Geoffery McKinney on Treasure

Appropriately, I dug the following up on the wayback machine:

Treasure in My Forthcoming Book
Have you ever noticed in your D&D/AD&D/C&C/retro-clone games that the equipment list is a lot of fun at 1st level, and then rapidly slides into irrelevance?

"Let's see, I rolled 90 g.p. for my new 1st-level fighter. This really limits my arms and armor options. I'm going to have to skimp on at least one or the other. Hmmm…"

But by the time, at the latest, 3rd or 4th level is attained, the equipment list is pretty much meaningless: "How much does a morning star cost? Is it 6 g.p., or is it 8 g.p.?" ANSWER: "Who cares? I have 3,342 g.p.! Here’s two platinum pieces. Keep the change."

Such a large amount of treasure has to get amassed (if you go with the traditional 1 gp = 1 xp, which I do not do in my games) to acquire the 8,000 or so xp required to become a 4th-level fighter, that the PCs can (without hardly even counting the cost) have anything they can wear, ride, or carry on the equipment lists.

What's more, once the PCs start finding magic armor and weapons, they aren't even interested anymore in buying new arms and armor: "I have +1 plate mail and a +1 shield. Why in the world do I even need to look at the armor list ever again?"

I think all that is a shame.

Read Fritz Leiber's Nehwon stories. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser seldom get a hold of treasure, and when they do it is often stolen from them. They are outfitted like 1st-level D&D characters throughout their lives, notwithstanding that in the AD&D Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia Fafhrd is a 15th-level ranger/13-level thief/5th-level bard, and the Mouser is a 15th-level thief/11th-level fighter/3rd-level magic-user.

That's the sort of thing I like: Characters who ALWAYS (whether 1st level or 17th level or whatever) have to consult the equipment lists and make hard choices. ("I finally have the 150 g.p. to buy chain mail, but in that last fight I lost my heavy crossbow. Blast! Now what do I do? Do I pony up for the armor, or do I replace the crossbow and have to KEEP WAITING for the armor?...")

When a hunter in the real world kills a bear, or a lion, or whatever, how many times does he find a treasure chest in his kill’s lair? Never. Given that the monsters in my book will be unique entities with incomprehensibly inhuman thought patterns (assuming any thought patterns at all), what would they be doing amassing treasures? Are they saving up for that new suit of armor for the next time they go shopping in the nearest town? Preposterous. Money is worthless to monsters who could never buy anything with it. Perhaps the monsters amass treasure because they think it is pretty? That’s not quite so ridiculous, but why in the world would the aesthetic sense be similar between a human and a legless half aardvark/half snake that crawled out of a wizard’s vat? If the latter even had a sense of aesthetics (which is doubtful), it would probably think that something like viscera was beautiful. That leaves for the monsters only a bit of incidental treasure that previous victims might have been carrying. But that will be a very small amount. How much money would you carry on your way to a potentially lethal fight?

If you want treasure, you’re going to have to get it (whether by honest means, or otherwise…) from humans. The setting presented in the book is going to assume the relative poverty of, for example, France in A. D. 1310. How much treasure do you think the French peasants had stashed away? You can bet they didn’t have 4-24 g.p. under the floorboards in their hovels. They probably did not have any treasure whatsoever. How much do you think you could get for that 15-year-old tunic the peasant is wearing?

So if the player characters in your campaign want to find treasure chests overflowing with gold, they are going to have to sneak into the palaces and castles of kings, princes, dukes, and such. I’m sure there are no places more heavily guarded. Jewelry? Worn by royalty. Again, heavily guarded. Caravans? Lots of guards once again.

Practically speaking, the treasures your PCs will find will be stuff found on the equipment lists. Have the PCs killed the bandits that ambushed them? Treasure time! “Hey, that one has a long bow!” “Look, the leader is wearing chain mail.” “Ooh, that’s a nice morning star.” “Score! Food and wine to last us a month!” “Horses! We could use those.” Etc. The 17 copper pieces found in their pouches will be the least exciting thing retrieved.

Of course, all of the above assumes a D&D group that is motivated primarily by exploration rather than by treasure. Some groups simply would not have much fun without relatively plentiful heaps of treasure. In that case, it is a simple matter for the DM to toss some randomly generated treasures in: Roll-roll. “OK, the monster’s treasure chest contains 1,000 g.p. and 200 p.p.” (Or whatever.) What is certain is that nobody needs me to do that for him. I aspire to make everything in the book something fantastic, something that is not easily generated in a few seconds by any DM.
Posted by Geoffrey at 8:10 PM

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Claytonian at the gmails.