Tuesday 21 May 2013

Treasure-Centered Adventure Design



In most adventure design methods I have seen, treasure placement is kind of an afterthought. The perils and creatures come first, and then the treasure is placed more or less methodically according to what is guarding it. Or, you place your dangers and then you ration out how much treasure the level will contain, in dribs and drabs here and there, with an all-important number in mind ... let's say, 5 party members at 2000 xp each to get to second level ... yup, clearing this dungeon level should get them there.

Now, if the party never catch on to the idea that their treasure is being handed out like a paycheck, that's fine. But as a DM I like to be surprised by my own creations. Rolling things randomly while stocking an adventure site is a big part of that. The random comes first, the sense comes after, and more often than not the gain to be had in creativity is immense.

I wanted to break out of this thinking with the treasure table I posted last week. Here is a revised version, with hopefully greater clarity, as some people had trouble understanding it at the first sight:

click it to enlarge
The idea with this treasure table is: each trove is its own thing. It could be a pittance, or a bank-breaking amount. There is an upper limit on each trove, because you want some control over huge hauls, but in my system it's a pretty big upper limit (characters need only 1000 xp to make 2nd level, so two maximum level hauls - you stop rolling once you hit or exceed 2000 x current "depth," or dungeon level - will get them most or all of the way there. However, the average value of hauls at depth 1 is about 500, so the average party will level from about 10 of them, or if there are other ways to get experience that are roughly balanced with treasure, about 5.

And not all treasure will leave the dungeon. Some of it will be unwieldy, requiring a laborious extraction. The matrix of value vs. weight pretty much sees to that (200 weight of fine quality wood anyone?)  Some of it will be hidden or just never found. Coins, in this table, are not all that common, so transporting and selling the treasure will be the norm. The more variables there are, the more adventure feels like adventure, and less like drawing a paycheck.

Let me break out the Lovecraftian italics for this manifesto:

If you are trying to create a sense of wonder, danger and adventure in your players, while you yourself know that you have scripted out the adventures with carefully level-balanced encounters and rewards ... while you may entertain the players, something will be lacking for yourself. 

Having rolled, and possibly surprised yourself, why not then build the adventure around the treasure, instead of the treasure around the adventure? Create the hazards and monsters more or less proportional to each trove, with some having no treasure at all but guarding key points - in effect, giving access to later treasures. I'll give an example, next post.

10 comments:

  1. You and I think very differently about this subject (diversity in thought is good!). I feel that your statement "while you yourself know that you have scripted out the adventures with carefully level-balanced encounters and rewards" does not relate to the topic of generating content based off of treasure from a random table. You could get the same effect by rolling random monsters from a table and then "create the treasure more or less proportional to each hazard or monster (to paraphrase your last paragraph).
    I feel the key issue is randomness in game design. This is a topic that is relevant to modern computer games!

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    1. That's true, and I do often go with random monsters first. I'm just thinking that the exercise of reasoning backwards from the treasure could help the creativity even more and break thought patterns.

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  2. I sorta miss the column in the building materials. Maybe a label would have been a more logical change.Either way, this is cool... And I think I'm gonna spend the next couple hours writing random tables to be used in conjunction with this in my own games. =)

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  3. Something else that occurs to me. You have bronze-- and judging by the illustration, not jewelry or statues, just bronze ingots. Is this supposed to be reflective of a more classical setting and tech level?

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    1. Well, "bronze" is the default metal for metal bars, and if the value is higher it can be silver/gold, or lower it can be iron. If there had been room I would have had a ranking of materials, so that for example a bronze object would be worth 10x a stone object of the same workmanship and weight. What I have is actually more reflective of a European medieval tech where iron is common and bronze relatively rare as a material.

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    2. Oh. Huh. That makes sense!

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  4. Your tables remind me of the ones for first edition Warhammer, where the treasure wasn't by monster but by location. The treasure table had entries for shrines, temples, wizard's house, and grave goods, etc.

    One thing I've been trying to add to my treasure tables is more context; associating the treasure with the location it's found or monster guarding it. A giant would have a different type of treasure than kobolds, not just different values. Likewise, treasure found in a ruined dwarven fortress should be different from treasure found in a wizards dungeon. The only system I've seen that can handle that type of association is the card-based system such as for GW's Warhammer Quest. When you bought the orc module, it came with orc encounter cards as well as orcish treasure you mixed into your treasure deck. The D&Dish card game Dungeoneer perfected this providing room, monster and treasure cards that all matched a common theme.

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    1. I originally thought of a table instead of the 2d10 roll that would give you types based on the monster or hoard context. But it wouldn't fit on the page!

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  5. Treasure is hard for me, but I found a trick I liked last week.

    Last session the party killed something I didn't think they'd kill, and frankly I didn't have this terrible thing's treasure prepared - now my setting is sort of odd both weird fantasy 19th century and post-apocalyptic. So after killing the giant rust spider I figured the thing was almost a wyvern and rolled some random Treasure Type D for it. Then I changed it into machine tools, glassware and other appropriate items. Of late I've been stocking the same way -

    Copper stays copper or other heavy but useful raw material, silver is usually furniture or textiles, Electrum is machine tools or instruments, gold is treasure, platinum is items of great value (art work, extra planar beast furs, non-mechanic changing magic).

    I find this works well - once the values are established the ideas come more easily.

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  6. This is fantastic. I'm definitely using it.

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