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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8260219" data-attributes="member: 18">Feel like I'm filling in a questionnaire lol!1) I tend to eyeball treasure rather than follow guidelines in 5E because like, it doesn't really matter that much. 5E doesn't have good rules or even guidelines for spending money (unlike, say Worlds Without Number), doesn't do treasure XP, and by default you can't easily buy/sell magic items (I usually provide some opportunity to do this in a campaign, but it tends to be limited).In 3E and 4E I tended to carefully follow guidelines because they operated on different principles. 2E I used a lot of tables, but also eyeballed it.As a player, interesting treasure matters hugely more than amount of treasure, unless the edition has specific expectations/requirements money-wise (i.e. to buy magic items, level-up training or the like). Only in the latter case do I care. Otherwise I'd much rather have a minor and interesting magic item (even like, really minor) or some cool piece of jewellery than XXXX GP.2) I love to hand out interesting and niche magic items, often that I've made up, and which are often not directly useful for adventuring, because I love to see how players use them, so I think maybe more of it is magic items than some groups, but perhaps fewer permanent-and-powerful ones (permanent and semi-useless/niche though, plenty!).3) All of the above re: placement. In editions where X treasure was required/expected at Y level, I'd ensure the bulk of that came from relatively obvious sources, like direct payments or gifts from NPCs, hard-to-miss treasure hoards, and also put some "bonus" treasure around, not all of which would be expected to be found (I could always be less generous next time if they found too much of it). Not always guarded, but if it's not guarded/owned, it's probably hidden, at least accidentally.4) Since my wife started playing (early 4E) there is always one player who has "the treasure sheet" which lists all the loot and who is carrying it and so on. Coin is usually divided up on the spot unless there's an awful lot of it. Never seen them not do an even split, and magic items are typically just handed to the person who can use them most with no regard for value (this has been true across an awful lot of groups), though there can be some "discussion" if someone seems to be getting "too many" magic items (which has lead to a PC who was maybe the second-best person to have one using it).5) The individuals own the treasure after division, unless they're putting money into a pot for something like repairs to an airship or buying a stronghold or a resurrection fund, in which case all will contribute equally to it.6) Relatively hard/rare for stuff to be destroyed/lost, as per rules approaches in 4E/5E which suggest this. It's not invulnerable but the rules basically strongly promote the idea that you can't just break people's stuff with rando spells or attacks, nor declare items to have fallen down a hole or whatever without good reason. True stupidity will of course have an impact - like the genius who insisted he was going to carry all the party's potions in his backpack because he was the cleric, and who then fell 30' off a rope he was climbing, and logic dictated he'd land on his back...7) Can magic items be traded or sold? Yes, it's not like there's a divine edict preventing it, and if you can sell a nuke, you can certainly sell a +3 Shortsword or whatever. However, in practice there tend to be relatively few opportunities to do this in my 5E campaigns. It's much easier to sell or trade than it is to buy a specific item. Items with less practical use or demonstrable powers will be harder to move (meaning you'll need to accept a lower price, or wait for the right buyer). Magic items are pretty high-value for their bulk so are good targets for thieves, so whilst it's unlikely they'll mess with adventurers going about their business, if the adventurers are hanging around trying to sell stuff, they may need to take precautions.Pretty sure there is IRL and it's called eBay. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> But there's certainly no guarantee they have the thing you're looking for.And prior to eBay there have always been specialists in certain kinds of goods, and networks to acquire certain kinds of goods (no exceptions that I'm aware of, and even in the neolithic you see trade routes for things like copper or bronze axe heads - the magic items of their day - thousands of miles long). Nothing that has value doesn't attract trader and sellers, and the lighter and more portable something is for its perceived value, the more likely people want to get hold of it. In a typical faux-medieval D&D setting you aren't going to get "magic item Target", but it seems like there would be some wealthy specialists and brokers who would trade in certain items (probably specific types), particularly in large cities on trade routes. But they'd be more likely to buy than sell, and even the speculative buying might be limited due to the amounts involved (unless the item was obviously easy to move - a wand featuring an offensive spell usable by anyone, for example) - brokers would be about setting up sellers with potential customers. Is you approach similar?Fakes and cons and tricks and so on would also feature, though they'd be harder to pull off with Detect Magic and so on. Certainly PCs desperate to acquire a certain item would attract con-men and chancers like flies, if they made it known to too many people.Also if we were looking at a more apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic scenario it's easy to see how magic items might seem to have little value compared to, say, food (though so, potentially would gold/jewels/etc.).</blockquote>

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