Take All
The one and only time I tried LARPing, I was assigned to NPC duty. As a newly-minted ice mephit my job was to accost adventurers, shout “five cold damage” whenever I hit someone with a boffer, and fall over once I’d lost 12 hp. I later found out that this was not my favorite pastime.
I bring it up here because I had one additional duty. I’d been given a small slip of paper that read “healing potion” on it, and was instructed to hand it over to the vanquishing heroes who managed to slay me. Unfortunately, my instructors were somewhat vague on finer points of corpse etiquette. No sooner had I gone down than I hopped back up, dusted myself off, and handed across the treasure like it was a flyer for some hot new DJ.
“Zounds!” said the dude in the plastic lorica. “Ne’er before have I seen the dead so eager to give up their bounty!”
I guess they were supposed to prod me with their boots and say ‘I search the bodies.’ Major faux pas on my part. It is an instructive moment for tabletop GMs though.
You see, I want my players to find the good loot and discover the cool secrets. But at its most extreme, that impulse metastasizes into Monty Haul GMing. Treasure feels more valuable when you actually have to work for it. Making a difficult search check, fixating on a tell-tale bit of flavor text, or lucking out and pulling the right sconce can all lead to cool gaming moments. But at its most extreme, an insistence on “active searching” puts players in the obnoxious position of having to announce “I look for treasure” every five feet. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I suspect that there’s a happy medium between monster piñatas that explode into magic swords and tight-fisted dungeons that demand Tomb of Horrors levels of investigation. And that of course leads us to our question of the day. How much of the ‘hunting’ do you like to remove from treasure hunting. Does the key to all mysteries lie in mechanics like passive Perception, or should there be rewards for players who actively investigate their environment? Tell us all about your best body looting practices and room searching techniques down in the comments!
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Flagstones are loot. Anything that ain’t nailed down and most stuff that is can be loot
If it’s nailed down it must be valuable, why else would they do so?
If you can remove it with a Crowbar and a poor roll, it wasn’t really nailed down.
…and nails have to be worth something too, right?
Methinks you been playing too much Minecraft.
Or Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Or similar ‘disassemble everything because you NEED the bits of nails and wood to survive the apocalypse’ kind of games.
Hmm, wonder if there’s any RPG that plays on those mechanics – where it’s more about surviving with limited resources and creativity than anything.
If dungeons didn’t want me to demolish them, they shouldn’t have been made up of stuff.
(I do think that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy has some abstract rules for when you start pulling out the fixtures to try to sell for scrap.)
“Wiz, babe, you wouldn’t happen to have Detect Magic prepared, right? If not, just have a look around with those beautiful, +2 Perception, secret-door-detecting eyes.”
We all know how this ends up.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/spot-check
That’s a strip that’s begging for a remake, with all the story development we’ve had so far. 😀
Usually I go with requiring the players to say the search the room (which then include everything in it, no need to individually specify flagstones and bricks and roof tiles and the corpses of slain enemies and decorative pots and so on and on and on).
I then ask for a single perception/search check and they can then say they take 20 if they want. Doing that is slower in universe which might, or might not, have consequences, but crucially isn’t slower at the table. Similarly searching a small mostly bare room is faster in-universe than searching a huge one full of boxes and other assorted junk, but that does still just mean a longer timeskip and a different but equally long in real-time description from me.
At what point does the room become so large that Take 20 is impractical? Suppose your Harry Potter campaign wanted to Take 20 to search Hogwarts for secret doors. Is the time skip simply prohibitive at that point, or does spending a month and then getting a list of castle secrets somehow against the spirit of exploring?
There’s a few factors that’d add up to something here.
Firstly they’d need to have at least a basic understanding of the place they want to search (i.e. they can’t search the room next door before they have been there and I have told them what they see there with just their baseline senses).
They’d also need to be in a position where they could go around prodding the walls and searching and so on without being interrupted (trying to search the Watch captains office while they are there won’t result in a timeskip, it’ll result in a reaction).[1]
So let’s say that the Dread Castle Hogwarts was a dungeon they had already moved through and handled the various threats through a combination of cleverness, negotiation and heroic violence.
In that case sure, if the group have/decide to take a big chunk of downtime (through I think is big enough that it might be more than a month all in all[2]). Then in theory I’m fine with some of them deciding that their big project is thoroughly exploring it and letting them take twenty, in practice such a large time investment is generally prohibitive.
For something on that scale I’d probably still they’d probably run into secrets that required “zooming back in” to normal time. For instance I might say “After exploring for a few days you have found [list of some stuff] office and have noticed that there seems to be a secret door under the sink in this bathroom (indicate which one), you haven’t found a lock or mechanism that opens it. Do you want to do more with that, or just move on and leave the area behind it unexplored?”.
My logic for why that required zooming back in, would rest on them not having been in the secret basilisk tunnels part of the map yet.
[1] at some point things become so large that this condition will never be met, since someone else would invariably have moved in, and something would invariably have changed before you finished. Trying to meticulously search through all of waterdeep one 5ft square at a time wouldn’t really work.
[2] I don’t usually bother doing the exact math to figure out how long it takes to search and instead go with a rough gut estimate for how long pr. roll. but spending two minutes on each little bit of space/thing quickly adds up.
I quite like this “zoom in” methodology. It allows groups to skip tedium while still providing the actually-interesting exploration challenges — You’ve found something unusual, now what do you do about it?
It reminds me of the time my party un-petrified a forest of medusa victims checking for alignment as they went. Most folk were grateful commoners. One was an interesting witch that required her own scene.
If your game centers exploring a massive castle (or other environment), roleplaying the search of every broom closet and abandoned classroom probably isn’t the best solution. Either create some kind of system to abstract searching large sections of castle a bit, or find a game that already has that built-in.
D&D claims that one of its core pillars is exploration, but it does even less to support that pillar than it does for social interactions.
Occasionally I like to put in puzzles to find hidden loot, secret doors and other goodies, but when I do, I like to make it obvious that there is something to look for. My usual approach is conspicuous decorations – if a corridor has some odd tapestries not found elsewhere in the dungeon, odds are that the players are going to check them out and find the one that hides the secret passage, rather than having to take pickaxes to all the dungeon walls. I also once had my players assume that some purely-decorative statues were hiding a way to open a door I hadn’t intended to be locked, so I decided to retcon in a secret switch to unlock it. My goal is generally not to outsmart my players, but to let them feel clever about figuring these things out.
Nice policy. The idea of “letting their hunch be right” plays right into several genres.
I like that idea. When my players entered a dungeon where every door had a conspicuous symbol above it, they quickly figured out that sooner or later one or more of those symbols would actually be significant, simply because none of my dungeons had ever had emoji doors before.
I usually just go for a player saying “we search the bodies” – there is always one – but occasionally I like to hint that some more thorough search could be fruitful. I should work on my delivery, through.
There was that one time the randomly-rolled treasure was a hat. Good velvet, silk ruban, worth some good money. As the PCs were exploring a half-buried forgotten cavern/settlement under a big city, I decided the hat has, also, come from above, and was stuck in the cavern’s wall. Requiring both a little search to notice it, and a quick climb to fetch it.
Nothing arduous, but it broke the routine.
Also, that explained why the hat was still wearable and worth something, instead of half-rotten and used as a nest by the ROUS the PCs just slayed.
The weird thing that comes up with “I search the bodies” is the corner case. What if the body is wearing a coat with a secret pocket?
A similar issue came up in my megadungeon game when a chest had a false bottom. It was only by listening closely to the “box text” description of the chest that anyone thought to give it a more-than-usual inspection.
In a lot of computer games there’s a key that you can press to outline all visible treasures, usually the Tab key IIRC, so what if you imported that into the tabletop game with this:
[b]Ioun Stone: Grey Truncated Pyramid[/b]
This ioun stone, shaped like a grey truncated pyramid with the word “TAB” etched on it makes all unattended valuables appear to the user’s preception to be outlined by a pale glow.
Moderate Divination; CL 12; Craft Wondrous Item, [i]Detect Magic[/i], [i]Detect Metal and Minerals[/i]; Price No idea, it’s certainly not worth the 144000 implied by the naive formula. I’d probably put it somewhere in the 4000-40000 range
That should say “all unattended valuables within 60 feet” not “all unattended valuables”
If it let you see a coin on the street from on top of a mountain then it might actually be worth the 144000
Neat! A balancing mechanic might look like a narrower band of detection. For example, a least tab stone might only detect copper pieces, while a stronger one might detect art objects worth at least ## gp.
An empty room like this calls for a scene in the local tavern:
While the adventurers are glooming over the meager lootings another Adventuring Party enters.
They go on and on about how they found a picture of a loot room with greenish granite, that was drawn so detailed that Atlernate Party Wizard was able to use it for scrying and then a teleport, right in the middle of the best loot box ever!!!
Thief is right. How do they know if someone didn’t hide treasure under the floor 😀
My GM is fairly lenient on perception rolls and generally will include room descriptions that will hint that there’s treasure to look for. However, if we abuse the system and are constantly rolling to search for shit, he will put his foot down.
I’m in the “make a roll” camp. I mean if they’re searching, make the roll. And none of the “you didn’t say you were double checking for a false bottom” nonsense. If the roll is good enough to also find the false bottom, they also find the false bottom.
And by that I mean the first Search roll where they search the room. They’ll notice if the chest isn’t deep enough base on having witnessed it. Now if the searcher leaves the room while someone else empties the chest… well, that’s a different story (which is why almost every one always makes a roll and almost everyone tries to have good Search skills).
If the treasure’s on a person, the player need to announce they’re searching the body; if they do so, then they can get the loot without need for a roll. Except in the case of hidden blades and the like, it seems odd to me that someone could fail to find that which’s on the enemies body. In the case of hidden items, I sometimes give it to the players automatically (as that stuff is often supposed to keep it hidden from casual notice, rather than a full pat-down), or call for an investigation check if it’s particularly well-hidden. It could cause problems if players metagamed, but my group’s fortunately quite good with that.
as a LARPer, it’s not uncommon for the ‘dead’ to cough up their loot quickly when they’re going to go respawn. Skeleton dies. Drops a couple silver on the ground. Goes off around the corner. Counts to ten. Comes back and attacks the heroes. Good for when you want a lot of bad guys, but not all at once, as you only have a handful of NPCs that weekend…
I handle this like so*: Anything I want to make sure they get, I make sure it winds up in their hands regardless of effort on their part. And then I usually scatter about things of varying difficulty/obviousness to look for that’s also there. With an additional bit of improvisation if they look for things/make an excellent roll for searching in a spot where I didn’t expect/hadn’t planned for anything to be there.
*Or at least ideally, my actual ability to smoothly pull anything off is rather debatable.
This is actually one of the bits I need to work on as a GM, as every game I’ve run has sort of too quickly resulted in a glut of magic items/consumables/etc. Probably because on the player side I often find I’m frustrated by a dearth of such things and I feel like magical objects is one of the coolest parts of fantasy. Because there might be thousands of fighters with your build, but if you’ve got the kind of GM I tend to be, yours will be the only one with a named weapon with a visual description and effects, not all of which have anything to do with being a weapon.
Rogue doesn’t need a chiropractor, she runs on noodle limb toon physics and high dex. Not to mention the narrative benefits of the other handbook.
Hmm, I wonder if the handbook claimed by Fighter in his origin story and the Patreon one are one and the same, or separate books (with separate ‘backstories’ as well).
Fighter is the reasonable person in the room? What form of doppelganger, illusion or mental domination is this?!
It’s not, he’s just being lazy and also there is nothing to kill in this room.
I guess I fall on the meaner side… or I try to. I specifically do not allow “detect magic scans” to identify magic items (on the rationale that the spell only detects active magic effects), and if players don’t explicitely investigate the flavour-text-device where the thing is hidden (and roll successfully), then they don’t get the loot.
But, if this works it is only because of a general understanding between the players and I that if they miss loot I will give more opportunities to aquire it and conversely, if they are hoarding a lot and are loaded down with cool gear, they will find loot becomes much, much more sparse. It’s not a situation where they can be completist.
As for a story of this going wrong… a couple of months ago, at the end of a 2-year campaign, the heroes were battling their way through the big bad’s citadel looking to stop the end of the world etc, and they knew that there was somewhere a stash with some items that would give a major boon in the final fight. This was the gear that has belonged to one of their NPC friends who had heroically died to buy them a bit of time some sessions earlier, and his tortured ghost had told them exactly what to look for and what to do with it. There was a whole demiplane vault full of goodies and even a chance for a free rest before the last fight!
And so, the party were studiously knocking on every wall and poking at every flagstone as they ascended the last tower. I was getting exhausted sof the interminable investigate checks, but had the party’s rouge/arcane archer make them automatically each time he checked a new 15-ft square. At +12, with advantage, I assumed it was just a formality to find the DC15 door. He passed all the checks easily… except for the very one in the place where the loot was actually hidden.
And the players didn’t think twice – they’d gotten so usex to the monotonous check-walk-check that they just ignored the 13/14 result and moved on, while I had to keep a straight face. They went right on up to the big bad still thinking thery would surely soon fi md their loot and their tea break opportunity – until they stepped out on to the roof under an omnious stormy sky and the fallen angel swooped at them.
The sense of betrayed trust was palpable. They’d all but been promised a boon and had (they thought) been exhaustively thorough in making sure they collected. I’ll admit I was thrilled to have them go into the final fight unprepared (and still win, thanks to the heroic sacrifice of our gruff Ukranian barbarian)… but I fear it might escalate the inane searching rolls even further when I play with the group again!
I sometimes let the monsters be wielding/wearing the treasure. One party became so notorious for “Detect magic–glowies go in the bag” –even interrupting the description of treasure at times to just mutter “In the bag,” that I made sure to include a haunted item. It took them half of a session to figure out which piece of swag it was that kept spawning the undead that would pop out of their bag of holding every time they opened it.
I like to make the treasure easy to find yet hard to master. Puzzle boxes, riddles, oddly-activated magic items. Things they have to pay attention to. My latest magic treasure was a sentient sword, easy to find since it was loudly bemoaning its position under the corpse of its past wielder. It introduced itself with “I am the blade of all truth. I am a benign entity.”
Well it is benign, and it is the blade of all truth, but you can imagine how little my players trusted it. Thing is, the sword periodically asks its wielder what is true. The sword knows all objective truths, and can make new truths, as long as they don’t contradict current known truths. So saying “I am dead” doesn’t work, since you are known to be alive. However saying “I know magic” works, since it can’t be proven up to that point that you don’t. And then the sword grants that as a wish, essentially, and gives you a random spell.
Of course, this would be an insanely powerful item, but luckily my players have still yet to figure it out. So far, the only truth the sword has accepted as non-contradicting is “I don’t know”. Vague, I know, that’s why it’s fun.
Rule 1 of the Rogue’s Handbook. Always carry a crowbar and fire extinguisher.
Take everything, even if it’s nailed down and on fire.
While I don’t do much hidden treasure I do have two repelpahnt anecdotes.
In the first case the dungeon was a Yuan-Ti stronghold. All the loot was hidden in a secret room hidden behind the throne. (Throne rooms are virtually guaranteed to have secret doors.) The throne room was an isolated room at the end of a long hallway. During a boss fight with an Anethema and a Pureblood Mage the Warlock had a brilliant idea: cast Sickening Radiance over the entire throne room, and just have the party wait outside. Little did the party know that the Mage had snuck into the hidden treasury to loot as much as they could, and then Dimension Door‘d out of the dungeon. I felt bad denying them their loot, but it made perfect sense in-context.
In another dungeon the party was MacGuffin hunting in an Illithid colony. Illithids don’t care much for material wealth so there wouldn’t be much to loot, but they were being paid to be there, so I figured it would be fair. The party had killed the Elder Brain and confronted the Illithid Mage with the magical research they needed. Sadly they didn’t kill said mage on-time and they Plane Shift‘d away. Their employer had to spend the money he would have spent on paying them on a pair of scrolls of Plane Shift.