LogicsFate said:
OOC: I don't care either... Though if no one has an opinion either way, then we are not going to get very far :\
OOC:[sblock]Let's walk through this nice and slowly. First, we got some coin (a fair bit of gold, actually) from Phineus's corpse. Troi wanted to divide it on the spot, and Lasair wanted to give back to the people it was stolen from. Oirhandir was all for dividing it up on the premise that it would be impossible to find the rightful owners, although he didn't weigh in with that opinion. However, he believed that returning it would be The Right Thing To Do, if possible. Upon considering that Lasair had some mystical powers to separate truth from lies, and that most if not all of Phineus's victims were headed rather conveniently to the same place we were, Oirhandir came up with his Solomon-like solution to let Lasair try to find the owners, and to let the party split up whatever she couldn't return. Had she been able to return every last copper piece to it's owner, Oirhandir's nose wouldn't so much have twitched.
At that time, he didn't really think in terms of the bandits having anything he could use. Hiriloce was genuinely straining under the load. One more gold piece in either Oirhandir's pockets or in Hiriloce's saddlebags, and Hiriloce would have moved from the Medium to Heavy encumbrance category. An extra 5 pounds was out of the question.
But once the caravan arrived in Covington and it was no longer necessary to worry about weight for a few days (Hiriloce wasn't going anywhere), and Oirhandir's dream of a bag or holding or a magical backpack seemed much closer, then the wisdom of snagging the chain shirt (light armor and no spell failure penalty for a bard) started to make a lot of sense to him. Hence, when Ingus asked, he asked the dwarf to "hold off a couple of days" on selling the shirt. Oirhandir wasn't sure he'd find a Handy Haversack, but was hedging his bet that he would.
Ok, so now the Haversack is bought and the backpack is sold. Oirhandir's attention has shifted entirely from encumbrance to the chain shirt (just as it will shift to something else in a few days should the chainmail thing work out). And just as he starts rapping with Ingus about the shirt, Ingus hands HIM the party's gold from the sale of the bandit's arms and armor. At that point, there was no question in Oirhandir's mind that the 226 gold was NOT his -- it belonged to the party, and it was just a matter of time until he asked them all how they wanted to split it up.
And, enter an OOC point of confusion. Bront mentioned that even splits came to 97 gp each plus change, and that he'd updated the tracking thread to show this. I assumed that meant that Bront had decided that the party had decided to split it evenly, and rather than hassle about it, I just updated my character sheet to add the 97 and change. It did occur to me that this was a little unfair, and it would have probably occured to Oirhandir, as well.
So, here we are with an OOC question about splitting the loot, and my take on it is that we should handle it in-game. Given the long discussion that took place after the bridge fight, I think we'd be selling our characters short if we agreed to something outside the game and our characters just passively accepted it.
So, if you want to do it that way, I'd suggest that Oirhandir has just asked Ingus to size his new shirt for 15 gp, and that he's still holding a bag of 226 gp that he doesn't consider his. If someone argues that he shouldn't get an equal split of the 226 because he got the best prize, or even that he should chip into the pot because his shirt is worth more (200 gp) than a share of the pot divided 5 ways, he won't complain, mostly out of a sense of fairness. He'd still insist on his 10 gp for guarding the caravan, even if he had to pay all that back in and more to "pay" for the shirt.
So I suggest we just role-play it out, and if (as I suspect) we decide that equal shares is unfair, I'll just subtrack the 97 and change from Oirhandir's sheet, and add (or subtract) whatever we come up with.[/sblock]
