How do you handle gems as a GM?

[Jd Smith1]

I quit using gems decades ago. It was just extra bookkeeping without adding anything.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I used to go all-in describing gems and art objects, taking my inspiration from the tables in 2e's Forgotten Realms Adventures. Love that book. Anyways, I started to notice over the years that it was just taking way too much time for me to describe the treasure, and for the players to write it down.

And often, they just wrote down shorthand "gems worth x gold" anyways. Only if certain gem types matter is it worth noting, but D&D never really ran with that outside of the occasional need for black onyx or diamonds. I suppose there's use for houserules, but I'm not a fan of balancing non-ritual magic with gp costs.

And I ran into the same problem with art objects- I used to hide important clues and bits of lore in the description of objects ("you find a detailed painting of five heroes standing on a cliff, pointing to a lighthouse, a certain constellation visible in the night sky"), but unless I put equal description into each bit of treasure, the players would instantly hone in on the important stuff (and if I did do that, they'd start chasing red herrings, convinced everything was important).

Plus the inevitable "how do I sell this" minigame that could occasionally be fun, but usually just sucked all the (limited) game time we had for more interesting things.

I'm starting to wonder if I should just convert everything into monetary value for future games. It makes the game less immersive and more bland, but in the end, it's just eliminating pointless busy work for myself and my players.

I think you can still do all of that stuff, when it's fun and interesting. So maybe they don't need to find a buyer for 99% of treasure -- it's treasure, people want it! -- but if the item is a big clue or connects to the overall story, then the treasure needs to find just the right NPC (or limited choice of NPCs) to connect with. Eliminate 99% of the busywork but keep the option on the table for when it's worth it.

 

[James Gasik]

I think you can still do all of that stuff, when it's fun and interesting. So maybe they don't need to find a buyer for 99% of treasure -- it's treasure, people want it! -- but if the item is a big clue or connects to the overall story, then the treasure needs to find just the right NPC (or limited choice of NPCs) to connect with. Eliminate 99% of the busywork but keep the option on the table for when it's worth it.

Yeah, I think I was just disheartened after completing a mega-dungeon recently. I'd become the group's unofficial treasurer, and negotiating with the DM about the value of the things I'd written down when he hadn't given me gp values was a huge hassle for the both of us (especially for MacGuffins and plot coupons that sounded valuable, like "an alabaster carving of a horse's head", but weren't given gp values even in the adventure) and things that were difficult to sell like "10,000 gp worth of profane jewelry that cannot be sold on the open market".

So in the end, I asked him how much money he'd be comfortable with the group having, so we could avoid wasting valuable time at the table negotiating with shady merchants or having to deal with taxes, thieves, and outraged Paladins, lol. Because in theory, we had 40,000 gp of loot (which the DM himself twitched at, lol, not having realized how much all this stuff was worth) but I knew in practice that we'd get a lot less when all was said and done, but only after a lot of hassle that, in all likelihood, wouldn't lead to much adventuring. When the stars align, we get 10-ish (in theory) hours of gaming in a month, so there's just no time to go chasing rabbits.

And this got me to thinking about how much of a process this sort of thing is in my own games. I don't really want to make treasure less interesting than it already is, but I think I need to be more focused on what you can do with treasure and less on how to liquidate, store, or carry it around, lol.

 

[MNblockhead]

I state the type of gem it is (unless rare and would require special character knowledge to identify) and describe the cut, color, clarity, and caret weight, which I have carefully logged in spreadsheet. If the characters attempt to sell, trade, or make a spell component of a gem, but fail to correctly recall the gem's "four c's", the spell the merchant rips them off or the spell fails.



Okay, no, I don't. I say "you find gems worth X GP" and the players record the GP value.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yeah, I think I was just disheartened after completing a mega-dungeon recently. I'd become the group's unofficial treasurer, and negotiating with the DM about the value of the things I'd written down when he hadn't given me gp values was a huge hassle for the both of us (especially for MacGuffins and plot coupons that sounded valuable, like "an alabaster carving of a horse's head", but weren't given gp values even in the adventure) and things that were difficult to sell like "10,000 gp worth of profane jewelry that cannot be sold on the open market".

So in the end, I asked him how much money he'd be comfortable with the group having, so we could avoid wasting valuable time at the table negotiating with shady merchants or having to deal with taxes, thieves, and outraged Paladins, lol. Because in theory, we had 40,000 gp of loot (which the DM himself twitched at, lol, not having realized how much all this stuff was worth) but I knew in practice that we'd get a lot less when all was said and done, but only after a lot of hassle that, in all likelihood, wouldn't lead to much adventuring. When the stars align, we get 10-ish (in theory) hours of gaming in a month, so there's just no time to go chasing rabbits.

And this got me to thinking about how much of a process this sort of thing is in my own games. I don't really want to make treasure less interesting than it already is, but I think I need to be more focused on what you can do with treasure and less on how to liquidate, store, or carry it around, lol.

Was the mega-dungeon Rappan Athuk? Sounds like Rappan Athuk. So many times as the GM I would have to determine GP value and write it in the book.

 

[James Gasik]

Was the mega-dungeon Rappan Athuk? Sounds like Rappan Athuk. So many times as the GM I would have to determine GP value and write it in the book.

Uh no, Scarlet Citadel by Kobold Press. There's some puzzles in the adventure that require you to acquire specific items that kept being tossed in the "loot pile" because they sounded like regular old art objects- a problem in of itself when the puzzle came up (like the one that required an ornamental warhammer and we had four warhammers on the treasure list), but later, when we got to a major city, even harder to sell since some of them didn't have sale values in the adventure.

 

[Andvari]

At one point I’d just say “you find an onyx and two opals,” letting them appraise if they had appropriate skills, but otherwise letting them be positively or negatively surprised when they sold them in town for the then revealed values.

But now I’d sooner avoid the hassle of tracking their gems, so now I state their values immediately when found. “The onyx is worth 50 gp etc.”

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

In D&D, as long as one of the characters has the jewelers kit proficiency I say, "[character x] has determined one of the gems is a onyx worth 50 gp, and the other two are opals worth 75 gp each."