Model my MacGuffin: Greed Focus

[Chaldfont]

The MacGuffin in my campaign is a gold mug, a magical artifact that radiates extreme feelings of greed in all intelligent creatures within one day's ride. The owner of the mug is especially afflicted, throwing away all concerns except the meaningless accumulation of wealth. The PCs are about to save it's current victim and take it away, but I want them to feel the effects until they are able to discover a way to destroy it.

What game rules would you use to model this effect?

 

[comrade raoul]

Tie experience and recovery effects to gold accrued--effectively, give players a big game incentive to want money for its own sake. There are a bunch of ways of doing this. One might be:

• When the party comes into possession of the Mug, have them (a) note their current experience point total, and (b) begin to track a "treasure horde."
• The size of a character's treasure horde determines the maximum amount of experience she can have. I'd use an algorithm for this that scales according to a character's level--so the higher-level a character is, the more and more money she has to find in order to earn experience.

The idea here would be that players affected by the Mug never really feel complete--they can't earn XP--unless they're also adding and adding to their treasure horde. They feel a compulsion, and it's a compulsion they can resist--but not really ignore.

 

[Chaldfont]

Tie experience and recovery effects to gold accrued--effectively, give players a big game incentive to want money for its own sake. There are a bunch of ways of doing this. One might be:

• When the party comes into possession of the Mug, have them (a) note their current experience point total, and (b) begin to track a "treasure horde."
• The size of a character's treasure horde determines the maximum amount of experience she can have. I'd use an algorithm for this that scales according to a character's level--so the higher-level a character is, the more and more money she has to find in order to earn experience.

The idea here would be that players affected by the Mug never really feel complete--they can't earn XP--unless they're also adding and adding to their treasure horde. They feel a compulsion, and it's a compulsion they can resist--but not really ignore.

I like it. I love it when players have to make hard choices like that. I was thinking also of using something like the diseases in the DMG but with Wisdom or Insight checks. Characters would lose healing surges and not get them back until they had obtained a certain amount of treasure.

Of course, everywhere they go, merchants are going to be gouging them and the PCs will be trying to hold on to as much treasure as they can. I'm hoping for some interesting scenes there.