D&D General Time to divide loot, treasure, items….

[Lanefan]

I mean, that could be a fun roleplaying scene. Ideally, the party discusses it and the wizard gets outvoted.

Or the dagger of venom gets used on the wizard...?

 

[Lorithen]

Interesting conversation. As some background, I'm a fellow player in the homebrew game that Lanefan also plays in (he describes our treasury division routine in message #19). As we're currently playing online, we're using a OneDrive Excel spreadsheet that all players can see and edit in order to enter item and coinage values, calculate each person's share, and record what they chose from the treasury. Treasury division actually takes a bit less time than one might think, as items are entered into the spreadsheet as they're found (thanks, Lanefan!).

When we were playing in-person (pre-COVID), Lanefan or someone else would keep a hand-written list as items were found, which was then typed into a spreadsheet, printed, and passed around for people to make claims.

I can see how sharing items around and ignoring item values can work in a campaign where a party stays together for the whole campaign and every character is there for every adventure. (Possibly this might be a relatively short-ish campaign?) But our campaign will be 42 yrs old this April (not continuously though - there was a break from 1998 to 2007), with 458 PCs and NPCs played over the course of the whole thing. Characters join parties and depart from them at the end of an adventure (usually), often to join other parties but sometimes to attend to other events in their lives (politics, family obligations, building keeps, etc.). Just the nature of how it has worked.

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

Everyone in the group carefully reads the description of each magic item. Then they discuss together how that item can be used to make the group stronger as a whole. It's amazing how nice they are to each other.

 

[cbwjm]

I can see how sharing items around and ignoring item values can work in a campaign where a party stays together for the whole campaign and every character is there for every adventure. (Possibly this might be a relatively short-ish campaign?) But our campaign will be 42 yrs old this April (not continuously though - there was a break from 1998 to 2007), with 458 PCs and NPCs played over the course of the whole thing. Characters join parties and depart from them at the end of an adventure (usually), often to join other parties but sometimes to attend to other events in their lives (politics, family obligations, building keeps, etc.). Just the nature of how it has worked.

Glad it's working out for you, but even if my group was in the same situation, the cost of items wouldn't factor into it, it's just not something we think about. All that matters to us is who can make best use of it currently. If a character leaves with a staff of the magi, then that's an item that is gone.

 

[amethal]

Call it selfishness if you will, but if the wizard gets the 40,000 g.p. staff (and can then turn around and sell it later!) and the fighter gets the 2,000 g.p. longsword then someone's getting the short end of the stick here.

We use the same method as most other people on this thread - divide the gold equally, magic items go to whoever wants them (with the "most useful" being the tiebreaker if more than one person wants it; the wizard is only getting an amulet of natural armour once everybody else already has one) and unwanted items are sold.

However, any magic items which are sold go back into party treasure, regardless of how they were acquired. So in this case the wizard would be splitting the proceeds with the rest of the party - even if he'd bought the staff with his own share of the treasure.

Party "expenses" also come out of party treasure, including expensive items such as raise dead - although there might be a delay, since the "expenses fund" is normally only a few hundred gold pieces.

 

[amethal]

I'm talking about beginner groups of teenagers, some who have never played an RPG, many of whom are not already friends, and some of whom have weak social skills. So it inevitably spills over into hard feelings. We talk about it in advance at Session 0 when we agree on the ground rules, but quite often someone gets overly excited or just decides they really want that thing or whatever, and then I intervene right away and remind them of the "no stealing from the party rule" and why we have it.

There could, of course, be situations where this rule would be violated because of story reasons, but in those situations I just make sure that it is obvious why the rule is being violated and no one gets upset.

TLDR: working with brand new teenaged players, some of whom have autism and other neural differences, means that sometimes you have to make things a bit more explicit.

We once had a campaign where one player had a ferret (or similar) as an animal companion that was trained to steal shiny items; basically it would start to loot fallen foes during combat, so it's owner would be effectively skimming a few gold pieces out of the party treasure each time.

I was the GM and mysteriously none of these fallen foes ever had any valuable gems on them that could be stolen in this fashion, and I explained to the other (very experienced) players that I was in fact upping the treasure levels to compensate for the handful of gold pieces they were missing out on, and the player character who was benefitting wasn't dominating proceedings. As the other characters never even knew it was happening there as no scope for intra-party conflict.

And it still caused some out-of-character resentment. Hard feelings are perfectly natural when you think you are being exploited, even over negligible amounts.

One of my favourite RPG moments was when I joined a new group that had started, and most of the players didn't really know each other. The characters didn't know each other at all, and circumstances had basically brought them together as an adventuring group. At the initial "team meeting" my character pulled out a length of rope, saying "I always carry this with me, just in case it turns out we have a thief in the party."

The look on the face of the player of the party's rogue was priceless.

 

[Horwath]

We always discuss how an item will benefit the party most. Unless it's characters family heirloom or patron gift or similar.

Also, there are disappointing moments for DM when he crafts 4 unique homebrew items with cool effects and history and we have "vendored" all of them in next city as they were mostly useless for our party. We got some +1 and +2 items instead.
Yeah, lame from our side, but +1/+2 works all the time and it's reliable.

 

[Lorithen]

We use the same method as most other people on this thread - divide the gold equally, magic items go to whoever wants them (with the "most useful" being the tiebreaker if more than one person wants it; the wizard is only getting an amulet of natural armour once everybody else already has one) and unwanted items are sold.

However, any magic items which are sold go back into party treasure, regardless of how they were acquired. So in this case the wizard would be splitting the proceeds with the rest of the party - even if he'd bought the staff with his own share of the treasure.

Party "expenses" also come out of party treasure, including expensive items such as raise dead - although there might be a delay, since the "expenses fund" is normally only a few hundred gold pieces.

That's an interesting variation and I definitely like it - the idea that if an item is sold, the proceeds go back to the party and that "personal expenses" such as raise deads come from the party treasury. Question: If a character leaves the party, let's say to retire or sail back to their homeland to visit their parents, do they have to hand back their magic items to the party, or can they take the items with them?

The main reason why our system evolved as it did was that in the older 1e campaign (with a different DM) which spawned it, the idea was that magic was shared, as you do, it with whomever theoretically could use it best. And no-one really knew what the items values were, other than players who were also DMs or (in one case) had snuck a peak at their brother's DMG. But how it ended up was that most assertive/vocal/experienced players got the best items for their characters, and the new/quiet players got relatively less. The eventual result was quite a disparity, e.g. a 4th level Cleric/Ranger with only a +1 long-sword and +1 armour to their name, while other party members had better armour and weapons plus various items like fireball wands and invisibility rings, a cube of force, flight devices, etc. The DM left it to players to sort out among themselves. Thus when this new campaign was spawned by a player in the older one who started DM'ing, we decided to use a different approach.

 

[Lanefan]

We use the same method as most other people on this thread - divide the gold equally, magic items go to whoever wants them (with the "most useful" being the tiebreaker if more than one person wants it; the wizard is only getting an amulet of natural armour once everybody else already has one) and unwanted items are sold.

However, any magic items which are sold go back into party treasure, regardless of how they were acquired. So in this case the wizard would be splitting the proceeds with the rest of the party - even if he'd bought the staff with his own share of the treasure.

This assumes the wizard is even still with the party at that point, which IME isn't necessarily a given. It also assumes the rest of the party hasn't turned over, also not a given.

Party "expenses" also come out of party treasure, including expensive items such as raise dead - although there might be a delay, since the "expenses fund" is normally only a few hundred gold pieces.

Here, people usually pay for their own revival-from-death costs* but sometimes a party will choose to foot the bill if the death was particularly heroic and-or the deceased simply can't afford the costs.

* - by far the two most common questions asked in Speak With Dead spells are, exclusively in this order, "Do you want to come back to life?" and "What of yours should we use to pay for that?".

 

[Lanefan]

Glad it's working out for you, but even if my group was in the same situation, the cost of items wouldn't factor into it, it's just not something we think about. All that matters to us is who can make best use of it currently.

That's how we do it when the party is still in the field. Once back in town, however, it gets divided fairly by value.

If a character leaves with a staff of the magi, then that's an item that is gone.

Only until the rest of the party track that character down...