D&D 5E My D&D Next Wishlist: Bring back XP for GP!

[Mattachine]

So, you kill the orcs, and pile the bodies up in the corner. Wash, rinse, repeat with every single encounter in the dungeon, continuing to add to the pile of corpses. Drop a Detect Magic on the whole mess to pick out the good stuff and you have now strip mined a dungeon.

Since everything's dead, you can take a fair bit of time getting everything back to town. And, half a dozen hirelings can carry a whole pile of loot. Never mind horses, donkeys and the like. You can likely get the whole lot in a single trip. "Jury rigging litters"? Dude, amateur. Who doesn't bring a wagon?

Tracking minutia? Dude, we tracked it down the COPPER piece. When we cleared a dungeon, that sucker was BARE.

I find it hilarious that people talk about smart play being the rule of the day, but, apparently, the goal of smart play isn't to maximize profits and minimize risk. Whodathunk?

My AD&D players did that sort of thing all the time.

 

[Derren]

My AD&D players did that sort of thing all the time.

And who exactly buys all the stuff from the dungeon?

 

[Mattachine]

"The closest major city"

 

[Derren]

"The closest major city"

Even in major cities you can't sell everything just because you want to.

 

[Mattachine]

In typical, AD&D, dungeoncrawl games, details like that don't often come up. Also, an appeal to semi-realistic economics doesn't work for a lot of games: if adventurers are coming into a city or town with massive amounts of gold, the silver standard is right out the window, and massive inflation would set in.

A lot of us DMing AD&D back in the 1980s just used the charts in the books to manage buying and selling items, and we didn't worry about the details.

When I switched to running a story-based campaign, the players stopping stripping the dungeon of every single item, and stopping looting normal armor and weapons off of defeated enemies. Still, because of xp, they did loot every purse, every valuable item, and every copper piece.

In retrospect, it would have been easier to skip the xp for gp rule and taken a "zero" off of all the experience point tables.

 

[Libramarian]

I hope DDN presents multiple, well-developed options for XP system, with a good discussion of the effects of each on the playstyle of the game, rather than just "if you want to give XP for some stuff besides killing monsters, go for it".

 

[Libramarian]

EDIT: Though I think I detect quite a cynical attitude towards members of the priesthood in Gygaxian D&D. Vance, Clark Ashton-Smith, to a lesser extent Robert E Howard, all present a cynical view of humanity. It's common in sword and sorcery. So maybe the Apollonian cleric's behaviour is not so inappropriate after all.

This is definitely true and a good point.

I love Vancian D&D. Gygaxian D&D does it very readily, especially if you use lots of monsters capable of speech and encounter reaction rolls.

The Cugel picaresque is a great model for a D&D campaign.

A sorcerer summons a giant demon to carry you to some weird land a thousand miles away; your goal is to make it home and slay him. You go from sandbox to sandbox, in each you have some amount of money you need to raise by roguery in order to pass.

 

[Obryn]

And this was the problem with the system that sounded good in theory. The fighter/rogue items weren't wrth nearly as much as the mage's items generally, especially at higher levels when the fighter's advancement rate slowed considerably while the mage's accelerated. Take the slightly better bludgeoning weapon for the next time you face the ever rarer skeletal beasties or take that wand and sell it for half a level? Screw the wizard, he's already dominating the game, I'm getting half a level.

I am not saying the system is perfect at all levels, but (to my surprise) AD&D generally has a far tighter wizard/fighter balance than 3e, IME. Spell disruption is a lot harsher, you get fewer per day, spells take a while to cast, and there are very tight rules for learning new ones. (Also, HP inflation is not nearly so bad, if you actually roll for HPs.) It's just as expensive to be a wizard!

As for the values... Well, you have only a 5% chance of rod/staff/wand, and a 15% chance of a scroll. OTOH, you have a 40% chance of armor or weapon (usually a sword). The remainder are potions, rings, and miscellaneous magic, which vary in their usefulness. So there's somewhere around twice the chance to find something for Fighty McFighterson, and odds are he'll get to sell a lot of those (for much more XP) once he has his own Sword +1!

-O

 

[imurphy943]

Another point, of course, is that XP for gold and AD&D aren't fully synonymous.

 

[Obryn]

Another point, of course, is that XP for gold and AD&D aren't fully synonymous.

Right? But when I was running it, I found it to be one of the game-defining features. YMMV of course.

I'm not saying that it's a good default rule, or a good rule for all playstyles. OTOH, it's a great option that makes certain types of D&D games really sing.

-O