D20 treasure system
From AJS.COM
The d20 treasure system is built around the idea of scaling possessions of a fantasy role-playing game character along with the character. The d20 System is a comprehensive set of rules for fantasy role-playing gaming, which is used as the basis for the Dungeons & Dragons system.
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Overview
The concept is fairly simple: characters gain wealth through adventuring and potentially as payment. This wealth is carefully controlled as a resource, similar to experience points. All items in the game are designed to provide a certain "bang for the buck", and no more. Thus, it is known that a level 2 character will have x amount of money (gold), and that money will translate into the sort of equipment that a level 2 character should have.
Treasure
To accomplish this, there has to be a delicate balance between the treasure that is available to the character through adventuring and the treasure that they can buy. To this end, there are extensive rules and guidelines on how magic items are created, how much money and magic treasure any given monster will have, how many encounters a character will have per level, and how much every item costs.
Treasure generation
Because the treasure system is so fine-tuned, it is dangerous to simply throw treasure at a party. This can quickly unbalance a campaign. However, it can also be very time-consuming and tedious to generate treasure by hand, since there are dozens of tables involved in the process, each requiring die rolls.
d20 treasure generator
One solution is my mktreasure program (available on the Web at http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/cgi-bin/mktreasure.cgi) — a complete SRD 3.5 treasure generator that can randomly produce the treasure for any level of encounter from 1 to 30.
This program is useful for a number of reasons. Foremost is the ability to simply generate a treasure for arbitrary encounters. However, it also removes the hurdle of taking lots of time to generate treasure, and makes customizing it a reasonable priority.
For example, the books allow for the generation of intelligent items, but the descriptions aren't very complete. Adding detail to specific items can improve this situation, and enhance gameplay.
Treasure value progression
The progression of treasure value in d20 is actually a bit odd. Here's what it looks like on average after 100,000 trials at each level:
| CR | Average value | Increase over previous |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 285 | 285 |
| 2 | 756 | 471 |
| 3 | 954 | 197 |
| 4 | 1806 | 852 |
| 5 | 1820 | 14 |
| 6 | 2185 | 364 |
| 7 | 2799 | 614 |
| 8 | 3675 | 875 |
| 9 | 4881 | 1206 |
| 10 | 6176 | 1294 |
| 11 | 8108 | 1932 |
| 12 | 10280 | 2172 |
| 13 | 13569 | 3289 |
| 14 | 17842 | 4273 |
| 15 | 23106 | 5263 |
| 16 | 29502 | 6396 |
| 17 | 33551 | 4049 |
| 18 | 48120 | 14569 |
| 19 | 61512 | 13392 |
| 20 | 72070 | 10558 |
As you can see the level-over-level increase is anything but linear. This suggests that careful analysis of treasure gained should be performed for your game, and treasure should be modified where it doesn't work quite as expected, especially at levels 3, 5, 9 and 17.
