Magic items
+1 swords are a little boring but you can dress them up a bit (as others have noted, fancy smithing techniques or materials are great). I do think it's important to keep a firm grip on the valve of how many magic items you're feeding to players and what they're like. Passive stuff like +1 AC is boring but useful, so they just need to be dressed up a little. Items that grant some special magical power that is unique or interesting are very cool but you really shouldn't give out too many, maybe 1-2 per players is a decent target. Items that grant weird/lateral solutions to niche problems, though? You could hand out quite a lot of those and it won't generally ruin things. People won't be thinking about their Portable Boat or Universal Solvent or whatever in every situation, just the situations where it's either obviously relevant or they're really racking their brain to overcome a problem. I love those kinds of magic items both as a player and as a GM and I will readily hand those out as part of treasure.

Don't let players buy/sell magic items without actually putting in the work to locate a proper broker. It shouldn't always go smoothly, either. Robbery, fraud, all that should be possible. The alternative is you end up with players kind of looking forward more to a shopping trip than their delves (aka playing the game).

Earning and spending
Nickel and diming the characters for living expenses doesn't work very well in my experience. Players are weirdly frugal about things because they don't taste the gruel and they don't experience the aching back from sleeping in the stables. The number of times I've seen people sleep outside city limits or in the streets just to avoid playing the inn rate (or having players try to double or triple up in a room) is just crazy. Telling people they just can't do that feels like it breaks verisimilitude, so you need consequences for being cheap instead. People who sleep in the streets get diseases, get robbed, don't rest well. People who buy the cheap beer don't get the good reaction rolls when they chat up the NPC contact they need to talk to for a quest (or maybe the player buying fancy drinks attracts more interesting company). You get the idea. I currently do this ad-hoc, but I'm working on random generation tables mapped to a player's standard of living (determined based on what the player is willing to play).

In my experience, as long as players see good impact for spending their coin, they'll be willing to spend their coin. I do find coin counting boring, so I try to focus on the big, interesting choices. I don't track rooms, stabling, a drink, a fine meal, whatever else individually, but rather I essentially stratify the economy into different economic classes or standards of living. People can invest in their well-being. That stuff is easier for me personally to map to the kinds of consequences I can imagine and creatively weave into the situation.

Use XP for Gold Spent and people find or invent creative ways to spend their money, even if it's not an obviously productive pursuit in itself. You can work interesting events and consequences into that kind of stuff. Remember also to charge hazard pay with mercenaries, collect taxes, that sort of thing.

Gold standard
The simplest solution if you're looking for something a little more realistic is to adopt the silver standard. IMO it feels more "true" to the economic scale most characters will deal with until name level.

I personally ended up rewriting my economic system for my game to try to make it feel better at the table. I reduced all costs and treasure down to gold points, where a gold point essentially represents a weight of gold defined by the setting. This was inspired by the Roman Libra, predecessor of the British Pound. So if you have X gold points, it might be several coins of various denominations but ultimately it adds up to a Libra (or equivalent for the setting). At the low end (a few points or less), that's easily represented as a few silver coins exchanging hands. So far I'm happy with it, but a long ways off from being done.

As for encumbrance, I see things this way: gold coins or stamped bars essentially represent the highest density of weight/size to value you could possibly carry (short of a letter of credit or some less liquid good like a precious jewel). Unless you're carrying an big chest of gold coins around, the weight won't be a big factor relative to the bulk of carrying almost anything else. So when players find treasure in the dungeon, I'll have sacks of copper coins or chests of silver coins (as an example) take up more encumbrance than their value in gold points. So a torso-sized sack of copper coins might add up to 1 gold point total if they get them to a moneychanger. A chest of silver is very heavy and bulky but may be worth 20 gold points. But if you actually reduce the points down to gold, you're no longer encumbered by it until you end up with a very large number. I also grant trade goods or luxuries as treasure which vary a lot in value and size and can't be easily offloaded like pure coins can be.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 23, 2023, 11:45:36 AM
One thing I'm starting to dislike running OSR adventures* is the insane amount of treasure and magical items that you find. In addition, the more I read the DMG, the more I feel they were just too generous with treasure

Something I only realised fairly recently re the 1e DMG treasure tables is that you're not really supposed to use them as-is, since they tend to hand out absurdly powerful items early on. You're supposed to curate them to something more like the NPC adventurer treasure tables. That said, even the NPC adventurer tables do seem extremely generous to me. I like the treasure balance in Moldvay Cook/Marsh B/X and Mentzer Basic/Expert a lot better, with the low level and high level treasure tables (Moldvay is a bit more generous and I pefer his tables). I don't like the Rules Cyclopedia that does the 1e thing of undifferentiated tables.

Quote from: S'mon on June 24, 2023, 07:19:33 AM
Something I only realised fairly recently re the 1e DMG treasure tables is that you're not really supposed to use them as-is, since they tend to hand out absurdly powerful items early on. You're supposed to curate them to something more like the NPC adventurer treasure tables. That said, even the NPC adventurer tables do seem extremely generous to me. I like the treasure balance in Moldvay Cook/Marsh B/X and Mentzer Basic/Expert a lot better, with the low level and high level treasure tables (Moldvay is a bit more generous and I pefer his tables). I don't like the Rules Cyclopedia that does the 1e thing of undifferentiated tables.

I like to use a fair amount of cursed items that have some good qualities or mostly good items with a minor curse.  So when using those kinds of tables, if I get a cursed item, it has some useful feature.  When I get an item that is over-powered, instead of dropping it, I slap enough curse on it to bring it back down to a reasonable overall value.

I do this because cursed items are also kind of boring.  They are more like traps.  You get caught by them, you are hurt, and then you do whatever you need to do to get rid of it, which is usually have or find the right caster to handle it, plus whatever that costs.  Whereas, an item with a mix of curse/useful will tempt the players to keep it.  Or if not keep it, pawn it off in ways that are likely to have consequences later.   Though lately I also prefer to make curses a bit more difficult to get out of.

Lots of interesting data on historical coins, nice!

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 23, 2023, 09:49:37 PM
Picking up from the original thread:  In addition to a silver dagger being a "silvered" dagger and what that implies directly, I've always assumed that a major portion of the cost of a silvered weapon was the production of it, not the silver content.  Silvering something is not easy or cheap.  It may even require industrial technology to get something the way it is portrayed, which means you are looking at secret elf or dwarf processes or even outright magic to do it.

In fact, it was thinking about silvered weapons that gave me the idea that I explained in the previous post.  I wanted to extend that concept, because the setting had an expanded role for silvered weapons. 

Eh... you can come up with all kinds of justifications, but a CLUB costs 5 gold... Gold must be raining out of the sky - else, it would be easier to cut trees and make more clubs than finding/exploring a gold mine.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on June 23, 2023, 02:27:12 PM
And I don't use gold for xp even in OSR style games. That just opens up too much of a can of worms with characters carting around buckets full of coins, and playing Medievial Tax Lawyer instead of getting their asses back into the adventure.

This is my impression too.

Quote from: Jason Coplen on June 23, 2023, 03:15:26 PM
I've used master crafted blades for decades. I tired of modules doling out way too much magic in the form of sword+1 and dagger+1 and so on. Better steel and better craftsmanship solves a lot of this problem, that and I limit magic items to a single one per hoard except in very rare cases such as dragon's hoards. D&D modules sure toss out way too much magic.

Yup, a good solution.

Quote from: Brad on June 23, 2023, 03:18:33 PM
No idea what these criticisms are except theory-crafting. In play, never had any issues with this stuff.

The OP explains that I only noticed this in actual play, by level 5 (after more than a dozen sessions) without any theory crafting.

There must be a dozen people in this thread in the same situation already, look at all the examples above.

Dropping by with a quick sidenote:

Quote from: thedungeondelver on June 24, 2023, 01:05:30 AM
Kyle's got the right of it.  People who complained about the "monty haul" nature of AD&D or that characters were festooned in excess magic items and so on weren't using the rules correctly.  Treasure is meant to be spent and there's mechanics in the game for this.

Seems like a lot of confusion over levelling up with treasure could have been avoided with a "GP Required" printed on the character sheet within or somewhere near the XP Required area. Each class description in the rules would also have benefitted from a column listing that base training cost.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 24, 2023, 09:13:15 AM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 23, 2023, 09:49:37 PM
Picking up from the original thread:  In addition to a silver dagger being a "silvered" dagger and what that implies directly, I've always assumed that a major portion of the cost of a silvered weapon was the production of it, not the silver content.  Silvering something is not easy or cheap.  It may even require industrial technology to get something the way it is portrayed, which means you are looking at secret elf or dwarf processes or even outright magic to do it.

In fact, it was thinking about silvered weapons that gave me the idea that I explained in the previous post.  I wanted to extend that concept, because the setting had an expanded role for silvered weapons. 

Eh... you can come up with all kinds of justifications, but a CLUB costs 5 gold... Gold must be raining out of the sky - else, it would be easier to cut trees and make more clubs than finding/exploring a gold mine.

I'm not saying that the system is perfect for everyone or even perfect at all.  Merely that the silver dagger is a bad example of the thing you are discussing.  It's entirely plausible and reasonable given the assumptions of the system that a silver dagger would cost that much.  I've also heard, for example, the justification for the club as being well-shaped, made out of the right wood, seasoned, with maybe some metal bands or spikes in it, too.  I don't buy that one as much, because once you start doing that, we are really talking about a rather exotic mace.  (I don't discount it as an argument entirely.  It's an argument that doesn't really work for me, though.)

Neither of those are like the garlic thing, where you need to do a lot more rationalization to make it fit, when it is pretty clearly something done because of vampires, not because of any setting reason.  To make that rationalization work, I need to really constrain my setting in some ways.  Whereas with the first two, it only stops working if I start discarding other core features of the system, as Kyle outlined.

Edit:  As for "club for 5 gold" not being a good fit, I agree!  But that's because all the prices are inflated with the gold boom.  It's easy enough to switch to a silver standard, which I do.  Just read all gold prices as silver, including gem prices, and charge training prices in silver.  No more crazy inflation.  The relative prices of most items, though, are rather reasonable, given the assumptions of the game.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 24, 2023, 09:40:06 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 24, 2023, 09:13:15 AM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 23, 2023, 09:49:37 PM
Picking up from the original thread:  In addition to a silver dagger being a "silvered" dagger and what that implies directly, I've always assumed that a major portion of the cost of a silvered weapon was the production of it, not the silver content.  Silvering something is not easy or cheap.  It may even require industrial technology to get something the way it is portrayed, which means you are looking at secret elf or dwarf processes or even outright magic to do it.

In fact, it was thinking about silvered weapons that gave me the idea that I explained in the previous post.  I wanted to extend that concept, because the setting had an expanded role for silvered weapons. 

Eh... you can come up with all kinds of justifications, but a CLUB costs 5 gold... Gold must be raining out of the sky - else, it would be easier to cut trees and make more clubs than finding/exploring a gold mine.

I'm not saying that the system is perfect for everyone or even perfect at all.  Merely that the silver dagger is a bad example of the thing you are discussing.  It's entirely plausible and reasonable given the assumptions of the system that a silver dagger would cost that much.  I've also heard, for example, the justification for the club as being well-shaped, made out of the right wood, seasoned, with maybe some metal bands or spikes in it, too.  I don't buy that one as much, because once you start doing that, we are really talking about a rather exotic mace.  (I don't discount it as an argument entirely.  It's an argument that doesn't really work for me, though.)

Neither of those are like the garlic thing, where you need to do a lot more rationalization to make it fit, when it is pretty clearly something done because of vampires, not because of any setting reason.  To make that rationalization work, I need to really constrain my setting in some ways.  Whereas with the first two, it only stops working if I start discarding other core features of the system, as Kyle outlined.

Edit:  As for "club for 5 gold" not being a good fit, I agree!  But that's because all the prices are inflated with the gold boom.  It's easy enough to switch to a silver standard, which I do.  Just read all gold prices as silver, including gem prices, and charge training prices in silver.  No more crazy inflation.  The relative prices of most items, though, are rather reasonable, given the assumptions of the game.

Yeah, I agree - changing everything to silver fixes a lot of things. The relative prices are good enough with a couple fo exceptions (garlic, armor), but the silver dagger costing 30 sp is still reasonable enough.

Quote from: Brad on June 23, 2023, 03:18:33 PM
Lots of treasure is the best part of AD&D. Then you have to spend fucktons of it for training, so you rarely have enough to save up for your fortress when you hit name level.

No idea what these criticisms are except theory-crafting. In play, never had any issues with this stuff.

I think a lot of the problems expressed here are due to NOT using training and associated costs to level up. If these costs were used then most players would be fairly poor after all was said & done. Add in factors such as taxation, encumbrance preventing hauling a lot of treasure out and a few other factors including upkeep (100gp per char level per month IIRC) and many players will be selling off all but the most cherished items to cover all the costs. In addition a lot of wealth in certain adventures will be nearly impossible to get out of the adventure area. Consider valuable large urns, statues, furniture, works of art, tapestries, ect. These items are worth quite a bit but unless the PCs have extraordinary resources at their disposal most of this will have to be left behind. If you handwave the party bringing all of this stuff with them then you are contributing to the problem of too much loot.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 24, 2023, 10:55:28 AM

Quote from: Brad on June 23, 2023, 03:18:33 PM
Lots of treasure is the best part of AD&D. Then you have to spend fucktons of it for training, so you rarely have enough to save up for your fortress when you hit name level.

No idea what these criticisms are except theory-crafting. In play, never had any issues with this stuff.

I think a lot of the problems expressed here are due to NOT using training and associated costs to level up. If these costs were used then most players would be fairly poor after all was said & done. Add in factors such as taxation, encumbrance preventing hauling a lot of treasure out and a few other factors including upkeep (100gp per char level per month IIRC) and many players will be selling off all but the most cherished items to cover all the costs. In addition a lot of wealth in certain adventures will be nearly impossible to get out of the adventure area. Consider valuable large urns, statues, furniture, works of art, tapestries, ect. These items are worth quite a bit but unless the PCs have extraordinary resources at their disposal most of this will have to be left behind. If you handwave the party bringing all of this stuff with them then you are contributing to the problem of too much loot.

QFT! A fine, fine post indeed 

Also, am I the only one who almost never uses basic "+whatever weapon"? I usually give 'em a plus for combat, but also something cool. Like "Returning" thrown weapons, "Flametongues" that set targets on fire, "Dancing" melee weapons, or something special like that - since I'm super-stingy with magic.

Quote from: S'mon on June 24, 2023, 07:19:33 AMSomething I only realised fairly recently re the 1e DMG treasure tables is that you're not really supposed to use them as-is, since they tend to hand out absurdly powerful items early on. You're supposed to curate them to something more like the NPC adventurer treasure tables.

One of the first OD&D products was the Monster & Treasure Assortments which had a different treasure chart for each dungeon level so the high powered items were more likely in the lower dungeon levels. This also matched the treasure tables from the basic/expert sets. For some reason, this idea was completely abandoned for AD&D yet I don't really know why since it worked so well.

I'm wondering about the possibility of sacrificing the magic item for spell effects?

The general idea:

• Wizard: 2nd level spell that drains magical item energy to inflict extra damage or get a temporary higher spell slot
• Cleric: 3rd level spell that drains magical energy to heal X friends in Y radius a guaranteed amount of health back, no rolls
• Druid: 4th level spell to wild shape (since this is not an old-school class feature)
• Bard: 5th level spell which creates an aura granting X bonus to some save

and so forth.

You could also offer certain magic items as the price paid to NPCs for resurrections, minor wishes, breaking a geas, etc. Any character that finds an enchanter/artificer/alchemist could also pay the magic item to them as a means of reducing the XP cost needed for that character's next level up.

Once the energies are drained, it might still look very finely crafted, but is no longer otherwise magical. This could prove to be an interesting fight with the likes of intelligent swords that may not be partial to the idea.

Quote from: The Rearranger on June 24, 2023, 09:38:53 AM
Dropping by with a quick sidenote:

Quote from: thedungeondelver on June 24, 2023, 01:05:30 AM
Kyle's got the right of it.  People who complained about the "monty haul" nature of AD&D or that characters were festooned in excess magic items and so on weren't using the rules correctly.  Treasure is meant to be spent and there's mechanics in the game for this.

Seems like a lot of confusion over levelling up with treasure could have been avoided with a "GP Required" printed on the character sheet within or somewhere near the XP Required area. Each class description in the rules would also have benefitted from a column listing that base training cost.

Well, what it costs can vary, based on how well the player plays their character.  AD&D is the first TTRPG to include rules for rewarding good role-play, and the reward is shorter training time, and, thus, lower cost to train.  So it's a variable, not a fixed amount.

dunno if already mentioned but henchmen and hirelings will benefit from those extra items and i assume that is what gygax intended, problem is most people never use henchmen or hirelings to the same extent that gygax did or intended i suppose.

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 24, 2023, 02:30:38 PM

Also, am I the only one who almost never uses basic "+whatever weapon"? I usually give 'em a plus for combat, but also something cool. Like "Returning" thrown weapons, "Flametongues" that set targets on fire, "Dancing" melee weapons, or something special like that - since I'm super-stingy with magic.

Depends on how you want to count it.  I like to have a fair amount of better quality equipment that I'm not all that stingy with, at least after the first 4 or 5 levels.  I don't necessarily want it to be overtly magical.  Past that point, I get more stingy, and that's where the various curse and more favorable properties start to happen, usually.  I'm not opposed to handing out a Dagger +0, returning, occasionally.  But usually it's my +2 and better stuff that is "magical" and the +1's are left for quality.

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 23, 2023, 03:24:40 PM
I probably missed the thread on it but ... do GMs really have "Magic Stores" in their campaigns? I had seen stories but always thought they were nonsense rumors. I like "inherited, stolen or won": why haven't I used that? I'm stuck in the dungeon I spoze. Great post!

They do, because they would realistically exist; anything rare and valuable has a market and to pretend otherwise is to deny human nature.

Now, a "magic item store" isn't going to be like a Walmart or something. That WOULD be silly. No, think luxury automobile and art dealerships. Think the market for high end yachts.

It's an elite group who only deals with established clientele (many of them rulers of realms) that probably requires an introduction from an existing client to even be introduced to them, and even then it's not a magic mart... it's a catalogue of available items they can sell to you. You don't even see the merchandise until the price has been negotiated and a meeting place for the exchange of goods is arranged.

And you don't insult them or you will find your ability to buy, sell and trade within this elite world could be cut off with the snap of a finger (and because they obviously keep the best items for themselves and their security).

Basically, it turns the whole process into adventures in and of themselves.