Most interesting way to make random treasure?

[Wonton]

Scenario: Party is exploring lost ruins of an ancient city.

Question: What is the best way to generate random treasure for the party, without slowing the game down too much, and also keeping the treasure interesting.

I have looked online for treasure generators, but a lot of them give you things like this:

Crystal skull (80 gp)
Decorated silver plate (60 gp)
Decorated silver plate (60 gp)
Gem: Citrine (45 gp)
Gem: Hematite (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Irregular freshwater pearl (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Irregular freshwater pearl (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Quartz (Rock Crystal) (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Rhodochrosite (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Sardonyx (40 gp)
Gem: Shell (9 gp)
Gem: Tigereye (11 gp)
Gem: Turquoise (10 gp)
Ivory drinking horn with copper ends (60 gp)
Potion of Animate Rope (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Arcane Mark (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Potion of Bless Weapon (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Enlarge Person (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Grease (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Magic Weapon (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Protection From Good (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Resistance (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Potion of Shillelagh (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Stabilize (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Potion of Vanish (Sell for 25 gp)
Scroll of Detect Magic (Sell for 6.25 gp)
Scroll of Inflict Light Wounds (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Scroll of Levitate (Sell for 75 gp)
Scroll of Magic Weapon (greater) (Sell for 187.5 gp)
Scroll of Magic circle against good (Sell for 187.5 gp)
Scroll of Resist Energy (Sell for 75 gp)
11 cp
103 sp
94 gp
5 pp
Total Value: 1335.66gp

Which, while it might be more "realistic", is also incredibly boring. No one wants their D&D game to turn into tedious inventory management.

Likewise, there is the issue of gems and art objects: Do you tell the players the value right away? In that case, they won't even bother writing it down and just write down "300 gp". Do you make them write it down as is and have them bargain with a vendor? Now we're back to the above points of "inventory management is boring and slows down the game".

tl;dr - Anyway, what do you do to keep treasure varied and interesting?

[zlefin]

I'd say it depends a lot on the tastes of the group; some love all the little details, to others there's only items we can use and GP.

I find the treasure generators give all the detail you need; you just need to compress into the amount of detail your group wants.

an intermediate way is to basically just mention only one or two of the choicest special objects, and group the rest into "other valuables".

[Crake]

"Inventory management is boring" is a subjective opinion. For some groups, making sure you're not encumbered, and having to find a way to transport all your loot from a dragon's hoard back to town safely is part of the fun.

[Mike Miller]

For my group, it is just a matter of encumbrance before it is all sold off for gp. I pick out items I know would be good for my characters and then just pick random stuff that equals the amount of gp I want them to get, since they don't care about the rest

[death390]

my group did away with the encumbrance stuff, this was due to the fact that even basic gear was putting several of us on the edge of the medium load. (heck i often run Str 10 due to caster chars)

honestly when you get access to magical means of inventory management it becomes mostly a non-issue. the only stuff we keep track of is extra heavy equipment or if the DM thinks we are overloading ourselves. things like carrying a teammate (we do keep track of general str stats), extra large objects, or just cumbersome ones.

as for loot, we tend to use simple items like, coins (as standard), gems (often small ones, 50-350g), or other small items of large value. for example a female PC found a decorative hair comb for example it was worth 400g but only weighed 1lb, or the craftsman artificer found a mastercraft forge hammer, the cleric found a few items that were well made and decorated for gods that were aligned with his god (got gold from the church's for the items).

the commodities table p38 in the arms and equipment guide is also a good selection of misc items actually there is a lot of good misc treasure items in arms and equipment. p30 has different jewellery items costs, p31 for exotic alcohols, heck you could also use misc hard to get foods as loot as well ginger, cloves, nutmed, and even saffron all have high gold values for relatively little weight.

[ATHATH]

Why does the treasure need to be randomly generated? How would the players tell/know the difference between items that were randomly generated and items that weren't randomly generated?

[Strigon]

Why does the treasure need to be randomly generated? How would the players tell/know the difference between items that were randomly generated and items that weren't randomly generated?

1) It's normally pretty easy to tell. Unless you're deliberately choosing a certain percentage of items that aren't helpful to that party's makeup, your players will take note that all the loot seems suspiciously useful to them. And if you are choosing a certain percentage of items that aren't helpful, why not just randomly generate it anyway?

2) It saves time. Without random treasure, you either have to spend time coming up with constantly new and interesting treasures for every encounter, or you simply choose from a stock supply of bland items to give them, and just make the numbers bigger as they go along. Random treasure gives the opportunity to quickly hand out detailed and interesting treasure.

[Zaq]

Why does the treasure need to be randomly generated? How would the players tell/know the difference between items that were randomly generated and items that weren't randomly generated?


1) It's normally pretty easy to tell. Unless you're deliberately choosing a certain percentage of items that aren't helpful to that party's makeup, your players will take note that all the loot seems suspiciously useful to them. And if you are choosing a certain percentage of items that aren't helpful, why not just randomly generate it anyway?

2) It saves time. Without random treasure, you either have to spend time coming up with constantly new and interesting treasures for every encounter, or you simply choose from a stock supply of bland items to give them, and just make the numbers bigger as they go along. Random treasure gives the opportunity to quickly hand out detailed and interesting treasure.

Yeah, mostly the second one. If you as a GM have enough time to hand-craft a description of every potentially valuable item that the PCs can loot out of a ruined city, you've got more time and/or brainspace to devote to this sort of thing than I do. (That said, I believe that randomly generated loot should generally either be nonmagical or of a magic level pretty far below the party's general magic level. I do not personally enjoy having a giant percentage of my WBL be in the form of major magic items that I cannot use or that are tangential at best to my character's abilities, and I do not enjoy the game-within-a-game of making a big deal of selling magic items and trying to find someone capable of making or selling the high-level stuff that I want. I feel like that should be minimized to the extent that the group as a whole is comfortable doing so. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.)

[Elkad]

my group did away with the encumbrance stuff, this was due to the fact that even basic gear was putting several of us on the edge of the medium load. (heck i often run Str 10 due to caster chars)


Being in Medium load isn't a big deal. The guys in heavy armor all move that speed anyway.
Having to figure out how to carry the necessities on your Str6 whisper gnome is part of the fun. Your Haversack is a third of your light load all by itself. You do want some readied items, right?
And then if you take any Str damage, you get rooted in place. Or have to ditch your pack...

[death390]

Medium encumbrance is not naturally horrid, for people who wear medium/heavy armor. but for alot of the characters in the game who don't boost strength it is a nightmare. my standard kit in game costs 100g (if bought not craft) and weighs 35lbs. that is pushing it for my average 11 str. characters. these are adventurers god damn it. why are the floors for encumbrance so low?

honestly i walk around with 12lb worth of crap in my coat pockets everyday i go to class, not to mention the 40lbs worth of books i run around with (campus is several miles, hell the 'green' is larger than a football field). i am by no means strong (probably str 8 with a con of 6 **** you asthma!), but even i can move around all day with about 50lbs worth of crap on me for 12 hours a day. not to mention going hiking! hell i climb trees with my books and read in them (its quite soothing feeling the tree sway beneath you on a windy day). can i lift 160 lbs yes, could i move with it? no way in hell. i think the encumbrance chart in 3.5 is super unrealistic. they put the floor too low, and the ceiling to high. think about it a str 10 character is expected to only carry 33 lbs for a light load meaning no penalties while at the same time lift 200 lbs and stagger around? but is to weighted down at 34lbs that is noticeably slower? what!?

these are our heros! why is it that we have such a low encumbrance floor but the cap is super high? many of the great games of the last decade use encumbrance fallout, elder scrolls, neverwinter, ect. but at least their style of encumbrance is usable. you go over you move super slow. honestly a good houserull to keep encumbrance would be to punt medium encumbrance to where heavy is and make heavy encumbrance slow you to 10/5 ft. and push light load up to where med currently ends.

[rel]

The answer to the OP's question is make inventory management part of the game. Not tracking, management. The players need to be making meaningful tactical and strategic choices about what they do and do not loot.

In this style of game a random table works because every item has the potential to create trouble along with opportunity.

If you are not playing the inventory management minigame then the various stats of treasure; it's value, weight, fragility, etc. is not relevant.

In that style of game random tables provide little more than a description and since there are no choices to make regarding the loot any book keeping the players do adds very little to gameplay.

In this kind of scenario, the only way for treasure to be interesting and memorable is if it serves an alternate purpose; fleshing out the setting and providing extra information without the need for exposition.

Sadly, this requires work from the GM.

[Fizban]

tl;dr - Anyway, what do you do to keep treasure varied and interesting?
You're going to have to define "interesting" before you can recieve a meaningful response. You've already made it clear you don't care for detailed descriptions of gems and art objects and appraisals, so clearly that's not what you mean. Presumably that includes detailed coinage and mundane vendor trash, which leaves magic items.

If you want random magic items, the two main books with magic items have random tables. To speed up the game you pre-roll them instead of rolling at the table, though I think a lot of people that like random loot specifically do so when it's rolled in front of them, allowing them to directly enjoy the randomness of it. The only way to speed that up is to git gud at rolling it faster.

And of course there are plenty of people that don't want "varied and interesting" treasure, they just want a value that they can convert into the item list they've picked out for their build. The best way to speed the game up for them is to stop paying attention to details and just give them a loot value to total up and spend.

[Wonton]

You're going to have to define "interesting" before you can recieve a meaningful response. You've already made it clear you don't care for detailed descriptions of gems and art objects and appraisals, so clearly that's not what you mean. Presumably that includes detailed coinage and mundane vendor trash, which leaves magic items.

If you want random magic items, the two main books with magic items have random tables. To speed up the game you pre-roll them instead of rolling at the table, though I think a lot of people that like random loot specifically do so when it's rolled in front of them, allowing them to directly enjoy the randomness of it. The only way to speed that up is to git gud at rolling it faster.

And of course there are plenty of people that don't want "varied and interesting" treasure, they just want a value that they can convert into the item list they've picked out for their build. The best way to speed the game up for them is to stop paying attention to details and just give them a loot value to total up and spend.

The question was "what do you do to keep treasure varied and interesting", so I'm open to hearing whatever your definition of interesting is. Personally, I don't find

Crystal skull (80 gp)
Decorated silver plate (60 gp)
Decorated silver plate (60 gp)
Gem: Citrine (45 gp)
Gem: Hematite (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Irregular freshwater pearl (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Irregular freshwater pearl (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Quartz (Rock Crystal) (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Rhodochrosite (5 gp) (unworked: DC 10 for 2d4)
Gem: Sardonyx (40 gp)
Gem: Shell (9 gp)
Gem: Tigereye (11 gp)
Gem: Turquoise (10 gp)
Ivory drinking horn with copper ends (60 gp)
Potion of Animate Rope (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Arcane Mark (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Potion of Bless Weapon (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Enlarge Person (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Grease (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Magic Weapon (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Protection From Good (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Resistance (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Potion of Shillelagh (Sell for 25 gp)
Potion of Stabilize (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Potion of Vanish (Sell for 25 gp)
Scroll of Detect Magic (Sell for 6.25 gp)
Scroll of Inflict Light Wounds (Sell for 12.5 gp)
Scroll of Levitate (Sell for 75 gp)
Scroll of Magic Weapon (greater) (Sell for 187.5 gp)
Scroll of Magic circle against good (Sell for 187.5 gp)
Scroll of Resist Energy (Sell for 75 gp)
11 cp
103 sp
94 gp
5 pp
Total Value: 1335.66gp

to be interesting. Sure, it has flavor and it "feels more real", I guess, but it's pretty boring in actual gameplay I think. Very very few people come to a 4hr session of D&D, hoping to spend 1-2 hours doing shopkeeper RP, managing the minutiae of their finances, and adding gp values on a calculator.

But like I said, my question to other DMs was simply "what do you do", because yours and your players' preferences may be different than mine.