Hoarding
I guess they came back for round two. I didn’t realize we were doing continuity now. Neat.
As it happens, we’ve already had the discussion about fiscal pvp, so what do you say we talk about the other thing going on in today’s comic? Depending on how you’ve decided to structure your game, loot can be commonplace, impossibly rare, or anything in between. In that sense, a couple of measly copper pieces after a dragon fight is either an injustice or a king’s ransom. That leads me to believe that the loot itself is relatively unimportant. In reality it’s player expectations that you have to manage.
Take my recent encounter with the shopping monster. It was my Pathfinder megadungeon, and the PCs had been adventuring for a good long while since last they’d seen the magic merchant. I put an apparatus of the crab in the magic merchant’s stall, mostly as a “no way in hell will my players shell out 90K for this thing” item. I posted the loot list to the group’s Facebook page. It included stat boosting items and class-specific items and big six items. Here’s a smattering of responses:
- “Yessssssss crab tank!”
- “I just noticed it and want this campaign to go on a ghost in the shell tangent.”
- Heavy Breathing Cat
The party bought quite a bit of sweet-ass loot that day, but the majority of their excitement was reserved for the apparatus of the crab. They took it for a victory lap. They began training their mounts to operate its levers. One player is asking for a way to roll up a new PC specifically designed to be a steam tank pilot. All this for an item widely reviled as mechanically weak. I guess one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Here’s today’s discussion question then. Have you ever been disappointed by treasure? Conversely, have you ever been overwhelmed by the awesomeness of your quest reward? Let’s hear your tales of phat lootz in the comments!
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So I guess Goldie’s been replaced. Which is a little awkward, as Goldie is sentient. When you stop using/interacting with a sentient magic item you’re basically condemning them to solitary confinement in your bag of holding.
In Thief’s defense, I don’t think the rest of the party would use a magic dagger or diamond corset.
In Theif’s further defense, she’s really pulling off that diamond corset.
Thief: “Do you know how hard it is to resize a diamond corset?”
Fighter: “Hand. It. Over.”
I’m not saying that I’m writing this Goldie comic right now. I’m just saying it’s a possibility.
Hey, Thief can two-weapon fight, right? Yes, it’s awkward dealing with Mom’s new swordfriend, but a blade’s gotta do what a blade’s gotta do, am I right?
(…What am I even talking about now?)
Think aboot how shitty a sentient magic item’s life must be before they’re found.
Best case scenario they have a buddy in the treasure-pile to keep them company, or even a monster that’s guarding it to chat with.
Most likely scenario, they’ve spent centuries alone with nothing but their thoughts and a view of the treasure-pile.
Going through that would turn even the most NobleBright item into a Mr. Stabby level basketcase.
…It is now my Headcanon that Mr. Stabby used to a Lawful Good sword belonging to a Lawful Good hero who was betrayed by someone they opted not to kill.
A couple of centuries in a treasure-pile with nothing to do but think aboot how a simple act of mercy left him in his current predicament twisted Mr. Stabby into what he is today.
That’s a great headcanon. I’ll adopt it, too.
In Thief’s further-er defense, she’s the only one in the party with Charisma, so it only makes sense that she’d take the circlet of persuasion.
Well as a mostly Fighter guy i often had moments like this: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/weapon-focus
Yes yes that Sword would be great. Sadly i am a Flail Guy and i can’t use half my Feats with that damn Sword of Awesomeness. In the End the DM had Mercy, and we happend to find Weapons speciffically suited to our characters.
Phat loots? Well,… Lets just say if we Clear the Dungeon, that means we clear The Entire Dungeon. One Time we stole, excuse me, liberated a STONE SACRAPHAGOUS, with a lot of Diamond and Gold Ornamentson it, to sell it. Also we removed every Trace of Metal and other things, including but not limited too: Door Handels, the Doors themselves, the Monster Corpses, Wires from Trap Mechanics practically everything that can be made into even a few Copper pieces.
If our Party robs a Dungeon only cold raw Stones remain. We steal everything that isn’t bolted down, and then we steal everything that IS bolted down. Yes we are a rather greedy Group. But hey, we got a two Muscle Guys to move the Stuff, one Caster to judge it’s Worth and a Bard to sell it.
Ya know Adventurers gotta make a livin too! Were richer than many small Nations you say? Don’t be ridicules we are Dirt poor, i only have the +3 Weapon of Awesome Killing, do you know how long i have too save up for the +5 Version? XD
Laurel fondly tells the story of her college group stealing the adamantine doors from a dungeon. Lesson learned. If you’re trying to make an impenetrable barrier, it pays to use force fields.
Interestingly, the megadungeon style solves this problem by virtue of being impossible to completely loot. You can find all the rooms and all the listed gear, but by design the megadungeon is an ecosystem. Completely clearing it is like trying to completely clear a forest or a mountain range. Monsters keep showing up to repopulate it via “revisit” encounters and random encounter tables. That means there are rarely uninterrupted blocks of time for large scale excavation projects.
I remember reading an adventure log of one campaign where the party set up an industrial mining-operation right next a rift that lead to the elemental plane of salt. And of course there was the time my own party stopped to loot the haunted house on our way out.
Never underestimate the ingenuity/greed of players.
For ease of reference: https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I
You know, hearing about this Megadungeon makes me want to run one as a sort of Star Trek discovery style. That is, it’s a bit less about murdering everything in sight and more about exploring and learning about the unique ecosystem.
Of course, there are the creatures that try to kill you on sight. Can’t let the Fighter feel like dead weight, after all. But I’d love to see players discover a Mario RPG style Monstro Town in the middle of an underground complex.
I think I linked this on the site once before, but here’s Monte Cook’s style guide from the megadungeon I’m running:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Dungeon-Design-Assumptions.html
It does indeed have several “friendly monster” areas. So far my players have discovered tribes of fish people and hill giants willing to ally with them. It’s all about variety rather than, “New room, kill thing, loot corpse, repeat.”
My players stole the spikes out of a spike pit.
Wooden spikes.
… what did they DO with them? Go vampire hunting?
This reminds me of a story about an Archer I played with who insisted upon retrieving and reusing arrows. Even when we faced infectious viral type homebrew zombies. >.> Thankfully, he did not live long enough for my character to have to voice her enthusiastic disapproval.
When I first saw this comic, I thought that the joke was that the party had hit the official Wealth By Level and the GM had been cutting back on encountered treasure, so as they got richer the amount of treasure they found magically reduced as a part of a strange cosmic equilibrium.
My main loot story is less about the loot itself and more about player interactions around it, Maltese Falcon-like. Basically, the party had an NPC tagging along for reasons she was keeping to herself (we were pretty sure she was worried about one or more of the MIA soldiers we were searching for, but had been joking about her plans to betray us). We trace the soldiers to an enemy base and mostly clear it out, finding a bunch of gear from the soldiers (mainly bows and armor – the party gets surprisingly attached to the bows despite none of us being archers) but not the guys themselves. We need to search the upstairs area, so we leave the gear and our low-HP-and-blinded Bloodrager downstairs with the NPC to watch over him. As we are upstairs, the GM takes the Bloodrager’s player out of the room. After a minute, the player comes back in, looks at his sheet, says “Well, that’s not good”, takes his d20 and goes back outside. Everyone looks at each other for a minute before the Paladin’s player shouts “SHE’S GOING TO STEAL THE BOWS!!” Cue immediate panic in the room, made only worse by the fact that our characters cannot act on this metagame knowledge.
A session later, we’d located and taken the enemy’s auxiliary facility and recovered the soldiers. It’s a happy scene as the NPC reunites with her mentor and hands him his bow… and then I say (as a joke) “She did steal the bows!” Cue immediate table flip before the Bloodrager explained that the NPC had asked him for that bow (as it was her mentor’s) and his mysterious die roll had been Sense Motive to tell if she was telling the truth (which she was) – his Sense Motive was low but he still rolled high. Then, we learn it was a magic bow, which we hadn’t known before because we hadn’t cast Detect Magic on it. Cue a SECOND table flip and loud shouting of our main Detect Magic-er’s name.
…Did I mention that the player who cared the most about the bows is not only playing a Paladin, but a Paladin who uses a musket, making him the least in need of good bows of all of us?
As a comic genius, I can tell you that the joke works on many levels and it’s completely intentional in every case. >_>
I love the image a paladin flipping out about pointless bow thievery.
Was it Shalelu btw? I think I remember that scene from Hook Mountain Massacre.
Yeah, that was Shalelu. It was actually interesting because, due to player turnover, none of the PCs (or players, for that matter) had been around for the first book of the AP, and so none of them had actually interacted with her before. Added a bit to the trust issues, I suppose.
And yeah. At the moment we have two Paladins in the party and both are played by our most murderhobo-y players. The above-mentioned one is pretty good outside of his desire for loot (though we’ve developed a habit of asking him for permission before engaging: “Those two are standing next to paintings made out of human blood. Do we have permission to engage, oh Paladin?”) and roleplays as a gruff cop who’s too old for this crap. The other one intentionally roleplays as Lawful Stupid, gives probably-un-Paladin-y battle cries like “OGRE GENOCIDE!” and the character unintentionally sexually harasses everything he interacts with – male, female, nongendered, inanimate. EVERYTHING. Trust me. My character’s had to put up with most of it. Plus, that Paladin always believes he is in charge (thanks to his Holy Tactician archetype, as well as his levels in Cavalier), which my character disputes due to the fact that the Paladin literally showed up out of nowhere like two in-universe days ago. Not that my character necessarily wants to be the leader, but she basically is de facto thanks to seniority and no other party member wanting to make decisions. But our leadership struggles are a tale for another time…
Good luck out there. My Runelords campaign fell apart right at that ogre farm, so I cant offer you much advice beyond that point. Or at least no advice about the adventure. As for the murderhobo, I suggest making him walk in front.
Perhaps another dragon or group stole into its lair when it was out and that’s why it was raising Hell over the countryside. Well hey, that gives incentive to hunt down whoever took your reward and double down on all that treasure. Maybe the dragon donated most of its hoard for worthwhile causes? 3.5’s Draconomicon has an example of a dragon that does just that.
I’ve certainly been in a group where sweet treasure was on the line. In the campaign I’m setting up there’s a few places where there’s treasure aplenty. On the DM side of it there always a worry that giving that much money or items could tip the scales on the players side.
They cashed in half a million gold pieces at level 13. It’s a guild with 7 players and 14 PCs. Is that balanced? I honestly don’t know. My best shot at balancing loot is letting the party worry about it. They can always go another level deeper is stuff starts getting too easy.
I like Thief’s new stuff. I imagine some use of a Jedi mind trick to convince the others that she’s just catching up to the loot they’ve already gained.
Two questions though:
1) What’s that effect around Mr Stabby?
2) Where is Fighter? Has Thief got revenge for the monster tongue stud?
It’s hard to see in some panels, but Mr. Stabby always has a spell effect on him. I think Laurel just changed up the style this time so it’s more noticeable.
As for Fighter, he is currently trapped under the dragon’s corpse. Gotta watch where you’re standing when fighting gargantuan critters.
The PC group I spend the most time DMing for is highly greedy, but I’ve discovered they can be satisfied with weird crap that’s worth a lot but not very powerful.
Which is great!
Because it means I can throw the usual WBL tables out and just make most of the wealth be non-cash, and non-powerful. So when they want to ‘sell’ an item it’s really ‘barter it for other stuff’ and finding other stuff is easy, but finding USEFUL other stuff is hard. So then they either have to invest in feats and time and somehow gather cash to make stuff themselves (they haven’t), or they have huge long lists of mostly-useless stuff that sit around in various storage options and which so far has worked remarkably well to satisfy that greedy streak. (At least they’re organized about it. I caught two of them arguing over spreadsheet options to track loot. Although nobody remembers where the “mummified (inanimate) hedgehog dressed in a miniature brocade suit, mostly still intact, enchanted with Endless Mothballs” came from.)
Does… Does the hedgehog have a name? You should give them the accompanying case and make it a migrus:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/m-p/migru/
… there’s a Shroedinger’s Cat wondrous item? That is wonderful!
I wish I had an Apparatus of the Crab. Letting my Familiar become a lobster mech sounds pretty great. 🙂
One of my parties fought an Adult Red Shadow Dragon while travelling through the Nine Hells, and got no loot from it at all. The fight was over quickly, but it was pretty tough. My Cleric lost 90% of her HP just from the initial breath weapon, I had to spend my big girl spell slots to keep everyone up. Still, we were on a large raft floating down a river of lava, so there wasn’t exactly much opportunity to find loot from it. Where would it be, its stomach?
So, like any good party, we improvised and looted the dragon parts. It may not have had any mechanical properties, but on that day I got a captain’s coat made of shadow dragon scales. I was reasonably happy with that outcome at the time, but now, long after her campaign ended, i’m quite happy to recall my Cleric with the Captain’s Coat.
If this thing turns into a way for the scorpion familiar and the kestrel familiar to clutter up the battlefield and provide flanking bonuses while shouting, “Left! I said left you miserable arachnid!” then I’ll be a happy camper.
Hehehe, i’m sure it could.
Incidentally, I could get used to Crystal Bodice Thief.
I will say that the Diamond Corset seems a bit out of character for Thief, since she seems to resent being sexualized.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/waifudolon
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/traditional-garment
Diamond corsets don’t have a bare midriff. Thief hates a bare midriff. Except that one Patreon wallpaper where she’s rocking the yellow polka dot bikini. That’s just fashionable.
I thought she was also cleavage-averse. I guess not.
…And I just used the phrase “cleavage-averse”.
how much to slap a Ghost Touch on that apparatus? Would be fun for Team Shadowdancer.
Meh. Enchant the claws as per regular weapons. Since it’s an underpowered strat, I would probably call one enchant good enough for both claws.
but than the shadow companion still can‘t drive the thing
Ah. Well in that case an amulet of mighty fists loaded down with the ghost touch enchant is 4,000 gp.
I keep hoping for a sweet new bow or something, but it never shows up. The fact that I’m still using a Longbow instead of the Composite variety chafes, but I’m six tenths of the party damage anyway, so the extra 1 damage on any given attack really doesn’t matter too much, I guess.
I still have a full chat log of an adventure that happened on a 3.5 chat where everyone walked away with a feather that gave them a free reroll on any d20 after seeing the effects once a day, which was subtly the most overpowered thing I was not expecting to have in my transmuter’s pouch for a long time. I’ll hook you up with the transcript once I find it, Andalus and Bartuc were good pals.
Laurel’s Pathfinder paladin actually took a dip in hunter just to get the +2 to Strength to use a looted composite longbow effectively. It made for an interesting plot point about the setting’s huntsman god losing a bet to that paladin’s god and needing to do a favor to one of his followers, but yeesh… Bows and arrows man. If you want fiddly weapons tracking look no further.
I wound up getting an Efficient Quiver, spending 100 gp, and saying “I just wrote down ‘Plenty’ in my ammunition column, I’ll let you know when I’m using the special ones.” Other than that, we’re using roll20 so all I had to do was make a macro that shoots my shots for me, and remind people of simple changes like ‘oh, these ones are +4 to hit and damage because Divine Power’ when applicable.
Yeah, but imagine guns. Not only do you have the book keeping of ammo, but you also need powder, and there are variant cartridges, and then there’s misfire….
I still wanna try the class out some time. I’m getting “Dragon Hunter of an emerging Modern Age” kind of deal. Of course, Clinton Boomer’s Gunslinger quote from his Monk/Dragon/Gunslinger article did a lot to encourage this idea:
http://thatboomerkid.tumblr.com/post/140427319296/gun-vs-dragon-vs-monk-a-pathfinder-essay
I feel like that’s in part because of the piecemeal application of “reality” to some weapons and armor, and also because of the aforementioned ammo issue. “I bet you run out of arrows before I run out of sword.” etc etc etc
In many videogames, archers just pull a seemingly endless amount ammunition out of their armpits, and Hollywood is famous for it’s bottomless magazines.
When I used to play WoW, the game actually made Hunters track their ammo usage- it stacked in bundles of 200, and hunters would still devote an entire backpack space (totalling thousands of shots) to ammunition, just so they could get through a single night’s raiding. It was not ideal, and I think Blizzard eventually got rid of it.
But there’s lots of other stuff you COULD be tracking in D&D, like spell-reagents. In my experience though, no one does, and if the GM is looking like he’s gonna ask how many pinches of bat guano you have left, players reach for Eschew Materials at the earliest possible moment. Because this is Dungeons & Dragons, not Accountants and Audits.
I heard of a neat ammo idea where you buy die sizes rather than track individual pieces of ammo. Full ammo is a d12, which goes down to a d10, which eventually disappears after a d4. Every turn after you fire, your roll your ammo die. On a 1 you go down by a die size. It struck me as a more cinematic and less fiddly way to go about tracking ammunition.
It took me a minute to figure out exactly what you meant, but that is an interesting idea- according to some other threads it equates to about 40 shots on average before you run out. Probably enough to get through one day, although you’d have to buy several “d12s” worth of arrows if you wanted to go for a week or more in between resupply stops.
Another thing that some groups apparently do is just not track ammunition at all. That would certainly win on simplicity, although if it might break some people’s sense of verisimilitude.
Personally I never liked 3.5’s idea of “enchanted ammo”, where each shot represented a not-insignificant investment. I’d rather just say you can enchant your bow like a sword, and it applies the effect to every shot your fire. It doesn’t seem that game-breaking to me, right?
So I can definitely get behind less bookish ways of doing things, at least for normal ammunition. Whether it’s ammo dice, or cheap enchantments (on either the quiver or the bow), or a houserule, whatever you loose in “realism” I think you more than make up for in smoothness of gameflow. And you can still have your players track their “special” ammo if they want to play certain archetypes and carry around smoke-screen arrows, sleeping-gas arrows, glue arrows, net-arrows, boxing-glove-arrows, etc etc etc.
I may have heavily modified an Apparatus of Kwalish for street racing in Sigil once.
It was glorious.
Well that’s freaking awesome.
I’ve actually got an apparatus-themed mini-dungeon in this thing:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adventureaweek/mini-dungeon-tome-for-5th-edition-or-pathfinder-rp
It’s just such an evocative item!
Running an extremely low magic campaign (heavily regulated, hunt down apostates…totally not inspired by the Thief PC game series…really) I had to get creative for loot. I compensated by removing the level restriction on potions and adding an alchemy system of sorts (like TES). The party stopped caring so much about raw power items. I also used the dragon horde suggestions to include more art, so appraise became a lot more valuable a skill.
Finally, one of the players was a chef. With the TES alchemy system the quest for new and interesting ingredients became nearly paramount. Bag of gold? Who cares…but ZOMG there is saffron here! Holy crap holy crap holy crap! No kidding their reaction. Best ingredient they got was dire cow milk.
Finally, for weapons, I used the weapons of legacy rules to start giving specialized gear. Players loved it and it helped prevent the issue you talked about last comic about the awesome sword of awesome for a fighter. And their favored flavorful weapon could grow in power with them, or they could shop around.
I’m not familiar with the TES alchemy system. Any links to more info?
The Eldar Scrolls, sorry. Basically an ingredient has up to 4 properties and when you mix them you get any effects of 2 of them. So they were making Assassin Vine Leaf Tea and things like that.
What…. what does assassin vine leaf tea do?
I believe it boosted constitution temporarily, and with the right spices allowed underwater breathing. I just kinda made it up as I picked ingredients and things that either amused me, or could prove useful. Dire cow milk was going to give the benefits/negatives of barbarian ‘rage’ when combined with alcohol.
I ran a short-lived (almost) all-Bard campaign once.
…there was nearly bloodshed over who would get the Cloak of Billowing at the end of the first dungeon.
I may be a bard, because that just activated every SMASH NEED BUTTON impulse in my brain.
If my players find themselves suddenly coming up short on treasure, it’s generally a hint from me that they have too many limited-use items that they haven’t expended yet.
It typically comes one stage before the party being apprehended and stripped of all belongings, limited-use or not.
Use it or lose it folks, I don’t give out those scrolls for you to start a library.
Do you players tend to take the hint? I could see this technique being a bit… oblique… as a solution to hoarding.
“Oh man… The treasure has all but dried up! We better conserve what we have.”
It would be, but fortunately enough of my players are old hands with me now and have heard me say this openly – and they remember it when the transmuter’s potion cabinet is inexplicably empty but for 3 healing draughts and a flask of baby oil.
Interestingly enough, my disappointing loot moment ALSO involved the Apparatus of Kwalsh/Crab
This particular DM decided to run a few high level one shots. I built a ridiculous Tabaxi (cheetah man) Mobile Monk Rogue who could move something like 330ft in a single turn, and if hasted boosted that up to somewhere around 1000ft in a round.
Since each of the one shots was fairly brutal, he offered us to roll on a legendary item table, and then remove the attunement requirements of that item. Sounds great! Well, except I’m a monk and only maybe 2 items would have been of any benefit at all on from the list we were rolling on.
I raised numerous concerns, and asked to just be able to pick a lower teir item, or be allowed to remove the attunement removal from an existing item if I came up with something that didn’t need attunement.
Surprise surprise, I won the mother fing lotto and got the Apparatus of Kwalsh. A 20th level character with a movement speed in the hundreds was supposed to benefit from a “legendary item” that could move 40ft tops, and doesn’t even require attunement, so of absolutely no benefit.
The other players rolled Efreeti Chain and Ring of Spell Turning. The next battle ended up as a TPK, primarily because our boat was sunk by a concentrated ambush by dozens of water weirds and a captain with a vorpal blade and 8ish attacks a round, and instead of just running away on top of the water, I tried to actually toss the apparatus to my non-waterwalking allies.
The DM then offered to let us keep the sans-attunement items when we restarted with new characters at level 1. I again requested that I could bring one of my OTHER items over and apply the “sans-attunement” feature to that instead.
Still no.
I then attempted some more bargaining; so that my new character isn’t completely gimped in comparison to the other players, if I run as an arcane trickster, can I use the mage hand to activate a 3rd lever? Can my familiar activate multiple levers?
No, that would be “too OP”
I reminded him that I would not be able to access those tactics until level 3, and my fellow players would be having Efreeti Chain and Ring of Spell Turning (without even losing an attunement slot) right at Level 1.
Still no.
I dropped that DM.