Saturday 19 December 2009

Old-School-Ish Random Treasure

Over the last couple of years, I've become increasingly irked by the concept of wealth by level, and treasure by challenge rating existent in 3.x and later editions of D&D. I mean, sure, it might be good game balance, but it leads to situations where the average goblin is walking around with more wealth then a dozen peasants.

Which is why, when I first saw it, I was quite enamored with the Basic/OD&D idea of giving each monster a rated treasure type, dependent on who likely it was to actually collect loot. You would look up the type on a table, and roll to see whether it had any of a variety of things. Sometimes you got nothing, sometimes you got a huge horde. Of course, this was back before you could, let alone needed to buy magic items, so a heap of coin wasn't quite as useful, and it wasn't such a huge deal if a bunch of 1st-level characters found 15,000 gold coins in a goblin den.
Of course, after a while, I started to find some drawbacks to the system - the rating was per lair of monsters, which meant getting treasure for smaller bands was fiddly, and the whole thing required tables to be looked up. I wanted something simpler.

So, here I present a compromise. It's a sort of homogenized version of all the assorted treasure types collected by most humanoid (or humanoid-ish) critters in basic D&D, and comes out pretty close on an average-value-per-hit-dice-of-monster comparison.

For every 13 hit dice (give or take) of monsters in a dungeon, roll once for each category. The % numbers are the likelyhood that type of treasure will be found. The number after that is how much/many of that treasure type will be found.


(click for larger view)

Special treasures are things that don't fall into the other categories, like expensive wines, stockpiles of armour, rare books, etc. I may do a post about my own personal special treasure tables at some point.

1 comment:

  1. SilverGoldBull is a highly trusted precious metals dealer. You will be provided with reasonable, up-to-minute pricing and they will make sure that your gold and silver is delivered to your door discreetly and safely.

    ReplyDelete