4 comments:

David said...

Treasure distribution and control is probably one of the tricks to DMing that takes the longest to learn. For instance, I still screw it up.

Along the lines of not giving an NPC a +1 sword if you don't' want the players getting hold of it, be careful with inventory you list in shops. My previous campaign had a thriving black market run by a large criminal organization. The market dealt primarily in stolen magic items. Normally this isn't an issue, except that the party polymorphed themselves, destroyed the market, killed or drove off the criminals in the immediate area, grabbed as much as they could carry (in a dozen bags of holding and a few Tenser's Floating Discs) and planeshifted.

Suddenly, I had a party that had randomly shifted to a point in the Heroic Domains of Ysgaard with three million gold in magic items.

Anyway, just presented as a cautionary tale. Yeesh.

September 29, 2008 at 8:29 AM  

RipperX said...

Oh man, David. That would suck, but the cool thing about mistakes is that it challenges the DM to be more creative. How did you rectify this situation?

I think that I would invent a nasty cursed item that infects all of the other magic items. Something that can't be detected right away, and will corrupt or destroy all of it, even the stuff that they had before the robbery if they aren't careful.

I never sell magic items, EVER. Stores full of magic just seems to take away the mystic of what a magic item is. They aren't common things, if they were then the world would be a silly place, and that is the last thing that I want.

September 29, 2008 at 1:42 PM  

David said...

To be honest, I kind of blunt-forced the issue. Though they'd stolen a great deal of material, I decided that they each found a single item of notable worth (the party was mid-high level at this point) amongst a pile of 'useless' +1s and whatnot. I allowed them each to pick a category, and I rolled a major item from that. Other than that, it was a pile of what might be considered junk at that level.

Also they lost quite a portion of sales by the fact that no vendor can afford the wealth they were trying to sell, and no vendor can reasonably move that much in a lifetime anyway. I think they ended up getting something on the order of one million gold from the sale.

Also three quarters of the party died shortly afterwords, because they were stupid. They decided that the cursed (intelligent, CE wizard soul) Amulet of the Planes was fun to go sightseeing with. Since the intelligence in the item forced an opposed roll against the amulet's user to wrest control of the plane shift, it took control fairly commonly. Eventually it tired of overuse and shifted the party into the Nine Hells, directly in front of a Pit Lord. The party all failed fear and scattered, though I ruled that the wizard had presence of mind enough that "Fleeing in the most direct route possible" included "Planeshifting to the Prime Material". The party took heavy hits from the huge devil, and then on the wizard's turn, he ported himself and the two party members in reach to the Prime Material, in a random location. They cowered from the fear effect on the ground in a forest, while one of them bled to death from wounds. The fighter of the party (technically Dragon Shaman) was captured and enslaved in the Hells.

The campaign involved a lot of planar travel afterwords, but they did stop the stupid sightseeing nonsense. They also used a combination of spells to remove the intelligence from the Amulet, so that it became reliable.

Though the influx of money and loot certainly 'broke' the campaign regarding PC power levels, it also led to some fun stories.

September 30, 2008 at 3:59 PM  

Unknown said...

It isn't the right fit for every campaign but the Earthdawn style of handling magic items works rather well and tends to lead towards a game that's more like a story. I mean really, how many fantasy stories get all detailed about how the characters are constantly upgrading their gear?

In Earthdawn there are few if any random magic items. They were all created and there are two basic sources. Craftsmen and legends. Crafting a magic item takes a lot of effort and is moderately costly. These items are the +1 swords and daggers and the general workhorse items. The powerful ones all come from legends.

These legendary items are fairly normal at base, you have to actually bond with them and learn what they are to get any great use out of them. And as you learn more about them, you invest time (and in Earthdawn, the equivalent of XP) in them. Sometimes to increase an items power you don't passively learn about it's legend, you must go imitate it. If you find the legendary sword of a pirate king it may require you to subdue several pirate lords and take command of them at some point, much as it's former master did.

Whether to charge XP for each step like this is up to you. In Earthdawn there are several ways one can spend XP so it doesn't stand out there. Doing so in D&D might require more thought. But if legendary items are slightly more useful or powerful than what everyone else has, charging XP to ramp up their power might not be a bad way to balance things if everyone doesn't own one.

Oh and for David's scenario... Wow that sucks. Sounds like it was probably really lousy roleplay. Although scenarios like that are easy to introduce villains and extra plots to. Just add another, more powerful layer to the guys they stole from under the surface. That market was just a branch of a much larger cartel spanning dozens of prime material worlds and only a few people knew of that. The head honcho had a shipment of infernal weapons on the premises he was buying from a demon lord but the deal hadn't been finalized yet. The god of thieves is angry at them because many of his fervent worshippers died to the party's weapons and the god is mad because the PC's didn't even pull the job off with any finesse, they just killed everyone. One of the newly acquired magic items is a prison for a powerful creature with an agenda, whom the party accidentally frees.

I know that won't help with the game you mentioned but hopefully it'll give you ideas for next time. Or maybe it'll just remind me. I tend to go all deer in headlights when players do things that grossly overbalanced to me too.

October 3, 2008 at 9:51 AM