Interesting point.
What's the purpose [of an adventure designer] for placing this treasure in the room like this?
1) Simulation: Placing minor points of interest in a room whether treasure, clues, or simply color with no immediate purpose helps the characters feel like they are part of something real rather than an arbitrary game in which things occur and exist only to advance metagame goals.
2) "Keeping Score": Based on reading the 1e DMG, Gygax probably would have considered this the most important part. Treasure hauled out of the dungeon and realized was in some way how Gygax was marking who was playing well. There is a dungeoneering skill involved in finding the treasure and balancing a treasure taken against your encumbrance limits. The player's ability to find treasure, evaluate its worth, sort among the priorities, and haul it back to the haven is part of what Gygax considers to be the point of the game. It's how a player demonstrates that he's skillful, and conversely, the DM's skill at making this job have the right degree of difficulty compared to the player's skill and thereby forcing the players to be clever in order to 'win' in large part demonstrates the DM's skill.
3) "Not every treasure can be realized": You are going to hate me for this based on what I percieve is the point of this thread, but I think the point of scattering the treasure to be had a bunch of difficult to find, unwieldy objects, some of which have dubious value is that the designer doesn't expect every treasure to be found. The DM expects a certain percentage of the treasure to be realized through a combination of skill and luck before the party will be forced to flee back to the haven with whatever they can carry. The DM is therefore liberally salting the adventure with treasures to be found knowing that he needs to put somewhat more treasure available than is necessary in order to ensure that a suitable reward is available.
What's the purpose [of a DM] for making this treasure require a lot of effort on the part of the Player to find it? (The effort is mostly from the Player with the DM, not so much the character with the in-game room.)
To keep it from being found. Gygax would say that the effort expended is the game, and the treasure found is the reward. Players that balanced effort with reward would enjoy the game, thereby being rewarded for their skill play in the most obvious way. Players that didn't balance effort with reward would be frustrated, and would hopefully then by way of negative feedback come to find better strategies.
Is any real benefit, for the game/campaign as a whole, gained or given by having this treasure easy or difficult to find and take? Is this rewarding Players/PCs or training Players/PCs?
I think its both. I think that this is very basic training in good dungeoneering skills. The room presents one of the simpliest puzzles in dungeoneering - find the disguised treasure. The treasure is (at least by my interpretation of the puzzle) lying in plain sight, awaiting only the recognition that it might be more than it seems. This recognition presumably comes through investigation, and the investigation is presumably in the form of a player proposition to interact with the described game space. Notice how I put the puzzle together, that it can't be solved by a gamist proposition like, "I take 20 and search the room." The response to that in the context of the puzzle I presented is to say, "After kicking things around for a half hour, you find nothing except what I described in my initial description." The novice gamer has already 'lost' this challenge, wasting a large amount of time on a futile search. On the other hand, a some what more experienced gamer (or one that is so green that they haven't learned bad gamist habits) procedes to try to interact with the environment, "Tell me about the bed...", "Tell me about the...." whatever. Gradually, the player builds up the ability to imagine the scene in his head and focus on the important features. In this case, it was the contrast between the black cresset and the rusted red chest fittings that I threw in as a clue.
Especially considering that another room, "It is possible to spend considerable time searching the litter here, but nothing of value will be found." There's no guarantee of which room the PCs will come to first.
And as I said, this is critically important. Because what the other room helps to prove is the futility of just trying to search everything, both from an in game standpoint - it might not work - and an out of game standpoint - searching everything is not the most rewarding way to play.
I've always thought that slightly hidden treasure rewards PCs/Players for being curious and exploring. But extremely hidden treasure often serves no purpose, because if it's not found, it might as well not be there at all.
But you can't determine ahead of time what will or won't be found. If you don't give the players the option to find or not find, if you don't make the set of things that they return with vary, then effectively you've started rail-roading the players. It's true that most of the extremely hidden treasure might go unfound (especially by novice gamers with low level players), but some percentage of it probably will be found and will bring with it rewards in and out of game when it does. The player experiences, "Ain't I clever to have found that." The character gains new wealth and experience. What isn't found doesn't hurt the player in anyway.
And I've always thought that ocassional unhidden, obvious treasure sets up PCs/Players for potential traps later in the game. If the PCs/Players know that sometimes treasure really is just accidentally dropped by monsters and such, finding that little trinket out in the open won't set off all their danger alarms, every time. Besides, for in-game verisimilitude, sometimes little treasures are dropped and lost by people, and found by others.
I agree. This is IMO essential to a good game. It's essential to a good game that not every room contain a treasure. That not everything that appears to be treasure is very valuable, and not everything that doesn't appear to be treasure is worthless. It's essential that not everything that is found be a treasure. The characters must live in a real world, else it is far too easy for the players to metagame all the problems - for example, by taking 20 to search every room. If you don't sandbox a little, you teach the players to read the DM, rather than interact with the game world.
I've continually astounded to hear players of 3e say, "The appraisal skill is worthless" How do you know what you've got? The answer is, the DM is probably just telling them exactly what they got, and as a result what good is the appraisal skill?
