Selling the Dungeon

[glitterbaby]

I was viewing a thread recently in which a DM was unhappy over his players wanting to sell the corpses of slain monsters. I didn't read too much into it but it got me thinking. Looking back it seems my group does this a lot. Just last session we took on, for brevity's sake, a bandit camp. They had a crude prison room, among other things, made out of a bunch of iron bars hammered into the ground and when we were finished we dug up all the iron, which came out to about 3 or 4 tons. The enemy base was in the middle of a large forest and took about a day of uninhibited travel and so we decided to send someone back to town for a team of horses and while it ended up taking about 3 or 4 days longer, we got all our iron back to town and were able to sell it. This leads, finally, to my actual question. On the other thread people were suggesting the unhappy DM simply give less gold in future encounters to make up for their inflated wealth, as treasure is something over which the DM has absolute control and the PCs have no way of knowing otherwise. That doesn't exactly seem right to me. It seems as though the PCs are being punished for being creative. Should they really receive less treasure when they had to attribute additional resources, be it time/effort/spells, in order to get their little boost? I'm not a big fan of DMing myself so it's entirely possible I may have a bit of a bias. Help me understand, Playground!

[atemu1234]

Lowering gold is good. Penalizing the sell value is better. Pulling a Tomb-of-Horrors-Revision is betterer.

[Larrx]

Punishing players for being creative is bad. However, there are many things that a DM is responsible for. Creating fun, challenging and engaging encounters is one of those things. Wealth by level is an inherent assumption of the system. So much so that it's often seen as a character building resource like feats. If a character or party has more wealth than expected than they are more potent than they should be. A DM has to deal with this. You can reduce future treasure to compensate, you can increase the CR of encounters or optimize them better, you can introduce thieves and rust monsters, you can think up a more elegant solution. But, you have to do something.

The alternative is to allow the players to accrue enough power to simply steamroll all planned encounters. This, typically, is boring for everybody.

So yes, be prepared. Be frugal. Do whatever you can do as a character to gain an edge. But also be aware that while a DM may make challenges easier as a result, he cannot make them trivial.

[Threadnaught]

NPCs have their own trusted suppliers who may be offended if they're not paid for their supply?

NPCs may notice the PCs carrying large amounts of valuable loot around and proceed to "help" them by "lightening the load"?

NPCs only have so much money in settlements of a certain size to offer the PCs and there are only so many coins in circulation before the PCs can no longer sell anything?


A minimum sized Metropolis has a limit of 100000gp per item bought or sold, and there are approximately 125000000gp worth of coins floating around such a settlement, the smaller a settlement gets, the less money there is and the lower the purchase limit. I like Sharn in Eberron for running a business, a billion gp just there for the taking for a clever merchant.
Consult the DMG for the purchase limit per settlement, it's quite easy to miss, but the asset limit for how much a settlement has in circulation is (Population/10)*(Purchase limit/2). Now it's a little easier to limit what your players can buy and sell now, isn't it?

[RogueWizard]

It's all about balance.

More money = better equipment = more power = imbalanced play

Creativity should NEVER be punished, not when it's clever. However, the DM must keep encounters challenging. CR assumes certain level of loot per level which helps keep encounters balanced and getting extra loot means imbalancing the game and making it too easy.

That being said, CRs don't accurately depict what players can and can't handle. A team of newbies probably need CRs lowered a little, and a team of veterans probably need their encounters to be near impossible and require great tactics and creativity to overcome. Personally, I love overpowering my players as a DM, but in the process I overpower all the encounters they face to match. If they become too strong, I send them against something more their level and they feel even more badass.

The DM's job is to create fun. Being rewarded for creativity is fun, and challenging encounters are also fun. A DM should consider both when making decisions.

[Milo v3]

It's not punishing the creativity, it's acknowledging the aftermath that occurs when you give players more gold then they are mechanically intended to have.

[jaydubs]

Don't forget the gold sink. Done well, players will feel rewarded for their efforts, while still not becoming too powerful for their level. Manors, knighthoods, fancy living, getting famous, building orphanages, supporting their deities, etc. are all things players will want to give their characters, that won't make them mechanically tougher to deal with.

You can also allow extra wealth to increase narrative (rather than mechanical) power, but you have to be more careful with it. Hiring armies, gaining political power, etc. are things that can go well or poorly. Handled well, the characters get to exert more influence on the world, but still need to handle a lot of problems in person. Handles poorly, it will transform a campaign about adventuring into a campaign about sending other people to have adventures.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Wbl must be maintained to maintain some semblance of balance. As others have pointed out, reducing future treaure is just one way of doing so.

Personaly, I prefer this method:

Only permanent and semi-pemanent items (wands, staves, etc) count against my players' WBL. Liquid resources (gold, art objects, gems, etc), one shot expendables, and property that doesn't contribute -directly- to a PC's power don't count. Have a castle with a bunch of minions, a few businesses, a paid position in government, etc.

None of that matters when you're in the thick of it, up to your ankles in muck and blood, blades clanging and magic sizzling, and -that- is where WBL actually matters.

That said, I usually put a pretty quick stop to players wanting to loot everything that's not nailed down or on fire. That's not clever, just tedious. Piece out a dragon? Cool. A winter wolf? Not so much. The iron bars of a large cage? Get out of here, you doorknob.

[Zubrowka74]

A winer wolf? Not so much.

Not so much, heh? Wait until you see the looser wolf!

[Ferronach]

Totally go the wrong idea from your title...

I had this image of a group clearing out a dungeon and then holding an auction (in-game) where they would sell the dungeon to the highest bidder along with an aditional fee to stop the party from cleaning out the dungeon again.
Maybe I have spent too much time learning the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition...

Personally as the DM, I would just point out that the locals have no interest in or have no money/tradeables for whatever the party decides to take. I would not do this right away but if the party kept doing it, I think it would be reasonable. That being said, if the party really got creative with it or took something that is obviously useful to those they try to sell it to then I would let them do it.
Another useful tool is Bandits... a large force can easily derail plans to transport large amounts of valuable items. They also add in believability as well as providing some XP or a party threatening encounter.

[Threadnaught]

A Village may have 4000-9000gp floating around it somewhere, but the richest people/businesses only have up to 200gp on hand at any one time and it takes time to find them and negotiate a price.

It's hard enough to sell 1000gp worth of loot in such a place for the right price. It's all but impossible to sell 10000gp worth of items without incurring a significant loss.

[Xelbiuj]

If they're going to waste time selling scrap, why not just go logging? You can make a lot of 10' poles with a single tree . . .