How're we supposed to divvy the loot?

[keterys]

For people who feel a need keep a zero sum going, pick a % for magic items to be valued at that's between the sale and buy price - say 70% of ritual value. Track everyone's ongoing total of stuff and money taken. People who are at lowest values always get first pick at new treasure and get larger shares of money.

Alternatively, convert all cash into magic items as soon as possible. Then you're just comparing magic items. It'll be more like '1 7th, 1 6th, 1 5th, 1 4th, 1 3rd, 1 2nd' for magic items.

You'll never be _precisely_ even, but you'll have an ever shifting amount that works out to average.

The only place I see this _actually_ being a problem is RPGA. If it's a real problem for friends who sit down and play for months and years, then you need to rethink your priorities and/or who you play with.

Thankfully, you can't just take magic items for value and sell them and make a profit, so that greed aspect is out the window. Now it's about actually using items. Hence my point that there's no real gold standard anymore.

 

[Wolfwood2]

When we began playing 'Age of Worms', I began keeping a word document with each character's major items written down and converted to an approximate gold value. A few days before each session, I'd sent it out to the group for comments/corrections.

Now, normally we just divided up items by who could use them and split gold evenly. The purpose of the sheet was to give a rough idea of where all the characters stood, not to ensure that everybody was precisely even all the time. It was expected that everybody would spend some time up or down over the course of the campaign. On a few occasions, though, we'd notice that one PC was trailing really far behind and make a special effort to give that PC the next item that looked useful to them.

 

[Ginnel]

Its roleplay

Hopefully I'm reading these posts wrong and the players characters are thinking up these loot distribution methods in game and in character. The only time a fixed method should come into play at all is if the party in character has decided to do that, it is a roleplaying game, there should be no fixed pattern.

If one character wants to put across opinions as to why he should get more items (in character all of this) then all the best to him, if the other players character's aren't interested in stopping someone taking all the good stuff then thats how it goes, if other players are interested in playing a timid character won't speak up for themselves or a drunk who isn't interested in any loot but where the coin for his next drink is coming all the best to them as well.

Roleplaying between the party is great, especially the conflicts, and I think it provides some stand out moments in games, its just as a DM you need to know when to step in and move the story on before it gets stale.

Ginnel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"someone on the internet is wrong!"

 

[Wolfwood2]

Hopefully I'm reading these posts wrong and the players characters are thinking up these loot distribution methods in game and in character. The only time a fixed method should come into play at all is if the party in character has decided to do that, it is a roleplaying game, there should be no fixed pattern.

Sometimes it's easier for the players to just decide the result they want and then roleplay to that result.

 

[drjones]

Isn't the thief taking a bigger share through creative accounting and sleight of hand traditional at this point?

 

[Shayuri]

Interesting.

In my 3.5 games, the typical modus operandi as far as treasure goes is very similar to the original post. We -rigorously- keep track of values of treasure, because that's part of the power curve.

It occurs to me though that this approach works because of one basic cornerstone.

We sell like...90% of the stuff we find.

Seriously. We sell practically EVERYTHING. It may be idiosyncratic to the games...where an overwhelming majority of the magical items comes from NPC's instead of monsters or discovered treasure. This means we find a lot of Rings of Protection, Cloaks of Resistance, Items of Neem Boost, and so on...all in values less than what we already own. They are, therefore, useless to us.

Also, we tend to face guys who aren't like us in terms of class and weapon preference...so the looted weapons, armor, and other stuff tends to not be compatible.

We might keep the odd wand, or occasional interesting trinket...but largely, the loot turns to gold, and is distributed evenly. Someone wants to keep something, it comes out of their gold supply. The rarity of high budget items, and the vast, swollen sum of gold, makes this work out fine.

Reading the article on Wizards...this approach will -not- work in 4e. Selling items will almost always be counterproductive (depending on the cost of disenchanting). I already have house rules in mind for haggling based on what I've read, in fact...since a universal 20% buyback seems kind of arbitrary to me (not that 50% was any less arbitrary). But! That's neither here nor there. The point is...selling stuff will be far, far less efficient.

Which brings me to another game I'm playing. In this game, we do not -have- access to towns and stores. If we want something, we either make it...or find it. Opportunities to sell stuff are few and far between. We're on the same power curve, but these limitations have radically altered our attitudes towards loot, and how it's distributed. We now proceed with the assumption that we're going to keep this stuff...and if we're keeping it, we may as well use it. The result is a more up for grabs, "Okay, who wants this ring of protection +1? Anyone? Well, I can use it for my familiar..." sort of thing. At first there was a transition period, where diehards were complaining that no one could use that thing, because their share value wasn't enough...but then we saw how silly it was to -keep a perfectly good item in a bag of holding- just because no one could "afford" to keep it. The distribution system was exposed as being a construct of rules mechanics, rather than game events.

This chain of events is leading me to believe that I prefer the 4e system...at least in principle. Clearly, it requires a deft touch to make sure everyone's getting goodies. But that's no different than now. The devil will be in the details...which will be forthcoming soon.

 

[keterys]

With the way loot is setup for 4e, you're not going to be drowning in +1 weapons, armor, rings of protection, etc.

This is a huge improvement, and does much to remove the 'we need to sell everything' aspect from the equation.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

I think most items will be distributed naturally, through the PCs discussing things amongst themselves. Watching them go over their loot, talking pros and cons while I'm preparing the next set of encounters has always been one of the bright moments to each session. I've never used a system to distribute loot so don't expect this to impact me.

This is how we've always done it, and it's worked pretty well so far.

 

[tuffnoogies]

Treasure distribution is something I always let the players figure out. It's their loot. Let them worry about it.

 

[gizmo33]

The trick is that you stock the vaults without making it look like you're stocking the vaults.

IME it takes me about 1 day of gaming with a DM that does this sort of thing before every reasonably intelligent player at the table knows what's going on. AFAIK the point of narravist style gaming is not to trick the players into thinking that they're playing a simulationist style game. Since the players enjoyment of the game revolves around their acquisition of balanced loot, then as I said, why not dispense with the pretense? If my "job" as a DM is really to fool the players into thinking that I'm running one kind of game when I'm really running another then I want a different job. Players who don't care about the DM stocking the vaults could possibly appreciate the chance to spend their "loot-points" in ways compatible with their narrativist instincts. If they want to pretend that they got their loot from the monster they just killed, then I don't find that to be substantially different than pretending that you don't know the DM put that magical weapon of the kind you've specialized in just because of your character.