wingsandsword
Legend
You know what all this talk of fiendishly hidden treasure reminds me of?
Nodwick style antics of having a henchman carry off everything that isn't securely bolted down (or if it's bolted down, can't be ripped off and carried away). Or Knights of the Dinner Table antics of stripping an entire dungeon down to the walls, double checking the walls, and having everything hauled off for appraisal and evalutation later, and the end of an adventure being more like an archaeological dig through everything to find the treasure than anything else.
By the book, a lot of that treasure was hidden, and many groups may have blown right by it, but others would have been fiendishly methodical, gutting every creature they found, scouring every pile of detrius for possible magic items, interrogating any survivors about the location of their treasure, and hauling anything of possible value off.
It meant that the actual treasure in play had a huge range of variation, in most of the AD&D games I played in, a single +1 Sword was a big find (and they were so incredibly hard to make that no PC mage would ever want to make a magic item, except maybe a few potions or scrolls at great cost), while others would play games where they'd all come back from dungeons with literally wagons laden with enchanted loot.
What D&D 3e gave us was a baseline of expectations that was much higher than the low end of what came before, but was a little below the upper end of what came before. Therefore to many people it looks like a huge jump in magical power, but to others it looks like it has always been like this.
Nodwick style antics of having a henchman carry off everything that isn't securely bolted down (or if it's bolted down, can't be ripped off and carried away). Or Knights of the Dinner Table antics of stripping an entire dungeon down to the walls, double checking the walls, and having everything hauled off for appraisal and evalutation later, and the end of an adventure being more like an archaeological dig through everything to find the treasure than anything else.
By the book, a lot of that treasure was hidden, and many groups may have blown right by it, but others would have been fiendishly methodical, gutting every creature they found, scouring every pile of detrius for possible magic items, interrogating any survivors about the location of their treasure, and hauling anything of possible value off.
It meant that the actual treasure in play had a huge range of variation, in most of the AD&D games I played in, a single +1 Sword was a big find (and they were so incredibly hard to make that no PC mage would ever want to make a magic item, except maybe a few potions or scrolls at great cost), while others would play games where they'd all come back from dungeons with literally wagons laden with enchanted loot.
What D&D 3e gave us was a baseline of expectations that was much higher than the low end of what came before, but was a little below the upper end of what came before. Therefore to many people it looks like a huge jump in magical power, but to others it looks like it has always been like this.
