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

[S'mon]

Thankfully I've not seen any attempt by a player with multiple PCs to trade items freely among them. Gifting items to NPC henchmen is fine of course.

 

[Lanefan]

No, not time. You're going to get this much reward after this much success. You will get rewards for your successes, just like you do in murderhobo play. It is exactly the same thing as "you will get this much reward after killing this many monsters", except that it also rewards other methods of success.

Except that's not how it works either: killing "this many monsters" doesn't at all guarantee getting "this much reward", when talking about treasure. Xp, sure, but not treasure.

Well, playing the same character for years is a common in my groups. Not sure where you think it's a single story, it's a whole campaign. Every character has at least one arc, some more than one, that I'm weaving alongside everything else that's happening. There are multiple stories being told outside of that. I throw far more hooks at the players then the characters could ever resolve and character interest guides where the focus goes next. I pay attention to what the players are interested in and craft that into stories. Plots they ignore can unfold into something greater - or be solved by others if they players find other things more interesting. I can go on, but I can't even envision myself running a campaign that's only a single story, it's why I homebrew everything. It's also why I average five years a campaign, with every one since 3.0 came out coming to successful conclusions.

Cool. I must have read your initial mention of the Masks concept as being much more minimalist than it really is.

And also (a) the magic item grows with them, so it's like many magic items just in one slot, and (b) I don't know where you got the idea there isn't other magic. Just that the party was the least interesting in going after loot for loots sake. Items are rare, and are determined to make sense which usually means being useful to whomever has it as opposed to being tailored for particular party members, but that doesn't mean there's no magic. Or no loot - they have some, and have found it useful when they can't get something from the government, or can't reveal they are Mask Bearers.

Again, I read it as minimalist; and thus took "each character has one magic item" to mean that was all they'd ever get.

 

[S'mon]

If by "free purchase" you mean a la 3e where the item and price lists were player-side and they could freely choose whatever they could afford, I'm right there with ya.

Yes, 3e or 4e style, treating items as a build element. Terrible in 3e. It actually worked fine in pre-Essentials 4e, as the magic items were deliberately made weak enough they could never break the game. Lots of clever maths in the 4e system. Didn't necessarily make the best gaming experience, but definitely clever.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Even though I tend to dislike artificiality, I long ago artificially fixed magic item prices in that no matter where you go or what you do item x will always both buy and sell for price y.

I did this specifically to stop some players playing buy low, sell high with magic items and so far it's worked like a hot damn.

Yeah makes sense, you'd have to.

It doesn't. What ends up happening instead is that if there's someting the party just can't live without but no single character can afford it, either the party keeps it with everyone owning equal shares (characters leaving the party are bought out), or a group or consortium of characters buy equal shares in it. In either case, eventually and inevitably as more loot comes in one character will slowly buy up all the shares from other characters.

That said, I like it when the party have to make choices like this: can we afford to keep it or do we have to sell it.

This is fascinating. I think it plus the above are arguably very artificial/anti-immersive but at the same time they create a really interesting situation which you're describing, which over time would become part of the fabric of the game.

There is that. I'm no expert designer but I have gone through and re-priced absolutely everything (using the 1e DMG as a baseline), while also increasing the size of the magic items table - particularly weapons and armour - by a huge amount. There's still a few prices that aren't right but they're locked in now by precedent until-unless I ever start another campaign/setting.

Yeah you'd need to and I suspect the prices you have given are probably a lot better than the random values from Xanathars or whatever. Even "non-expert" you seem to have been running this system for a long time and probably have a good feel for prices that make sense.

Oh, it'll cause acrimony once the players realize that character A has accumulated 45000 worth of magic and character B has 12000 simply due to "that's what each can use best".

You'd think this would be an issue right?

Except clearly it doesn't happen in practice. I'm mean I've seen 30+ years of this across multiple groups. I suspect part of it is that people don't sit around comparing "magic item value totals" much in the groups I've seen, but even when they have, so long as the right people have the right items, I haven't seen complaining, in part because people are always expecting their ship to come in magic-item-wise. Note that in 3E/4E though you are basically under instructions to hand out items in such a way that it's likely they're distributed fairly (not quite literally but that's the de facto effect) so you're unlikely to see a different as large as 45k to 12k (more likely 30k to 25k or something) and in 5E they explicitly/intentionally don't even have fixed prices (or prices at all w/o Xanathars) so the point could never be made unless someone did something like you did and homebrewed prices for them.

I am pretty sure, however, that if you introduced the "military" approach to a group which was doing what maybe we can call the "mercantile" approach you guys are taking, it would absolutely cause acrimony though! This is one of those little D&D traditions that people probably assume everyone does "their way" until they find out they don't!

It actually worked fine in pre-Essentials 4e, as the magic items were deliberately made weak enough they could never break the game. Lots of clever maths in the 4e system. Didn't necessarily make the best gaming experience, but definitely clever.

Yeah it was kind of fascinating how well it worked. I had people write up magic item wishlists if they wanted. Not everyone did, but a couple of people were very keen, and it's interesting, they are the sort of people who get excited when they get specific items, whereas the others have more of a "Oooooh a present!" approach and get excited by the surprise and so on. I kept actual magic item sales/buying rare, but dropped the right items into adventures and I don't think the PCs missed any major ones, and certainly it worked with the math.

I kind of prefer 5E's "items are a bonus" approach overall but it has some drawbacks, and some of the fun-but-not-huge items of 4E are sadly still not present. In fact one of 5E's biggest disappointments for me is that there's been no "magic item book".

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah makes sense, you'd have to.

This is fascinating. I think it plus the above are arguably very artificial/anti-immersive but at the same time they create a really interesting situation which you're describing, which over time would become part of the fabric of the game.

Yeah you'd need to and I suspect the prices you have given are probably a lot better than the random values from Xanathars or whatever. Even "non-expert" you seem to have been running this system for a long time and probably have a good feel for prices that make sense.

You'd think this would be an issue right?

Except clearly it doesn't happen in practice. I'm mean I've seen 30+ years of this across multiple groups. I suspect part of it is that people don't sit around comparing "magic item value totals" much in the groups I've seen, but even when they have, so long as the right people have the right items, I haven't seen complaining, in part because people are always expecting their ship to come in magic-item-wise. Note that in 3E/4E though you are basically under instructions to hand out items in such a way that it's likely they're distributed fairly (not quite literally but that's the de facto effect) so you're unlikely to see a different as large as 45k to 12k (more likely 30k to 25k or something) and in 5E they explicitly/intentionally don't even have fixed prices (or prices at all w/o Xanathars) so the point could never be made unless someone did something like you did and homebrewed prices for them.

I am pretty sure, however, that if you introduced the "military" approach to a group which was doing what maybe we can call the "mercantile" approach you guys are taking, it would absolutely cause acrimony though! This is one of those little D&D traditions that people probably assume everyone does "their way" until they find out they don't!

Yeah it was kind of fascinating how well it worked. I had people write up magic item wishlists if they wanted. Not everyone did, but a couple of people were very keen, and it's interesting, they are the sort of people who get excited when they get specific items, whereas the others have more of a "Oooooh a present!" approach and get excited by the surprise and so on. I kept actual magic item sales/buying rare, but dropped the right items into adventures and I don't think the PCs missed any major ones, and certainly it worked with the math.

I kind of prefer 5E's "items are a bonus" approach overall but it has some drawbacks, and some of the fun-but-not-huge items of 4E are sadly still not present. In fact one of 5E's biggest disappointments for me is that there's been no "magic item book".

that's pretty much my experience as well even I. Groups that
Split stuff by gp shares in past editions like I described earlier. Everyone knows it's rarely going to be perfectly even split and nobody wants to imagine a time where their awesome "precious" magic item gets sold to force an even split so that doesn't really get forced on others. As long as the gm is following the advice you note to give treasuries likely to feel about even players dont mind if it doesn't quite work out that way.

Thst not minding can eventually reach a point of wtf like the legendary gear plus shield of expression thing mentioned earlier, but even that tends to get handled by the group. Everyone in that situation recognizes that the monk got shafted hard and fixing that might take some shopping if the treasure found doesn't clear things up within a reasonable few sessions before/after that one with the shield of expression.


The problems show when the gm ignores that advice and doesn't provide solutions that fix the imbalance or allow the group to fix it. A player who got shafted was often either cradling their recent precious thing, eagerly looking forward for finding the thing thst makes it work out, or perhaps trying to explain/understand why there seems to be a percieved imbalance in value somewhere

 

[Warpiglet-7]

From another thread:

Everything has an owner. Either a PC owns it, or several PCs share ownership of it, or the party as a whole owns it.

Any item found while adventuring but in an as-yet-undivided treasury belongs to the whole party that found it. Doesn't matter who happens to be carrying it around; and if someone walks off with it that's flat-out theft from the party.

After division, items claimed by a PC as part of a share then belong to that PC. Unclaimed items are sold, with rare exceptions: sometimes nobody can afford to claim something really useful and really expensive, so it gets carried forward into the next treasury as a party-owned item.

I like that idea. Cool items should not be everyday occurrences and what a shame to get rid of them due to lack of coin.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I kind of prefer 5E's "items are a bonus" approach overall but it has some drawbacks, and some of the fun-but-not-huge items of 4E are sadly still not present. In fact one of 5E's biggest disappointments for me is that there's been no "magic item book".

In case you, or others, missed it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/vault-of-magic-for-5th-edition/description

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In case you, or others, missed it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/vault-of-magic-for-5th-edition/description

Nice! I'll definitely keep an eye on that.

I guess I'm just disappointed we haven't seen a corebook for it, but it is a space 3PPs can work pretty well in (same for monsters and adventures). I really hope Beyond gets some 3PP integration one day, or if WotC do a Beyond of their own in 6E they do it. I can see why it'd be a pain to work in backwards, but if you designed for that from day one it should be trivial (and anything on DMsguild could come via it, the authors would just have to code stuff themselves, like we do if we put in a custom item).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Everything has an owner. Either a PC owns it, or several PCs share ownership of it, or the party as a whole owns it.

Any item found while adventuring but in an as-yet-undivided treasury belongs to the whole party that found it. Doesn't matter who happens to be carrying it around; and if someone walks off with it that's flat-out theft from the party.

After division, items claimed by a PC as part of a share then belong to that PC. Unclaimed items are sold, with rare exceptions: sometimes nobody can afford to claim something really useful and really expensive, so it gets carried forward into the next treasury as a party-owned item.

I dunno if "everything has an owner" is actually true, conceptually. An owner implies total power over a thing and complete rights over a thing, but I think a lot of items in parties exist in a more complex liminal space between fully owned and party owned and sometimes even "used for the good of the world". Almost a "quantum superposition" of ownership, that would only be collapsed if the person with the item wanted to leave the party or sell it.

The "mercantile" system you outlined in the other thread is interesting because it eliminates the liminal space and creates a precisely delineated system of strict ownership or shareholding. This eliminates questions relating to ownership, but doesn't reflect the way these things tend to play out in fantasy fiction, mythology, or from what I've seen, actual party dynamics in a lot of TT RPG groups (obviously it does in yours and some others). You're describing your system, your approach in your quote there, but it's not a universal view.

Arthur never really "owned" Excalibur, he merely possessed it, and the same could be said of an absolutely vast number of mythological magical items. Not every culture has really been big on permanent ownership either. If you look at Native American cultures for example, there's a real breadth of concepts relating to both the "ownership" or rights relating to both land/territory and objects. The Salish for example tended towards a fairly straightforward/familiar direct perpetual ownership model not much different from that of most Western Europeans, but many cultures had different views, for example that once an tool or a land was no longer in regular use, it was up for grabs. And even in places like Western Europe, ownership could be complex (c.f. "the tragedy of the commons" but also a lot of other situations where strict ownership was not well-defined).

 

[Blue]

Except that's not how it works either: killing "this many monsters" doesn't at all guarantee getting "this much reward", when talking about treasure. Xp, sure, but not treasure.

Not every challenge will have loot as a reward, just like not every combat. It really is exactly the same.