while other business was being done.

What is slowing your group down is the shopping for magic items. That takes forever. Especially if you hem and haw over what you might buy and what you might keep. If your group just divides loot before shopping it should take all of an hour for a big haul, maybe 90 minutes tops.

 

[bret]

One suggestion for those who want to do the book keeping methods: do it via e-mail.

Make the group treasurer make a list of all items and the monetary value per person. The treasurer sends out the list via e-mail so everyone can see what items were found.

Next session, split the loot off the list and get to playing.

Don't expect the GM to do the book keeping, they already have enough to keep track of. Assign it to a player people trust, even if you have to say it was a different character who actually did it. Most likely the stuff is carried by more than one person anyways, so in the game world there is a lot of handing stuff around.

 

[Vocenoctum]

One suggestion for those who want to do the book keeping methods: do it via e-mail.

Make the group treasurer make a list of all items and the monetary value per person. The treasurer sends out the list via e-mail so everyone can see what items were found.

Next session, split the loot off the list and get to playing.

Don't expect the GM to do the book keeping, they already have enough to keep track of. Assign it to a player people trust, even if you have to say it was a different character who actually did it. Most likely the stuff is carried by more than one person anyways, so in the game world there is a lot of handing stuff around.

My group is online. During the session the treasure just gets gathered. During the week between sessions I email out the treasure, with the values and such done.

Basically, they don't have anything to do except pick stuff out.

Sure, some of them put stuff off until the session, but it mostly works.