Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1011387Estar, this is a nice break down and I see one thing now that makes a bit more sense.

The treasures are based on what the adventures would have acquired using the random treasure tables over the course of an adventuring career for 1ed AD&D "by the book".

that's cool, that's not how I do things. I never played 1e and never used the random loot tables (as intended) in any edition. Mostly I judge treasure lay out based on my idea for "high" or "low" fantasy (which often seems to translate to high treasure/magic everywhere versus rarer treasure/magic).

To me, it just seemed "off" to have all of this wealth laying around a backwoods town. But if you populate the town with a bunch of retired adventures that had been dungeon crawling through dungeon's full of 1e random loot tables then it makes more sense.

So if I learned anything here, I now know that when I develop a campaign world, I don't want my campaign world's economics based on 1e loot tables. Which is cool, never really though about it like that.

One way to think of it is that the AD&D loot tables encapsulates Gygax's thinking on that part of the campaign at the time he wrote the DMG.

A couple of points. Regardless of how rich or poor you want your setting to be, I suggest you see what the implications are by using either NBos Inspiration Pad Pro or Tablesmith. Once you set it up, run it through a 1,000 times and see if the results are what you want to live with.

For example I coded up the Swords & Wizardry random tables in IPP and they were way too stingy for my taste. So I tweaked things until I started getting, on average, the result I liked.

Don't use them? Well everybody does. A referee's judgment of who has what and where stuff can be found is just another random table in your head. One that is biased. What I find what works best for me is a combination approach. I use random tables a lot but within the structure I outlined. And for key details about which I have firm idea I always pick what I want to use.

I find regular use of random tables helps greatly in freeing me from my own bias and increases variety in the campaign. But again I worked on the table I use to reflect what the min, average, and max of how things ought to be.

Two, once set then live with it. To do otherwise makes the referee an asshole and more importantly unfair. If the players wind up doing everything right they will bust the curve you set. Not always going to happen and the usual result is success in some areas and failures in other.

Take for example the village of Hommlet. It appears rich because every single inhabitant of the place is detailed.  It just how settlement are. To take one and loot it of everything is going to be a relative haul regardless if the default of the campaign is rich or poor.

My attitude towards this is mostly due to my focus on running sandbox campaigns. I set the table so to speak and what happen, happens. If the players decide to be murderhobos then they are going to get lot of loot if successful. It why the Vikings went viking for decades and centuries.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1011406I'd forgotten that place was such a treasure trove. It makes me want to bring a party in and strip that town to the wall studs!

Likely there will be long lasting consequences for the party that is successful at doing that. The people behind the good guys at Emidy Meadows (like Elmos older brother), the Viscount of Verbonac, etc.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1011391Maybe, you are correct.  The part I felt leveled at me was the "bandwagon" part which I would take to mean started by the OP. If that is not what he meant by starting a bandwagon, I apologize.

If I were referring you I'd have said bandleader.

This is why I say that D&D has never been medieval-authentic.  The economics are just one example, but again it goes into the way D&D utterly disregards social classes.  I make a point (in Albion and in Lion & Dragon) that most peasants wouldn't even have money at all.

But even if you weren't playing a medieval authentic game, those sorts of sums of money seem crazy excessive.

I'll start with just some real world examples today;

18 Treasures found in unusual places
https://steemit.com/curiosities/@katiasan1978/18-treasures-found-in-unusual-places

9 Spectacular Hidden Treasures
https://www.oddee.com/item_98717.aspx

10 Strangest Backyard Finds
https://www.oddee.com/item_99051.aspx

15 Times People found Valuable things in Abandoned Places
https://www.ranker.com/list/valuable-things-in-abandoned-places/jordan-love

27 Unusual Places to look for Treasure
http://gpex.ca/smf/index.php?topic=1671.0

Back in 2013, I had determined that I really, really wanted to visit the ancient port of Caesarea, in Israel north of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean Coast to inspect the ruins there and go diving off the coast. I figured it was probably a good place to look for treasure given it was a major port for may centuries in the ancient era, and guessed that one or more ships may have unexpectedly sunk in the shallow coastal waters over the years. ...Oh, I was so right about that... just last year one of the largest treasures of our time was found there. I think I even posted about this last year here already.

Ancient Roman Treasure Trove off the Coast...
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Ancient-Roman-treasure-trove-found-off-coast-of-Caesarea-454096

More than 2,000 coins found...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ancient-trove-of-gold-coins-found-off-coast/

Anyway, my whole point is ridiculously awesome treasures can and are found, ...in a peasants hut, or in a farm field, ...so just the idea that such a treasure exists is not at all far-fetched.

That said, as a GM I usually hide modest treasures in peasant huts, but there should always be one or more outliers in each and every hamlet, village, city, or region, because there are just such examples in real life of unusual people who do unusual things in very mundane places. This adds quite a bit to adventures by the way, and should be included in your games.

Maybe the local Thieves Guild used the peasant cottage as a secret stash, and the guy in charge of keeping the stash unexpectedly died.
Maybe an ancient fighter hid his gear in the peasants hut.
Maybe the peasant got the gear from another dungeon going adventurer, and has a partial dungeon map as well.
Maybe the peasant stole the treasure and is hiding it, secretly melting down the coins, ...one by one.
maybe the Peasant is clueless about the treasure that is hidden somewhere in the floor/walls/attic etc.

In one of my favorite movies of all time Trespass, with both Ice Cube and Ice-T, A couple of street gangs go to war in an abandoned Office building in Kansas City with a couple firefighters that are there treasure hunting, and who have located an ancient stolen hoard. At the end of the movie, some homeless dude gets away with a full dufflebag of gold and silver items. ...Great, totally entertaining story!

OMG, Talk about treasure found in strange places!
http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/general-discussion/57584-omg-talk-about-treasure-being-found-strange-places.html


Today's finds on Treasurenet
http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/today-s-finds/

Pretty sure if magic were much more common, we'd be finding magic treasure troves too.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1012613This is why I say that D&D has never been medieval-authentic.  The economics are just one example, but again it goes into the way D&D utterly disregards social classes.  I make a point (in Albion and in Lion & Dragon) that most peasants wouldn't even have money at all.

But even if you weren't playing a medieval authentic game, those sorts of sums of money seem crazy excessive.

Well, D&D by the book is wildly over the top with massive amounts of gold, treasure, and magic items. It's up to the Dungeon Master to accept that and roll with it or else revise it down before Day One of the campaign.

Quote from: estar;1011415Regardless of how rich or poor you want your setting to be, I suggest you see what the implications are by using either NBos Inspiration Pad Pro or Tablesmith. Once you set it up, run it through a 1,000 times and see if the results are what you want to live with.

Can you explain more about what these tools do?

I'm with GameDaddy. Crazy treasure shows up in crazy places.

I love random magic item tables because every once in a while, the rats have an artifact in the first room of the first level dungeon.

That's a good thing, not a flaw.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1012613This is why I say that D&D has never been medieval-authentic.  The economics are just one example, but again it goes into the way D&D utterly disregards social classes.  I make a point (in Albion and in Lion & Dragon) that most peasants wouldn't even have money at all.

But even if you weren't playing a medieval authentic game, those sorts of sums of money seem crazy excessive.

D&D clearly (to me) uses the what I will call 'Goonies Treasure model' (yes, D&D predates The Goonies) -- buried treasure has to be big enough to fill a chest or it isn't really a treasure. The coins have to be gold, because if you know there are silver and gold coins, well, gold must be better, right? (although D&D does do plenty of 'most of the coins are silver, how are you going to cart it away?' quite well, I think, but the expectation that gold is 'where the real money is is silly). The gems must be at least as large as a 'box of chocolate' sized chocolate, because real world gems actually look rather small in comparison to the palm of ones' hand, or other on-screen comparator.

Quote from: Dumarest;1012671Well, D&D by the book is wildly over the top with massive amounts of gold, treasure, and magic items. It's up to the Dungeon Master to accept that and roll with it or else revise it down before Day One of the campaign.

Agreed. Both are valid choices.

Quote from: Aglondir;1012776Can you explain more about what these tools do?

They allow you to create and roll on random tables.

An example using the fumble chart I use in my Majestic Wilderlands Campaign

Table:Fumble
Roll:1d6
Type:Lookup
1-3:Drops Weapon
4-5:Breaks Weapon
6:Hits an Ally within Range otherwise breaks weapon.
EndTable:


A slightly more sophisticated example of a name generator where have the option of choosing Male or Female


Header: Names

Prompt: Sex {Male|Female} Male

Table:Name
[when]{$prompt1}=Male[do][@Male][end] &
[when]{$prompt1}=Female[do][@Female][end]
EndTable:

Table: Male
Bob
Chris
Larry
Sam
EndTable:

Table: Female
Alice
Chris
Mary
Sienna
EndTable:


Where it really shines is any set of random tables that nested onto of each other. For example a lot of the more sophisticated NPC generation table have something like

Generate NPC
Generate NPC Personality
Generate NPC Gear

Each of these have two or three levels of tables underneath.

Once made for IPP or Tablesmith you can generate a result in seconds or hundreds of result in second. In addition you can use the hundreds of result to see if it reflects what how you think things ought to be. This includes the average and the outliers. If not, then it is trivial to tweaks the tables and re-run to see if better.

This next part isn't directed at you, but invariably somebody is going to pop in and say "Well I just make up all my stuff" or "Just make something up."

The point to me of doing this is the fact I found that when creating anything that has a dozen or two "elements" (NPCs, Locales, Monsters, whatever). I rarely have anything specific in mind. So I sit there and rack my brain for ideas and jot whatever comes to mind.

I found it faster and easier to code up a table to reflect how I think about these things. Then roll until all the blanks are filled in. Then I look over the results, anything that does't inspire me or I think it nonsense I throw out and re-roll until something clicks.

I figured this out when I turned my hand to making my own megadungeon, the Majestic Fastness. I used the the B/X Dungeons Stocking rules, and the OD&D Monster and Treasure Assortment to quickly a populate a level with over a  hundred room in an afternoon.

First I placed the two things I knew that was going to be on this level. Then I did a first pass, and see if anything made sense either by itself or as a group. I circled those areas and tossed out the rest then re-rolled. I kept doing that until I had the level done.

For example there was a area with a complex of six adjoining room. I rolled Evil Sorcerers, Empty, Dwarves, Treasure, Giant Scorpion, Treasure guarded by Trap.  Looking at that inspired to thing of the place as a evil magical laboratory where the Sorcerers were transforming Dwarven slaves into Giant Scorpions. And the treasure with the trap represented their treasury. It fit the theme of the Majestic Fastness as a once proud Dwarven City taken over by a Dragon and transformed into a "evil underground city".

I did this 8 years ago and applied the methodology to the other things I was doing in my campaigns. It helped greatly. The key is that it a hybrid method. I am still making up shit but the use of random generation helps cover the gap when I no particular ideas.