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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9384829" data-attributes="member: 7045072">I think this is a lost fact, or at least a very sound interpretation of OD&D - which of course demands interpretation. It's like the other stocking advice you point to ... great and easy to miss, meaning I suspect that a lot of people have missed it over the last fifty years. Of course there is evidence of the best tables using it, but there's also a lot of evidence of the opposite. Certainly very few people were running D&D entirely as randomly generated dungeons (though again, some seemingly were if one looks at A&E), but the treasure tables, monster tables and such offer the idea and offer the possibility, especially for the uninitiated. There's also a fascinating aspect of how this all feeds into OSR design....Anyway treasure, yeah I am really not a fan of the treasure tables.  I get that they serve a purpose of showing how much treasure one should maybe offer ... but the coin weights don't really work well with the encumbrance rules (especially post OD&D), and well coin hoards are boring.  I wrote another long post on that but of course never finished the follow up on alternate tables and treasure design. I really should, no one likes gripes without answers.The strange thing with D&D's treasure placement to me is that as much as there may be some sources for decent amounts of treasure stocked (as you mention) a lot of flagship TSR stuff ended up ending tournament modules - which of course don't really need much treasure, being one shots.  Later editions of course lean into combat XP and then I think a lot of OSR design followed these as TSR adventures as models without a lot of examination of baked in assumptions about treasure amounts. You end up with very paltry treasure in a lot of published stuff - look at Stonehell for a gruesome example.  Then there's also that famous Gygax piece in Strat Review about pacing and leveling - which I think is pretty polemical.  No one I know gets to (or wants to?) play 3 days a week for 10-12 hours a session... let alone do that for 5 years to get to level 15.Personally I like to think of dungeons like "who many sessions will this take a group of 6 v. how often do I want them to level?".  I was shocked when I ran treasure calcs on the 50 room dungeon I'm finishing up and if a party of 6 recovers all the treasure in it they will go from 1-6th level.  Now they won't and it will take I suspect 10 - 20 sessions to really deal with this thing, so I figure that's about right.</blockquote>

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