2023-01-09 Do not overthink treasure placement

Writing a quick blog post before starting with taxes. Also drinking a bit of whiskey. 🥃

If you’re not sure about the amount of treasure to add to your treasure, I’m here to tell you: don’t fret. Instead, make sure you have a solid restocking rule and you’re golden. There will always be enough treasure if restocking adds treasure. And if you’re running a Megadungeon, it never gets cleared out so there’s always restocking to do.

Now, if the dungeon is harsh, and you’re harsh, and your players die like flies, maybe change how you run the game. Friends of AD&D might suggest to let hit points go to -10 before characters die, or people like me might suggest you use other house rules. In my case, I’ll suggest the following three changes:

shields shall be splintered (after the referee announces the damage, sacrifice your shield to avoid it)
death & dismemember table (when you drop to 0 and every time thereafter, roll 2d6 on a terrible table to often survive unscathed)
cover allies (every body can take a hit meant for somebody else once per round – ideally people with good armour or enough hit points)

Still, you might find that your players get to explore 5–10 rooms in 2h of game time, and then they retreat, and the next session, you’ve restocked the dungeon and so they once again get to explore 5–10 rooms.

There are two solutions to that:

a dungeon with long corridors and shortcuts so that people can skip the 5–10 rooms even though you’ve restocked them
have the restocking table result in less monsters (and treasure) so that the party can explore further the next time

In B/X on page B52, the stocking table can be roughly translated to following as far as monsters go:

+-----+--------------------+
| 1d6 |      Contant       |
+-----+--------------------+
|   1 | Monster            |
|   2 | Monster + Treasure |
|   3 | Trap               |
|   4 | Special            |
| 5–6 | Empty              |
+-----+--------------------+

The important part in terms of danger for players is that there’s a 2-in-6 chance for monsters.

Stonehell page 9 recommends the following restocking table:

+-----+--------------------+
| 1d6 |      Contant       |
+-----+--------------------+
|   1 | Monster            |
|   2 | Monster + Treasure |
| 3–6 | Empty              |
+-----+--------------------+

Again, the important part in terms of danger for players is that there’s a 2-in-6 chance for monsters.

So if you want to tone it down, just reduce the number of monsters without treasure.

Or use the reaction table more often: don’t have the monsters always fight. Make sure to roll for monster treasure. Make sure your monster tables include monsters with actual treasure that players can steal or extort without having to fight them all.

Stonehell has orcs and goblins, for example. In B/X, 1d6×10 (~35) orcs have treasure type D, 3d10 (~17) goblins have treasure type C.

Treasure type C has ~75gp in silver coins, ~50gp in electrum coins, no gold coins and no platinum coins, ie. ~125gp in coins on average, ignoring copper, gems and jewels.

Treasure type D has ~98gp in silver coins and ~2100gp in gold coins, no platinum coins, ie. ~2200gp in coins on average, ignoring copper, gems and jewels.

A rough calculation per HD gives me that goblins are worth ~7gp per hit die and orcs are worth ~63gp per hit die. Whom should players force their attention on?

I’m not saying that this is how a referee should approach their dungeon design. I’m saying that if your dungeon has lairs of goblins (poor monsters) and not orcs (average monsters), then players can’t choose to go after the richer party. That’s what I mean with regards to having monsters in your dungeon that actually have treasure: if you’re using B/X, have one or two class D hoards on level 1, and when you restock your dungeon, let there be more class D hoards.

The point I’m trying to make is that the stocking and restocking rules are essentially an expert system that TSR employees wrote up because they felt it resulted in a good game, not necessarily that running a game by those rules on *Hurt Me Plenty* mode is the best game ever.

Here’s what I want to suggest:

be kind to your players and don’t have the monsters attack all the time
be kind to your players and house rule death in some way
be kind to your players and have monsters with decent treasure
be kind to your players and restock monsters and treasure between excursions

With all that in place, I don’t think you’ll have to masterfully calculate how quickly your player’s characters are dying (and taking experience points into the grave), how much treasure to hide on a level (because it keeps growing back), and you’ll have a much easier time doing Dungeon 23.

“… double the treasure on dungeon level 1.” – The BX/OSE Treasure Problem

The BX/OSE Treasure Problem

#RPG