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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4281475" data-attributes="member: 4937">It worked alot better in 1st edition D&D where acquisition of treasure was in many ways the central challenge.  For example, it's what you got XP for.I'm old school.  In 1st edition, you didn't assume you'd get treasure.  You assumed that you'd have to work for it, and killing the BBEG was just part of that work.  In addition to killing the treasures guardian, the treasure was probably hidden, often trapped, generally disguised, often heavy, and sometimes fake.  An appraise skill would have been very handy.  Figuring out where the treasure was sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, but generally accepted as part of what made the whole thing challenging.  That sort of thing has been deprecated in later editions.  I propose that, for single items, appraise/haggle is worth it.  If the player/character doesn't think its worth it, he'll just handwave it and not try to maximize the value he realizes on the exchange.  I'd rather have a player inform me by his play what he did or did not consider important than have the rules tell me what is or should be important.  For a handwaved encounter, I'd abstract that to take 'taking 10', give the player some standard percentage of value (say 60%) and likely everyone would be happy with it.  A large trove of appraisable items is less worth it because its more of a chore, but again its easily handled by assuming he 'took 10' on the trove because on the average it will work out close to that.  This tends to work for me because by the time the players are getting large troves, they've managed to build a working relationship with an honest broker (or a dishonest one that's scared of them) who isn't ripping them off and who is probably better at appraising/selling things than they are.  They can RP with 'Hashem', 'Honest Dibbler', 'Master Hammersmit' or whoever to the extent that they enjoy doing so.   Yes, that's normally, 'Let's take this all to Hashem and see what he'll give us for it.', but that isn't so bad.  By that point, I've managed to make a memorable NPC.If DM's don't like that style of play, even where the rules are provided for it, there is a simple solution.Give all your treasure in coin.  Easy.</blockquote>

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