Greedy player doesn't know when to quit

[talien]

I know a large part of it is my impatience. I want this adventure OVER so we can semi-retire the overpowered characters and concentrate on world-building. The PC has already constructed a fortress via a collection of Lyres of Building, and he is essentially trying to bring civilization to a wild land (to use WoW as a comparion, imagine if the Blood Elves had created Silvermoon City smack dab in the middle of the Barrens).

The reality is, he wants as much loot as possible to have as large a wealth base as possible for creating Portals (as per FRHB), and I don't begrudge him that.

This is an interesting discussion because it shows the evolution of fantasy gaming.

Originally, the reason you adventured was to get loot. Who the heck knows what you DID with the loot -- training, castles, drinking yourself into unconsciousness...didn't matter. Point being that you got loot for the sake of getting it (and in the old, old days, you got experience points for actually getting the loot).

More modern gaming has goals and a vision, and certainly this is often why game masters are interested in GMing at all. They want to build, create, enjoy the fruits of their labors and spin complications from them.

Ironically, "old style" gaming (itself a simulation of a wargame style in which one side "beats" the other), has come back in force in MMORPGs and CRPGs. This is because it's the easiest to model with a computer -- it's a lot harder to say, throw an interesting plot point at a PC than to calculate some numbers to determine the strength of a monster in the next room.

This is also in full force in RPGA games. Enough that we use the term "Greyhawking" the dungeon, which means finding every single item of value, selling it, and thereby "winning" the dungeon. This attitude becomes a habit for new characters, who see loot as their means to survival, and as characters reach higher level it becomes a hard habit to break (do we REALLY care if the splint mail doesn't get sold for a few gold pieces?).

What's at heart here is that you want to change the style of the game. You started out with a dungeon crawl simulation, and now want to do world-building, which is a different simulation. The player rightfully sees himself starting over at a low level -- he's going to be a tiny player in a big world-building simulation, so he wants all the advantages he can get...just as if he were a 1st level character hoarding everything he finds.

You can tweak this plenty of ways: make the gold harder to get (wandering monsters, coordinated monster attacks), make the dungeon crawl itself less appealing (just give the PC the treasure), skip time and sum up the whole thing so you can get on with world building...but really this is about two different styles of play. It sounds like your greedy PC is just performing the same method that worked for him so well up to this point, and he's having difficulty "thinking bigger" for your larger campaign.

Discuss it with the player, summarize the evolution, get to the good parts and move on. He will probably need reassurances that he did indeed get the best possible advantage in his dungeon crawling, which of course won't give him 100% security in this new world-building phase in any case. To continue to linger in a game where you're not having fun is just going to make it less fun for everybody.

That said, you may lose him as a player if the new world-building phase does not also include a similar accumulation of treasure.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

Easy solution if you don't want him going into the other 1/2 of the dungeon. Seal it off, have him step on a trap of some sort and a cave-in ensues, this could be with spot checks of amazingly high difficulty and checks to see if he gets trapped or buried himself, if he doesn't - he can't get through 200 tons of rock and debris and find the "treasures" he's after if it's buried. You are the GOD of this world, make stuff up as it suits you to move it along more quickly.

 

[N0Man]

Wandering monsters and random encounters. For every room explores, roll for an encounter.

This way he still gets the freedom to explore as much as he wants, but that there will be a certain amount of attrition involved.

I don't know what edition you are playing though. In 4E, this would cause a bit more drain on his healing surges and can definitely reinforce that there is cost and risk involved with the more exploration he decides to do.

This assumes his ability to rest to have a full or extended rest is limited.

Regardless of what edition you are playing though, the answer is that his actions are going to slowly drain what resources he has, and he needs to make sure he has enough for the final battle.

 

[Lwaxy]

Why not let him encounter another adventurer and her party, who have gathered the remaining loot and do not want to part with it? This way he either will have to fight the other group or let them have it. Or you could make the