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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5592970" data-attributes="member: 70709">I like a mix of chosen and random treasure, which appears to be the most common choice.I'm curious, though, about the who and the when for random treasure.  For example, do you as DM roll it when preparing an adventure?  Do the player's roll it at the end of an encounter?  I like that the former can give less incongruous results, especially when the former gives results where a defeated creature should clearly have made use of its treasure.  (Yes, maybe it didn't know what it had, etc. But if it used a +1 shield, and after the fact someone rolls a +3 shield, it just feels awkward.)  Plus, it allows tweaking the treasure or the encounter as necessary to make the verisimilitude work.  Of course, the latter can be incredibly exciting at the table, and is an instance where both the players and DM let the dice take them where they will.  The downside, of course, is that a fantastic treasure can have negative results for balance as well as party/campaign cohesion, and often the final results are anticlimactic.Personally, I got into the habit of predetermining treasure for most encounters, but using player rolls.  Every once in a while we'd sit down and I'd have them roll enough of every conceivable roll used in random treasure generation, record them in order, and then use them whenever I needed a random treasure, or even just part of one. The excitement is similar (a 100!  But on what table!), although the gratification is delayed.  I could also record the provenance of each item, if they wanted to see after the fact how it happened.  I think it gives most of the benefits of both the DM determining treasure beforehand (randomly or otherwise), while making sure the players feel critical to the process.  Plus, they don't feel the burn of anticlimactic results so clearly, where an excellent roll or series of rolls feels wasted.  But I can make the ones that did work feel like victories, simply by telling them that "so-and-so's 94 lead directly to this treasure."  Selective memory is great like that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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