eamon
Explorer
I've seen a few responses here suggesting that it's OK to hand it out as treasure as long as you balance that by removing equivalent treasure parcels elsewhere. That's an admirable level of attention to the details keeping a campaign from going haywire, but...
- Players will sniff this out. You'd like to avoid turning the game into a zero sum game, so, from that point of view, when the players actually get a good idea (or conversely, screw up and need to run, say) you really want them to suffer the consequences. It's more fun in the long run.
- Now, if you just want to keep balance, mneme idea of a skill challenge or other mini quest is brilliant. See, it's OK if you hand out too much treasure so long as you also hand that out in XP - the game just progresses as if any other encounter had taken place; no sweat - and the players feel even more rewarded, they get XP and gold!
- You don't actually need to keep balance. I think the best campaign I ever ran was one where I placed and quantified the amount of treasure before each session. The players walked into loot almost worth that of an entire level once; they missed an even bigger pile another time. They notice, and they start thinking craftily... The trick is, and this works particularly well in 4e, treasure value scales enormously as levels rise - character wealth goes up 40% each level.
So, if you don't hand out 40% one particular level, but an absurd 200% (5 times too much) - well, now they have about twice as much as they should. That's not even a +1 bonus higher than usual for some perspective - the game won't break down. 4e extremely resilient like that. And even if you don't reduce future treasure, they may have 2 times too much now, but over the course of 5 levels it's just 20% more than usual, and 5 more levels, it's 4%.
Now, you'd be slightly crazy to hand out loot worth twice everything the PC's have - but the point is that the game won't break down, even in that extreme example. So don't be afraid to skip over-precise accounting; keep an eye on the overall ballpark current wealth and don't sweat the details. Let the players notice that the fate of the heroes is in their hand. And once they've figured that out, you can take the kiddie gloves off . - Another sneaky trick you can use to work around handing out loot that's "too powerful" is to make it powerful in the current situation (say, resist cold whilst in icy northern climes) but less useful down the road when the campaign takes them to a different area. When they choose to sell, they only get a fraction of the worth of the item, and not selling leaves them with a fairly useless item - which basically means the item turns into a plot device for a limited time - as was intended.