D&D General Treasure - how much, how often, and how does your group divide it

[Democratus]

I usually go "by the book" for treasure. If a dragon has a Treasure Type of "H", then I roll the dice and see what results.

There is a dragon not too far from the player's base (PC levels 1-3) that has over 50,000 coins in his horde. This isn't really a big problem if you track encumbrance. A PC got a run at the pile of treasure and could only leave with 1,600 coins because that was the most they could carry.

One tweak that I apply is that all magic weapons have a name and a history that can be discovered through research and magical inquiry.

When it comes time for the party to split up treasure, they go to the local moneychanger/jewler figure out a way to divy things up evenly. Magic items are distributed by negotiation. Since we are playing West Marches all treasure has to be divided at the end of each session, since there is no guarantee the same characters will be together on the next adventure (15+ players in the game so far).

 

[el-remmen]

The only part of that which doesn't ring true here is the word "give". Replace it with the word "sell" and you're pretty close to what happens (usually) in my games.

Why "sell"? Because if something's yours it's (almost*) certain you paid money to acquire it, either by claiming it as part of a treasury share (and thus getting its value less in coin) or by buying it externally. Therefore, if say I've got a Ring of Protection +1 that I paid 3000 for at some point in the past and I claim and win a Ring +2 in the treasury now (which will cost me 8000), it only makes sense that I'm going to a) sell the Ring +1 to try and get my 3000 back and b) offer to sell it to other party members first before putting it on the open market.

Every group I have every played in or run, treasure distribution was separate from item distribution. And I have the opposite of greedy players across the board since the 90s with totally different groups. A lot of, "No, you take it!" "No, no I insist! You should keep it!" Then again, as I mentioned in my original post, the selling of magic has generally been frowned upon in my games, especially between PCs.

 

[Blue]

As far as possible we try to do it in character.

If you can get agreement that's prefered. But we usually do it out of character so that everyone is satisfied. Having an ongoing irritant such as one player unhappy with how treasure is divided is actively losing the game - with winning defined as having fun. Since different personality characters can easily want to do it in different ways, we smooth it out, often in session 0. Just like our usual no PvP rule includes no stealing from other PCs.

Would the amount "earned" be arbitrarily made about the same, though, whether they looted the bandits, got a reward for the bandits, or joined the bandits? If yes, that seems a bit artificial. (never mind the most profitable route is to defeat and loot the bandits without killing them and then turn them in for the reward as well )

No problem looting the bandits and then turnign them in for a reward. It's just gold gotten earlier, good for the party. I can easily adjust future loot if it's a game changing amount, but otherwise be enterprising and clever.

It's artificial in the same way AC is. And they have rather different outcomes and non-monetary results, no one would mistake one for the other.

4e introduced the concept as treasure packets, where you aren't locking players into certain types of actions and plans to get material rewards. It's extremely freeing in how you play your character. Otherwise you get what you reward and players will often eschew options like stealth, diplomacy, bribery, or even just avoiding encounters strategically because they don't want to miss out.

I find old school "if you do any solution but combat you will be penalized by missing out on rewards" games to be stifling now that I've experienced the freedom treasure packets brought in 4e.

Interesting. I'm guessing this is a short-ish campaign?

The Masks of the Imperium just about to hit the one year mark and there's plenty ahead of them. The last three D&D/D20 campaigns I ran were 4 years (D&D 3.0->3,5), 7 years (D&D 3.5) and 4.5 years (13th Age), so I wouldn't expect it to be a short campaign. Curious what makes you think that?

 

[TwoSix]

My last few games have been similar, in that they were high-level games set in magic-rich settings (Ravnica and Eberron), so I used pretty similar principles for both of them.

1) Treasure tended to be concentrated on humanoid enemies, who would have their own coin reserves and their own magic items.
2) Magic items can usually be harvested for useful reagents by skilled magical item crafters.
3) Getting your own magic items made requires calling in favors, a chunk of cash, some time, and help tracking down special reagents for rare and up items. It doesn't matter if you have 200,000 gp, to get that holy avenger you need a flawless Siberys dragonshard and some special metal gathered in Irian, the plane of Light. Better get questing!
4) Finding reagents for crafting (like a canister of pure blue mana) is just as good as an item.

My next game is going to be much lower power, and magic items are needed to unlock class abilities, so the placement there will be much less player-facing and more deliberate.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The only part of that which doesn't ring true here is the word "give". Replace it with the word "sell" and you're pretty close to what happens (usually) in my games.

Why "sell"? Because if something's yours it's (almost*) certain you paid money to acquire it, either by claiming it as part of a treasury share (and thus getting its value less in coin) or by buying it externally. Therefore, if say I've got a Ring of Protection +1 that I paid 3000 for at some point in the past and I claim and win a Ring +2 in the treasury now (which will cost me 8000), it only makes sense that I'm going to a) sell the Ring +1 to try and get my 3000 back and b) offer to sell it to other party members first before putting it on the open market.

But if I'd paid for the Ring +1, won the Ring +2 and paid for that, and was then expected to give away the +1 for nothing? Not happening.

* - the exceptions being stolen and gifted/reward items, but those are rare.

That's interesting, it's like a separate cultural tradition (one that rather relies on magic items have pretty clear, fixed and known prices I note, otherwise it seems like the game would become an episode of one of those reality shows featuring an awful lot of price negotiation). I've played since 1989, and like Blue I've never actually seen it happen, I think because in Ye Olde Dayes of early 2E, we liked to act like magic items didn't have fixed, precise, known values, and after that it just would have been a big hassle (and in no edition of D&D have I ever seen gold to actually be worth much, once you get beyond a few thousand - I suspect it might have been worth more in 1E).

There's also this issue:

Party survival? Unless you have very easy item purchase, a powerful useful item in the hands of the PC best suited to it is a big positive for the whole group.

Which I think would be the deciding factor that would prevent us adopting it even in an OSR-ish game.

The alternative would be that you could force items on people and put them in "debt" if they didn't have the cash, but that is not likely to end well, in my experience. I've seen similar things with MMORPGs and Dragon Kill Point-type systems. Some guilds used to have people able to force-assign items to people, people who might otherwise save up their DKP to buy a different item, because those guilds wanted people to make the guild group stronger, but this always ended in acrimony to some significant degree.

Whereas if you just hand it to the best person to use it, that's likely advantaging everyone and not causing acrimony.

With any kind of "pay for it system", unless you're swimming the pay resource, you risk situations where someone refuses a very good item which would be a big benefit to the party because they want to reserve the pay resource for something else. It also relies on the gold costs of the items being sensibly apportioned by the designers.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, the bag of holding is a party item. The tricky party is nailing down who is carrying it, so they all can't say "I reach into the bag of holding and pull out x." They just obtained a second one, but from the sounds of it, they intend on using the second one for storing 'harvested materials' so they can commission their own magic items. That and a death chamber for polymorphed monsters

Instead of adding that extra step, isn't is easier to just polymorph the monsters into fish or something else that can't breathe air, and kill 'em that way?

If there is an item that could be useful by more than one character, they talk it out and try to make a decision that is best for the party, even trading items every once in a while. It usually starts with "Who wants it?" & progresses to "What do you have currently & how many require attunement" and then "alright you take x, but can I have y?" The only time I have sensed regret was when the ranger realized that the sunblade he was ignoring could be used as a finesse weapon - once the paladin picked it up, her face lit up, she's never giving it up.

So, no cash or other equalization of values?

One player has left & one has joined. One player has changed characters a couple times - once because it was the merger of two groups and it was a convenient time to change, the other time was because that character wasn't working out. A charisma/social pillar based character in a dungeon crawling/combat pillar heavy campaign (I don't want my players to play a character they're not having fun with). When characters leave, they leave with their current equipped gear unless their is a discussion amongst the players and they tell me otherwise. There has only been one character death, which was weirdly just before the merger of the two groups (some of the players were in both groups).

Even with all those developments it sounds a bit more linear than what I'm used to.

Here, each player has a number of PCs in the setting who often get cycled in and out between adventures depending on some combination of who best suits the mission and who they feel like playing at the time; meaning that unless two adventures are somehow directly connected - as in one leads into the next, or there's clear and obvious story continuation - I'm usually looking at about 1/3 of the party turning over between each adventure. Never mind that because we can only play one group at a time, parties get put on hold so we can play/catch up different parties or PCs who may have (or may be about to) interacted with other groups of PCs - and bought/sold/traded items with each other.

Given all of that, nailing down treasury division and who owns what becomes rather essential if only to avoid arguments later.

 

[Lanefan]

I usually go "by the book" for treasure. If a dragon has a Treasure Type of "H", then I roll the dice and see what results.

There is a dragon not too far from the player's base (PC levels 1-3) that has over 50,000 coins in his horde. This isn't really a big problem if you track encumbrance. A PC got a run at the pile of treasure and could only leave with 1,600 coins because that was the most they could carry.

That's one thing that has always bugged me a bit: coins are mostly way too heavy, I think.

One tweak that I apply is that all magic weapons have a name and a history that can be discovered through research and magical inquiry.

When it comes time for the party to split up treasure, they go to the local moneychanger/jewler figure out a way to divy things up evenly. Magic items are distributed by negotiation. Since we are playing West Marches all treasure has to be divided at the end of each session, since there is no guarantee the same characters will be together on the next adventure (15+ players in the game so far).

You're doing one adventure per session? Yeah, I can see how treasuries there would need to be kept straight.

 

[Lanefan]

Every group I have every played in or run, treasure distribution was separate from item distribution. And I have the opposite of greedy players across the board since the 90s with totally different groups. A lot of, "No, you take it!" "No, no I insist! You should keep it!" Then again, as I mentioned in my original post, the selling of magic has generally been frowned upon in my games, especially between PCs.

Curious: why would it be frowned on between PCs?

 

[el-remmen]

Curious: why would it be frowned on between PCs?

It wouldn't occur to them to sell things to their friends? It was more like, "If you need X and I have X, I'll give you X." In rare cases where two people really wanted the same thing, they might roll off for it with the loser getting first pick next time or something. But usually, it really was "I'd like the longsword +1" "Oh, I wanted that." "Okay!"

It might help that in my games magical items are more likely to be gifted to specific characters and tailored to them to some extent than they are to just be found. Heck, in one of my games they got items from their own future selves creating a mind-bending paradox at one point!

 

[Lanefan]

If you can get agreement that's prefered. But we usually do it out of character so that everyone is satisfied. Having an ongoing irritant such as one player unhappy with how treasure is divided is actively losing the game - with winning defined as having fun. Since different personality characters can easily want to do it in different ways, we smooth it out, often in session 0. Just like our usual no PvP rule includes no stealing from other PCs.

Fair enough. It's anything goes here, and though we (nowadays) meta-sort it out up front there's still always the possibility that in-character a character or even entire party might change it up, and as treasury division is up to the players I can't and won't stop them.

4e introduced the concept as treasure packets, where you aren't locking players into certain types of actions and plans to get material rewards.

Benefits and drawbacks here. You've pointed out the benefits. The main drawback is a sense of artificiality and pre-packaged-ness*, that no matter what you do or how you do it you're going to get this much reward after this much time.

* - an issue I have with much of 4e's IMO overly-small-g-gamist design.

It's extremely freeing in how you play your character. Otherwise you get what you reward and players will often eschew options like stealth, diplomacy, bribery, or even just avoiding encounters strategically because they don't want to miss out.

I find old school "if you do any solution but combat you will be penalized by missing out on rewards" games to be stifling now that I've experienced the freedom treasure packets brought in 4e.

You're selling old school way short here.

True old-school eschews the combat where possible, and instead just sneaks in and steals the treasure with no-one the wiser. If you end up in combat you've made a mistake somewhere.

The Masks of the Imperium just about to hit the one year mark and there's plenty ahead of them. The last three D&D/D20 campaigns I ran were 4 years (D&D 3.0->3,5), 7 years (D&D 3.5) and 4.5 years (13th Age), so I wouldn't expect it to be a short campaign. Curious what makes you think that?

What made me think that was as a player I'd find the Masks concept really cool for a while - maybe 6 months or a year - and then quite likely find it really stifling after that; as I'd probably get bored playing the same character with the same one magic item following the same story.