A simple treasure table system

Here's a classic problem: The characters find some treasure – let's say there are diadems, gilt-framed paintings, jade figurines, and various other art objects. The GM describes them so that the players can write them down. The objects may not be sold for many sessions, before which many other treasures will be acquired from various sources, including different modules and the GM's improvisation.

The characters shouldn't generally know how much the art objects are worth when they find them. That should be GM-facing information. On the other hand, the GM shouldn't have to remember where every item came from, or transcribe each one and then try to hunt for it on the big list when the characters eventually try to sell it.

The typical solution is usually to bite the bullet: give out sale values along with treasure, or make it a hassle for the GM. Or perhaps compromise by giving out an indication of a treasure's worth and then rolling randomly based on the indication at the time it is appraised or sold.

 

A better solution:

I'm proposing a system which I've never seen in a TTRPG before, but it's so obvious that I bet I'm reinventing the wheel. It's similar to how item values work in the video game Dwarf Fortress.

We express each treasure as a phrase containing {class, descriptors}, where class is a type of item with a baseline monetary value, and descriptors are adjectives with multiplicative value modifiers. These are on big lists that are privileged GM information.

So the GM has a list of item classes coupled with base values that looks something like

Amulet   2 gold

Beads    1 silver

Cutlery  5 silver

Diadem   20 gold

Ewer     12 gold

Figurine 4 gold 

...

Then there's a list of descriptors, or possibly separate lists of positive and negative descriptors, each with a fractional modifier. Perhaps

Antique     ×5

Cracked     ×3/4

Gold        ×12

Half-rotten ×1/4

Jade        ×2

Large       ×3 

Rusty       ×9/10

Shattered   ×1/20

...

The GM has these lists at their fingertips. They are lookup tables, but of course if you did have a nice number like 20 or 66 or 100 entries, they could pull double duty as dice tables for treasure generation.

Illustration by Zed Nope

 

How do we use the tables?

A zillion sessions ago, the GM let the players know that they found an antique gold diadem and a large cracked jade figurine.

Perhaps they were described more fully (what does the figurine depict?) originally, but the GM made sure to communicate which were the key words, so that's what the players wrote down. The players weren't told the value, just the description.

Now time has come to sell these art objects. The GM doesn't need to remember anything about the treasure – where in the world it was found; what published adventure it came from or whether it was rolled or improvised; what rough-and-ready valuation the characters were given by a passing tinker.

The GM only has to do a couple of table lookups.

Diadem: Base price of 20 gold pieces. Antique: ×5. Gold: ×12. Actual value: 1200 gp. 

Figurine: Base price of 4 gold pieces. Large: ×3. Cracked: ×3/4. Jade: ×2. Actual value: 18 gp.

And that's all you need. The lookups are trivially easy; they're in alphabetical order and should fit on one piece of paper. The maths ain't hard.

 

Joseph Gandy (1771-1843)

 

The benefits:

There are seriously so many.

1. Hidden information stays hidden.

Players don't get information on value which should be secret. If they've found something made of 'ebonshell' and they've heard in passing that ebonshell is valuable, the word is a descriptor on the table and the players won't find out if that means "buy another round" or "buy a castle" until they seek out a valuation in-world.

Prior valuations stay consistent, too. If the GM allows a skill check for valuation, they can look up the true value, give an approximation (or a false answer if the check fails), and then completely forget they've given out that information whether or not the players go on to sell the item.

2. Descriptions correlate nicely with values.

Assuming you have a good set of tables, you're buying extra verisimilitude. The "cloudy garnet ring" you find in one dungeon and the "dull garnet necklace" you find two dungeons later have similar values, both are vastly less valuable than the "hundred-faceted ruby amulet", and that's exactly what players will expect.

Things that would otherwise 'just' be flavour start to matter more to the players. We can only take so much stuff back with us. Is the one-of-a-kind altarpiece cracked or just chipped? What's our best guess about how that compares to this sack of obsolete silver coins? Speaking of which,

3. There are learning opportunities.

We're all big fans of rewarding player skill, right? With this system, attentive players can begin to infer what words matter most for treasure values. This reflects the learning their characters would be doing.

On the other hand, the tables are

4. Easily reset.

If you want to start fresh in a new universe, or with new characters, or change GMs, it's trivially easy to just cross out a bunch of values for base items and modifiers and write in slightly different ones.

Players no longer know what to expect but the whole thing stays internally consistent, because you only tweaked the values. For the same reason, it's

5. Easily customisable.

Let's say you decided in this world, jade has mystic properties which make it worth more than gold. Cool, change ×2 to ×15 in the table and you're done. Any treasure you've already put out there is immediately converted.

If you're using treasure from a publication, when you go to convert an item you'll notice that it's described as "jade", check "jade" in the table, be reminded of your modification, and decide whether this particular thing is massively more valuable or whether you'll keep the value and change the material.

It's easy, because in general, this whole system is

6. Compatible with published treasures.

It's not much effort to start with treasures described by value and work backwards to create the descriptive {class, descriptors} phrase.

Suppose an adventure says "the bag contains three opals worth 300 gp each". What does that convert to? Well, you start by finding the "opal" class base value (or maybe "gemstone" is a class and "opal" is a descriptor), then flick around looking for more descriptors that will get you to 300 gp.

Maybe huge + dazzling + round + opal = 300 gp? Perfect. You've acquired more information about what the treasure is actually like. Or maybe it doesn't fit that they're "huge" so you try a few other descriptors and find that small + flawless + fashionable + opal = 320 gp? Close enough.

7. Simple calculations.

It's easy to price something up. We can put both decimals and fractions in the tables, so that people who are less proficient at mental maths can use a calculator. It wouldn't be hard to make a spreadsheet or online tool that calculates values very quickly.

8. Adaptive.

This single framework should work for most systems and settings. Only the tables will need to change.

Once published, individual GMs could hack further as they pleased. Have as many or few base object classes and modifiers as you want. It's easy to simplify or expand, because

9. You can hang stuff off the system. 

Let's say a character comes from a clothier background, and makes alterations to a "silk sash". Now it's a "tailored silk sash" and its value changes accordingly. A fighter is able to repair the "ragged rusted mail hauberk" enough that she can wear it, and now it's a "patched mail hauberk".

Want to get more out of jewellery and gemstones? Have a subsystem for inset jewels, which might add to or multiply an item's value.

Want to get into meticulous detail regarding some setting-specific fine arts? Add a whole extra table of modifiers referring to specific artists and times and trends and students and suspected forgeries.

Want collectors to be interested in specific things? Express that as custom modifiers. The antiquarian pays ×7 instead of ×5 for the "antique" descriptor. The archivist ignores penalties from the keywords "old" or "repaired" on books. The vizier only wants jewellery in good condition, so will pay double for any items without any negative modifiers, half otherwise.

Have item valuation and haggling skill systems? This framework just establishes the ground truth / base price, so those should sit neatly on top without you having to lift a finger.

10. No tracking.

It really bears repeating that the GM doesn't need to track any extra information, or resort to improvisation when they can't find the item they gave out months ago.

Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874)

So there's my idea! Do something cool with it. I've added "make a whole little book for this stuff and possible extensions" to the ideas pile.

Upon training your character's replacement

I was thinking about the value of a long time scale for fantasy TTRPG adventures, and how it actually ties in neatly with many aspects of old-school style of play:

• Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
• Delves and expeditions
• A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
• Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
• Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
• Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
• A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury

Let's say you implement seasonal play, as in e.g. http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-long-haul-time-and-distance-in-d.html. The PCs have a meagre initial home base. They have some local adventures and make some coin. Enough that they can plan a modest expedition, one that will take months. They come home and spend their wealth, advancing their characters, improving their base, and acquiring the resources for a big expedition, one that will take seasons to complete.

Now let's build on this basis, by adding some game elements to do with character advancement, followers, and character replacement, and see what other common rules might be tweaked.

Character advancement

Character advancement has a cost in looted wealth (e.g., at 1 gp = 1 xp or whatever works with your game rules). Up to half of looted wealth can be used for training; the rest is available for improving the characters' lives and pursuing their goals in other ways.

The requirement that xp must be from looted wealth (e.g. dungeon treasure) ties it back in to the idea that the characters are getting something out of their experiences on delves and expeditions, and also prevents advancement based on capitalism; it feels gamey, but not TOO gamey.

Looted wealth is used to pay for training, tutors, study materials, and so on. Early on, these things are readily available. At higher levels, they might have to be sought out in the world, as it gets harder to find more advanced texts, teachers more skilled than your character, and so on.

Character advancement therefore represents costly, high-intensity learning and study (with an undertone of the character having gone out and had perilous experiences, resulting in both the necessary wealth and the motivation to excel in the training). Advancement takes a long time; let's say a season per level. You could have a more fine-grained system with an increasing time requirement, though.

Followers and character replacement

From say level 2 or 3, players can acquire a number of followers. In D&D-likes, we might say they have followers up to one third of their Charisma score. In those games that already have fleshed-out follower mechanics, you'll need to call them something else or combine the systems.

Followers are just characters like any other, starting at level 1, created with the same character creation rules. They are distinguished from hirelings and other NPCs by an understanding at the table that they are essentially backup PCs; in particular, they won't ever betray the PCs, and they won't be killed 'off-screen' unless the players decided to send them into danger.

Players can invest looted wealth in their followers to advance them, exactly as for their primary PC. This has the same training costs and time and so on. A PC's followers can advance to 1 level lower than the PC and no further.

In-world, followers are squires, apprentices, butlers, bodyguards, family members, and so on. Some of a PC's followers might be their own apprentices (if the same class). But the wizard could retain a loyal housecarl, or the barbarian might have adopted a witch. And some of a PC's followers might be apprentices of other PCs.

The crucial detail for all of this: A player's next character will be drawn from their pool of followers. 

If a player's character is safe back home, the player may choose to retire that character, taking all its wealth and social connections and so on with it. If they choose retirement, the player can have some decent portion of the character's experience transferred directly to their followers, including their new character. Let's say, 50% of earned experience, with no more than 20% allocated to any one follower, and no advancement further than the level of the retiring character. Importantly, the old character then becomes a tool of the GM and is kept out of the way, not a free resource for the remaining PCs to hit up at any time.

But if a player's character dies, the player either takes on a new character at starting level or chooses a candidate from their followers.

Tweaking the rules

This framework works best when the cost of character advancement increases drastically with ever level (as in most editions of D&D). That way, a PC isn't terribly disadvantaged by diverting a split of their wealth/xp to maintain a small coterie of backups.

The GM may need to tweak the total size of wealth awards, and/or give a small bonus to any xp allocated to followers (so that it doesn't feel like the current character is losing out). There should be a balance; players should feel a tension between the risk of investing in their PC and the surety of investing in their followers (in case their PC dies).

Different play groups can organise things differently. One player could pick another's follower as a replacement if they agree, and possibly if a bonus/weregild is paid to compensate. Players could trade followers. A group might decide to divert some initial split of their loot into a set of replacement characters, then treat them as a communal resource.

Followers are also a resource in themselves, providing spells and character abilities and so on, giving additional incentive to invest in them. However, in a world where returning from death is cheap and easy, players won't feel as compelled to 'waste' xp on maintaining a pool of followers. The GM might need to make resurrection spells cost additional wealth/xp, or improve the rate of return on follower advancement, to balance it out.

This system would be easily adapted to a playstyle where everyone plays multiple characters at the same time.

What are the benefits?

So going back to that initial list of old-school play elements...

- Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
- Delves and expeditions
This framework, being predicated on plundered gold-for-xp, puts the focus squarely on treasure-hunting. Having a long time frame and big expeditions also helps emphasise the sheer amount of wealth in the adventure location: it's worthwhile planning a trek across the sea, continent, or world for.

- A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
- Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
This framework achieves these while offering the players a lot of important choices. The long time frame with seasonal expeditions means that there are regular opportunities for the characters to advance via lengthy training without the pace of adventures precluding it, and without the game devolving into fine-grained in-world scheduling puzzles.

- Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
Having increasingly huge amount of treasure in more distant and difficult-to-get to dungeons, alongside increasing wealth costs for levelling up, also helps with game world investment. PCs can do social climbing, come up with their own megaprojects, invest in capital, build fortresses, improve their communities, and so on, with the half of their looted treasure that they can't use for character advancement.

Having an expedition 'off season' (winter) creates room to breathe, and for PCs to get entangled in whatever the player finds compelling: planning, hiring, selling treasure, magic item creation, wheeling and dealing, starting a family, capital investment, politicking, dealing with long-term campaign events, and so on.

- Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
Expedition-based play encourages use of hirelings, and managing a coterie of followers ties in well with managing hirelings and paves the way to realm-based play. Travelling for a long time to an adventure location necessitates retaining staff or paying friends back home to tend to the character's other, broader concerns while the character is off adventuring.

- A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury
Not everyone cares about verisimilitude, but for those of us who do, the long time scale and the group of followers together permit a GM to tweak rules and powers towards needing long-term recovery. A character who gets injured has the time required to heal up before the next expedition. When a character is knocked out of a delve due to injury, their player isn't sidelined for a session or two; they have followers with them who can go in instead. Or they can attempt the risky proposition of having their PC continue while seriously injured, knowing they have the backstop of having levelled followers back home if 'injured' turns into 'dead' as a result.

...And finally, as the Against The Wicked City article noted, players will have a chance to actually update the age written on their character sheet.

TTRPGs and the state, redux: Looting the dungeon

When I was talking about states recently (one, two), someone said they thought there was a more fundamental question.

In a classic fantasy tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), why are there reasonably nearby zones of adventure (shorthand: dungeons) filled with hoards of treasure and magic items (shorthand: loot)?

Why hasn't the local viscount sent an expeditionary force of, say, a hundred men-at-arms and a dozen court wizards to burn down the goblin lair and snaffle up the coin and artefacts?

Now in this case, there are only weak parallels to draw from our world history: in our world, people are the apex predator and are easily capable of using basic technology to survive most naturally-occurring terrain challenges, meaning there haven't been 'zones of adventure' since the stone age, and when treasures lie buried or forgotten for ages, they're essentially never guarded by traps or environmental hazards. The closest parallel might be local raids against individuals or small groups (of citizens, outsiders, or neighbouring states) to seize their wealth, or larger-scale colonial or pseudo-colonial expeditions, like Hernán Cortés using military and technological advances to loot the Americas for silver and gold.

Still, given a reasonable chance of a large resource payout by directing military action against a somewhat nearby stronghold of non-citizens, especially a stronghold which the TTRPG's nature demands can be overcome by a small group of risk-taking specialists, it's clearly sensible for the state to do exactly that. Directing military action is one of the things a state is good at, almost by definition. If it's more of a 'crumbling trap-filled but otherwise undefended ruin' situation, then all the more reason for the state to use its unique advantages (centralised wealth, coordination of groups, compulsion of individuals) to get some specialists in there and extract the wealth.

I'm not going to go for thousands of words about the world-building problem this time, but I can think of some solutions of various quality.

Poor solutions:

• The world doesn't make sense, so what. Abandon verisimilitude, embrace gameplay. I think this unambiguously makes for a weaker game, but that may not actually matter for e.g. beer-and-pretzels one-shots.
• People work differently here. People in this world act differently, make different decisions, and in the role of the state, do different things. This essentially turns people into aliens and makes role-playing much harder.
• There are naturally-occurring weak states. States in this world just have little collective power and low reach, so non-looted dungeons exist. It's really a non-answer, raising questions about why other states haven't taken over, and why the individuals capable of looting dungeons haven't risen to become state powers.
• Present it as a mystery that the player characters can't solve. By positioning the issue front-and-centre, diegetically, it turns the players' asking "but why doesn't X?" from a complaint into a question. However, it's going to be extremely unsatisfying to then never give an answer. The GM would also have to be careful about things within the world accidentally becoming false "clues".

Unusual solutions:

• States here are extremely wealthy and have low populations. The expected value of running a dungeon is high to an individual PC, but low or negative to a state (the cost of losing manpower is high and the wealth within is low compared to the state's existing resources). This can work in some settings. The state needs to have hoarded a lot of wealth, rather than this just being a rich society: otherwise the implication is that the gold pieces and magic wands you're looting are as common as pennies and screwdrivers.
• The PCs are the agents of the state. I seldom see this as an integral assumption of the game itself, but it can naturally emerge in a campaign. If the PCs are strong enough, then they can be tempted or compelled to act as an arm of the state. Maybe there's a gold rush on dungeons at the moment, and the PCs are one of many small groups being sent to some of the smaller zones of adventure, while the knights and court wizards and levy archers and such are sent to the big ones.
• It's a mystic underworld, innit. In this world, dungeons are haunting netherworlds that can only be broached by true archetypal heroes. The state has no way of acquiring those without removing their 'archetypal hero' status in the process, and this is all part of the setting metaphysics. Of course, it's still in the state's interest to encourage the existence of these heroic types and then tax them enormously when they come out of the dungeon, an angle that's almost implicit in OD&D but which I haven't seen much in games since then.
• Dungeons grow faster than states can keep up with. A few settings, especially I think those influenced by computer RPGs, have organic/magical dungeons as entities which rapidly appear (maybe propagate themselves), grow, etc. The danger/reward can therefore be higher than, and move around faster than, people can collectively deal with. I would expect states to still do what they can, but 'roaming adventurers' and 'professional dungeon delvers' can become a plausible part of the setting.

Neat solutions:

• The game is set after a massive cataclysm. Some disaster or combination thereof (war, plague, ice age, undead legions, minor apocalypse) has resulted in weak and disorganised states, low manpower, recent ruins, un-exploited situations, and maybe a dungeon 'gold rush' as civilisation bounces back.
• The game is set after an apocalypse.  The same thing writ large; the PCs have emerged from a bunker into a post-apocalyptic world. The neat thing is that this not only provides a reason for weak or non-existent state powers, but the remaining bunkers can be natural zones of adventure, as can the post-apocalyptic wastes. Other bunkers can be safe cities to return to.
  
• The state has bad information. The state is wrong about how dangerous the dungeon is, how lucrative the dungeon is, how close by the dungeon is, whether the dungeon exists, etc. It's easy for us in the information age to overlook just how slow it can be for accurate knowledge about the world to be discovered and propagated in pre-industrial times (although you'll need to scrutinise whether communication and divination magic are enough to overcome this). This solution works best when there's little to no history of dungeon discoveries. It's perfectly reasonable for a short dungeon-delving campaign to be propped up by, say, the PCs just happening on a collection of treasure maps.
• We entertain the gods. All-powerful interventionist forces enjoy the world being a certain way, which happens to align with the GM's aims, and the result is a setting that's good for the TTRPG. Very easy to implement, and a conscientious GM will make it a discoverable premise within the world. The only question left is "why do the omnipotent forces have these preferences?" and there are lots of answers if they are remotely person-like in nature.

 

 

Are there games that have lit upon other notable solutions?