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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Daniel" data-source="post: 8261894" data-attributes="member: 694">So my process works basically like this. Using (a modified form of) the algorithm from red box D&D, I'll prepare to stock a dungeon by rolling 2d6 for each room:First Roll … Room Contents … Second Roll1 or 2 … … Empty … … … … … Treasure present on a 13 … … … … Trap … … … … … … Treasure present on 1–24 or 5 … … Monster Lair … … Treasure present on 1–36 … … … … Special … … … … Treasure present on 1–2Then I'll list out all the rooms like so, coding each one "E" for empty, "T" for trap, "M" for monsters, "S" for special, with a "$" tacked on if treasure is present:1. M2. E3. M$4. T$5. T6. S7. E$8. E9. S10. S$etc.(Before I actually decide what monsters and treasures go where, I'll "dress" the dungeon with a combination of random tables—Courtney Campbell's "Tricks, Tracks, & Empty Rooms" is one of those invaluable resources, and the 1e DMG helps too—and whatever the dungeon seems to need, or what strikes my fancy. But that's not terribly relevant to the matter of treasure-placement.)Next, I'll decide how much treasure I want on the dungeon level. (I don't use the random treasure tables in dungeons, for either monster lairs or unguarded hoards. I really only use those for singular monster lairs in the wilderness.) If it's a 1st level dungeon floor with, say, 50 rooms, I'll make sure to place enough cash treasure to advance ten 1st level fighters to 2nd level, so 2,000 × 10 = 20,000 g.p. A 30 room dungeon level might have 15,000 g.p. of treasure, while a deeper dungeon level will of course have more (appropriate to the expected level of the characters). Then I'll count up the number of "$" marks on my room key—that's the number of hoards on the dungeon level—and I'll just divide my treasure total in half a number of times until I have sufficiently many hoards to fill the dungeon, according to <a href="https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2015/09/stocking-per-moldvay-part-2.html" target="_blank">this method from the B/X Blackrazor blog</a> (kudos to JB for coming up with it).For each hoard, I'll roll a d6 to see what form the treasure takes (gems, jewelry, high-value coins, low-value coins, art objects, trade goods), and for the coin hoards I'll roll some extra d10s so that the number of coins present isn't belief-beggaringly round.Next, for every 20 rooms on the dungeon-level, I'll put maybe 1 or 2 permanent magical items and about 2d6 consumable magic items (with magic-user scrolls being more common than potions, and potions more common than clerical scrolls), always either well hidden or in the possession of intelligent monsters. The monetary treasure may be well-concealed behind secret doors or hidden cubbyholes, under flagstones, buried in the ground, owned by monsters and left in sacks, locked in chests, grave goods interred with corpses, or even openly on display, depending on context.Operating under the assumption that the players definitely will not find all of the treasure on a given dungeon-level, I always try to generously overestimate how much treasure to place—and to periodically restock the dungeon with treasure as well as monsters, because after all, low-level characters need a place to adventure when they join the campaign, even if it's ground that the campaign's longtime veterans have already covered many times.Since I tend to play red box D&D more than I play AD&D, XP generally gets awarded for non-magical treasure only, and dividing the money and claiming magical items are two entirely separate matters. The monetary treasure nearly always gets divided as evenly as possible (full shares to player characters and half shares to their sidekicks and henchmen, if any, with the remainder going to pay for expenses, specialists, men-at-arms, etc.), and it must be divided up (not pooled) for the characters to earn XP for it.Magical items usually go to whoever can use them, with an eye toward splitting the loot as evenly as possible. (If a party with a fighter, a cleric, and a mage come away from the dungeon with two nifty new magical swords, the fighter is getting one of them for sure, and the other will likely be passed to a henchman in the service of either the cleric or the mage—thereby benefiting the player character by both making the henchman more effective and further securing that henchman's loyalty!)Magical items are generally regarded as priceless and are rarely sold. Except for potions and scrolls, they generally can't be purchased in a town or a city, and selling one is always a troublesome process of finding a private buyer and then avoiding gossips, frauds, thieves, intermediaries, bureaucrats, legal authorities or other interested parties who try to claim ownership of the item for one reason or another, etc. (Characters do earn XP for immediately selling a magical item that they find as treasure, but only one-twentieth the g.p. value in XP, so it's really just something characters do if they desperately need funds for whatever reason.)Players are at least somewhat discouraged from the practice of willy-nilly passing magical items around, either trading them or lending them. (They're supposed to be precious beyond belief, after all.) It's generally not too big a problem, as most players are all too happy to cling to their magic items like Smaug sitting on a hoard of dwarf-gold. I would only have to step in as DM and say, "No, you can't do this," if a player running more than one character somehow got it into their head that all of their characters' items belonged to them, the player, rather than to the individual characters; and that they could just heap the whole pile in rotating fashion on whichever of their characters they happened to running for that adventure. This is, of course, the very thing that the "no sharing magical items!" rule from AD&D is intended to prevent. But I haven't actually encountered that problem too much, because most players are perfectly happy to regard their magical items with appropriate levels of in-character cupidity. <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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