In Labyrinth Lord, 5d8 dwarves have 55% chance to carry 1d6x10,000 gold with them. That is quite a lot of gold… I decided to reduce that number. Have your players ever noticed this and decided to kill all the dwarves and take their stuff?
I’m still thinking about that settlement element of “numbers appearing” and the longer I try to fiddle with it, the more frustrated I get. I actually don’t want to roll on three or four tables in order to figure out whether the party runs into a small group of scouts, a war band, or whether it discovers a settlement. It’s too much work. So I think I’m going to fall back on typical Labyrinth Lord numbers.
#Monsters #Old School #RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
I did. Then I realize that 23 dwarves with crossbows can wipe out a party quite easily starting with the casters, so it’s fair.
– Paolo Greco 2016-10-29
---
Good point.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-29
---
No, but I have had players decide it was better to take on the single minotaur in the Caves of Chaos rather than mess with the tribe of kobolds, because better return on the effort.
– Brian Murphy 2016-10-29
---
Yet another reason to never include Dwarves anywhere.
– Gus L 2016-10-29
---
I seem to remember somebody at the New York Red Box blog did an analysis of B/X monsters and their treasure, and concluded that out of all the monsters listed, Dwarves have the most loot compared to their toughness.
– Johnstone Metzger 2016-10-29
---
Nope. But then we’ve never used *Labyrinth Lord*. I do think there is a slight mismatch of treasure versus difficulty there, though.
OD&D has **40-400 dwarves** having a 75% chance of 1d4 x 10,000 gp and a 25% of 3d6 gems and 1d10 pieces of jewelry, and a 50% chance of **four** magic items, which is a much more sensible arrangement for hex-based encounters whilst exploring. [And the Treasure Type tables should only ever be used for these lairs/settlements.]
[Under D&D rules 23 dwarves with heavy crossbows are **not** that difficult to take out for a group of non-beginning adventurers, without major damage to themselves. As opposed to a sensible game system like *Runequest*.]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
---
Maybe there was a ×10 modifier lost in the number of LL dwarfes? That would fit. Anyway, how do you handle random encounters and settlements anyway? Because randomly “meeting” a dwarf village in a well known area of the map would be quite strange... Depends on hex size, I guess...
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-29
---
In previous games, people would wander into the wilderness and all the hexes are blank. That’s one way to run a minimal sandbox, the Microlite Campaign.
Or, if running a game with one of the generated maps, then you only know the human settlements, for example. See Text Mapper Thus, in a pinch, I would roll for random encounters once per day of travel or exploration and if an encounter occurred, I’d roll to see whether they stumbled upon the lair. But perhaps that doesn’t make too much sense? Or perhaps it’s not a problem because these “settlements” still only have 23 dwarves on average.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-29
---
Although I suspect that a better approach for npn-predetermined sandbox wilderness encounters is to determine *what* you encounter (a village a trading caravan, a temple, a castle, a ruin, a hunting party, a patrol, a raiding party, an army, a monster lair, a hunt, am earthquake. etc), and then determine *who* you encounter (humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, dragons, etc).
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
---
Yeah, but you have to go back – no not really – but you probably want to go back into charted waters sometimes. And then there are settlements where there weren’t before... 24 miles hex sure, 6 mile hexes maybe? Smaller than that... Huh... Because settlements leave a bigger footprint than the number of it’s inhabitants, at least I think that. It gets even worse when you take od&d numbers.
– Christian Sturke 2016-10-29
---
On the other hand medieval populations were very dense (mostly due to the resources required to build shelter). In the manor house for example, you slept where you worked (knights would sleep in the great hall). Officers might get a room, which was also their office.
A village can easily exist within a 5 mile hex and even be missed (although you’d be likely to come across trails when passing through the hex, so it would have to be intentional on the part of the inhabitants).
Even towns were very small, although on the weekly market day they swelled as the local villagers (and travelling merchants) travelled into town.
This is a nice indication of how smalla footprint it can be: Medieval Demography Made Easy
[That said, in OD&D a castle’s footprint reaches out two five mile hexes, but then the pirpose of a castle is to provide a secure site from which the domain can be patrolled.]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
---
Hah, interesting numbers in *Medieval Demography Made Easy*!
Yeah, if you’re back in “civilized” territory, it’s tricky. I’m not against finding new dungeons and a second or third village, a bandit camp, a troglodyte cave or whatever in the same 22mi² – that’s a large area to search on foot. I’m also supposing that villages try to hide – they want the orcs not to notice them, and so on. If you’re in territory near to a big city with plenty of patrols, perhaps no random encounters should occur. If you want to talk to a merchant, just say so. There are plenty of them to see every day.
LL also has the same numbers. They’re also in B/X. But the dungeon numbers have additional problems. My first problem is the number appearing. It says that it is “the suggested number of that monster *when encountered on the same dungeon level as that monster’s* **hit dice** (or **monster level**). […] The exact number is left to the DM’s choice.” I’d love to see better advice. The next problem is how much treasure they should carry. None? Then again, as I don’t create megadungeons of my own, perhaps that doesn’t really matter for my own rule-set. I just checked ACKS and that’s an interesting system. And treasure type is “D (per company)” so that would also solve the money issue. Right now I basically said that in a dwarven city, there’d be 10 times as many dwarves with 20 times as much treasure (figuring that urban areas have more riches).
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-29
---
For humanoids I tend to have people carry appropriate pocket change based on their social rank (cf *Swordbearer*). Or for example follow the OD&D recommendation of 1d6 gp (actually sp in my game) per level - so a typical soldier would have 2d6 sp on their person. Plus their equipment. A peasant on the other hand would have 1d4 sp on them.
Larger treasure “collections” always depend on what is actually encountered. So caravans and merchants have a certain worth (a portion of that in potable currency, the rest in trade goods), armies have pay caravans, manor houses and temples have luxurious furnishings, etc. These things are what are encountered as a rule, and this is the main source of wealth.
Hoards don’t generally come into play at all at the individual adventurer level - apart from sneaking in and stealing as much as you can and then leaving. In OD&D they were really the prize for conquering the hex with your army I suspect. They were the amount of tribute that could be extracted from the group. Looting would only gather a part of this total, and an individual band of adventurers would be more likely to target the magic items that were there, or run away with a small amount of treasure. It did indicate the economic worth of the community. So there was a 75% chance the gold mine was functional (my dwarves tended to be surface dwellers that were good miners rather than the classic underground dwellers of modern fantasy), and a 25% it was producing gems. [Actually I used a completely different table with all sort of ores - including really exotic magic ores - but 75% does sound right for productivity.] A non-prodcutive village would be either desperately eeking out the last bit of value or seeking to move. The dwarves being very akin to gypsy miners, since they couldn’t herd their main source of wealth. They were a boon to the local human communities though, because they bought food for good prices.]
Adventurers tend to be an exception to the system and carry a lot more cash and much more interesting equipment - but this depends on what you set you campaign guidelines to for PC wealth. Since xp must be bouaght with gp in my game, my players were always working out how to spend their money effectively so were often shorty of cash. Conspicuous consumption was always good for xp. Magic items were very much class based by level. For example a fighter has a 25% cjhance per level of a magic sword, with every 100% getting a roll on the table, and whatever was left over was the chance of another role - however they only got one magic “sword” (the best one that was rolled). If magic is rare in your game drop it to 10% per level. [If the magic item was uber-powerful then there obviously was a story behind why this 1st level fighter has a vorpal blade...]
[I’d also consider exceptional officers in a monster grouping to be along the same line as player characters.]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-10-29
---
The group I had at my former workplace figured that out after protecting a caravan from ogres and hill giants, betraying the last few survivors and taking all the riches for themselves...
– Florian Hübner 2016-10-29