Appraising Gems - Any Suggestions?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm sympathetic to the crowd of players that want to avoid bookkeeping, but speaking as an 'old school' player or DM I want to tell you what I think you give up by adopting the 3e and now 4e perspective on treasure.

For me, you give up on being excited to find treasure. That, 'Woot! Woot! Loot!' feeling sems to go away. The problem with the 3rd edition approach is that treasure becomes something you expect to find, and not something you hope to find. The distinction I mean by this is subtle, and I don't know that I can get at it exactly, because obviously there is in any edition a rational expectation of finding lots of gold and some magic items. But in earlier editions the impression given was that treasure was something that had to be claimed through effort, where as in default 3e on, the impression I had as a player is that treasure was something which I had to recieve because the assumptions of the game expected me to get it. So in 1e, you might kill the monster and then say to yourself, "Did we get any treasure? Is it hidden? Where can we find it?" In 3e, you kill the monster and then expect that the treasure will be forked over without fuss because its something of a disaster if you don't get it.

This seems to be one of the issues where "game balance" and "fun" get in the way. Finding treasure is fun. But (lack or finding of) treasure that leads to power imbalances is not fun.

I don't know how to fix that in a satisfying manner. Maybe treasure really shouldn't give powers.
But then, what's the point? That's a problem I had in Iron Heroes - you could have 5.000 gp, but what do you do with it if there's no magical item to be bought for it? Shouldn't I just retire my adventuring life?

Or should it be used a lot more sparingly? (Maybe 4E "treasure parcels" can help minimize the amount of treasure actually giving out?)

 

[Celebrim]

This seems to be one of the issues where "game balance" and "fun" get in the way. Finding treasure is fun. But (lack or finding of) treasure that leads to power imbalances is not fun.

Yeah, it's a tough knot and I don't have an easy answer either.

I do know that even in 1e when we couldn't convert gold into magic items easily, we still managed to find things to do with our wealth. I also know that obtaining property isn't everyone's idea of fun, and that what many groups want to do is just get on with the dungeon crawl.

I had hoped that when treasure was divorsed from XP, that D&D would drift toward a model where treasure did not have to come in any particular amount but could be tailored to the style of the campaign. Instead, what happened is that treasure became more important than ever because magic items became a liquid commodity.

I dislike that in every fashion. First, alot of broken builds in 3.X would be alot less broken if magic items absolutely tailored to the build weren't dependably acquired. Second, it reduces the fun in finding a magic item to treat it as just another form of easy cash.

Or should it be used a lot more sparingly? (Maybe 4E "treasure parcels" can help minimize the amount of treasure actually giving out?)

There is some hope for that but I doubt it. 4E appears to me to encourage the distribution of far vaster sums than ever before in order to fix magic items discretely into certain tiers while still maintaining the commodity magic item model.