Parties screwed without an Int-based PC?

[Keenath]

I see the process of treasure as a plausible outcome of certain opponents.

Some opponents should have nothing. In fact, faced with 100 undead over a 5 day span, it's plausible that the guy who raised the undead took all of their treasure and the undead have none.

Absolutely! I don't think anyone is suggesting that a group of eight zombies needs to have a treasure packet somehow strapped to them, any more than a bunch of wolves would somehow be carrying around 8 gold.

But from a metagame standpoint, that encounter was "worth" a certain value of treasure -- usually one treasure packet, if it wasn't just a very simple encounter -- which gets "credited to their account" to be delivered at a later date by the DM. Giving that packet to the big boss is a perfectly reasonable way to handle that.

If the PCs never encounter that guy or he gets away, it's plausible that they never acquire the treasure. On the walk home, finding a treasure chest in the middle of the road to make up for that isn't plausible (or finding it in an Ogre lair or whatever).

That's correct, so don't do it that way.

If the big bad has the treasure, they'd BETTER encounter him -- if your players never actually bother to track down the necromancer who sent zombie hordes at them, something is totally messed up. I'll talk about escape below.

But like I said before, there's no need for in-game logic to be involved in treasure distribution. A level 4 zombie didn't ever "have" some gold that somebody else "took". You could easily have several zombie encounters and then have them rescue a fey creature who was being menaced by the walking undead, who gives them a handful of rubies and a magic cloak as thanks for saving his life. It just so happens that those treasures match up to the sum treasure value of all the encounters up to this point, but there's no concept that the gnome was carrying zombie-gold.

If you're doing it right, you can pretty easily make sure that these payday encounters happen at the right spots such that the party can't avoid them, and you can adjust the payout to match the encounters to that point. (If they missed a fight with some ghouls, you deduct 200 gp-worth of rubies from the reward, for example.)

It's like watching a movie in a theater and suddenly realizing that you are in a theater instead of engrossed with the movie. The "gain the treasure anyway later" concept makes it feel like a Monopoly game instead of a smoothly flowing FRPG story.

Maybe only to you. The players need never be aware that the gnome's reward has a mathematical correlation to the number of zombies slain to that point. They get a reward from the gnome because they helped him; the size and nature of the reward can easily be varied to match without ever tipping your DMly hand.

The way it is set up, magical treasure is a game mechanic, not a plot device. If the plot says there should be no magical items, the game mechanics disagree and say that there should.

Since you're writing the plot and you KNOW magic items are 30 or 40% of the treasure take, why would you purposely write your adventure to put yourself in that position?

In any case, I have a very hard time thinking of any plot that couldn't have some items slipped in. Even the Zombie Horde could easily be designed with a few big nasties who have items that further boost their powers (like a squad of skeletons, one of whom carries a magic spear, or a powerful zombie (like a corruption corpse) that has a magic cloak or something.

If the DM wants to run a low magic world, he has to adjust the game because the game is set up for a high magic world where the PCs acquire 24 magic items each over 30 levels. This is not a flexible part of the game design, it's a rigid one.

That's already been discussed two pages ago. You just give out a free +1 to the players' AC, Defenses, Attacks, and Damage every five levels, and you need never handle a single magic item. The math is rigid; the use of "magic items" to meet that mathematical need, is not.