Cursed treasure.

[gizmo33]

Any suggestions?

Yea, I have a similar problem - my players like to gibby-gab with NPCs and roleplay while I wish they would just go bash things and take treasure. I'm thinking about creating a cursed NPC (a "thespian-bane") who looks like they want to tell you an interesting story but when you talk to them their head explodes and does sonic damage to everyone in a 20 ft radius.

Or - maybe trying to metagame a punishment for your players gaming style is a bad idea and they'll possibly see through this as an attempt to manipulate them into playing the kind of game you enjoy (which you have a right to play - but so does everyone else)

 

[Aeson]

I see your point.

Yes I would rather have more role-playing in my role-playing game. Do I really think this is going to change them? No, I do not. I think I want to have fun with their greed. It is mainly another plot line for the game.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Here's one of my favorite ideas, which I've admittedly not tried out on my PCs yet.

Make the cursed item one of the treasure horde's coins. Just a single coin, which looks like all the other coins of the realm. Due to the nature of the curse, this coin will never be picked up at random out of the character's pouch/purse, and ensure that it will be the last coin spent.

Every night, at midnight, something terrible comes for the character that holds the coin; what exactly depends on your characters and campaign (I prefer an entropic reaper, personally, but YMMV).

If you do it right, the PC will never figure out it's a coin. I mean, seriously, how often do PCs check their coinage for magic?

There are two ways (aside, of course, from removing the curse from the coin itself) to end the curse.

1. The character has to spend ALL of his money. Every single last copper. Otherwise, the coin stays in the character's coinpurse.

2. The cursed character has to have the coin kissed by a powerful lich imprisoned deep within Carceri.

 

[Deng]

Ring of unseeing.
It acts as a ring of invisibility. But in "stressful" (DM call, but generally if the PC is rolling dice) situations the character must make a DC 15ish will save or go blind. Blindness lasts 1d4 rounds after the inviso is dropped. If save is made no other save needs to be made for a minute or two.

What I've always wanted to do is put a ring of invisibility in some treasure that when identified still showed as a ring of invisibility but all it did was make the ring invisible On a slightly nastier note it could make the wearer think they were invisible but they weren't

 

[Nightchilde-2]

What I've always wanted to do is put a ring of invisibility in some treasure that when identified still showed as a ring of invisibility but all it did was make the ring invisible On a slightly nastier note it could make the wearer think they were invisible but they weren't

One of my favorite items from the old magic item compendium books was the "arrow of sleighing." It, of course, detected as an "arrow of slaying" but when fired turned into a sleigh.