This image combines an Egyptian bracelet image by Zorro4 from Pixabay with an agate background image by Ludwig Willimann from Pixabay, photo-manipulation by Mike.

Some History

It used to be so simple, back when I first started GMing AD&D.

Each monster had a treasure type, and each treasure type had a table (or sequence of tables) that you rolled on, and a set of rolls on that table determined what treasure would be found in the vicinity. Room, Inhabitant, Treasure, Rinse, Repeat – easy!

The cracks in this edifice began to show very quickly – the first time a monster rolled up a treasure that they should logically use (instead of the crappy default weapon his race was normally stuck with).

And then, monsters with Treasures they should run from, screaming, or drop into the deepest, darkest bog that they could find. Weapons that were anathema to their kind. Armor that conferred immunity to their greatest attack. Like, any rational entity was going to leave those lying around. Pull the other one, it has bells on.

In the original DMG, there was also a table to indicate how much treasure a humanoid NPC with levels should have on them. That was fine, because such didn’t get a treasure type, they got this stuff instead. And, unless you decided otherwise for some reason, all the goodies were on or about their person, making them easier to find.

Some More History

Then I went away and did other things for a long time. But I did design a new D&D campaign, with the full intention of using AD&D once again. I knew and understood those rules, I knew where the weak points were, and what changes I would be introducing through house rules.

When I finally found the time and players to bring this new campaign to life, I was persuaded – somewhat reluctantly – to use the 2nd Edition AD&D Rules, even though I didn’t have a copy and hadn’t read them. It was, according to the most insistent player, just “AD&D with some of the bugs fixed”.

This was supposed to start out as a magic-light campaign and slowly gather magic as the party went further and further afield. After all, virtually every magic item in existence had become a fused lump of base metal in an apocalypse a little over 100 years earlier, and at the same time, Elves and Dwarves virtually vanished and mages were banished (and usually lynched) because they got blamed for said apocalypse. That eliminated most of the sources of magical equipment, so it stood to reason that magic would be lower level and far less widespread than in a standard campaign..For a while, things seemed to go okay. Bit by bit, though, things started to escape control.

Systemic Woes

And so, even though I had never GM’d the game system, and hadn’t read it in about 20 years, the decision was made to port the campaign to Rolemaster, on the grounds that it was designed to be closer to the magic-light environment that was supposed to contain the campaign.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Character conversion didn’t take the PCs back to where I thought they should be at that point in the campaign, it took them to a point equivalent to what they had achieved, perpetuating the problems and compounding them with other difficulties.

Less than a year later, the whole campaign transitioned again, this time to D&D 3rd edition. For the most part, this conversion was a success, though the characters seemed to have gained about 5 levels in process – and, unlike AD&D, and 2nd Ed, these levels were capped to a maximum of twenty. What’s more, the players demanded that their characters be equipped with things that were deemed reasonable for PCs of their level, according to the DMG.

I compromised, since it was about time for magic to start becoming more widespread than it had been before in the campaign. Where the book suggested a +3 or +4 item, it became a +1 or +2. Once again, this didn’t reset the characters to what they should have been, but it didn’t mess things up too much in the treasure department, only in the character levels department.

The new system didn’t incorporate the old Treasure Type tables, which I would have happily house-ruled to bring my campaign planning into fully-formed existence. Instead, there were a more universal set of tables in play. The problem was that the guidelines offered in the text and in the different tables didn’t match up with each other. If I set an encounter at a level that provided a suitable challenge to the PCs and was appropriate for the in-game circumstances, it came with a bucket-load of loot, and earned lots and lots of XP to boot. A large part of this discrepancy arose because of the game-system contortions, I admit, but it was an in-game reality.

In particular, it was really difficult to reconcile the treasure levels given in monster descriptions with the treasure tables in the DMG. It didn’t help that certain rooms had their own treasures provided as necessary decorations, or that monster treasures were entirely too easy to find, because I had not yet discovered the truth about the DC scales provided by the rules – which worked fine at low character levels but broke down hopelessly at higher levels.

The Bigger Picture

In part, these problems can be laid at the altar of inexperience with the game system. I was literally learning it “on the fly”.

But set that aside.

The popularity of articles like With An Evil Gleam: Giving Treasure a Personality and all the articles that were offered when the Blog Carnival topic was Making The Loot Part Of The Plot (including no less than six articles here at Campaign Mastery) – the link is to the roundup page; unfortunately, all too many of the sites are no longer in existence – shows that I’m not alone in being interested in the subject.

I’ve already suggested uncoupling XP from encounters (see Objective-Oriented Experience Points). I was thinking about that while writing last week’s article on Random Encounters, when an even more radical proposal came to mind – and that’s the subject of today’s article.

Why not uncouple treasure from the encounters, too?

A reality check of the most brutal kind

The loot that should be recoverable after an encounter should be the intersection of three different considerations: What the PCs can find of what was there for them to find, what was there for them to find because the encounter had collected it, and what the encounter had collected out of what was there for them to choose from.

Those treasure tables sure pack an awful lot of unsubstantiated assumptions into their nice simple figures, don’t they?

If the primo loot was never there in the first place, it can’t become part of a creature’s hoard.

Even if something was there, the creature will obviously either use it, destroy it, trade it, or conceal it.

If they conceal it, it may be hidden nearby or it might not.

If they use it, they may not actually have it on them – they might use it to bait a trap, or to lure dangerous enemies closer to a more deadly encounter.

Even if they use it in the traditional manner, the item may have been lost or stolen in the meantime. (The party in my Fumanor campaign at one point attracted the attention of a high-level rogue, who correctly tagged them as a pack of up-and-comers. While they were busy dealing with an encounter, he was carefully and secretly filching the best of the loot that was on offer. They never figured this out. It was only when he lost their trail in the depths of the Drow City that their treasures returned to “normal”).

If they can’t destroy it, the next best thing is putting it in the most inaccessible location the creature can reach. How many would-be thieves are really going to spend round after round groping around in that river of lava looking for dumped magic items?

There are, therefore, multiple factors eroding the retained treasure relative to what was there to begin with.

Then we get to the whole question of where the creature keeps it’s goodies. Does it bury them? Hide them on shelves? Disguise them? In one place, or dispersed over many places?

Because the searching is tedious, GMs tend to hand-wave it and simply list the treasure that’s available to be found as the treasure that has been found – I know, I’ve done it myself. If the entire party rolls, to search, and only one of them needs to succeed in order for them all to succeed, the odds of failure quickly become vanishingly small.

I don’t know about your players, but once mine found some treasure – any treasure – they tended to assume that was all that there was to find, and moved on. Smarter creatures used to leave a few “trinkets” (and a few things they had misidentified as trinkets) where they could be found relatively easily so that their main cache went undiscovered. Not that it helped the creatures much – most of them would have been killed by the PCs long before this loot was found.

The point is, of course, that the treasure tables are blatantly unrealistic and PC-friendly compared to anything even remotely realistic.

The History Of Each Object

In theory, if you can back-trace the path taken by each object to get to where it is when the PCs find it, you can make the entire campaign a far richer experience for the PCs. Arcana skills become knowledge of this history, once this unique item is identified, and each item is made a whole lot more special as a result.

The downside is that this is an impractical amount of work. I can see the potential upside quite clearly, and in my opinion, it isn’t enough.

What’s needed is to shortcut the process, killing off as much of that extra prep requirement as possible.

After tossing the problem around a time or two, I’ve come up with a two-pronged attack.

    1. Create Legendary Artisans
    2. Histories of Key Items only

    Create Legendary Artisans

    A legendary artisan is one who was so skilled that his handiwork is still routinely found, today. There should be a legendary sword-smith, a legendary armorer or two, a legendary leather-worker, a legendary potion brewer, a legendary wand-maker, and one or two more – a legendary weapon-maker, for example. Most if not all of these should be long-dead.

    Each should have some distinguishing trademark by which their handiwork can be recognized.

    And, finally, each should have a percentage chance of any given loot of the appropriate type being their handiwork. This need not be all that high – 5-10% – for the name to quickly be recognized. In general, the more ubiquitous a loot item is, or the more diverse, the lower the percentage needs to be. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with your Legendary Sword-smith being responsible for 25 or 30% of the blades that have survived the eons, if you want to.

    Personally, I think that level of productivity probably takes away the uniqueness and becomes suggestive of an industrialized process – churning out low-end magic items to empty the wallets of tourists. If that’s you guy’s personality, then fine – but otherwise, reign in that enthusiasm a little.

    This sort of detail is clearly what the authors of D&D, from 3.0 onwards, had in mind – the process of creating a magic item makes that clear with the need to create a Masterwork item. But it’s never carried to its logical conclusion.

    A Problem Of Population

    The sheer number of magic items that would be present in a typical game world is at odds with the concept.

    If nine out of every ten characters survives to achieve their next level, we get:

    which could be more usefully stated:

    Log (Ln) = Log (L[n-a]++0.04575749a

    So, to get one character of tenth level, we would expect there to be 10^1.4575749 = 28.6797 first level characters out there. Seems reasonable.

    To get one character of fifteenth level, we need 43 first level characters.

    To get ten characters of twentieth level, 74.02737 first level characters – and 82.25 zeroth level characters.

    If you do the math, one twentieth-level character requires 82 zeroth + 74 first + 67 second + 60 third + 54 fourth + 49 fifth + 44 sixth + 39 seventh + 35 eighth + 32 ninth + 29 tenth + 26 eleventh + 23 twelfth + 21 thirteenth + 19 fourteenth + 17 fifteenth + 15 sixteenth + 14 seventeenth + 12 eighteenth + 11 nineteenth + the 10 at twentieth, or a total population of 733 (according to my quick math).

    Let’s say that on top of that, each of these needs 10 people to feed, clothe, and equip them, and another person doing the admin. And someone needs to be in charge, so 1 nobleman. That carries us up to 8796 people.

    So, in a kingdom of 100,000 people, there would be 113 or 114 such twentieth level people – each with, according to the DMG guidelines, something like 80,000 gp worth of magic gear. That’s 9 million, 120 thousand gp of loot floating around in the world.

    In a kingdom of 1 million, there would be 1137 twentieth-level characters and 90 million, 960 thousand GP worth of treasure amongst them.

    Okay, you say, that all sound reasonable. And then you realize that this means that the average wealth per citizen – counting everyone (except the level twenty characters) as having nothing – is more than 90 GP per head.

    The problem gets worse if you factor in the assumed wealth of all the other character levels. That almost 91 million becomes 596,834,040 gp – or almost 600gp per head.

    And that’s still with every peasant and noble and churchman and tradesman and salesman who doesn’t have character levels supposedly having nothing. Which I find very hard to believe.

    With these survival rates and this level of wealth, that Kingdom of 1 million doesn’t really need to have any sort of economy other than adventurers going out and bringing back goodies.

    The common-sense solution is to say that these NPCs form an economic hierarchy at least equal to that of the adventuring population, and probably several times it – five or six times sounds about right. If you do that, then adventuring becomes a minor part of the economy, important for other reasons, but no more-so than wheat or mining or livestock or land or trade.

    What’s more, social mobility up the economic scale is likely to be a lot harder to achieve – the equivalent of a far lower survival rate. If only 1 in 10 achieves the next step in social standing, then for every noble with 80,000 gp in goodies, times that factor of five or six to get 480,000 gp or so, you need 10,000,000,000 peasants with nothing.

    That 1-million-people kingdom has become a 10-billion-people problem. We don’t have that many people on the entire earth right now!

    Which simply means that 1 in 10 is too harsh. Maybe it’s one in five, yielding a bottom-of-the-heap population count of 9,765,625. Suddenly, that’s sounding a lot more reasonable, if still a little high.

    But you can’t reduce it too much, or adventuring becomes a disproportionate share of the economy.

    There are lots of variables that you can play around with – even reducing the adventuring survival rate from 90% to 89% has a significant effect, increasing the numbers at the bottom of the pyramid a lot faster than those at the top.

    If you’re really interested, get yourself a spreadsheet and start calculating the parameters of Kingdoms in your game world. And be prepared to lose a lot of time, it tends to suck you in.

    Of course, all this stems from my gut feeling that an average of 90 gp a head is way too high, that it should be more like 4 or 5 gp a head, average, or less.

    For our purposes, it’s enough to say that there’s a LOT of money out there. And that’s the problem – if the typical 15th level character has 22,000 gp and the typical 18th level character has 47,000 gp, how many 15th-level characters does the 18th level character need to bump off to have more wealth than most 20th-level characters (80,000 gp)?

    Two.

    Just two.

    Yet, the disparity in levels means that you would expect the eighteenth-level character to win seven days a week and twice on Sunday. In terms of risk-vs-reward, the reward WAY outweighs the risks – if you can tell what level a character is from the gear they are carrying.

    If you try and analyze table 3-3 in the 3.0 DMG, it seems to be all over the place. The first four levels are linear multiples of 300gp, at level five, that goes up to 320, and at level six, 333.3. If you plot the table on a graph, however, you get a surprisingly orderly result.

    Plot of Treasure per encounter against EL

    Anyone who remembers any high-school maths will glance at that and say “that looks like an exponential curve”. It might be something else, but as a first guess, that seems pretty good.

    Graphing the Log of the treasure values is even more revealing:

    Plot of the Logarithm (base 10) of Treasure per encounter, vs EL

    From level 3 onwards, this is essentially a straight line (at least to the eye), confirming an exponential relationship. What’s more, Level 2 isn’t that far removed from that straight line – but it is noticeably just a little lower. The one case where the results have clearly been massaged is first level, and that’s entirely forgivable. No doubt a ruler applied to a printout would uncover all sorts of minor bumps and shallows, caused by rounding – every value on the chart has been rounded to a value in the hundreds.

    These are results that you clearly would not have expected, just from looking at the raw numbers, which demonstrates the usefulness of the graph as an analytic tool.

    An exponential or a geometric curve is exactly what you would expect to find, in any event. The question that needs to be posed is whether or not that curve is too flat? Perhaps whole thing should be shifted to the left so that the “bend” (where vertical increases become larger than the horizontal) should happen at 10th level and not 16th?

    This would give a higher value for 20th level – I estimate it to be roughly 10^5.4 (using the log graph), which equals 251200 (rounding to ’00’). But we can scale everything proportionately, simply by multiplying the results by 80,000 and dividing by 251,200. Better yet, we could neaten things by setting the 20th level to 100,000gp.

    If I do that, I get

    EL Official
    Result
    Calculated
    Result
    80k Result 100k Result
    1 300 787 500 570
    2 600 1033 600 750
    3 900 1356 800 1000
    4 1200 1780 1000 1300
    5 1600 2335 1400 1700
    6 2000 3065 1800 2200
    7 2600 4022 2300 2900
    8 3400 5279 3100 3800
    9 4500 6928 4000 5000
    10 5800 9092 5300 6600
    11 7500 11932 6900 8700
    12 9800 15659 9100 11400
    13 13000 20550 11900 14900
    14 17000 26969 15700 19600
    15 22000 35393 20600 25700
    16 28000 46449 27000 33700
    17 36000 60958 35400 44200
    18 47000 80000 46400 58100
    19 61000 104989 61000 76200
    20 80000 137784 80000 100000

    What’s clear, looking at these results, which were derived using the average change in the logarithm results from 3rd level through 20th (because it gave the nice, neat total of 2.125, well almost) is that until quite high levels, the 80k adjusted result is low by almost exactly the amount that the 100k result is high – so 90k would probably yield the best fit to the existing table. But I don’t care about the existing table, I want neatness.

    The first level results will still need to be massaged – the 80k adjustment to 300, and the 100k to 500.

    From 3rd level to 18th level, the 80k adjusted results are down – encounters would be worth less treasure. The amounts start small – 100, 200 gp worth – but ramp up massively from 13th to 16th levels, with differences of -1100, -1300, -1400, and -1000. But there’s a difference of 500gp or more from level 9 all the way to level 18.

    The 100K results are different. Every level gives more than the existing table, so if you are looking at this as a way to control treasure disbursements, you will need to find another – increasing the value of magic items MIGHT be the better way, but is a double-edged sword. The best method is a magic tax – 10% of the value to the crown every time a magic item is bought or sold. This puts the price of magic items up for the purposes of allocation, but puts them down for the purposes of PCs actually selling loot. And puts them up again if the PCs commission or buy magic goodies, to boot.

    For the most part, the differences between the official numbers and the 100k results aren’t all that great – 100gp, 200gp – until 6th level. Then it’s +300, +400, +500, +800, and it all rockets up from there.

    So, let’s revisit the question I posed earlier: how many 15th-level characters would an 18th-level character have to pillage before he had more gp / loot than the average 20th level character? The official numbers say 2 – but, in fact, that puts him a long way over; the truth is one-and-a-half.

    With the 80k adjustment, he gets 20,600 from a 15th level character, and he needs 80,000 minus 46,400 or 34,600. So the answer is still 2, or more like 1.7.

    With the 100k adjustment, he gets 25,700 and he needs 100k-58,100 or 41,900. Still only two, but the real number is about 1.6.

    So both the changes provide a better answer to the problem without being completely satisfactory – and the 80K adjustment is the best of them.

    Once again, feel free to set up your own spreadsheets and start playing around – and the same warning applies – prepare to lose a LOT of time. A base log value of 2.54 and a change of approximately 0.12 per EL will get you started. The lower the base, the lower the 1st level value; the higher the value per EL, the faster the curve will rise. The second is VERY sensitive.

    Histories of Key Items only

    Major caches might have one “signature” item per 25,000 of value. It’s worth thinking about the history of that one item. Your 20th level character will probably have 3 of them, and a 20% chance of a fourth. Fewer than 1% would have five.

    These are items whose history can be discerned from details of the construction, decoration, and makers’ marks, at least in part – it might not be clear how they came to be where the PCs find them!

    I’m fond of the idea of a mad alchemist whose potions are always in a bottle of green glass. Sometimes his healing potions are an ointment, sometimes you have to quaff them. He was notorious for adding little “extras” to his potions – sometimes enhancing their effectiveness, sometimes ruining them. He never took notes – not any that survived, anyway – so you never know quite what you’re going to get out of one of his bottles.

    Give your Legendary Artisans personalities and find ways to reflect those personalities in the items they crafted. And let the rest be fairly generic.

To each Level, treasures!

The major reform is this: the Objective-Oriented XP system already defines an adventure as being worth sufficient XP to gain X number of levels, then divides that down to individual encounters, whose values are thus measured in terms of the advantage or detriment they pose to the completion of the adventure.

If you look up the resulting number of character levels on the chart, you get the total value of loot – that’s gold, gems, and magic – for completing the adventure. Multiply by the number of PCs to get the total on offer. Subtract the value of any goodies that the NPCs are actually using against the PCs (but don’t count any that they simply have on hand). The rest can be distributed anywhere within the adventure that the GM sees fit. There will be some temptation to make the end-of-adventure reward extra juicy with a disproportionate share of the loot value – resist the urge. If anything, since that already has a major reward – enough XP to gain a level – I would be tempted to spice things up elsewhere in the adventure.

Place your treasures, both in time and in space, in places where they make sense in terms of the story, and in terms of the opposition to be faced.

Most GMs do this anyway – but don’t make any allowance for loot that the baddies might be using when they stock their adventures. As a result, treasure quickly VASTLY exceeds the GM’s expectations.

Of course, you can’t have an enemy using something and then deny it to the PCs without good reason. (Which reminds me of another NPC I used at one point, though I forget his name. This guy would pop out of nowhere (Wand of Teleport), attack with a wand that he had looted that was almost out of charges until it ran dry and evaporated, then teleport out again. What the players of the time never realized was that he came with the treasure, and the wands that he was using against them were treasures that the PCs were expected to recover later in the adventure! Somehow, I forget how, they cottoned on to this and exiled him in the Plane Of Mirror Images by screwing with his teleport-escape…)

The power of this proposal is that it makes the connections between opponents and loot completely indirect unless the hostile can use that loot to give the PCs more trouble. The rest can be put in places where it’s sensible for treasure to be hidden – an adjacent room, a wall cavity, inside another (less valuable) treasure, or whatever – even completely outside the dungeon walls if the creature has access.

If the loot on offer using this system seems inadequate, you can increase it, knowingly – and put it in places that will take more than a search roll to find and recover. Your goal is to have the loot that the PCs find match the amount that the system says goes with the character levels that will be achieved – if they only find half the loot, you can double the amount to be potentially found without distress.

You can even rob Peter to pay Paul – if there’s an adventure that seems likely to be short in loot potential, you can knowingly give away a little extra before and after.

Loot means more than treasure

When Johnn and I were working on a more comprehensive taxonomy for Roleplaying Tips, I listed thirty or more types of reward other than “treasure”. Throw in treasure subtypes, like “Magic items” and you have a huge list.

Alas, I no longer have that taxonomy; many of the planning documents from that era were lost in a computer crash when my backups turned out to be corrupted. Nor can I reasonably hope to replicate the many hours of work that we put into that list, back in 2009. So the list below is likely to be a little abridged.

    1. XP

    The standard. Included for the sake of completeness.

    2. Money

    As standard and default as XP.

    3. Mundane Goods

    Often overlooked, these should be a lot more ubiquitous than they usually are. But they are often boring.

    3a. Party Goods

    A couple of bottles of booze and some ready-to-eat snacks that won’t stay edible long enough to sell should always be popular rewards. A sub-type of category 3.

    4. Ornaments & Decorations

    It’s not quite $24 worth of beads, but it’s in the same line. Should offer a circumstantial CHAR buff, the circumstances to be defined by the GM, which can be trickier than it sounds. My advice is to keep it simple.

    5. Exotic Goods

    How much is a jar of spice worth, if it’s a variety few have ever even heard of before? How about a whole set of exotic spices? Or an unusual die – Purple is associated with royalty because the die was so rare, and worth as much as 10x it’s weight in gold. How about seeds from a rare plant – of practical value. People forget how many of our foodstuffs were imported from other lands – everything from tomatoes to rice.

    6. Magic Items

    Another ubiquitous choice, possibly over-used as a reward – because they carry with them the exotic flavor of the fantasy game. But a little goes a long way..

    7. Rare Coins

    A favorite of mine, because unless the players look closely, this will be mistaken for category two. I once ‘slipped’ a wooden coin into a trove; the players threw it away, thinking it worthless. Only later (when I rubbed their noses in it, in character) did they discover that it came from a desperate time when metal was in short supply and was probably worth more than the rest of the trove put together!

    8. Tradable Commodities

    Commercial quantities of something – even as a one-off – are a great way to get the players enmeshed within the commercial realities of trade in the game world. The sheer quantity elevates this from category 3. Examples: 10 bolts of high-quality silk. 40 sacks of beans. 100 cheap long-swords. 75 Quills. A vat of fermenting wine. A set of 6 healing potions that confer an additional +1 per die if all 6 are consumed by different people simultaneously.

    9. Books

    I remember at one point discussing whether or not “rare books” should be a separate category with Johnn. His point was that in this pre-printing press era, all books were hand-copies, or magic copies, making every book rare and valuable. That thought should perpetuate through every detail of every book (scroll, etc) that appears in the game – either it’s an original work, or someone wanted the information within badly enough to hand-duplicate it. An educated man might have two or three books plus his own journals; a collection of 100 books is a major library. This is why the Great Library of Alexandria is vast enough to qualify as a Wonder of the Ancient World. GMs and Players undervalue books massively, our sensibilities tainted by modern publishing capabilities.

    10. Entertainment

    A night’s feasting, getting invited to dine with the royal court, etc make cheap rewards from the point of view of the person giving the reward – and, in theory, a once-in-a-lifetime memory for the PC. Hosting the whole group at once might be seen as giving them too much prominence, but inviting each member in succession is more low-key. And the sequence can be used to score political points, as a bonus.

    11. Expertise

    Almost 2/3 of the list were rewards that could only be bestowed by someone as a reward for services rendered. Johnn thought these should be all lumped together because you couldn’t stick them in a dungeon hoard – until I pointed out that the service in question could be performed in a dungeon. It might be clearing a source of local trouble, it might be the recovery of some family heirloom, it might simply be boosting the economy through the trade in exotic knickknacks. It didn’t have to be rescuing a member of the royal family from bandits or Orcs or whatever.

    “Expertise” is the first of this type of reward – it’s not that the noble has it, or gives it to the PC (that’s covered separately), it’s that he pays or instructs an expert to provide his expertise to the PCs to some restricted degree. It might be “three questions”, it might be “three days”, that doesn’t matter – the point is that it’s not an unlimited resource. If the PCs want more, they will have to go out there and earn it.

    12. Education

    Here we have someone of substance – wealth and/or position – who pays the bills to get a PC some additional skills or expertise.

    The smaller the reward in terms of game mechanics, the more the actual skill acquisition can be hand-waved. Giving someone four extra skill points is fairly major and might represent 6 months to a year of education – that’s fairly hard to skip over, unless all the PCs are doing it at the same time. A single skill point, on this scale, represents about six weeks work – quite possibly with a single lesson a week, and studies and practice the rest of the time. That’s right on the edge of hand-wave territory. Or it might all get done in a single week of intensive attention – that really is a time-frame that can be set aside. Gaining +1 to hit or +1 damage due to training in some exotic combat style is probably the equivalent of those 4 skill points. Converting a cross-class skill into a class skill is comparatively minor, but obviously bigger than a single skill point of extra skill.

    Remember, no matter what your character might be getting out of it, it’s boring to sit around while others are doing something – but not much worse than doing something dull every time the spotlight points your way. On the other hand, various incidents might be intensely memorable and to be roleplayed – so give some thought as to the personality of the instructor and the reactions and identities of his other students.

    It’s also worth contemplating the personality of the person bestowing this reward. If there is some expertise with which he associated, it is a lot easier for him to share that expertise than it is for him to arrange lessons from a master of some other discipline.

    Nor do characters actually have to request this as a reward, contrary to what some GMs seem to think. Once the idea occurs to someone who has to hand out a LOT of rewards for service, they will exploit it to the hilt, regardless of what the character on the receiving end might want.

    13. Servants/Staff

    This is not necessarily any form of slavery, as some people thought when I mentioned this type of reward casually – just because gifts of slaves were common in the era when slavery was practiced. No, it might be the Jarvis solution: a manservant who is paid by the giver to care for the character whenever the character is in town (in the original comics, Edwin Jarvis was a butler given to The Avengers by Tony Stark to maintain their Mansion – in fact, he more or less came with the Mansion. But he continued to get his paychecks from Stark).

    Many of the other reward types that follow can be assumed to include servants or staff most of the time (but not doing so can be a way for the giver to trim his expenses, if the giver is a bit of a skinflint). It can also be an opportunity for the giver to clean out the malcontents, incompetent, unruly, and accident-prone from his own staff – again “cheapening” the value of this reward considerably.

    If the servants/staff are competent, one next has to consider questions of loyalty. The giver might be placing a spy in the PC’s household! This also speaks volumes about the character of the giver.

    In some societies, having servants or staff might be a “right” that has to be purchased from the crown (or their local representative, annually). So this might not actually involve specific individuals – not until the PC goes out and recruits them.

    Either way, the servants/staff are, at least potentially, recurring NPCs, and should be treated as such by the GM – as an important development within the campaign.

    14. Sponsorship

    Granting admission into some sort of club or private organization is another sort of reward that can sometimes be bestowed. There was a time when this was the equivalent of being Knighted in the manner of a field commission!

    But this reward type can also represent Patronage, which can be significant from a character perspective – but, unless it’s a means to an end, probably means character retirement from Adventuring.

    That still leaves open a broader interpretation of the concept. A small stipend, paid into an account administered by the crown on the character’s behalf (assuming there are no private banks yet), to defray the costs of adventuring? Why not? 5 gp a week while actually on an expedition, 1 gp when not – or a 2 gp flat rate each week – can be a godsend at low levels.

    But the term “expedition” raises still more possibilities. It was not at all uncommon during the Age of Exploration for an individual to back an “expedition” aimed at achieving some significant goal or reaching a specific location, with the backer providing personnel and equipment for the attempt. This practice continued all the way up to and including the age of the Entrepreneur, beginning to decline in frequency only during the Great Depression. “I will sponsor an expedition, led by you, to establish a new trade route to the Crescent Sea and the wonders of Jastinople” – sounds like a great choice of reward to me! A ready-made Adventure, and everyone gets something out of it if it succeeds.

    And that, in turn, suggests something beyond even this fairly traditional interpretation of the concept: “There is a pestilential hell-hole that blocks access to the silver-mines of Dunthragg, a fortress of beasts and Undead. I will pay you and your friends 20,000 gp each to go and empty it of the living and unliving. 2,000 now, the balance if you succeed and live to claim it.” Again, this sounds like an eminently suitable reward – if the personality of the giver fits. (When you first read this suggestion, many people automatically assume that the ‘giver’ is the local Nobleman. Not So! It can be anyone who stands to gain from a successful outcome – a trader, a merchant council or league, a regional mayor, a consortium of small businesses…)

    15. Concessions & Licenses

    This was hinted at in category 13. “I grant you the right to search the Blacklands for mineral wealth, and to establish up to two mines in your own name within that region of Crown Land”. Or perhaps it’s a license to operate some regulated business – an inn or tavern. Or to provide a carriage service for goods and people along a particular trade route.

    16. Transportation/Vehicle

    Which provides a natural segue into this type of reward. “I gift to you a carriage of the finest oak, and eight trained horses to pull it, suitable for the transportation of nobles anywhere in the land.” What you then do with it – what you can get away with – is then up to you. Or it could be a more practical vehicle, or a ship. The latter always includes the assumed right of being permitted to display your flag, and of being able to trade anywhere that you can reach. So this reward contains a vast breadth of possible scale.

    17. Livestock

    Nobles had agricultural land, which was hard to replace, and livestock upon that land, which were comparatively easy to replace. If you had to reward someone, you might give them some of that livestock and a lease on the farmland on which they presently reside, in effect putting you into the farming business. Still more canny nobles might offer livestock and title to lands that they don’t actually posses yet, requiring you to go out and “capture” it in his or her name.

    Nor does this necessarily tie the character down, or not as much as many players and GMs tend to assume. Once the land has been cleared of nasties, fenced, and patrols hired to keep it clear, the livestock can move in. Throw in whatever you need to actually farm them, and an Estate Manager to look after the business side of things (with the threat of the occasional audit to keep him honest), and you’re free to wander off, and maybe even do it all again. You don’t think nobles run their estates themselves, do you? Okay, these days, many have to, but back then labor was a lot cheaper, and it was common practice to turn the day-to-day headaches over to someone else while you went off to the capital to spend and politic!

    Your reward (usually described as a “gift”) might be a herd, or a breeding pair. The encumbrance placed upon a character’s lifestyle is proportionate, but temporary. It’s just a couple of very different adventures!

    18. Land

    The next step up this particular ladder of reward scales brings land and that which resides upon it – be that peasants or livestock. This, effectively, rewards the character with the right to be taxed.

    It normally excludes mineral rights, but there can be exceptions; I once rewarded a PC with a silver mine that the noble knew was almost played out. He got a half-dozen payments of a few thousand gold, and then title to a worthless mine. But, anytime the character was significantly hard up for cash, he could head up to his mine and dig out a few nuggets of ore – worth no more than 20 or 50 gp in total, but it was enough for a fresh start.

    The noble also usually reserves the right to demand or maintain free passage through the land on any established roads. Nastier types might not include rights for the landowner to use any roads in the vicinity – forcing the rewardee to bargain for access to the better, more profitable, markets – every year.

    I once granted title to lands to a pair of PCs for the establishment of two towns, which would confer minor noble status upon the pair (and expand the domain of the giver considerably). One was principally an Elvish community, with a few Humans of uncommon expertise thrown in; the other was a far more cosmopolitan affair, with Dwarves and Desmodu and Humans and Halflings and Gnomes and the occasional Elf (though most of them went for the first). The catch: the budget on offer for the construction of these townships and appropriate defenses was only about half what would be needed, and that was only the set-up cost; ongoing costs would demand the establishment of industry (taxable), trade (taxable), and commerce (taxable) – plus repayment of the throne’s investment in the form of regular tithes over the coming century.

    19. Property

    The final step up this ladder is, ironically, not that dissimilar to where we started – the granting of land, but land with some sort of building and business already operating. In discussions, we started using the term “property” to distinguish between mere land and land with a going concern on it. Again, this could be an Inn, Hotel, Bar, Warehouse, Dock, Toll-Bridge – almost any sort of structure.

    Standing above even this level of reward is the granting of land with a bespoke building to be constructed upon it. Depending somewhat on the location, this can be the ultimate reward short of bestowing titles of Nobility. “I give over the crown lands located at Wiltshire Street, and the warehouses which currently stand upon it, which are to be progressively relocated to a site yet to be determined and razed for the construction of an Academy Of Magic” was an actual reward handed out to a PC at the end of the first Fumanor campaign. From temporary structures and less than half-a-dozen students, in between every adventure, this place grew and developed through the ensuing two campaigns, becoming a completed fixture within the campaign upon the retirement of the PC in question.

    20. Retainers/Retinue

    There’s a big difference between retinue and staff – the latter stay more-or-less where they are, the former travel with their master and serve on the road. Retainers are more like staff, but they can be relocated by their master as desired. Both tend to be permitted to swear personal loyalty to their master, superseding any other obligation in the process. That’s a big step up. The downside is that the character is expected to pay their wages.

    21. Introductions

    A fairly cheap reward, in the financial sense, though there may be all sorts of politics involved in actually bringing it about, simply introducing a PC to “the right people” can be a significant reward.

    22. Fame

    Public admissions of gratitude and debt are a far bigger deal than simply doling out some reward that only the bookkeepers pay attention to. The difference is one of generating Fame. This is always a double-edged sword; certain people will begin to perceive the PCs as rivals and potential enemies. There’s so much juice in the question of fame and PCs that it’s a subject for a whole other day. Suffice it to say, for now, that you can do more with a fan club than with a whole company of trained soldiers!

    23. Pardons

    Criminal Charges – trumped up or real – can be pardoned in exchange for services. That should be enough to get the gears in any good GM’s head turning.

    And remember that these charges don’t have to be leveled directly at the PC. A friend or family member, a husband or wife or child, or even a complete stranger (if it’s the right complete stranger and the right PC) can do the job.

    It’s generally considered particularly bad form to arrest the people who you have just rewarded, but some underhanded types won’t mind stooping a bit – in exceptional cases. More wholesome leaders will grant pardons for any crimes committed in the course of achieving the results for which the PCs are being rewarded.

    And always remember that a wholesome public image may mask the most brutal of underhanded monsters.

    A minor variant of the pardon is the Head Start, which honorable men sometimes grant the unscrupulous and unpardonable as reward for services. How much of a head start depends on the services and the leader.

    24. Titles

    Up at least one notch is the granting of a Title – “Master Of The Eldritch Bow” or something meaningless like that. This is a bestowment without authority, though it recognizes and commends some particular demonstrated expertise (whether or not there is actually a skill to reflect it).

    If a Noble is so disposed as to hand out meaningless titles as rewards, they will quickly run out of good ones, which is how you can get “Keeper Of The Royal Spittoon” and “Protector Of Mutton” being recorded. The deeds with which the title is associated, more than the content of the title, tends to determine the respect in which it is held.

    25. Endorsements

    This is another step up the “Name Hierarchy”, and also reward types 14, 21, and 22. Endorsements aren’t an idea of the modern age; being able to say that someone famous or respected uses your wares was a standard of advertising for as long as there have been merchants.

    A ship calls into port full of foreign trinkets, you might permit them to be sold at the markets, unless captain / crew give you reason not to with their behavior; such a ship arrives with letters stating that they are trusted suppliers to the Royal Family of some distant kingdom only the scholars have ever heard of, and you are likely to invite them to the palace – with samples of their wares. The wise merchant will then offer a discount on any large purchase in exchange for a similar letter from this noble, adding to his ability to trade elsewhere.

    Even without a large order, or even a purchase by the noble of any sort, the mere fact that the Noble thought the goods worth personal inspection will make selling even things the Noble doesn’t personally want easier.

    One could say that the famous attract offers of endorsement the way dogs attract fleas.

    26. Art / Commemoration

    “We are deeply indebted to… what were their names again?… and so decree that portraits will be commissioned and hung in the entrance to the Palace that all may know of the esteem in which these gentlemen and ladies are held.”

    All you could really say is, “Gee, thanks”. Possibly under your breath.

    “We shall commission a tapestry to commemorate this epic heroism for all time.” Gosh, that’s big of you.

    “Let the word be spread, let hymns be written and songs commissioned by the finest bards, that all may know of this example of conspicuous gallantry” – that’s edging into ‘fame’ territory, as is the commissioning of art of any sort for public consumption such as statues to be erected at the site of the deeds being commemorated.

    Such rewards are popular with those who are more politician than ruler; they seek to elevate someone in popularity in the hopes that some of the popularity will rub off on the giver. Nobles who care about public opinion, and who want to do well for and by their citizens, will often reward unexpected service with commemorative art.

    As a general rule of thumb, the more prestigious the artist, the more prestige will attach to the rewardee from such bestowments, and the more it will drain from the Treasury. A favorite tactic of mine is to have a short-sighted noble commission lavish public art as a reward and then be forced to raise taxes to pay for it; the public therefore blame the PCs as much as the noble for the tax rise (insert evil grin).

    27. Access

    This reward type is one of the more valuable. Having the right to bring any problem directly to the King, or to the Chancellor, or to the Archbishop, or the General, and be able to expect a hearing at the very least, is powerful. The toadies and courtiers and would-be advisers and those with an opinion as to what public policy should be (right down to the barman at any watering-hole you even look at) will be quick to grasp the possibilities implicit in this new channel straight into the heart of power.

    Bear in mind that it’s usually a crime to be granted access and then sell access to that access. But being a conduit of truth to Nobility can be a great source of adventures enmeshed deeply within a campaign setting.

    28. High Office / Promotions

    Appointing someone Sheriff, in charge of law-enforcement in part of one’s domain, is pretty much the minimum form of this reward, and the adventures that can result only grow with each scaling up of the reward. You can work your way up the various non-Noble offices, with proximity to the capital being the principle determinant of reward value. After that comes the more nebulous “Member Of The Court” (giving you one voice amongst many) and the more prestigious “Adviser To The Crown”. Then you get into the real big ones, which have real authority attached to them – “Chancellor To The Exchequer”, “Commander Of Our Armies”, and the like. The only step up from there is “Principal Adviser To The Throne” and then into the Nobility.

    29. Noble Titles

    So let’s keep the ball rolling. One lesson that I took from the “Family D’Lambert” series of Novels (supposedly by EE Doc Smith) is that the authority and respect of Noble Titles is not the absolute that they seem to be in theory.

    Having Title to a small but immensely wealthy province is more powerful than having a higher title with less wealth. So that’s a second factor.

    Size of domain is a third, even if much of the land is not all that desirable right now.

    Proximity to the Capital is worth more than a Title in the Inner Kingdom, which is worth more than one in the outer Kingdom.

    Having a Port (especially a seaport) automatically elevates a rank, too, as does having a major trade route..

    Put several of these factors together and you can easily get a Baron with more real power than a Duke, a Duke with more power than a Prince.

    On top of all that, most Nobles of importance end up with multiple Titles. Not only do these compound, sometimes they can combine in other ways to vastly exceed the mere sum of their parts.

    And on top of that, you have the number and total authority of your supporters. Nobles who play the long game will maneuver people loyal to them into positions to be of service to the Crown, and will use any child not a direct heir to their titles, to gain further authority – on the general principle that if they don’t, someone less to their liking will.

    Many nobles spend inordinate amounts of time and effort tracking small changes to the resulting pecking order. Others pay someone else to do so for them. Minor acts in Court are often trial balloons sent up to measure such authority. The outside observer sees nothing but the court wasting its time dealing with fripperies like the color of the flowers or the cut of the drapery; the reality might be a deadly-serious game that means life and death to many.

    This is politics at the heart of the Government of the realm. Throw in temporary and limited alliances and vested interests and party memberships, and you will see that modern forms of government have simply found more ways of complicating the picture.

    The granting of a Noble Title is an invitation to play in this sandbox. Actually, it’s more like a Royal Command to play in this sandbox. It is only nominally a reward; the expectation is that you will be loyal to the giver, and thereby reorient the power balance within the Court. Accepting earns you enemies you’ve never even heard of; Refusing marks you as a political enemy of the Throne and a potential Traitor. Even as the Nobleman offering the Title smiles and accepts your refusal, the authorities are turning against you.

    It takes luck, skill, and wisdom to successfully navigate such a maze. Which doesn’t describe too many PCs.

    But this is a double-edged sword – even offering the reward can mean a vast amount of work for the GM. Dozens of Nobles will need to be detailed, at the very least. So bear that in mind!

    30. Tax Relief

    This is a very VERY rare reward. But excusing someone from paying direct taxes, or giving them a reduced tax rate, is at least theoretically possible.

    The reason it’s rare is because it largely removes the individual from the authority of the Ruler. Not only can this be a problem in and of itself, not only can this establish a precedent that could eventually beggar the Throne, but it can give people…. ideas. Subversive ones. Intolerable ones.

    But it’s at least theoretically possible.

    31. Adoption / Marriage

    The ultimate reward: Adoption / Marriage into the Royal Family itself, with all the obligations, Titles, ambitions, duties, perks, responsibilities, and rewards that comes with it. I once ran an adventure in which – to foil an assassin – one of the PCs was forced to go undercover as a surprise Betrothed to the Princess. By the end of the adventure, you couldn’t have paid that character enough to get him to sign up for the real thing.

    If you’re feeling particularly nasty, you can have it discovered that a PC is the descendant of a lost cousin – just out of the direct line to the throne. Everyone will immediately want a piece of the PC, aside from those who want the whole carcass mounted on their walls, and that’s just from sheer pragmatism and never mind any of these alignment niceties. There will be things done in the name of the PC that he could not and would not countenance, right up to armed insurrections against the throne; the popularity of the current ruler does nothing but mitigate the scale of the disaster. A little. Ambitious men being what they are, it won’t be enough to prevent one.

Any and all of these can be given out in place of part or all of a treasure payout. Many of them have obvious utility as a springboard to new adventures or even a whole new phase of campaign. This, of course, beggars the question of how much they are worth?

If there was a simple answer to that question, I would have presented it while discussing the individual awards. There isn’t; there are just too many variables.

There have been attempts that suggest that some of these should be handed out in the form of additional experience. That’s just fundamentally wrong, in my opinion, and compounds other problems, especially since it means that full monetary rewards will still be expected.

No, what the GM needs to do is to estimate a monetary value for the reward, excluding any ongoing earnings from it other than those that can be expected prior to the character next achieving a character level or completing the current adventure, whichever is longer. That value can then be deducted from the adventure awards that have not yet been placed.

Whats’ that? Did I turn that corner too quickly for some of you?

Sand-boxed Rewards

As much as possible, specific rewards should be allocated only a session before they are to be handed out.

There are obvious limitations. Villains need their gear from the moment of their first appearance. There will be some set pieces, rewards that can’t be altered too much or you risk an anticlimax. What remains is your pool for distribution as rewards throughout the rest of the adventure, subdivided into rewards to be accrued in each chapter of the adventure.

Some of those rewards may be cash. Some may be goodies. And the rest should be drawn from the list of reward types offered. If the logical reward is too valuable, you can steal up to about 10% of the value of subsequent pools before it will be noticeable, or you can take a closer look at the fine print attached to the reward – I’ve given several thoughts in that direction in discussing the individual types.

Final Thoughts

This article has been about uncoupling non-XP rewards from encounters, just as the earlier article Objective-oriented Experience Pointswas about uncoupling XP from encounters.

I was going to use the term “Divorcing”, but it’s not quite accurate; everything, from encounters to XP to loot is still derived from progress in the plotline; it’s simply been scaled to accommodate the rate of progress that gets recommended by the books (three adventures to one character level) or whatever rate greater than that with which the GM feels comfortable.

The chief advantage that results is that the storyline is strengthened immeasurably by harnessing both experience and loot to that end; and that in turn strengthens the campaign. The chief disadvantage is that players may have grown too accustomed to feeding at the trough.

If the proposal is too radical for you, however, you can always decide on a partial implementation, or a phasing-in approach to give your players time to get used to the changes.

For example, you permit 1/2 the normally indicated reward levels and 1/2 the story-indicated reward levels, then total the two to get the actual payouts.

You could start with a 90:10 split and shift it 10% in the other direction with each character level achieved.

The danger with this approach is that if the characters gain in level faster than you are expecting, which they almost certainly will, you will then face the difficult choice between adjusting your expectations or being even more miserly.

For example, the adventure after next might be best suited to lower-mid-level characters – somewhere around 7th or 8th level. But the characters have already earned 7 character levels, will gain an extra one-and-a-half in the course of the current adventure, and another one-and-a-half in the next – making them 10th level when you want them to be only 8th. Either you adjust the end-of-adventure goal for that adventure to 11th level – meaning the PCs will potentially earn substantially less than 1 level’s rewards, or you commit to handing out minimal experience and changing nothing, making the adventure a relatively easy one for the PCs. Neither answer is all that satisfactory.

Existing campaigns will face similar problems in changing over to this new system.

Fractional Levels

Part of the solution comes from rejecting the concept of character levels being integer values. As soon as we attach a decimal point, with the integer values representing a threshold at which all sorts of nice things can happen, we gain greater scope.

For example, The PCs have achieved 10th level, and are about 1/3rd of the way through to 11th. They are, in effect, at level 10.33.

Instead of setting your target to a hard 11, and giving out only 2/3 of the XP that this system is recommending, you could aim for 11.2, giving 83% of the new XP scale; the adventure after that, you could aim for 12.1, and give 90%; then 13.05, and 95%; and then you “lock in” to the integer values.

But there are two even better solutions

My preferred solution is to break a character’s XP total into two parts: Level + excess. A character in 3.x (and it works in other versions of the game system, too) isn’t at 10.33; they are at 10th+333xp. Then you simply aim for each adventure to deliver them to Level+333xp. This has two effects: first, the fraction of a level that 333xp represents will continually shrink, so you will approach the simplest view, i.e. the integer view; and second, this creates a buffer that ensures that a character will never fall just a couple of points short of expectations and fail to get a level – something that, with a number of variable factors, is otherwise quite possible. That’s good, and it means that the system will achieve it’s intended effects.

The alternative is simply to continually aim not for the integer levels, but to maintain whatever percentage the PCs already have: 11.33, 12.33. 13.33, and so on. This is simply a redefinition of what a “whole level” means. This seems simpler, on the surface, until you realize that what was previously simple (333xp) is now complicated; you’ll need to adjust your “excess target” with each character level. 33% of the gap between 11th and 12th level is 3,667 XP; 33% of the way from 12th to 13th level is 4000xp, and so on (The numbers might be different with Pathfinder, but not too much so, or the systems would not be even close to compatible). This represents an additional level of complexity – but there is a reward for your efforts.

Virtual levels

Imagine that when you achieved a character level, you didn’t improve the character, but instead rolled/chose what you would earn BY THE TIME OF achieving your next level. It seems a subtle difference, possibly an asset to roleplaying as the character goes through the steps they imagine will lead to that character level. But the GM has more systemic flexibility, and he can use that to the character’s advantage by stratifying the development process.

Let’s break the process of gaining a level into sub-steps. You

  1. Gain a hit die plus any modifier in HP.
  2. Spend as many Skill Points as your character class receives.
  3. Adjust your Save bonuses if necessary.
  4. Adjust your BAB, possibly gaining an additional attack in a round.
  5. Acquire any class abilities that come with the new level.
  6. Select Feats for each feat Slot that is acquired at the new level.
  7. Apply the benefits of each Feat.

There might be more, but those 7 are enough to be going on with. Pick one that won’t occur until the new level is fully achieved – number 5 seems like a sensible choice – and you can let the others occur at discrete intervals along the way. How you structure this is up to you – I can see merit in top-loading everything into the second half of the gap, and also see merit in distributing gains throughout the acquisition of a level. Where multiple points are received, you can even split the gain up – if you are gaining 10 HP, then getting 1 HP every 0.1 levels works. If you are going from +11/+6/+1 attack BAB to +12/+7/+2 BAB, that’s three separate changes: you might go +6 to +7 in the middle (+11/+7/+1), then give the +1 to +2 at the low end (+11/+7/+2) and then, on gaining the level completely, the +11 becomes +12.

My suggestion would be to go simple. Divide a level into 10, 20, 30 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100% fractions of the progress – perhaps throwing in 25 and 75% if you feel like it – then allocate something to each of these levels.

Instead of an interval-system in which there are massive gains, this transforms the game into a progressive system in which immutable directions are chosen for each character at discrete intervals.

Just be consistent in your approach.

This gives an ongoing sense of progress to players. There is some character reward from every significant encounter. This is especially useful when it comes to acquiring a prestige level or level in a different character class, which usually means acquiring membership in some sort of select group or subgroup or a change in attitude – because you no longer get an instant effect of doing so, you acquire it over time. Time that is presumably spent studying and learning the ways of the new class, meditating on the path to be taken, practicing lessons that they have given you to unlock the potential within you, etc.

Character development becomes an ongoing personal evolution. That’s a difference both subtle and profound, and one well worth considering.

Treasure placement. Who knew it could get so complicated?


Discover more from Campaign Mastery

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.