Classic Vs. Treasure, Part 1

All Illustrations are
Howard Pyle's from 1883 - 1921

TREASURE TROUBLE
One aspect of Dungeon Crawl play that All Dead Generations hasn’t covered in any detail is treasure. This is an oversight, because treasure, like exploration, like encounters, and like combat is an important element of fantasy RPGs and especially important to the older style of play that All Dead Generations discusses. When we consider how treasure works in fantasy RPGs it usually seems fairly simple, even in Classic games - pick up the treasure and bring it back to civilization for experience and leveling. It is this simple, this is the gist of treasure in Classic fantasy RPGs -- pure reward ... but like everything else in the interconnected edifice of Classic play treasure presents its own complexities that interact with various important procedures and mechanics. Unfortunately the way treasure is structured in most classic systems makes it less of a reward and more of a chore, eating up play time with logistics and calculation.

The Function of Treasure
First, recovered treasure is the Classic player’s metric of success. Even in Classic rule sets that provide experience for defeating or killing monsters (something I dislike as it sends confusing messages about the goals of exploration), the majority of characters’ experience will come from the treasure recovered in the dungeon. Random treasure generation has been a mainstay of Referee preparation since the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons however, and it has an enduring appeal because imagining treasure is delightful - it’s a space where wonder can enter RPGs, this alone makes it valuable. Yet, these formative random treasure systems, as found in all early Dungeons & Dragons, reject wonder. Despite the gambling style fun of rolling up random hoards, random treasure has been largely unvariegated mass of coinage.

There are mechanical reasons for these coin hoards, coins are far easier to generate randomly and far easier to track encumbrance for. Dungeons & Dragons has also long used coin based encumbrance, with characters able to carry a few thousand coin weight (it varies by edition and represents a failure point for early dungeon crawl mechanics - see below). This ease couples well with the gambling appeal of random treasure generation, and the random “treasure types” that appeared in the 1970’s white box have endured appeal, despite most older editions cautioning against coin hoards for various reasons. However, even when a designer or referee doesn’t use random generation or design advice cautions against it the treasure tables set the standard and expectation of what treasure looks like in Dungeons & Dragons, and from there fantasy adventure as a genre.

More influentially random treasure generation in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons provide guidance about the expected speed of character advancement. For example, if the party defeats a dragon in 1981 Basic D&D and takes its hoard they will find the glorious Treasure Type H, worth an average of 50,000 GP. This of course isn’t really a linear challenge system as even the relatively weak six Hit Die White Dragon has such a hoard, while the much more dangerous saber tooth tiger (big cats are absolute terror beasts in Basic) they will get only a few hundred gold from its paltry Treasure Type V (or more likely nothing - the chances of having even d100 GP is 10%). Still, Treasure Types and random coin hoards are the main way that early editions offer referees and home designers a means of visualizing the rewards of successful adventuring and so provides clear metrics for pacing and level advancement.

Yet, treasure should be more than coins. Coins are a simple game currency that characters can exchange on a 1 of 1 basis for experience points, but “treasure” is, like fantastic locations and strange creatures, a concept that offers up the excitement of fantasy. Yet I won’t suggest abandoning random treasure generation in favor of inventing unique treasure caches as part of adventure preparation, perhaps lovingly describing each valuable object after reviewing the online collection of the British Museum for inspiration. This is time consuming fun, but it neglects an important element that makes coin hoards useful -- coin hoards work perfectly with early Dungeons & Dragons coin based encumbrance system to create complications and allow players to make informed judgments about the relative value of specific treasures.

The coin system is still of course dull, but it need not be as it’s easy to expand and cover a wider variety of treasure with minimal change, once one recognizes its mechanical basis and if one is willing to set aside some of the implied setting it creates.

A NOTE: On Encumbrance, Treasure and Session Structure

Recently I’ve discussed the importance of resource based risks to classic play, and perhaps offered a reason to use this play style, but I’ve saved the most important element of meaningfully including supplies in your game until now. Risks and tables that offer dire consequences for characters who fail to appreciate them are maybe interesting, but they’re superfluous if they never have a chance to enter play, which requires limiting player supply. The primary way to limit supply is Encumbrance. The amount of equipment, weapons and armor that a character or party of characters can carry in game is important because it provides a clear metric of character strength beyond hit points that makes intuitive sense to any player, and with proper rules can make mechanical sense in a dungeon crawl (see The Risk Economy Part II).

 

THE RUST MONSTER’S LEGACY - EQUIPMENT AS SUPPLY

 

When I was a kid, playing Basic Dungeons and Dragons after school in a friends basement around 1986, one of the game events that upset me the most was an encounter with a ‘Rust Monster’. The propeller tailed, bug thing completely devoured out fighters’ weapons and armor before being killed. A prized +2 sword was reduced to a jagged crumbling shard of metal and both me and the other two players were aghast at the horror visited upon us. The Rust Monster is one of the uniquely Dungeons & Dragons creatures that Gary Gygax invented from a bag of plastic toy “dinosaurs”, but more than any of those others: the Bulette, the Owlbear and perhaps the Umber Hulk, the Rust Monster is a monster tied to the exploration side of the game. It doesn’t do much harm to characters’ hit points, but it destroys the party’s ability to engage in combat with other enemies, dramatically increasing the risk of further adventuring because it attacks equipment rather than hit points. It upset us young players for precisely this reason, because it operated outside the structure of risks and rewards we expected. It was such a scandalizing outrage that I still remember it because equipment (especially that magic sword) is something that D&D players value greatly but view as static, and because its destruction made a great deal of obvious sense.

The rust monster's natural form

 The Rust Monster itself looks a bit goofy, but there’s nothing wrong with what it represents, a novel danger or obstacle for the players to think around. It’s a trick monster, but notably the Rust Monster’s trick, while dangerous, doesn’t represent a danger of immediate death for a character. The loss of equipment hurts a character effectiveness and increases overall risk and is difficult to replace in the adventure locale, but it has an intuitive logic - tools break - and so it doesn’t feel like a gamified and artificial mechanic. There’s an important distinction her though, as much as Rust Monsters, prying open doors, rolling down slopes of jagged scree and wedging moving walls apart make losing weapons or armor make sense, weapons, armor and magic items are generally considered permanent - players don’t expect them to be exhausted, while other items are disposable. Food, light sources (including oil bombs), scrolls, potions and a few mundane supplies like iron spikes are something that players expect to exhaust during the adventure and resupply in town. It’s useful to make a distinction between these types of supplies - semi-permanent equipment and usually the easily exhausted consumables (or supplies).

Risk to character equipment has a history beyond special monsters such as oozes and the rust monster, and the AD&D includes a set of saving throws for equipment based on its material and various types of disasters. Potions boil, freeze and shatter while scrolls survive falls and “crushing blows” with ease. It’s a fairly functional system really, applying both to the loss of player items in trying circumstances and player character efforts to destroy mundane objects: cutting ropes, burning down doors and such.

AD&D Monster Manual Rust Monster
David C. Sutherland III (?)

5th Edition also makes some nods to the possibility of equipment destruction, thought it seems more concerned with players destroying obstacles and dungeon furniture.“When characters need to saw through ropes, shatter a window, or smash a vampire's coffin, the only hard and fast rule is this: given enough time and the right tools, characters can destroy any destructible object. Use common sense when determining a character's success at damaging an object. Can a fighter cut through a section of a stone wall with a sword? No, the sword is likely to break before the wall does.” - 5th Edition Dungeon Masters’ Guide, Pg. 245. Afterwards the 5th Edition Guide provides useful rules for item Armor Class, Hit Points and damage reductions/thresholds to make durable objects stronger.

The burdensome nature of these rules (or punitive one if used in every situation where they might apply - do all the items in a PC’s pack need to save after every blow, after every battle?) makes them something that often gets forgotten in play, but exact method (the saving throws above, or perhaps a simple X in 6 chance of breakage) is unimportant and can be streamlined or applied only in extreme situations. The special revulsion and horror that I showed towards the rust monster as a young player shows that risks to character equipment remains a valuable tool for a GM who wants to expand risk while attacking something other then character HP, but like most serious risks, if a character would have a chance to evaluate risk of breaking an item then the player should be forewarned.

SUPPLY - The Risk Economy Part II

COMPLICATING THE RISK ECONOMY

Slow building tension and risk is one of the goals of the Risk Economy, a way to encourage exploration by offering the chance and creating a need to find the best routes through a location, unpuzzle secret entrances into new areas or discover safe havens within the dungeon. Yet, time and space alone won’t make a compelling Dungeon Crawl. Wandering endless halls can still feel like a time filling chore rather then slowly building tension and a constant concern that the characters have delved too deep. For the Dungeon Crawl to work there needs to be palpable slowly increasing risk. Random encounters provide one essential form of risk, but by design they aren’t predictable and calculable to the players - they may create dread or a sense of danger, but it’s one that only incidentally increases over time as the dangers of the dungeon become better understood at the price of depleting party numbers, spells, equipment and hit points.

Light, food and equipment are another, far more regular, character resource subsystem..

Jeff Easley's cover to the 1986
"Dungeoneer's Survival Guide"

Both Random Encounters and Supplies depend on Timekeeping to be meaningful and emphasize the risk of exploring, but they are also separate mechanics that can be implemented effectively or badly. Supply or Resources are the steadier, more constant risk subsystem most directly related to the exploration and spatial aspects of play (though random encounters can be used to good effect in other types of adventure), but they require more than simply a large dungeon and timekeeping to function. The mechanics of encumbrance and with it treasure with XP value are also implicated, but will need to wait for a more in depth discussion. Supply alone, assuming there’s the possibility of depletion and an associated risk, present a counter intuitive, but useful way to mitigate the danger of puzzle solving and exploration.

SUPPLY & RISK

One popular complaint about classic Dungeon Crawls, but even more, about modern efforts to implement the Dungeon Crawl is the high lethality and arbitrary nature of puzzle obstacles. Critics reject adventures where players quickly come to fear traps and dungeon dressing that threatens or conceals instant destruction. To some extent this is a playstyle problem - a player ethics of completionism (likely borrowed from computer RPGs), or a GM problem of antagonism and performative rigor - but it’s also a mechanical problem.