Art from “Excerpts: Hoards” posted by Wizards of the Coast

In the comments to yesterday’s post, regular commentor Jimmy asked:

“I’m bad at placing treasure. Any advice on that?”

You’re not alone, Jimmy. I’m bad at placing treasure too! I even wrote about it just a few months back:

“I also have a bad habit of being a great deal more generous with treasure than I ought to be, because I’m worried about keeping my players engaged in the adventure if they don’t feel suitably rewarded.”

It hasn’t been long since I wrote that, but if I do say so myself, I think I’ve improved a great deal. I’m sure many GMs would scoff at how wealthy I’ve allowed my players to become. But I no longer feel as though treasure “gets away from me.” A lot of different elements come together to support this, so I’ll go over them and hopefully some of what has helped me will help you.

Traditional Dungeon Crawling.

Like many young GMs, the dungeon crawl for which the game was named didn’t interest me when I began crafting adventures. Its only within the last year that I’ve reflected on my own gaming history, and realized that I’d avoided many of the fundamental experiences of D&D which are commonly considered “played out.”

My first real dungeon crawling experience was a mere 6 months ago when I began playing in Vaults of Pahvelorn. Since that experience, I’ve worked similar dungeons into my own games. Dungeons with fifty or a hundred rooms, each of which must be navigated slowly to avoid traps, and carefully examined for hints.

The traditional dungeon crawl is limiting in a good way. It reduced the game to its core elements: the players want treasure, and the environment wants to kill them. The rooms are puzzles where failure means death and success means gold. The obfuscation of heroism is torn away and the game’s foundations are laid bare.

There are many different kinds of adventures, and most of them can be fun. But having thoroughly experienced the game in its fundamental state, I now have a much better grasp for what players must do to earn their treasure.

Greater Rewards Require Greater Trials

It’s easy to get into the first room of the dungeon. Any treasure found there will be minor, if there’s any treasure to find at all. After all: it’s easy. Many adventurers have come this far before you, and would have carried off anything of value long ago. If you want to find some of the good treasure, you’ll need to make your way past deadly traps and merciless monsters which have scared off or killed the adventurers who came before you.

The really good treasure will be behind secret doors, and guarded by deadly monsters or traps.

Gold, Hidden in Non-Gold Form

When we think of hidden treasure, we think of secret alcoves, and gems buried in a pile of fireplace ash. But this is only the most obvious way of hiding treasure. A much better way is to hide treasure in plain sight, as books, fine clothing, land deeds, exotic animals, bags of spices, or any other number of possibilities.

Recognizing treasure is part of the game’s challenge. You can tell your players flat-out that they find 3 silk gowns when they open the dusty armoire. They may or may not realize they’re looking at 300 gold pieces worth of tailoring.

Encumbrance!

While I confess I still struggle with encumbrance in my games, it cannot be undervalued. The character’s income is limited by their carrying capacity. In a society where learning has largely been lost, the discovery of an ancient library deep underground could be worth more than a dragon’s hoard! But books are heavy. How many can each PC actually carry themselves?

Make the players think about whether they’d like to take multiple trips, or hire a crew to get it all out in one go. Make them wonder if the treasure will still be there if they turn their back on it for a few hours. These are interesting choices for the players to face, and go a long way towards maintaining a reasonable level of wealth for them.

Missed Treasure is Forever Lost

Let your players miss treasure, and never hint that they missed it. It may be difficult as fuck, and I’m not perfect about it, but I’ve found it to be an essential skill to practice. I take immense delight in hiding treasure as well as I can without making it downright impossible to find. (with a fair scattering of less difficult to find treasure to keep my players from getting discouraged).

Often, this means my players miss out on a really cool magical sword or badass piece of artwork that I was looking forward to them finding. But that’s okay, because you can always use that treasure again later. And when they do find some of the better hidden treasure, it’s exciting. Both for them, and you.

1d6 For Wasting Time

In keeping with oldschool rules, roll 1d6 once every 10 minutes of in-game time. If a 1 is rolled, then the players encounter a monster appropriate to the area they’re in. If that’s too much fighting for your game, bump the die up to 1d8 or 1d10. The important thing is that there is a penalty for wasting time. The players can search every 10′ square segment of wall in the entire dungeon for secret doors a dozen times over if they please. But they’re going to encounter a shit-ton of monsters while doing it.

Making time a resource which the players have to be careful about wasting, makes them more focused on their goals, and less likely to search for treasure by process of elimination. This means that more of your hidden treasure will stay hidden as noted by the point above. And while I’m never happy to see my players miss out on something cool, I would rather reward smart play than time wasting.

1d6 For Cleverness

Sometimes, while exploring a room looking for treasure, players will look in a place that the GM never even considered. And sometimes that hiding spot is so damned clever that the GM decides they’re going to remember it so they can use it in the future. When that happens, I roll 1d6. On a 6, I tell the player they find a small amount of treasure, despite the fact that I never placed any there.

The treasure they find is usually pretty minimal. A sack of 20 gold pieces or a small gemstone worth about that much.

Budget by Section

This is an idea I just thought of today, so I’ve not tried it, but it seems as though it would be helpful.

Divide your dungeon (or other adventuring area) into whatever sections seem natural. For most dungeons, a single level of the dungeon would probably be most appropriate. Determine what level you think your players ought to reach for completing that section of the dungeon. Look up how much gold the players should have at that point on the wealth-by-level table, then increase that value by 50% to account for the treasure the players probably won’t find.

The resulting gold-piece value should be the sum-total of all the treasure in that section.

Does anybody else have tips? I could still use some improvement myself!

EDIT: Generally speaking I prefer not to edit posts once they’ve gone up, but I’ve just remembered an entire section I had intended to add to this post, and completely forgot about. Apparently I didn’t add it to my notes!

Hoards are for Dragons

Sometimes its appropriate to make a big pile of treasure, or “Treasure Hoard.” A hoard will typically represent multiple types of treasure, and require a great feat of skill to obtain. Hoards should not be the default method of placing treasure. Most treasure should be found piece-by-piece. A coinpurse in this room, a valuable painting in the next. These smaller items are still exciting to find, and they provide context for the day that the players finally do discover a true hoard of treasure.

If every chest contains an assortment of gold, gems, and magic items; then such treasure is the player’s expectation, when it should be a coveted and exciting accomplishment.

Illustration by Erol Otus, from the D&D Basic Set by Holmes. (Thanks, Fotzie!)

During my most recent pathfinder game, a number of my players were absent. Among them was the group’s sorceress, Phoenix Darkmatter. Her absence was particularly relevant because the primary quest of the party currently revolves around her. Without her there to participate, I assumed that the party would want to pursue some other goal, so prior to the game I prepared a number of quest threads in the town they had ended their last adventure in. True to form, however, they completely bypassed everything I had prepared. As I had predicted, they didn’t want to continue the arachnohomnid quest line without Phoenix, but they weren’t even slightly interested in protecting dwarven caravans either. No, this party of low level adventurers recalled hearing about a lich which lived in the southern lands, and determined that killing it would be an appropriate use of their time.

The rogue participated only under strong (and well justified) protest.

Fortunately, a random roll of the dice brought the party to their senses. After nearly being killed by a pack of wolves they randomly encountered while crossing the planes, they settled on a more reasonable goal: find out why the nearby forest was filled with half-ogre monstrosities. It’s a quest thread I had introduced in one of our first sessions. They had never seemed particularly interested in it before. I had to leave the room for a moment to find some of my older notes related to that quest–and what I had was not much. A mad wizard with ogre minions had taken up residence in the ancient elven ruins of Gorak Torar, where he was experimenting on transforming the local Gnoll population into Ogre-kin servants for himself. That’s all I had.

Oh, and the ruins were made of blue-white stone. Because this place was not at all a ripoff of Dire Maul.

The players asked intelligent questions and quickly found a trail of clues leading them to the ruins themselves. They’re starting to get too good at this game, I can’t rely on them fumbling about for too long while I find my bearings. It didn’t take them long after finding the ruins to gravitate towards the large building at the center, and make their way into the dungeon beneath it. A dungeon which I had absolutely no plans whatsoever for. So I improvised.

I’ve always prided myself on my improvisational skill, and everyone enjoyed themselves. It was easily the most fun I’ve had recently, and my players were still talking about the adventure a couple days later. Once the game was over, and I had a moment to review my performance, I went over my methodology for creating the dungeon, and retroactively codified 8 rules I had used to help me go about the task.

1. Steal. Do it rampantly, and do it shamelessly. Even if you were to completely rip off the layout of an environment your players were intimately familiar with, it’s not likely that they would notice. And if you change a room shape here, and add a few more doors there, a dungeon layout lifted from another game becomes completely unrecognizable.
2. Don’t make the dungeon fancy, just make it. Don’t waste a bunch of your time thinking about how to make things interesting, or how to create a theme, or complicated multi-room puzzles. You don’t have time. Draw corridors, draw doors, draw rooms, and figure out what’s in them. That’s all you have time for. If you want to add depth, do something simple like a locked door, or a key hanging on the wall. Then you can easily insert the matching element later.
3. Read -C’s PDF guide On Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design. The Empty Rooms part is particularly important. Commit as much of this PDF to memory as you can, and use it.
4. While your players are discussing amongst themselves what they want to do in a given room, that’s your opportunity to figure out what’s behind all of the room’s doors. You don’t need to pay attention to everything they say, but you should already know what’s behind every door of the room they’re in.
5. You don’t need to worry about anything beyond the rooms which are adjacent to the one your players are in. There’s no need to waste time detailing a room which they might never even get near to. If you have spare time, focus your attention on adding details to the rooms you’ve already got. Something like a trap, a secret door, or some unusual monster or treasure adds depth to your dungeon.
6. Restroom breaks are a perfect opportunity to expand your map.
7. Select a small number of enemy types, maybe 2-3, and have those creatures constitute most of the dungeon’s population. Some rooms might have a special monster of some kind, but a small number monster types repeated gives the dungeon a sense of consistency. Don’t be afraid to put those monsters in a variety of situations, though.
8. If your players are looking for something in particular, it will not necessarily be along the path they take through the dungeon. They will likely pass a number of doors on their way through the dungeon, and it could easily be beyond one of those. If you’d like to handle this with as much agency as possible, roll a D6 each time the players descend to a new level. On a roll of 5-6 (or 4-6 for smaller dungeons) what the players are looking for is on that level of the dungeon. And each time the players enter a new room on that level, roll a D20. On a roll of 19-20, what the players are looking for is in that particular room.

These are just the rules I came up with off the top of my head during the game. I’d be curious to know if anyone else has similar methods, or tips on how I could improve my own!

“The Problem with Diversity” is not the kind of post title I ever would have expected to see on Papers & Pencils. The site just doesn’t have enough confederate flag icons to justify that sort of thing. I mean, fuck, I’m the kind of hippie who uses words like ‘privilege,’ and ‘cisgendered.’ Yet there it is, and here we go: there is too much racial diversity in modern fantasy gaming, and it’s hurting us.

Allow me to be perfectly clear: I do not mean ethnic diversity. Frankly, I think we could use a few more black elves. It’s pretty fucked up that the only ones we have live underground and worship an evil spider goddess. I get that drow are not intended to have any connection to real-life black people, but that doesn’t make it much better. And while we’re at it, some Asian dwarfs might be cool. So, with regards to ethnic diversity, we need more. It’s racial diversity which we need less of. Racial as in the human race and the dwarven race and the elven race, etcetera.

Most large towns or cities in most fantasy games are expected to have a variety of humanoid species present. Often they’ll have a primary race which exists in the majority, but a “human” city could easily have a population which is 15% dwarves, 10% elves, 8% gnomes, and 5% miscellaneous. I’m not sure what compels us to do this. Maybe we’re all instinctively creating allegories for the real world and trying to craft diverse cultures where everybody gets along. Or maybe we’re just being children who mix 10 flavors of soft drink together and think it’ll taste amazing. (Hint: it doesn’t).

The races of a fantasy world are different. Far more different than any real-world humans might be. Regarding the aforementioned human city, why would enough dwarves to constitute 15% of its population choose to live there? To a dwarf, human cities are ugly and uncomfortable. A dwarf is used to being underground, where even outside of their home there’s still a roof over their heads. Dwarves enjoy the natural beauty of stone formations and mineral deposits, not the natural beauty of flowers and trees. The elves make just as little sense. Elven cities incorporate much more nature into their design than human cities do. And why would a creature who will live thousands of years want to live in a place where most of their neighbors will die of old age in just a few short decades?

The problem with diversity is spawned from another problem more well documented in the tabletop community: the problem of humans in funny hats. It’s hard to see the world from a different perspective–that’s absolutely true. I have a hard enough time putting myself in the shoes of a woman, and I’ve lived with and around women all of my life. The idea of being able to put myself into the shoes of someone who grew up in a completely different culture from me is almost too much to conceive of. And a dwarf? A completely different species with a completely different evolutionary history, living in a completely different kind of world? There’s undoubtedly more to them than short, strong, taciturn humans with Scottish accents.

Gary Gygax realized this. Which is why 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons is explicitly described as a “Human-Centric” game. Now, personally, I don’t like the extremes Gary went to. I don’t like the idea of race being used as class, I don’t think races should have an inherent alignment (at least not an absolute one), and I don’t think we should view other races as being less important to the game than humans are. However, as I’ve mentioned before, we do need to make a concerted effort to make each fantasy race distinct. Part of that is that they should all live separately.

I sometimes feel as though modern fantasy is trying to emulate the cantina scene from Star Wars, without understanding that scene’s full effects. On the one hand, the cantina scene shows us just how diverse the Star Wars universe is. We’re overwhelmed by the amount of fantastic creatures we encounter all at once, and we gain a better appreciation for how large and varied this universe is. Everybody understands that part, and it certainly seems like something we’d want in a fantasy game. The second element of the scene, however, is that nobody cares. Aside from Luke, the wide-eyed farm boy, none of the characters give the slightest indication that the scene before them is as impressive to them as it is to the audience. And even Luke just walks up to the bar and orders a drink. So yes, that scene shows us just how diverse the universe is. But it also shows us that diversity is old news. The various species of the galaxy have lived with each other for so long that they’re all on pretty familiar terms. Is that really what we want in a fantasy world? By placing humans, elves, dwarves, and the rest into a single environment and making them as bored with one another as the species in the Star Wars cantina, we take away a lot of what makes them interesting to us in the first place.

Now, I’m not saying there should be no mixing of the species at all, but it should be much less frequent. Two or three orders of magnitude less frequent. For example, a human settlement could have a 1% chance per 1000 people to have [population/1000]d4 member of a different species living there. As an example, a city with 10,000 people would have a 10% chance of having 10d4 dwarves living there. And those dwarves would probably be outcasts among their people, or have some other extreme reason for living amongst humans. Greater diversity could always be achieved in other ways as well: a human city might have a delegation of 100 elven diplomats in residence. Halfling merchants may frequent the town to sell their fine textiles. Or perhaps there’s a gnomish settlement half a day’s travel away, and only one of the two towns has a high level cleric. But regardless, the different races should live apart, not together, except in special circumstances.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to run their game. There’s nothing worse than somebody who thinks it’s possible to have fun “the wrong way.” But I sincerely believe that most games would be more fun with better distinction between fantasy races. I’ve certainly been guilty of shoehorning pointless amounts of racial diversity into my game’s settlements. But I’ve known for awhile now that it reduced the impact of my game worlds. It’s only now that I’ve put it into words that I can say with conviction that I am officially done with it.