So, in the 1st edition AD&D DMG, Gygax writes about how when the characters slay a particularly fearsome monster such as a dragon, or even a bunch of ogres that have a stash, there are lots of ways that the DM can prevent them from "cashing in" the whole haul of treasure.

Basically, he states that the treasure should be kind of cobbled together and bulky as if it were accumulated over a long period of raids. So, gold coins should be rare but maybe there's a lot of silver and copper (snort!). The loot can include art objects and inlaid strongboxes and crap like that which are hard to carry. When the characters carry out as much as they can, the rest will disappear before they can come back because other monsters will remove the remainder.

I'm okay with the treasure being piecemeal or in low denominations (although coppers are kind of ridiculous; that's like an armored car carrying a haul of pennies) but the idea that the player characters won't be able to haul it with them is pretty ridiculous.

I've had the privilege to work an overseas natural disaster response in the past year and have been lucky enough to have had some experience with logistics. As it turns out there's a well established field that basically concerns getting large, bulky, and heavy supplies from point A to point B within certain time tables and across geographical barriers. A lot of it goes back to planning ahead and mathematics, in terms of planning for weight and volume given the means of transportation.

The guy who had introduced me to the field of logistics mentioned in one of his lectures how supposedly Roman logisticians would be executed or otherwise severely punished if there was a logistics hiccup with the supplies for the Roman armies. If the Romans had it, why can't logistics be a thing in the world of D&D?

If the purpose of risking one's life on an adventure is to accrue lots of treasure (and indeed you get EXP for treasure transported home) why would the PCs spend all their time buying swords and flaming oil and 10' poles, but not spend their time and energy on logistics? My first thought would be to find some investors, get a wagon train and a bunch of guards, and instead of just trying to stuff a backpack like some kind of cat burglar, focus on filling up the wagons instead.

Especially if you plan on taking out a dragon with a Smaug-like pile of loot, you would think that one of the first orders of business would be lining up a wagon train, some ships, or whatever to haul back ALL the loot. Who would seriously risk their life for as much as they can personally carry? That is what would make the least sense.

Ahh, but they do Ronin, it's called "Henchmen"! (Also teamsters, muleteers, etc)

Back in the older editions, hiring and sourcing of suitable minions (with useful skills, not just horse-holding-while-the-heroes-nuke-the-dungeon) was a biiiiig deal, sort of how like Leadership (The 3rd Ed feat) should be used.
Getting your character to level 10 pretty much meant that you'd have some sort of land, or pull, and you'd use that to make looting/cash-conversion easier.
That being said, you'd also get XP for each GP "captured" (but not necessarily recovered) so if you didn't take care of your infrastructure (for lack of a better word) you'd end up XP-rich and cash-poor...and unable to pay for your privileges (land, levies, time-in-lieu, etc) and you'd be left with one or two sworn retainers that were useful for camp-making and horse-holding.

The false scarcity could be used by a good DM to drive campaigns and character development and bad DM's could use it to punish players who didn't want to get on the Plotline Railroad.

Tir:)

E.G.G. seriously underestimated player characters, I think. I imagine he found his PCs employing entire teamster unions to cart off their hauls.

Me, I've had players actually move in to the recently-vacated digs. Sure, it may be a remote fixer-upper, but the buying price was right!

I was thinking about this the other day. While the traditional game dealt with combat, traps, and forbidden temples or what have you, I find my mind wandering to different questions.

What kind of economy does the game world have? Can PCs put the money in a bank? Can they invest it in a joint stock venture? Hypothetically if the Paladin has to donate a million gold pieces, what happens if he drops it all off at the nearest rural local church, rather than carry it around?

What happens to a rural economy if player characters keep returning from adventures and dumping astronomical amounts of gold into it? Does inflation take hold and make all the locals starve? Does the cash infusion cause the rural town to develop, but then bust when the PCs move on? Could a situation arise where all available goods and services have been purchased but there's so much excess gold floating around that cannot circulate?

Do formerly secret dungeons and lost temples get exposed the first time after the PCs return to civilization with sacks of loot? The next time they go out there are they going to run into other squads of adventurers?

How many adventurers are there? What is the average power level compared to the characters? Are the PCs unique or one in a million? (The same question sort of comes up in Shadowrun.)

When you start thinking of all this stuff, you feel like the game becomes more and more about management and economics.

Hey, look at this: http://dyverscampaign.blogspot.com/2013/08...ons-part-1.html

Having the "too much treasure to move" problem occasionally can be fun.

Regularly dangling treasure in front of the players only to snatch it away is pretty much a Dick Move.

Then again, Gygax has occasionally been known to be a Dick GM. A lot of the old adversarial GM vs Player attitude is readily apparant in old D&D publications.

Fortunately GMing has generally evolved past those tropes. Most current systems emphasize a cooperative relationship between player and GM, rather than adversarial.


-k

Heh, the "too much treasure to move" problem was fun in the first Ever Quest. Beggars would ask for plat, so as a high-level caster I would oblige them... Soul Bind somewhere out of the way, ask the beggar to meet me there, head to the bank, turn 2 plat into copper and shift back to my bind location. 2,000 copper weighed too much to allow you to move at all, so handing it over to the beggar would nail them in place with "too much treasure to move", and now rid of 2,000 copper I was free to move off and earn more.

Ahh, those were the days.

It can be an interesting challenge, actually. That's when having someone with the appropriate skills to appraise the value of objects on the team, as opposed to walking into the shop of a professional, Charming him into being your buddy and paying him a small sum to appraise an embarrassment of riches for you, comes in handy; your team appraiser can figure out which combination of objects have the best mass/volume:value ratio. Sure, that statue may be solid gold, but solid gold weighs a hell of a lot, and you might actually be better off taking a pile of ornate jewels and gems and minor magic items instead.

Alternatively, the players will invest in pack animals, teamsters, and some NPC guards, or an automaton wagon/pack horse/some other form of shenanigans to let them loot everything.

We leaked the location of the harder to move treasure and reclaimed the loot from the looters when they were nearer the city.

I would have given a level's worth of experience to the adventuring team that came up with this idea.

Your group plays D&D like Shadowrun, I take it.

Heh, I was in a party that did that at level 1. Cleared out an old barrow on our first adventure together and then went, well fuck, let's keep it! Headed back to town and used our newfound loot to hire a carpenter to help us fix up the place. 'Course we ended up having to fend off an army of kobolds who had a similar idea.

Seriously though, you just got access to a pre-furnished highly defensible lair, why wouldn't you move in?



Nicely done sir.

Well, if you're a roaming murderhobo, it doesn't pay to get tied down. You settle down, buy some furniture, let some folks move in to your lair to keep the place spruced up and supply you with goods at a discount, and all of a sudden some local asshole is trying to muscle in and demand you bend your knee to him and pay him taxes and shit, and of course then you have to supermurder him for having the balls to talk to people with Heroic Class Levels like being squirted out of the right vagina meant a goddamned thing to you, and then his heirs, his brothers, his father and uncles, etcetera, come to avenge him, and by the time you're done slaughtering your way through them, the King is mustering his army to take care of the "rebellion", and all you wanted was to be left in peace in your shiny new defensible digs and let some blacksmiths make you masterwork shit for cheap.

...note to self: Make sure all quests involve long-distance travel. O.o

Hehehe.

More seriously, well, player characters in D&D are second only to player characters in Exalted in terms of how powerful they are over the "common man." Most soldiers don't even have a level in Warrior, just one level of Commoner, and have been provided with the dirt-cheapest reach weapon available - a longspear - and if they're very, very lucky, a set of padded armor. Even professional soldiers/fighters have only a level of Warrior, or if they're very elite, three.

Point is, an army of mooks like this is something that any fifth-level wizard situated inside a reasonably secure tower could evaporate. An entire party of these guys ios going to make utterly short work of any realistic medieval army - remember, they make their living wiping out vast numbers of goblins and orcs who are on the war-path. A vast number of humans on the warpath is likely to be easier, what with fewer racial bonuses and no size modifier to armor class.

Therefor, they're likely to resent, greatly so, if some schmuck tries to invoke "rights" and "divine privilege" (try saying that with a straight face to someone who can literally immolate you with the power of a god who doesn't give one solitary fuck about your hierarchy,) and "noblesse oblige" and so forth and so on, as an excuse to levy taxes against them, especially when those people have arguably been providing more important public services than that jackoff and his band of brigands-in-nicer-clothes have been providing, because they're actually out there, killing monsters, while these guys just rough up peasants and make them pay taxes.

No, no, no. The reason why you are a roaming murderhobo is because you are the guy squirted out from the right vagina. Like the Empress Dowager and you call the fucking Emperor bro, except that he's stuck in the boring old office called a palace.

Always have a guy in group with uber-imperial/royal/political connections that can bitchslap local lords that get uppity.

Reminds me of the time we had a guy that played the Emperor's cousin with a Glory of 7-8 in L5R and the rest of us were the entourage.

All that's great as long as you don't "bring shame on the family" through murderhoboism, I guess.

All that's great as long as you don't "bring shame on the family" through murderhoboism, I guess.

Paladins, Clerics, and (sometimes) Monks should be able to pull that kind of thing off too, without needing to have been born to anyone in particular. Of course, Paladins and Monks are more likely to just submit because Lawfulness is a class requirement for them, which for some ridiculous reason means submitting to a hierarchy despite there being literally no reason for you to do so. (Some Clerics have this problem, too, but not all of them.)

In my circles, we like to call that kind of thing "guaranteed plot hooks."

Seriously though, most of these places are way the fuck out in the countryside. They're home to monsters and unlooted treasure precisely because the local lords don't bother sending soldiers that far out to try and secure "their" territory.

Besides, tax collectors? That's what traps are for. Chances are your new place came with some, just have the party rogue fix them up.

[edit]
I should probably mention that the party I was in that did this had a Tiefling barbarian on a Conan-esque "former slave to thief to ruler of his own kingdom" career trajectory, and a cleric who worshiped the god of random chance and literally flipped coins to decide which path to take in dungeons. We weren't a particularly social or lawful (or sane) group, so taking on the local kingdom one wave at a time wouldn't have been that unexpected for us.

So, I had another thought. Traditionally in these games a haul of gold is measured in "gold pieces" which implies a stamped metallic currency.

But medieval kingdoms and their monetary systems would be very small by today's standards. How many gold coins really should exist in the game world?

If the PCs are killing big dragons and finding tons and tons of gold, at a certain point are they going to be finding nuggets or some other unprocessed form of gold?

If they take all this gold back and dump it on a kingdom using a gold standard (e.g. gold pieces) will it completely crash that economy by permanently undercutting the value of that currency?

In the H. P. Lovecraft story "Shadow over Innsmouth," didn't the FBI come to Innsmouth to investigate large quantities of gold seeping into the (gold standard backed) US economy? Likewise, would the kingdoms of the game world essentially turn on the player characters as gold-spewing economic destructors?

Another issue that's interesting to consider is how the PC can actually hold the treasure they got out.

As history as shown many times, having a lot of riches in a medieval setting is likely to end with the king (or some other local ruler) coming up with a reason to arrest you (probably something to do with heresy) and, in the process, take your gold.

And that's not even taking into account the possible involvement of organized crime (many settings have thieves guilds which, in the end, are just crime syndicates with another name).

"Dude, we slew the biggest dragon around and you are willing to try and steal from us? you are brave. stupid, certainly, but also brave. No, you being the king means you do not get to steal from us either, you pay us for having freed your lands from the dangerous dragon either in more valuables or in the kingdom itself. we can probably find a use for somebody like you. We don't actually want to run a kingdom, going adventuring like this is way more fun"

It depends on the power level. If the characters are far above anything else in the realm, they can react like that.
If they're still mortal who can't survive a bolt to the head, poison or need to sleep and can't teleport away at whim, the king should be able to find ways to deal with them. There is also the possibility of declaring the PC enemies of the crown and punishing anyone in the realm who deals with them.

It's like a mafia or a gang can make the life of a Shadowrunner miserable even if the Shadowrunner can outfight them.

Then the PCs retaliate by blowing all their money in the capital city and destabilizing the currency.

And this is why bags of holding and primary spellcasters are so important. If you have all your wealth in a form which you can carry upon your person and a primary spellcaster who can use magic to ensure your safety while resting (through one means or another,) you can just pick up and leave if the locals get uppity notions about killing you and taking your stuff.

Because frankly, that's what you do, and it's mighty embarrassing to have some pisspot king whose only virtues are a bunch of guys with swords try that against you.

(It's also a good reason to arrange for said king's heir to immediately ascend the throne.)

Well, backstabbing politics in medieval times, who knew. A wise king will of course offer the PCs the position of a March - no or only a token tax demand in exchange for taking care of any enemy that comes along. Any additional land taken from OTHER neighbors would be paid for handsomely via services provided by the rest of the empire. Everyone except everyone else was happy ever after...