How Do You Divide Up The Plunder?

[Hand of Evil]

How can you divide up a treasure until you know its value?

My Players take the loot and have a trusted NPC take it and find the best price for it, this means it may take a little time. That money then goes back to the adventuring corp my players have set up, which pays them a salary. The Adventuring corp takes care of things like health care and supplies.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not a huge fan of "loot" per se. In my games, we generally don't get a lot, and what we do see is often tailored specifically to the characters. In the occasions when it's otherwise, we go with a very communist approach to resources!

 

[jhallum]

Bwahaha

How does your group usually divide up the plunder? Do you actually divide the loot into (roughly) equal shares, between magic items and gold? Do you hold a sort of "auction" system for the items? Or is the hardware usually just dispensed out to whoever can best make use of it without regard to the value of the item, the gold tossed into the communal gold pile, and the consumables spread out among the party?

We have the most arbitrary treasure distributing, depending upon the group we play in. Particularly, one of the players in our group hates "socialist" treasure distribution schemes, so in general, we've done share-based treasure distribution, capitalist-based distribution (my favorite), and authoritarion based distribution (Which fit the scheme and the group at the time--I don't think we'll need to do that again).

The capitalist one was the favorite. A dice was rolled to see who would go first. Player one, with the highest roll made a bid on a certain fraction of the treasure. If Players 2 through N wanted a piece more, they would make a bid on that piece or mass of treasure that they wanted more, and perhaps give something up to get that piece. The one time we tried the system, the people at the end got all of the random treasure, and all of the cash. I didn't mind, I turned it around in to magic items and scribed scrolls.

 

[Arnwyn]

My players seem to prefer the communal approach - and it looks like it works best for them. I haven't seen a treasure argument in more than 5 or 6 years. "Need before greed", as Cedric put so well above.

 

[Ziggy]

As good Norwegian socialists we divide it according to the needs of the characters, with the gold and other non-usables into the communal pot. After the items have been divided they are considered the private property of the characters, and can be used in any way according to the characters whims. We try to keep an eye on the total value of the items, and items that are useable by several characters usually goes to the character with lesser loot.

.Ziggy

 

[Umbran]

Cash usually gets split up evently, unless there's someone facing a great need at the time. Magical items tend to get split up considering need and best use.

 

[jujutsunerd]

How does your group usually divide up the plunder?

Potions/one use items are either sold or go to the 'group potion bag' depending on whether we think it would be useful.
Everything else is assigned a sale value (usually half the new value.) The sum total of the value of the loot is divided equally among the characters, who can then bid on stuff from the loot, starting at 'sale value'. Any 'extra' money from the auction is then split equally among the characters. If there is no competition for something it can usually be bought on credit, unless someone vetoes it (usually because they need money *now*.)

/Jonas

 

[Wombat]

I'm the GM

I let my players worry about such petty and mundane details!

 

[Mordane76]

In my campaign, the players tend to split the wealth as such...

First, usually the rogue finds it, and takes whatever share she wants from it, because none of the other players are really capable of stopping her; most of them can see she's taking things, but they're not sure what she's taking or how much.

Then, everything goes into a communal holding, for sale and division later once the group reaches town.


Magical items are usually given to the person who benefits from them most.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Our strategy tends to be "give out the treasure according to who can make best use of it, if there is an argument talk it over, sell the rest". It's working so far, but we're still not quite sure about some things.

It did lead to my players getting an Amulet of Natural Armour +1 and a brand new suit of platemail, however.