I've had this discussion several times this week, and it's the topic of the October Blog Carnival, so some thoughts (and I have a few) on treasure!
I'm going to talk about several things this month in regards to treasure, but for today, just some thoughts.
Dungeons and Dragons is the most successful RPG because of treasure. Players have an objective metric of how well they are doing -- the amount of gold they have collected. There's a reason one gold piece is equivalent to one experience point.
Treasure is your campaign throttle. It allows you to set the pace of advancement and character power, but like any indirect tool it takes some experience to use correctly.
Treasure should be exciting and interesting. The treasure you are giving is boring.
Treasure serves myriad of purposes, but should always be about driving player choice.
We will talk about all of those things and more this month, as well new tables, some reworking of the treasure document, an examination of what to let your players do with all that hard earned treasure, advice and guidelines for the distribution of treasure and more!
Not only I have ruined a game with treasure, recently I ruined the same campaign that I was playing with two groups in opposite ways. One group got too much treasure, and one didn't get enough! The lessons learned from this were manifold. I had another game that wasn't ruined with treasure, but let an artifact into play when one was generated at first level using random determination.
Have you ever ruined a game with treasure? Comment below!
P.S. I know I don't have one of the larger blogs out there, but I'd like to welcome all my new readers, and say thank you - last month was my first month to exceed 10,000 hits. I know that's not a lot compared to many blogs, but I wanted to say thank you just the same.
