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

[Clint_L]

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.

This campaign sounds amazing! I'm jealous! Also, you must have really good chemistry to have been playing together that long! (I've been playing 43 years, so your group is one year shy of my whole time playing this game - mind-blowing). Probably your sensible rules about loot sharing are a part of your secret.

I'm at sort of the opposite end of the spectrum - my two home games have been very sporadic since Covid and with folks moving all over the place, having babies, etc. So most of my play is with student groups that I DM for, which is fun but kind of like doing my job, too.

I'm hoping to get into a campaign as a player but don't know where to start to find a new group. So I'm super jealous of the situation you guys have going on!

 

[Lanefan]

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,

...or, more significantly, to join a different party...

do they have to hand back their magic items to the party, or can they take the items with them?

I put the above clause in because our games tend to be multi-party within the same setting; @Lorithen could, for example, pull a character out of one party while that party is in town and then slot that character into another party sometime later. If that character couldn't keep its magic items during this changeover it just wouldn't make sense.

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.

I ended up with a similar situation about 20 years later than what Lorithen describes, when a group I was running decided to divide by draft rather than value. One player (mostly in-character, in fairness the character was a greedy little thing!) drafted purely for value rather than usefulness, then once the treasury was finalized and the items were hers she turned around and sold off what she'd just claimed, sought out or commissioned items that were of actual use to her, and pocketed the rather large amount of change.

Over the course of three adventures that one character scored as much value as the rest of the party put together. Then the rest of the party caught on, and one legendary in-party firefight later they went back to the by-value division method.

 

[amethal]

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?

It's never come up - we tend to "sign up" for complete campaigns, and whilst in theory someone could get bored with a character and want to try a new one, in practice it has never happened.

What I think would happen was if a character was retiring from adventuring then they might leave behind some items they had no further use for, especially if they had been one of the "winners" from our treasure distribution system in the past.

If the character was moving to another campaign, and so still needed the items, then I guess they'd keep them and the remaining players would start whinging to the GM that the party was now under-resourced and that the loot available needed to be increased in the next adventure.

In a way our system is self-balancing, since if the cleric (say) has never been getting anything they can use then eventually the GM will throw in something for them.

One of the DMGs - I think it was the AD&D second edition one? - had an alignment discussion where the example given was the party distributing the treasure and how the various alignments might approach it. I think it was the Lawful Good character who wanted to split the treasure after paying to restore dead/petrified etc. members. So maybe our group of players tends towards LG (although I doubt you'd think that if you met us!)

 

[Lorithen]

This campaign sounds amazing! I'm jealous! Also, you must have really good chemistry to have been playing together that long! (I've been playing 43 years, so your group is one year shy of my whole time playing this game - mind-blowing). Probably your sensible rules about loot sharing are a part of your secret.

Players have come and gone over the years. Some have moved out of town and a few even out of country. Two passed away. Some have played in the campaign since the early '80s, and some joined fairly recently. Several campaigns have "hived off" from this one over the years, when some players started DMing (@Lanefan's own campaign began this way, in 1984. Trivia: Lorithen of Ravenwood was one of my characters in it, a Ranger/Illusionist).

I asked our DM for stats, and this is what he provided, current as of today:

• Total number of players: 50
• Total number of sessions: 1,958
• Total number of adventures: 140 full adventures, 10 mini-adventures, 5 background adventures, and 5 "one-off" anniversary games.
• Total number of player characters: 246
• Total number of NPCs: 212

The typical party has from 4 to 6 players at any one time, usually weekly sessions (more often when we were all young university students), but sometimes we still have two D&D sessions in a week, with different parties adventuring. Some players are in both adventuring parties (playing different characters).

For anyone whom Lanefan has shared the link to the private website, this campaign is the one linked with the green banner.

 

[amethal]

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.

In our current campaign, the party were each been given a magic item which allows them to contact their patron (a very knowledgeable dragon) and ask one question each level. (Retail value is nil, since it is personal to each member.)

They are now 13th level, so with 4 characters they could have asked 52 questions by now. I haven't kept track, but I suspect the total is probably around 6. You never know what is going to appeal to players, so I have long given up worrying about it. At least once all those +1s are on the character sheet they don't get forgotten about, unlike the more "interesting" stuff they find.

And when I'm a player you can bet I'll get my Cloak of Resistance up to +5 as soon as I possibly can, since I know what can happen if you don't.

 

[Lorithen]

I'm at sort of the opposite end of the spectrum - my two home games have been very sporadic since Covid and with folks moving all over the place, having babies, etc. So most of my play is with student groups that I DM for, which is fun but kind of like doing my job, too.

When COVID hit, we moved the game from in-person play to online, using Roll20 for the VTT and Discord for audio (our DM bought the $US50/yr Roll20 subscription). We have a website as well where our modified 1e rulebook ("The Blue Book"), adventure logs, character log, spell lists, geographic maps, etc. are posted for players to access. So far, other than minor glitches when someone's computer crashes during a session, it's worked out fairly well.

I'm hoping to get into a campaign as a player but don't know where to start to find a new group. So I'm super jealous of the situation you guys have going on!

Sometimes MeetUp is a way to find in-person groups to join, or if your town has a local gaming store. Also, Roll20 has a "Find Games to Join" option for prospective players: Roll20 . Have you tried these options?

 

[Lorithen]

It's never come up - we tend to "sign up" for complete campaigns, and whilst in theory someone could get bored of a character and want to try a new one, in practice it has never happened.

Just curious: How long, on average, are your campaigns? And do they have set end-points, and if so, what are these?

 

[amethal]

Just curious: How long, on average, are your campaigns? And do they have set end-points, and if so, what are these?

We play Pathfinder, and mostly play adventure paths, so we play from 1st level to around 16th / 17th level. So they end when the publisher (usually Paizo) wants them to end. Paizo's published adventure paths do include a "Continuing the Adventure" section at the end of the final installment, but we've all had enough of high level play at that point so we've never carried on.

I don't really know how long that takes us - a couple of years, maybe. (We play weekly, but we chat a lot.)

When the GM (whether me or somebody else) comes up with their own campaign it follows a similar model, since that's what we like.

 

[Lorithen]

We play Pathfinder, and mostly play adventure paths, so we play from 1st level to around 16th / 17th level. So they end when the publisher (usually Paizo) wants them to end. Paizo's published adventure paths do include a "Continuing the Adventure" section at the end of the final installment, but we've all had enough of high level play at that point so we've never carried on.

I don't really know how long that takes us - a couple of years, maybe. (We play weekly, but we chat a lot.)

When the GM (whether me or somebody else) comes up with their own campaign it follows a similar model, since that's what we like.

Definitely a very different gaming style. We're doing a highly-modified 1e, with no "adventure paths" per se. The DM might design a set of two or three adventures that follow and relate to each other, but you would only gain 2 or 3 levels from those (at most). The longest set of connected adventures I've seen in our 41 yr long campaign was a set of 5 adventures ("The Frost Keys Saga"), where my character (a Cleric) started at 6th level and at the end of the 5th adventure in the series was 7th level. The lowest level party member, a Ranger, started "The Frost Keys Saga" at 3rd level and ended at 5th.

The speed of advancement is different as well. Your campaign: usually two years to get from 1st to 16th/17th level? After 37 adventures (389 sessions), this Cleric of mine that I mentioned is now 13th level (tied with 3 other characters for highest level ever reached in the campaign) and it has taken me a total of the equivalent of about 25 years of game-play (not sequentially -- I've also played other characters at times while this one was doing non-adventuring stuff or was dead; and in half those years, her party's sessions weren't weekly).

So, I can certainly see how in shorter campaigns where all characters are on one adventure path, one doesn't need a treasury division system like ours (spreadsheet, item values determined, total value divided into "shares", etc.) like in a much longer "open ended" campaign with multiple characters running around all over the place and switching from one party to another over the years.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Trivia: Lorithen of Ravenwood was one of my characters in it, a Ranger/Illusionist).

In all my decades of playing, that's only the second ranger/illusionist I've heard of - which is sort of odd, given just how much fun that combo was to play....
(And downright nasty under the right circumstances...)

Mine was a female 1/2 elf named Iris Palebow.