How do you reduce treasure accounting

[DragonLancer]

My players don't bother. When the campaign reaches that stage where they have that mych treasure to hand out, they tend to buy/pay someone to make a bag of holding purely for party funds. Items are identified (party mage always learns that spell and/or has a wand of identify to ensure they can ID items there and then, and are given out to whoever needs that item. Gold and other valuable items go into the bag of holding, and it's used as the source of funds whenever anyone wants anything they cannot afford themselves.

The players came up with this, and it saves so much time each session.

 

[delericho]

They find what they find in the field, which may or may not be what they "need"...

So what steps, if any, do you take to ensure balance within your party? Alternately, if you don't care about balance, how do the players with the weaker characters feel about being overshadowed by their colleagues who happened to get the better magic items?

Sometimes, a character's share for an adventure might end up being just a big pile o' coins.

Now if they want to spend the time and extra money to specifically commission artificers to build items for them, fair and well...assuming, of course, they know in-character that said items even exist...

The problem here is that this massively favours spellcasters. Not only do they have exclusive access to the Item Creation feats, and therefore a monopoly on creating items for themselves, they also will be the characters with ranks in Knowledge(arcana), and so will be the characters who know what items actually exist.

The thing is, in theory, two characters with 100,000 gp to spend are roughly balanced, but that is obviously not the case if one character has that money invested in 'good' magic items, while the other has some 'poor' items and a huge pile of coins. Or would you say, "sucks to be them"?

Ultimately, though, the 'you get what you find' model is certainly a valid way to run a campaign. Arguably, it's more 'realistic' than the model where characters can basically get what they want (by purchasing or commissioning items of choice). But it's not without its flaws, and it's not the only valid way to run a campaign.

And while you're at it, tear up and burn the wealth-by-level guidelines...DMs trying to adhere to them is bad enough; players even knowing of their existence is just asking for headaches...

Why? When almost every published adventure out there is written under the assumption that characters of level X will have Y amount of money invested in appropriate equipment, why is it a bad thing for the DM to try to remain reasonably close to those guidelines, so he doesn't have to constantly adjust every adventure before use?

Moreover, when a DM is wanting to reduce the treasure accounting work for his campaign, why are you so opposed to him just side-stepping the whole matter by applying the guidelines provided by the game? Why is that bad-wrong fun?

 

[Hussar]

Put me in the camp of let the players have what they want. It's their characters after all. Why should I give a toss what gew gaws they want to load themselves down with? If Bob want's that +1 Flaming Bohemian Ear Spoon, good for him. He's got the cash? Go for it.

I so rarely actually try to force players to take whatever I toss at them anymore that I forget that some DM's actually care about this. Complete non-issue as far as I'm concerned. Why do some DM's feel the compulsive need to run their player's characters for them?

 

[Sadrik]

A lot of good responses and ideas.

I dont think that I want to go to the completely arbitrary method of giving the PC's anything and everything that they want by using the wealth chart. It removes some very good potential quest adventures, questing for magic items that characters want can make excellent adventures.

We used to do spreadsheets and e-mail between sessions and have one player copy party treasure and some of the first items purchased were heward's handy haversacks. We always collected arms and armor of our fallen enemies. Hauling them out with Tenser's floating disks and creating stashes of items with stoneshape spells. All that I don't think we minded. The part we minded is- now we have all this stuff and we have to account for it all. We like to make sure everyone gets the same amount of monetary value of the haul so the accounting at times can get a little tricky and negotiations can become lengthy.

The poker chip idea with the 3x5 cards is a great idea and very intuitive. However it makes just one more thing the DM has to plan for before a session. And I think that is the problem we dont as a group want to do that.

I am a fan of the DM just "guestimating" the overall value and having the players live with it.

I am also thinking of rounding everything into 100gp "bills". Items would also be in terms of these bills. For instance, 1 bill buys 2 potions of cure light 23 bills buys a +1 sword. A characters that has 20 bills can also hand wave any meanial costs of 20gp or less. All regular gear could be interms of 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 bills. I think this very subtle abstraction that can slim a little off of the actual acounting times. Call the bills Drachens or something cool.

What do you guys think would this shave time?

 

[MarkB]

First: If you're using random treasure tables, get the Magic Item Compendium and use its tables instead - they're quicker, tidier, and produce more consistent results.

Second: Consider dropping treasure altogether - instead, when a player levels, he gets spending cash to bring his current gear up to wealth-by-level standard.

Third: If that's not enough, forget cash money for the most part, and use the items-by-level system from the MIC.

 

[Particle_Man]

You could make the characters' favored items "quasi-legacy" in that they "eat" other treasure and items and get correspondingly more powerful.

Or give everyone "Vow of Poverty"

 

[puddington]

I love the 3x5 card thing. I do that regularly. Combined with a running spreadsheet I maintain, it helps preserve some flavor in the game. That notecard with "Pink Fluid" id#43, potentially with a picture or some flavor text on the card, is a lot more flavorful than "POTION OF SPIDER CLIMB". That said, it doesn't necessarily help with the accounting thing.

I've never employed the following method, but it's something to consider: Let the characters haggle it out in-game. Establish a sequence of "diplomatic combat" like you might do when talking an NPC into something. The treasure is divided beforehand into discrete packets of value. "1000 GP"; "A big, honking sapphire"; "A fancy-lookin' blade"; etc. For each of these, characters compete with diplomacy, bluff, charisma, and wisdom checks of various types. Maybe sometimes they team up to make sure the bard, sorceror, or rogue doesn't make off with everything(The equivalent of the party shouting, "Hey now, you just got something nice! Let us have some of it, too."). If everybody keeps in good humor about it, then the treasure can be divided without any major real-time haggling.

 

[JDJblatherings]

Hi,

My group plays 4-5 hours weekly and we are very tired of the accounting that eats into our game time. How do you eliminate this or greatly reduce it. Once, after a big haul, we spent 2 of our 4-5 hours calculating our haul and distributing and picking items. I really want to shave deeply into this time sink. What should we do?

Give them smaller treasures.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

My GM gives us cards with the items written on. They're great - make it easy to see what's available and also swap things around/sell them. Tend to go with a whoever can use it best policy. Sometimes it bogs down, but fast normally.


In my last mini campaign I ran - was shooting for a quick and pulpy feel. I mostly went with:

"You have found X GPs of cash or items *each*. Pick what they are now."

The gold alternative being if a)the horde was too small, b)they were saving up for something bigger. Players had to run stuff past me to avoid problematic items. (mostly overpowered one shots). Encouraged them to trawl books and work out what they wanted outside of game time. Buying was handled/handwaved whenever they stopped at a town.

Found it cut the treasure wrangling to a satisfying minimum. People had the sort of gear they wanted. It worked very well for that particular game, but somewhat too metagamey for my normal tastes. Would probably not use for a 'normal' game.

Email or forum would be my favoured approach, but some of my group go on the net less than once a week.

 

[Frostmarrow]

For magic gear, just have players choose equipment in accordance with the Wealth by Level guidelines. Let them re-choose fresh gear each level, or even between levels, just so long as they're always within a few hundred (or few thousand, at higher levels) gp of the suggested wealth.

I do this. It works for us. Some players redo their entire arsenal each level and others just tinker with the set-up.

For mundane equipment we treat bag of holding as a skill. If they want something from the bag of holding they roll a d20 and add their current bonus. The DC is roughly equal to the gp worth of the item. If they roll a 1 the bonus goes down by 1. It costs 100 gp to get a +1 extra on the bag of holding so it will cost 200 gp to raise the bonus from +10 to +12. (Then we ignore the bag rules as long as no one wants something ridiculous.)