Under the Hood – Mo’ Treasure, Mo’ Problems

Mo’ Treasure, Mo’ Problems
By The Warden

I’m going to make a confession, one that will not make me very popular. I hate treasure. Magic items, coins, crafts, weapons, armor, even packs to carry them all in. Perhaps if I actually walked into a room where piles of sparkling gold, silver, and swords glistened across my peripheral vision, I would be impressed and adore treasure again like I did when I first started playing RPGs. Unfortunately, just like real money, it loses its luster with age and all I can think about are the problems it creates.

What problems, you say? In the game as a character, there really is none depending on the GM you’re with and how she feels about encumbrance and burdening. In my teenage years, we seemed quite capable of carrying around precious works of art in a dungeon without affecting our access to weapons, spell components, and any other required item. We could somehow strap them to our back and carry on as normal.

As a player, treasure is a boring task. It’s inventory and as a former retail manager, I detest inventory. Your original base equipment and other items intentionally purchased for use on a quest were exceptions to this chore and no different than leaving your house with a wallet, keys, music player, and whatever else you need for your trip to work. Treasure is the equivalent of bringing your coffee maker from home onto the bus, at least according to my experience.

Like the title says: mo’ treasure, mo’ problems.

THE D&D SHOPPING NETWORK

I still play old school fantasy games – including numerous versions of D&D – but go to great lengths to avoid treasure counting. Most of my games have the designated treasure chest (or notekeeper, inventory dude, or whatever title you’ve assigned to the player responsible for tracking the party’s loot) doing all the cataloging or I rarely take any treasure unless I’m planning on putting it on, strapping it over my back, or wielding it in my hands. This habit carries over into my video games, where I select all and sell anything I’m not wearing at that exact moment.

I’m in the complete minority on this and I accept that. For me, rare is it for treasure to have mechanical value in a game. Nihilistic as this may sound, but I’ve always felt treasure appeals to the consumer in our quest to gather and accumulate. Not to say I’m beyond such petty desires – I squeal just as loud when the Think Geek email arrives and presents the Millennium Falcon bottle opener – but it’s not a value I can appreciate and feels counterproductive to most of the fantasy genre’s intent.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just agree that 99.999% of fantasy RPGs feature heroes battling evil monsters, saving innocents from doom, and fighting the good fight because it is the right thing to do. Even if your character is Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, you still have a good soul and will surrender the need to earn a profit if it means protecting your homelands from death and devastation. So why are the heroes getting paid? That just makes them mercenaries, doesn’t it? Sure, heroes have to pay the bills at home, but we’re never concerned about that level of detail, are we? Actually, sometimes we are. Anyone who’s played a long term OSR game has acquired a keep, castle, servants, followers, and other forms of property and possession. For me, I’m already paying bills in the real world and I’m not signing on to kill dragons so I can make sure my employees are paid on time. I’m here to live in fantasy, not reality.

The problem is heroes need treasure because many fantasy RPGs (along with other genres) use items to enhance and/or evolve their characters. Along with class levels, feats, traits, skill selection, and other facets of an individual game, equipment allows a character to enhance their abilities and step things up a notch. Some games are completely dependent on equipment to define power balance (D&D 4^th edition) while the rest provide it as an augmentation or source of mild variety between quests (i.e. switching between your +1 sword of flame and your +1 sword of frost before entering the volcano). Regardless of its level of dependency in a game, if the rules provides a guideline for treasure when you create a higher-level character, you need it just to keep up with the others.

There’s a specific reason for this week’s discussion and it stems from a blog ranting about finding 2,000 copper pieces in a room full of rats in Dwimmermount. As soon as I read that, it made sense because Dwimmermount is definitive old school fantasy and that’s exactly the kind of stuff I remember. The issue at hand was the believability of rats collecting nothing but copper pieces. What, they don’t like gold? That sums up my feelings on the role of treasure in this genre – it can get out of hand.

THE POOR MAN’S CHARACTER

Throughout the years, there have been clever options to avoid this style of play for those who want it (though I can’t say whether this was intentionally built for players like me or just a happy accident). For example, I remember an old AD&D kit called the Wizard Slayer from The Complete Barbarian’s Handbook, a xenophobe about wizards and magic who swore off the use of magic items and took a vow to kill all evil spellcasters. Compensating for the lack of magic goodies, the wizard slayer had augmented abilities and could attack as if he had a magic weapon. The Vow of Poverty option for monks in Pathfinder provides similar substitutions so that the poor monk (literally) wasn’t left out of the equation.

Fate has stepped in and offered a sign of relief for a beleaguered inventory tracker like myself from time to time. In yet another AD&D game, my fighter was armed to the teeth and covered in enough metal to build a car when he fell through a weakened cavern floor and plummeted into an underground lake. To avoid drowning, I had to ditch the armor, shield, two-handed weapons, backpacks, belt pouches, and dignity to stay afloat before dragging my naked butt ashore. While the rest of the party groaned at the DM’s cruelty, I was overjoyed. With glee, I erased everything from the character sheet and proclaimed a need to borrow someone’s dagger. “I’ll go through naked, let’s do this!!” It was a challenge I was suddenly willing to attempt, regardless of its idiocy.

Nope, it was not to be. Within a minute of reconnecting with the rest of the party, someone whipped out their bag of holding to provide new armor, shield, two-handed weapons, backpacks, belt pouches, and enough disappointment to put me right back to where I was before the fall. That’s just the stuff we carried around casually and it broke the intensity of the moment for me. Now that I think about, it seems that’s the exact moment I began to hate treasure.

THE GAMEMASTER’S BEST FRIEND

That’s my view of treasure as a player, but there’s something important to consider with Gamemasters and treasure: it’s an excellent method of controlling the game. The Gamemaster does not have any influence over the main characters as a general rule of thumb and most campaigns are run with player-generated characters. The Gamemaster’s role is adapting the material to suit the party and ensuring every character is challenged as equally as possible – a reactionary role. Even then, these options are fairly permanent and define the character for the entire campaign.

Let’s say you’re looking to transport the party into the Outer Plane of Pandemonium, an eternally howling tunnel where the wind whips with such intensity as to tear skin. Or even worse, you want to take them to an elemental plane of fire capable of scorching internal organs within minutes. Making sure the players can survive the dangers and not get killed as soon as they step out the portal, the Gamemaster provides them with amulets of protection from the flames. Or if their latest foe is a massive demon requiring +2 weapons or greater to damage, they’ll suddenly come upon exactly what they need around an hour before the big moment.

Treasure can be an incredible tool for foresight in your games. I’ve almost always made it a point to arm, load, or toss on any item a Gamemaster hands out personally with the assumption that item was specifically chosen. The fun comes in calculating when and what the treasure is meant for. It’s a tactic applied to fantasy fiction as well, such as the Light of Eärendil given to Frodo in Lord of the Rings. Hmm, what will the hobbit need that for?

Despite it all, treasure can be an incredible resource for keeping the game fresh and unique, mixing it up a bit when things are starting to turn a bit stale. There have been plenty of times when I was glad I had a particular item on hand and I’m a sucker for any weapon that’s on fire… intentionally. With all these parts laid out and put together, I’m still not a fan of treasure. Perhaps it’s the manner in which it’s been abused, becoming something so constant and expected that we can’t work without it. If you’re selling over half of your treasure for coins or in exchange for something else you want, why do we bother going to all the trouble of writing them down by name. Perhaps it’s just easier to hand over 2,000 copper pieces guarded by rats in a mega dungeon.