Quote from: jhkim on February 08, 2024, 12:38:33 PM

Quote from: Jam The MF on February 08, 2024, 03:58:19 AM

Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 11:33:23 AM
Like I said in the other thread, I provide opportunities to buy properties, titles (with holdings and duties attached), ships, and anything else that was normally for sale in the 13th to 16th centuries.

It is also very hard to keep a fortune of gold safe and secure.

The last sentence, says what I was thinking.  Unless they can store their haul away in a pocket dimension; how successful can they possibly be, at hanging on to it?  If they place it in some type of bank, instant taxes are going to be assessed; and the bank might even get robbed and lose it all.  They don't have any supposed FDIC protection.

The usual pirate solution is to bury the gold in an uninhabited place where only the PCs know. That's what the the dwarves did with the trolls' treasure in The Hobbit, for example. In the real world, this is very secure, the problem is just that you're not earning interest on the money.

The GM could come up with excuses to take buried treasure away - like gold-sniffing wandering monsters, but if those are common enough to scour all the wilderness, then the PCs should have a chance to know about them.

Isn't it a myth that pirates buried their treasure? Nothing wrong with using myth, just sayin.

The problem with caching the loot is that, if the place is hard to find, then you probably should write down directions or a map, or at least memorize the directions with a mnemonic like a riddle or song. If you go into the backcountry IRL, trying to find an old spot, even a year or two later, it is easier than it sounds. You could RP the location and if the players forget, then tough luck. Or you could have them create a map, which of course could be stolen. Memorized directions could be discovered by torture or magic. Besides magic, there are also mundane risks, like curious woodsmen and swamp hags, who might have seen a motley crew of dangerous types hiking into the forest with a large load. It's a bit of a catch 22, the more secret the location, the harder it is for you to find later.

So, yeah, risky and very gameable.

Quote from: rytrasmi on February 08, 2024, 12:54:28 PM
Isn't it a myth that pirates buried their treasure? Nothing wrong with using myth, just sayin.

Generally yes, but Captain Kidd actually did so. Barbarian Kings and others have also done so.

The main problem is that the PCs will hire a small army of henchmen and hirelings. In fact, I've heard that the reason the 1E DMG procedure for hiring a henchman is so involved and pitfall-laden is that in the Original Campaign (before 1E) this is exactly what happened. You planned the adventure for a party of six low-level PCs, and now they have another six 1st level PCs following them and helping them!

Even if this doesn't make the adventure into a cakewalk, a good part of the game will be taken up by the supporting NPCs' actions and rolls, and it becomes a team management game instead of a game in which you play a heroic character (or a potentially heroic one anyway).

There's a number of ways you could do up a ratio of coin to modern salaries.

The main one I think of is with the bare minimum costs of housing and food for a single person in the cheapest state of the union as equivalent to what an unskilled laborer would be earning... which presently is right around $10k.

This doesn't cover taxes or gas or clothes (which bumps it up to just over $26k in South Dakota) it's establishing an absolute minimum boundry with the presumption that fantasy day laborers scrape by on 1sp/day (36gp/year) without having cars and their taxes coming from extra unpaid labor for their lord and not starving to death en masse.

$10k/year divided by 36gp/year gives you 1gp = $277.

$26k/year divided by 36 gets 1gp = $722.

If the national minimum wage for an 8 hour day = 1sp then 1gp = $580.

Offering 100gp for a job is like offering someone $27,000-$72,000 to do something.

1500gp/level training costs makes just getting to level 2 the equivalent of dropping $500,000 to $1 million for a weeklong training program on the conservative side.

From starting to level four is a minimum of $3,000,000 you've shelled out for your education.
To hit level ten you've spent $22.5 - $45 million.

And you thought the Ivy League was bad.

ETA: from some research and for comparison, the cost to the US taxpayer to train up a Navy SEAL is about $2 million dollars.

Basically, in terms of training costs, a Navy SEAL is about a level two fighter.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 08, 2024, 02:35:42 PM
There's a number of ways you could do up a ratio of coin to modern salaries.

The main one I think of is with the bare minimum costs of housing and food for a single person in the cheapest state of the union as equivalent to what an unskilled laborer would be earning... which presently is right around $10k.

This doesn't cover taxes or gas or clothes (which bumps it up to just over $26k in South Dakota) it's establishing an absolute minimum boundry with the presumption that fantasy day laborers scrape by on 1sp/day (36gp/year) without having cars and their taxes coming from extra unpaid labor for their lord and not starving to death en masse.

$10k/year divided by 36gp/year gives you 1gp = $277.

$26k/year divided by 36 gets 1gp = $722.

If the national minimum wage for an 8 hour day = 1sp then 1gp = $580.

Offering 100gp for a job is like offering someone $27,000-$72,000 to do something.

1500gp/level training costs makes just getting to level 2 the equivalent of dropping $500,000 to $1 million for a weeklong training program on the conservative side.

From starting to level four is a minimum of $3,000,000 you've shelled out for your education.
To hit level ten you've spent $22.5 - $45 million.

And you thought the Ivy League was bad.

ETA: from some research and for comparison, the cost to the US taxpayer to train up a Navy SEAL is about $2 million dollars.

Basically, in terms of training costs, a Navy SEAL is about a level two fighter.

  Is that just completion of BUDS though?  Because SEALs do a TON of training after they leave BUDS and lots of it highly specialized and pretty darned expensive.  I am not sure that is going to be the best comparison when you get to what the total costs were for a SEAL who did 16 years with the teams after BUDS.

Quote from: Mishihari on February 08, 2024, 03:42:20 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 07:11:10 PM

Quote from: rytrasmi on February 07, 2024, 03:57:19 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 07, 2024, 03:17:03 PM
I remember having characters with hundreds of thousands of GP sitting on their character sheet, even after training and magic research and material components, and carousing.

How much does 100k gp weigh and where are you storing it? That's a king's ransom, my friend. Better build some sort of underground labyrinth to store it. Pay some monsters to guard it. You can even build a tomb down there, so you can be near it when you die.

Conversion into gems is the usual answer to that, if it didn't come in that way, which it usually did. And with all that cash, hiring guards and building a fortress is no problem. Though any low level mooks dumb enough to try and rob a party of (say) 9th level adventurers is gonna get what they deserve. High level adversaries usually have bigger fish to fry.

I find it hard to accept that reasoning when that's exactly the type of adventure the PC's are doing all the time.

It's a game. If you think about it, dungeons full of treasure held by level-appropriate-foes are silly. But when you tie xp to treasure and then make it the main source of xp, you have to provide a sufficent amount of treasure in an adventure whether it makes sense or not.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 08, 2024, 10:53:46 AM
Has anyone considered maybe just handing out less treasure to begin with?

That's what I've been banging on about in both threads. The problem is if you tie xp to treasure, you have to give out enough treasure to give the characters a reasonable amount of xp.

A solution, the one I've been using for years, is to reduce the xp award for gp value to some fraction. Say 1/4, so 4gp = 1 xp. Bump up the xp award for fighting, and then give a sum of xp for completing the adventure. If you're feeling frisky, you can break down the "general" sum into categories like exploration, social interaction, figuring out puzzles, etc. But that's a good starting point.

When you have a gold = XP system, I like to tie the XP to when you spend the gold, not when you earn it.  So, PCs end up enriching the town either through sales or building investments like shops, farms, fortifications and the like.  I think it is neat to see those dungeon border towns grow over time and more people move in etc.  I generally don't use Taxmen directly since the PCs are way too likely to incinerate or decapitate them.  But, if the mayor can vouch for the PCs as being 'good citizens' that grow the kingdom's power, that's another way for the PC to interact with the setting.

[edit for typos]

Quote from: rytrasmi on February 08, 2024, 12:54:28 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 08, 2024, 12:38:33 PM

Quote from: Jam The MF on February 08, 2024, 03:58:19 AM
Unless they can store their haul away in a pocket dimension; how successful can they possibly be, at hanging on to it?  If they place it in some type of bank, instant taxes are going to be assessed; and the bank might even get robbed and lose it all.  They don't have any supposed FDIC protection.

The usual pirate solution is to bury the gold in an uninhabited place where only the PCs know. That's what the the dwarves did with the trolls' treasure in The Hobbit, for example. In the real world, this is very secure, the problem is just that you're not earning interest on the money.

The GM could come up with excuses to take buried treasure away - like gold-sniffing wandering monsters, but if those are common enough to scour all the wilderness, then the PCs should have a chance to know about them.

Isn't it a myth that pirates buried their treasure? Nothing wrong with using myth, just sayin.

The problem with caching the loot is that, if the place is hard to find, then you probably should write down directions or a map, or at least memorize the directions with a mnemonic like a riddle or song. If you go into the backcountry IRL, trying to find an old spot, even a year or two later, it is easier than it sounds. You could RP the location and if the players forget, then tough luck. Or you could have them create a map, which of course could be stolen. Memorized directions could be discovered by torture or magic. Besides magic, there are also mundane risks, like curious woodsmen and swamp hags, who might have seen a motley crew of dangerous types hiking into the forest with a large load. It's a bit of a catch 22, the more secret the location, the harder it is for you to find later.

So, yeah, risky and very gameable.

Everything has some risk. It's risky to keep their treasure in a pocket dimension like a Portable Hole or spell, because the hole could be stolen or the wizard could be tortured into revealing the secret to opening that pocket dimension. How much do they really know about pocket dimensions? An extraplanar monster might snatch it.

With burial, what risks there are can be minimized by simple strategy. They don't have to announce they're going off into the wilderness in a trip specifically to hide their gold, and then come back unladen. Many fantasy PCs spend most of their life outdoors, and they're already traveling across the wilderness with a train of supplies (food, tools, etc.). After burying treasure, they're carrying just as much - it's only that some of their packs/chests now have dirt instead of gold, that they dump days travel away. And it's easily possible to write down personal mnemonics and leave markers near the site that only the person writing understands the meaning of, rather than a treasure map with clear instructions.

At some point, it seems like the rigamarole of making players strategize about how to keep their money, and GMs thinking of ways to take it away -- it would be easier to just not have as much treasure. The back-and-forth doesn't feel like fun gaming to me.

  Again...I really do not as a GM being the in the role of the IRS and trying to find ways to fleece players.  If they earned/won the treasure I let them have it.  If they are fools with it...that can open a game avenue.  If they have any sort of effort at security though I will simply give them options as to how they spend it.  Some will have the best looking gear, look to have a manor and full time staff.  Others will lock it in a vault and come count their coins in their spare time.   I do not care.  The whole point of adventuring is to go out and do things most sane people would not do to get rewards most regular people completely lack the nerve for.   If this means that through saving and hoarding they end up with a fortune, so be it.   I get 1e RAW was adversarial in many ways from the puzzles, to the traps, to the monsters to the keeping your money.   I am maybe too much a fair tax sort to go trying to retroactively snag the loot the players got fair and square.   Now if I screwed up and gave them too much...it is also not fair for me to cook up some way to "take them down a peg". 

   I prefer to give some ways to spend it if they want to (I find this actually ends up getting them to use their money and they buy things along RP lines for their character) and if they want to hoard it or use it to get all kinds of political power so be it.  I have never had an issue with a player saying he did not want to go on an adventure because his ROI's on investing in local shops was looking so good he was considering retiring.

  I mean don't we all have enough issues with someone trying to take what we earn IRL enough to NOT have this in a game?   Plot wise for some villain to steal from them I *might* do, but most of it always struck me as adversarial and meta means to hold them back. 

Since we are talking about giving away less money, that's what I do, I give 1/4 the gold. Training and monthly expenses are also 1/4 RAW values. Coins are also smaller, 50 to the pound. Gear costs stay the same. The XP for the 'gold not given' comes from achieving the adventure's goals. It's worked well.

Well, in my own current games, I use a silver standard, and am rather stingy with even that.  It's 50 silver or more to buy many weapons, and players are happy to find that much silver, total, in a typical, low-powered adventure.  As I said already, if you don't have any particular incentive to give out large sums of money, then it's a different dynamic.

Even in 1e or OSRIC I tend to go with "give out less cash, give more XP from other sources, and let them get wealthy".

One thing about 1e in particular is that the treasure tables are pretty stingy, but NPCs are often loaded down with hugely valuable items, and it's those magic items that tend to generate most cash, along with gems and jewelry.

I typically:
Keep cash hoards as-is but lower coin weight to 1/100 lb
Reduce gem/jewelry value to 1/10 or less the listed numbers
Reduce sale value of most magic items. If running 1e I may use the lower XP value for gp sale value.
I also tend to be more careful these days what magic items I give to NPCs.
Give monster XP more like OD&D, without a reduction for higher level PCs, eg 100 XP for a 1 hd creature.
Give quest award XP, typically 1/20 what a Fighter would need to level up, so 100 XP per PC at 1st-2nd level.
Trying to recall what I did re training when I last GM'd 1e/OSRIC a few years back, I think it was 100 gp/level. Might have been less though.

For my own post-post-apocalyptic sci-fantasy setting most places are barter (don't underestimate barter as a reward system) or precious metals with a silver cent (1 percent of a pound of silver) being the standard daily pay for an unskilled laborer). Barely sufficient food for a day in most cities runs about 1/2c if you prepare it you or 1c at a tavern (good food is 2c, exceptional meals might run 5-10c).

Skilled labor typically earns 2-5c per day. Bounties on criminals are typically 5-10c a head, though exceptionally dangerous local ones might reach 100c. Anything beyond that isn't something you put on a bounty board, it's something you hire professional contractors for and their fees will be the result of negotiations.

An average longsword costs about 60c, a munitions-grade brigandine vest and helmet will run about 100c, a full-suit of munitions grade armor will run as much as 400c. A single-chamber musket/rifle with bayonet runs about 140c.

Really expensive stuff gets measured in full pounds of silver (£)... though payment at that level would typically be gold coins (roughly one imperial oz. to the silver pound... 16:1 being a fairly typical gold:silver exchange rate historically) or precious gems.

Advanced-grade weapons and armor cost significantly more, a suit of reinforced heavy armor is £40, an advanced alloy blade will run you £6 (basically two-years wages for a laborer), a functional semi-automatic assault rifle akin to an AR-15 is £300 (and modern bullets for it 10c ... 10 days wages for a common man... each). You don't buy these things in a market, you go to a dealer who will arrange terms and delivery.

Lostech, when you can even find it, costs probably 10 times even that. Heavy armor as light as clothing or with an integral energy shield (£400), beam swords that melt through armor (£100), man-carried rail guns (£1000+), etc. You need to know a guy to even know who the dealers at this level even are and their stock is limited and may not even be deliverable immediately (think the market for mega-yachts and art with a price tag in the millions).

Outside of bounties and the smattering of coin humanoid opponents might have (typically less than a week's pay), treasure is generally in the form of useable goods that could be used or sold by the PCs; a case of advanced grade fuel cells or rack of munition-grade rifles found in a ruin could keep your group fed and housed for a week, a still functional arcane engine could be traded for enough to afford a suit advanced-grade armor (or a very nice house), a hoverbike or advanced rifle is probably something you're keeping for yourself and just trying to unload the thing for more fungible assets could become its own adventure.

Because somewhere along the way, EGG figured out he was giving out staggering amounts of wealth every few adventures, and he tried to figure out how to get rid of it.