Do you tailor your treasure or do you roll on the treasure tables?

[Orius]

I like to roll, because it gives me an opportunity to use my dice.

However, I don't hand out treasure completely nilly-willy, I'll throw out dice rules for magic items I don't want to use or which seems to powerful, or just don't interest me. My players generally end up finding stuff I tend to think is cool. Also, I will stick stuff in intentionally if the players may need it.

 

[Shemeska]

Everything is pre-created and detailed, nothing is left to random dice rolls. Call me a tyrannical control freak or just disgusting prepared for each session, but I don't think I've rolled random treasure in a year and a half.

 

[MerakSpielman]

I like to make the treasure as realistic as possible. Why would a kobold tribe have a suit of masterwork platemail sized for a human? As part of their 'horde'? They'd probably sell it.

Intelligent creatures don't keep magical items they don't have a use for, unless it's recently acquired and they haven't had a chance to sell or trade it yet. Unintelligent critters will have the treasure carried by their previous kills.

I do roll on the treasure tables (or rather, use a printout of treasures from a computer treasure generator that follows those rules) for random encounters.

I don't like getting treasure that seems specifically suited to my particular character. I had a bard once who specialized in playing the castinets. The DM had us find - in the lair of a mind flayer, no less - a set of castinets of panic. This bugged me. Do mind flayers play the castinets? Why not regular drums of panic? I never even got a chance to use them before the bard died irrevokably. Now the party is stuck with castinets.

On the other hand, I don't want my players to find themselves in situations where the only magic items they've found they can't use. I'm running an adventure with a small party - a rogue and a paladin. They groan out loud if they find arcane scrolls, spellbooks, etc... Too valuable to leave, but still useless.

My advice: give the characters something they can use, but go to extra lengths to make sure it fits in intelligently with the adventure.

 

[Aethelstan]

Treasure tables are a waste of both time and space. Just spend a moment to think about what treasure "feels" right for the encounter and for your group. Nine times out of ten you'll get it right. I've never understood D&D's obsession with random tables. Isn't the real fun of being DM lie in using your imagination and, occasionally, just plain winging it? Why consult table after table for things you can easily think up on your own? The tables are random, souless things. They know nothing about your group, your campaign world or particular and unexpected circumstances that send some DMs madly flipping through the DMG to find random table x, y or z. Have faith in your own creativity. Don't roll...think!

 

[Harlock]

Both.

 

[Pielorinho]

Even when I run a storebought adventure, I tailor the heck out of it. I'll look through my various rulebooks, find the coolest, weirdest treasure in there than I can find, and then I'll try to weirdify it up a little bit more before handing it over to the players.

For example, a hoard in one game included a staff of healing. Bo-ring! I mean, there's already a cleric in the party; what do they need more spontaneous healing for?

So I looked around until I found a cooler item: in Relics and Rituals 2, there's a staff that can cast fabricate and major creation and gives a +5 bonus on craft checks. Closer.....

I changed the staff to be instead a magical collection of tools that transformed at a command word into a set of masterwork tools suitable for any job and that could, once set in motion, work independently The tools thereby doubled the effective ranks a character had in any craft skill, up to +10 (e.g., a character with seven ranks in craft: trapmaking could use these tools to gain an effective fourteen ranks in craft: trapmaking). The tools could also be commanded to rapidly build or transform objects, per major creation or fabricate.

I bundled these tools with a collection of other thematically appropriate treasures that suggested the loot of a slain adventuring party (a scalp full of minor fetish beads, an ice-sword that transformed the user into a white tiger, etc.) and then handed it over.

Always tailor -- it makes the game more fun, IMO. Makes the world seem more alive, makes magic more mysterious.

Daniel