Just received a bunch of loot, too much loot?

[mehs]

Pathfinder

So essentially the party is wrapping up sidequests before fighting the part 1 main boss. We are level 8 and just completed a short dungeon. The boss of which was a buffed bogeyman and two (minor) templated Fleshgolems. We knew about the bogeyman in advance via speak with dead and similar, so he got shut down hard with remove fear, magic circle, and invisibility purge. Even got potions of see invisibility and cast communal darkvision and delay poison.

And we got loot.

A ****ton of loot.

including 250k worth of pearls of power that went to me.

Each of us got a +2 book for our main stat. On top of that there was a cache of pretty tailored loot. Tailored as in a kineticist diadem for the kineticist, a modified circlet of persuasion for the skill monkey, and two pharasma related rings for me the pharasma cleric. On top of *that*, there was 34 pearls of power of 1st-5th and 8th level worth a combined 255k.

Of my personalized loot, one of the rings is just so I stop hitting party members with aoe (undead in party with a pharasma cleric who refuses to take selective channel), and the other makes it so that I don't turn into an undead If I die under any circumstances.

The loot stash in total was a bit under 400k not counting the books. Of that stash, I got 265k as I am the only one who can actually use pearls of power. (while we have other casters, one of them multiclassed *extensively* so as to have a +40 and several rerolls per day for most skills, the other is an alchemist type caster and can't use pearls)


My issue is that due to the pearls, I got a vastly disproportionate amount of the loot. 265k vs a combined 130k for the three other party members. My spell slots have almost tripled (x2.5~) due to the pearls, even if they only let me duplicate prepared spells rather than diversifying to an extreme degree.


I am worried that this much loot might unbalance the game, especially unevenly distributed like it is.

[Particle_Man]

Interesting, but beyond a certain point will rest of the party be able to keep adventuring for the day, even though you have all of your spells because the pearls refreshed them? It might be that you will have more spells/pearls than you will use, so the loot is not used, most days.

[icefractal]

Depends on how the rest of the party feels about it. If you're using those slots for group-benefitting spells, they're sort of a party resource anyway.

[Vaern]

How experienced is the DM? The sheer volume of loot makes me think that he simply added the challenge ratings of all the creatures together to determine the overall challenge rating of the encounter. The bogeyman is listed as CR 10. Flesh golems are CR 7, and I'm guessing adding a template might easily bump them up to a 9 or 10. That might end up giving you an encounter level of 30 should be expected to give an average of 420k worth of loot, which looks to be roughly the case based on the loot you've listed off. [I]Or, if you look at the fast progression column of the loot table, you can instead expect 630k which would account for 4 +2 tomes at 55k apiece.

If this whole thing was just a CR calculation mistake, I'd recommend helping your DM find the appropriate challenge rating for the encounter and recalculating loot accordingly. Sure, it may be disappointing for the party to lose that whole cache of sweet loot, but getting that volume of gear at your level can absolutely ruin the fun of the game. Unless, of course, it was intentional and he has something big planned for the boss encounter that's actually going to require being severely overgeared.

[Efrate]

Long duration buffs of the levels you have pearls of. Look for 10 min or 1 hr per level. Spend those extra spells on passing those buffs around. It costs you effectively nothing. Barring that things like condition removal for the whole party out of one slot is huge and can help push you past some rough times or a devastating fight.

[mehs]

How experienced is the DM? The sheer volume of loot makes me think that he simply added the challenge ratings of all the creatures together to determine the overall challenge rating of the encounter.


The dm is experienced and this is coming after about levels 5-7 of almost no loot, but that dearth had already been remedied by some minibosses with big 6 items.

[icefractal]

I wouldn't worry about it in terms of balance vs the world; it's not hard to account for a party with more gear than normal, so if the GM is experienced that shouldn't be an issue.

The only issue I could see is intra-party balance. But as mentioned, if you're using the extra spells to buff others rather than nova every fight, it'll probably be fine.

[Godofallu]

If you took that loot and sold a lot of it and got very nice cherry picked items yeah you could break the game pretty easily.

But if you actually just sit on those items and keep them a few attribute points and extra spells per day probably won't destroy the game.