Treasure - how do you give it out?

[Roadkill101]

For planned encounters, I will have any treasure pre-determined. Though some of said treasure is generated randomly, such as I know there are 30 gaurds in the temple and each gaurd has 4-7 gold and 8-15 silver on their person.
For random encounters, I generate treasure on the spot, usually from a table, but occassionally from off the top of my head.

 

[Graybeard]

Most of the time, I preplan treasure placement. I plan the encounters ahead of time and have yet to use a random encounter in my current game. I do have some randomness such as guards/low level warriors have d10 gold and d20 silver. I often just decide what makes sense for the encounter based on what the PCs are fighting. I have often included mundane treasure like non magical scrolls, fancy boxes, ornate daggers, perfume vials, etc. One of my players was given a book about desert environment monsters (his character loved to study monsters). It was nothing magical or anything but it was great for his character.

 

[philreed]

Placement of treasure, in my opinion, is far superior to random generation.

 

[scadgrad]

Huh, maybe I'm just old school, 'cause it sounds like I'm one of the few who use randomly generated loot. I've always loathed the old "well, Bob keeps griping about not having a magic weapon so, since he's specialized in the Lucern Hammer, guess I'll just throw him a bone" approach. I think the random element is fun and lends an in-game sense of drama as players shoot for those high rolls at random treasure generation time.

By the way, as many of y'all know Der_Kluge plays in my game and for the most part, we have pre-gen treasure. It's only random encounters that I use random treasure.

 

[Liquidsabre]

I use a combination of random treasure and planned treasure. For prepared adventures and such I usually layout treasure and gear that make sense for the needs of the particular NPCs or what the creature might have available from sources of treasure (local town, adventurers, miners, etc.) and then I usually fill in the rest with random treasure.

A bit of randomness can bring all sorts of interesting story bits that would not have necessarily occured to me as a DM. Afterall, suddenly there is an evil intelligent +1 Rapier in the pile of treasure. Now how did THAT get there? The story unfolds from there. Quite possibly generating a whole adventure unto itself for the player characters. You don't always get those neat and unexpected twists when you plan everything out.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

How do I give out treasure? With an eyedropper. I'm going to be moving to a small hypodermic syringe, though that's still clearly too generous.

 

[Rel]

Some treasure I just pick and some I roll randomly for.

When I do roll randomly, I'll roll for all the encounters in a particular area and then redistribute it in the way that seems most fitting. I find that this gives me a somewhat more reasonable distribution of treasure than having the owner of each bit of treasure be part of the randomness.

 

[was]

I use a combination of randomized and placed treasures as well.

 

[der_kluge]

I don't bother with treasure. Whenever the PCs make a level, they lose their existing gear and choose new equipment equal in value to the standard wealth guidelines for characters of their level. This way, the players get to pick what they want and I there's one less factor that I need to think about as a DM.

I think this is one of the strangest things I've ever heard of in a game. So, here's the fighter who just made 3rd level. "Hey, what happened to all my crap!? - Oh, wait, here's a bunch of new stuff." What a strange world your characters live in.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Mostly I pick stuff. I look at the tables to see how much an NPC/creature is supposed to have and then figure out what he'll have probably tried to obtain if they have the means to do so, or what they've been outfitted with, or whatever. Sometimes, I"ll roll on the table to get an item I normally wouldn't think of, and in these cases, I skip anything that I consider stock - something I would normally pick myself.

I always pick beforehand. I could never wrap my mind around rolling for treasure after the creature was killed. "Ah, so he had a booch of shielding, eh? Good thing he didn't use it since I wasted him with magic missiles every round." Or, "Man, good thing that Demon didn't use that flaming sword on us that he was carrying." I had actually never heard of figuring out magical items after the creature was killed until I read about it on the internet. Even when I started playing, monsters used the treasure they carried.