D&D 5E "What Do You Mean, They Don't Have Any Loot?"

Tony Vargas · Jun 30, 2019

Retreater said:
To date, no official published adventure I've used has addressed this. None have used the guidelines in the DMG or Xander's Guide to Whatever. My party of 5th level characters are still so impoverished, they haven't yet gotten a single permanent magic item. (They've received a handful of potions.) The writers at D&D should follow their rules when creating adventures.

The baseline assumption in 5e is no magic (items), no wealth/level, and no make/buy. Your game should be running /smoother/, the encounter guidelines working better for you, than if you had let a few items drop.

MechaPilot · Jun 30, 2019

Virtually every humanoid has some loot on their corpse. It might be mundane weapons and armor, or it might just be the bloody and pierced remains of their clothing. At a couple coppers per foe, you might just be nicking and selling their boots and belts.

Retreater · Jun 30, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
The baseline assumption in 5e is no magic (items), no wealth/level, and no make/buy. Your game should be running /smoother/, the encounter guidelines working better for you, than if you had let a few items drop.

The DMG has a paragraph that states (paraphrasing): "a party can expect to roll on the treasure hoard chart x# of times per level." This sets a guideline to how many times a DM should award treasure during a campaign.

However, the one time I followed this, characters were stuffed to the gills with magic items and trounced most encounters. (I wonder if my copy of the DMG is the only one that has this paragraph in it, because no one - including the game designers - seem to remember it. Haha.)

Fenris-77 · Jul 1, 2019

Lower Class - d12 cp and d4 sp
Middle Class - d12 cp, d10 sp, d3 gp
Upper class - d12 sp, d10 gp, plus a goodie worth 10gp

Adjust as necessary. In my games the more the players bitch about it the smaller the dice I roll.

Fanaelialae · Jul 1, 2019

Retreater said:
The DMG has a paragraph that states (paraphrasing): "a party can expect to roll on the treasure hoard chart x# of times per level." This sets a guideline to how many times a DM should award treasure during a campaign.

However, the one time I followed this, characters were stuffed to the gills with magic items and trounced most encounters. (I wonder if my copy of the DMG is the only one that has this paragraph in it, because no one - including the game designers - seem to remember it. Haha.)

They're not mutually exclusive in terms of game design. You can design a game whose baseline assumption is no magic items, but also include distribution guidelines for tables that use treasure. Which is what the designers of 5e did.

I'm away from my books but I believe there is also a section in the DMG which states that if you give out magic items, you may need to account for the added power in your encounter design.

The primary alternative to that design would be to take magic items into account, which is what 3.x did. But that has it's own issues, in that DMs who deviate from the standard distribution will find that the encounter building guidelines no longer function properly.

Personally, I prefer the 5e approach. I find it easier to make encounters a bit tougher for parties with a lot of magic items, than I did in adjusting encounters for parties in 3.x that had less than the expected amount.

jayoungr · Jul 1, 2019

Thanks for the suggestions so far. To be clear, I'm not so concerned with items or treasure the mooks might be carrying. They're mooks, and I just expect them to be carrying a little cash and maybe an interesting mundane item or two. I've found resources for things NPCs might have in their pockets--the system-neutral "I Loot the Body" series from Raging Swan Press is useful for this--but I'm never sure how much coin the mooks should have. I don't want to be unreasonably stingy, but I don't want to unbalance the game by giving the PCs too much cash too early either.

Tony Vargas · Jul 1, 2019

jayoungr said:
I don't want to be unreasonably stingy, but I don't want to unbalance the game by giving the PCs too much cash too early either.

There's very little in 5e that hinges on wealth. Expensive material components and the best Armors are about it. Too much wealth too soon, and the heavy-armor types AC will be 1 higher than expected. Too little wealth and there are some spells that won't be practical to cast - but there are a /lot/ of spells to choose from.

Not much potential to break the game, there, IDT.

OTOH, giving out magic items...

Retreater said:
The DMG has a paragraph that states (paraphrasing): "a party can expect to roll on the treasure hoard chart x# of times per level." This sets a guideline to how many times a DM should award treasure during a campaign.

But using said chart in the first place is optional, no?

Because MM was very up-front about the design assumptions not including magic items.

However, the one time I followed this, characters were stuffed to the gills with magic items and trounced most encounters.

That's consistent with design goals & expectations, AFAICT.

Uller · Jul 1, 2019

Retreater said:
I think there's a disconnect between player expectations (from video games and previous editions) and the tools 5e actually gives DMs. Every session I run, after every encounter, in every group I run, players always search for treasure. They look for coin, they look for potions, they look for magic armor and weapons. To date, no official published adventure I've used has addressed this. None have used the guidelines in the DMG or Xander's Guide to Whatever. My party of 5th level characters are still so impoverished, they haven't yet gotten a single permanent magic item. (They've received a handful of potions.) The writers at D&D should follow their rules when creating adventures.

What adventureshave you run? I ran Sunless Citadel out of Tales from the Yawning Portal...they got a +1 Longsword and a wand of entangle. Now they are in Forge of Fury and are about to find a couple more similar items.

I guess some adventures have more than others? I know in Out of the Abyss there is a sunblade that low level parties can find if the DM puts a certain side quest in front of them.

In general if no treasure is listed in a published adventure I just use the DMG tables for individual treasure.