Fixing Treasure Tables

I should be writing a post describing the events of the Discord Campaign, Friday the 10th, but I've been working on a different project related to that campaign... in fact inspired by it. All this is old school stuff, so it won't help you with your later edition game. Sorry. My fixes are always in some way related to AD&D, not because it's "good," but because its familiar. I know where all the bugs are.

As such, this post isn't going to make a lot of sense to many except us old farts, but...

This horrid piece of trash is the infamous Treasure Type table from the original Monster Manual:

This is as much as the screen capture would produce. I could pull out my own manual, put it in my scanner and give the whole thing, but as I don't care (and it's probably somewhere on Google), it's sufficient for my purposes. The concept is more or less this: a monster such as a "troglodyte," which the party has been fighting of late (31, by my count), has a specific "type" of treasure, as shown below, beneath % IN LAIR.

The trog's "treasure type" is A, the first line on the above image. It shows a 25% chance of 1-6 thousands of copper, a 30% of 1-6 thousands of silver... and so on. We don't need to get excessive with listing things there. The idea (and no, this isn't the whole story, but it's the part we're going to use, so just roll with it) is to roll these and then compare the numbers obtained with the "No. Appearing" on the trog page. Thus, if you get 5,000 c.p. on the treasure type table, and you find 1 troglodyte in his "lair," then presumably he has 5,000/100 = 50 c.p. in his possession.

Like I said, no, it's not exactly like that. There's a lot of silly rules that are in no way consistent throughout the books about lairs and minimum numbers and so on, but please ignore that. It's not relevant.

Like most people, I've always hated the treasure table. The players always wind up fighting something hard and a bunch of bad rolls arise so the players end up with a paltry amount of treasure... so you have to ignore the shitty table and just give straight treasure as seems best. Or the players fight the easiest battle they've ever had and suddenly the treasure table works in their favour. It's too random, too inconsistent...

And yet, I've always felt that on some level, it was the good root of an idea. Only, I spent about fifteen years occasionally trying to find it to no avail. No matter how I turned the numbers around or made the rolls, it just wouldn't provide a consistent, practical number. A certain number of troglodytes should consistently have a certain amount of things, just as any large group of people that act independently accumulate a reasonable wealth merely by existing. Trogs have a fairly decent treasure, compared to orcs, say. And they ought to. The trogs my players have fought over two sessions have killed one of their party and have come very close to effecting a total party kill. The question, though, is how to produce that treasure logically, without pulling a number out of our ass.

But after years of failing to produce such a number, I sighed and, before launching this blog in 2008, I'd long since quit trying. Now and then, someone here has asked me about assigning treasure, and I've had no answer.

Until, I think, now.

Starting by compiling the original numbers for Type A treasure:

Those are the excel functions. We start by ignoring the "random" generation and just multiply the percentage of a type of coin against that amount of coin, doubling the chance of each type. Thus, it's 50% for 1-6 thousand copper (average 3500), and 60% for 1-6 thousand silver. The number of gems is 100% times 4-40 (average 22), while jewelry is 3-30 automatically also (average 16.5). We treat magic as special, ignoring the percentage, counting 3 treasure. Magic items are a special category and are dealt with differently, as I shall get to eventually (and not with this post).

It'll be helpful to see the calculations of the above and here they are. Adding up the total experience from each, we get a total of 113,076 for 100 troglodytes... dividing that between the 100 possible appearing, that's... 1,131 per creature.

Wait a minute. What?

Is that 97,000 g.p. next to jewellery a typing error? Why the hell is it so bloody high?

Well...

The "jewelry table" (American spelling) appears on page 26 of the original DMG, reproduced below, with it's description intact.

For reasons that surpass all comprehension, there's a 60% chance of getting an average piece of jewelry that's worth more than 1750 g.p., and an incredibly 30% chance of getting a piece with an average of 5,000 g.p. altogether. In fact, if you balance out the average across the table, the average is 2,910 g.p. per piece on the first roll.

However, the rules state that you should roll a d10 and a d8 to see if the "workmanship" or the "inset gems" are exceptional in some way... and if you use this rule, you get an average of 5,919 g.p. ... not because rolling a 1 on either die is likely, but because the cumulative effect of rolling said dice on multiple items creates jewellery of simply extravagant results. Jewellery by itself totally dwarfs the rest of the treasure types table, whenever it occurs... and frankly, though I've been at this game a long time, I can't ever recall having noticed this before to this extent. It's enough to convince me that I must have the math wrong, somewhere. Still, I can't help looking at those odds of getting an average piece over 5,000 g.p. That alone, even if I've screwed up the average (and I may have, I'm not perfect), is enough to make me feel that jewellery table needs serious adjustment.

Here's my new table... formula version first.

This really isn't a complicated calculation. It generates a d1000, then divides the chances of that between "wares," "valuables," "treasures," "adornment", "regalia" and "masterpiece."  A big problem I always had with the DMG table was that "gold with gems" doesn't really mean a damn thing since I don't know the type of jewellery (necklace vs. earring, for instance) or how much actual gold vs. amount of gems is being used. So, that's tossed in favour of trying to capture a "use" principle in these expressions.

"Wares" (20-80 g.p.) are valuable things one might own in a living space. "Valuables" (80-480 g.p.) are things that someone of the merchant/artisan class might especially esteem, but really is still just a higher quality ware. "Treasures" (240-1920 g.p) are the sort of thing that are kept either hidden or under lock and key; they're just too valuable to leave lying about.

"Adornment" (480-4800 g.p.) falls into things that are designed specifically to be worn or carried on a social-authority level, short of an actual monarchy: a guild or captain's crest, a lord or bishop's evidence of office, that sort of thing. "Regalia" (1440-7200 g.p.) thus fits the category of what a monarch wears; logically, one monarch may wear or carry half a dozen such items. Finally, the last category, the "masterpiece" is a one-of-a-kind artwork, worth (4050-13500 g.p.). Said regalia may be something that is in fact being sought after; or it may be something long forgotten from another age. Masterpieces might have a lineage of who made them or where they're from... but that's not necessarily something that needs tracking in the creation of the table.

If you transpose the above formulas, you can create a series of lines in which each line produces a result:

To be honest, I've played with this and regalia/masterpieces come up a bit too often... that might need some work. But as it's built now, the table produces an average jewellery value of 376 before checking for special... 414 if a "1" rolled merely doubles the value of the jewellery.

Lost? I hope not. I've tried to explain this as carefully as possible. Multiplied against those 16.5 jewellery in our original table, the total value of jewellery is down to 6,837... very close to the gems, though the two numbers are arrived at separately. So I'm fairly pleased with that amount.

But what about the 90,826 experience lost from the treasure type? Do we just throw that away?

Here's where things get fun.

Starting with coins. I don't use "electrum" and "platinum", so the latter is folded into the value of gold (125*5 = 750 x.p.)+4400 g.p. (4400 x.p.); this is then added to 85%*that 90,000 we lost from jewellery... and the total of all three of these together is divided by three. The total is that shown: 32,696 g.p. per type A lair.

Electrum's 1225 x.p. is added to silver's 105 x.p.; then 10% of the lost x.p. from jewellery is added to this and again, the total is divided by three. THEN, importantly, I give players 1 x.p. per 3 silver, rather than the silver value in gold. Thus, we get a nice tidy 13,756 x.p. for the silver that's here.

Finally, copper's 4 x.p. is added to 5% of that lost from jewellery and the total is divided by 3. I give 1 x.p. per 4 copper, so we get 6,528 x.p. from the copper found. With gems, jewellery and magic, the total is 54,804... without my needing to build a new treasure type table from scratch.

Crazy? Perhaps. But I like the number 553 x.p. per trog. Since my experience system gives 10 x.p. per hit point, plus another 40 x.p. for every point of damage the players suffer, the party has already achieved more than a thousand each from getting banged around during their various fights. Another total of 17,000 x.p. on top of that (yes, party members, there it is in the room with you, right now, just waiting for you to win one more battle) seems perfectly fair.

I could build in a 25% swing, so that dice are rolled to permit 75% to 125% of the totals shown here... but just now, I don't see the sense. These trogs have a reputation as raiders, so it doesn't make sense for them to be short of treasure from that. Just now, I want to see how it plays out.

The next post I write will be the campaign, and then I'll pick this up again... if you're interested. I swear to St. Crispin's ashes, if this post doesn't get at least five comments, I'm not writing another word on this subject.