How do you reduce treasure accounting

[TheYeti1775]

Always attempt to use our Yahoo group for that during the week inbetween sessions.
Generally everyone knows what they want or who can use what the best.

 

[Bad Paper]

All treasure is in platinum pieces. This will shave 10-40% of your time off.

 

[Thanee]

Give them half the value of the treasure in gp and let them buy what they want.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Scribble]

Quicken for Dungeoneers.

See your net GP worth at a glance. Even helps you track the value of your magical investments with one easy command word.

 

[woodelf]

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?

Stop worrying so much about monetary-equivalent value, and spend more time worrying about utility. Whoever can best use a magic item, or give the biggest benefit to the party by having it, gets it. After all, the thief is probably just as happy getting a cloak of invisibility as the fighter is getting a sword with a bigger plus--who cares if one of them is worth 3x what the other is?

Divide liquid assets (money, gems, etc.) fairly, rather than evenly. That is, if someone has gotten very little magic lately, give them more of the money. Just don't worry so much about the exact equality of shares, is my secret--ballpark it.

Also, if your group is okay with the SoD required, you can handwave all unwanted treasure into straight gps. So, anything they don't want is instantly converted to gold next time they visit town. I'd combine this with not worrying about the GP value of magic items, as above.

Using all 3 of these suggestions, you end up with:
1) Characters get only the magic items that (a) the party wants to keep around and (b) make the most sense to go to that character.
2) Money is divvied up evenly--that's a quick calculator operation--unless there's a really obvious disparity arising from step 1. (and by obvious disparity, i mean the loot includes several powerful magic items for the fighter and wizard, and nothing of use to the thief, or the fighter and wizard have both gotten cool magic items the last couple hauls while the thief has gotten a +1 dagger; not worrying about relative total GP values of the fighter's +1 plate and +3 flametongue longsword vs. the thief's +3 dagger and cloak of invisibility.)
3) whatever's left that nobody wants, is now *poof* more gold, to be easily divided equally between the group.

 

[Lanefan]

One guy keeps a running table of all the loot collected during the session.
Next time they're at a town/city, this loot list is read through, identified and I as the DM provide a value which they can seli each individual item for.
If someone want something in the list, they can claim it, knowing it'll get subtracted from their share.
Summarize the value of all the remaining non-claimed loot.
Sell the rest, split the cash.

This is *exactly* what we do, but it sure takes longer than 10-20 minutes.

There are only two events which can cause discussion:

1) An individual item exceeds the value of the rest of the loot, and someone wants it.
2) Two or more characters want the same item.

Issue number one is resolved by incurring a debt to the party.
Issue number two is resolved through quick discussion, and bargaining, with all the players involved. Generally, if worst comes to worst, and no one can agree, the item goes to the character who wanted it with the least wealth.

We usually handle issue 1 by having the loan come from one or more individual characters; loans from "the party" become hard to handle when two adventures have passed and half the characters have changed (and it crops up when the value of someone's share is exceeded, not the whole treasury). Issue 2 usually gets settled by a roll-off.

There's a third event that can cause discussion as well: an item that no one character wants to pay for but the party realizes would be more useful to keep than to sell. High-powered healing items usually fall into this category. These usually get removed from treasury and carried forward to the next one, in effect remaining a party possession.

Lanefal

 

[green slime]

This is *exactly* what we do, but it sure takes longer than 10-20 minutes. We usually handle issue 1 by having the loan come from one or more individual characters; loans from "the party" become hard to handle when two adventures have passed and half the characters have changed (and it crops up when the value of someone's share is exceeded, not the whole treasury). Issue 2 usually gets settled by a roll-off.

There's a third event that can cause discussion as well: an item that no one character wants to pay for but the party realizes would be more useful to keep than to sell. High-powered healing items usually fall into this category. These usually get removed from treasury and carried forward to the next one, in effect remaining a party possession.

Lanefal

Hi Lanefal,

I'm really wondering what your guys are doing. Is there lots of discussion and haggling regarding the treasure? We really get down to business. There is only one guy who waffles a bit, but he gets repressed by the others: After twenty years of his indecision, we're not cutting him any slack any more.

The guy who maintains the list, has really got it all together. It wouldn't be half as efficient without him. He often plays the rouge, and the running joke is that any left over cash (say from an uneven amount, or an effect from rounding down) inevitably finds its way into his character's pockets. All in good nature, of course. Being the most frugal when it comes to spending as well, some of the others have incurred large debts to his character.

We don't bother haggling prices with merchants, as the DM, I just make them an offer. If someone thinks they can get better, they are free to roleplay it, but as a whole, we consider it isn't worthwhile. They know I've got a handle on the expected wealth / level, and see no real gain to be made scrounging gp in the market place when compared to game time spent adventuring.

Yes, as the party increases in level, it is easier to incur debt to a specific party member (with IOU's). But in the first few struggling levels (1st to 3rd) it is easier to have a debt to the party as whole (the value of magical items are calculated at what the party can get for them "sale value", not "purchase value"). It gets sorted out pretty fast when characters gain more cash, and the magical items get more evenly spread out. And if the debt-incurring character should die, well, then the item is available to be sold anyway, repaying the debt.

Dead character wealth doesn't automatically go to the player's new character! Instead, it tends to get divvyed up amongst the surviving party again.

 

[Li Shenron]

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?

Put a smaller amount of significant objects in each treasure, and more gold pieces / gems / trade goods which are worth only money.
Optionally consider giving bigger magic items if you still want the PC to use what they found, instead of buying everything.

Avoid items which clearly no one will want (like +1 weapons when every PC already has them).

Delay treasure discussions to after the game (even email). If players "cannot resist" using the treasure immediately, then have them find one big treasure at the end of an adventure rather than smaller treasures scattered around, so at least you go through the process less often.

 

[gizmo33]

IMO the players can help out here by taking short cuts. If they really want to account for every gp to make sure everyone gets precisely the same amount of loot, then they get what they deserve. Throw out the copper pieces (donate them to the poor) and round down the GPs to one or two significant digits. So if I'm feeling lazy, and you tell me "you find 1,553 gp in a chest" I'm going to say "I take the 1,500 and leave the rest there".

It doesn't take an hour to divide numbers by 4 anyway, so you must be talking about magic items.

If they're nitpicking about magic item distribution there's not much to do there until they stop. It takes me about 5 seconds to divide up a dozen things among 4 party members. However, it could take significantly longer if people complained about what they got. Perhaps 15 seconds would be a nice comprimise. In any case, the players can stop complaining and most of the problem goes away.

Those are my general thoughts - I can't imagine what is actually going on for four hours - is it a 3 hour and 45 minute pizza break followed by 15 minutes of haggling over the potions?

 

[tvar]

Give them half the value of the treasure in gp and let them buy what they want.

That's what my group does. Just to elaborate, the DM sends out a list of all the items we obtained last session, and calculates the gold everyone gets for selling everything. We are then allowed to "buy" back any items we want to keep at their selling value.

I like the system because it ensures that treasure is spread equally and fairly among everyone (assuming the prices of items in the DMG is fair).