Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Raumz 04-17-07, 08:40 PM	Hi. Well I was thinking about my players and how they like to strip down things they kill (anything that has cloths, armor, weapons) and sell the stuff. They do not seem to get the wealth by levels table and how it can throw the game off if they have alot more gold than they are 'supposed to'. They base this off of games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion and World of Warcraft where you are supposto farm creatures for the soul purpose of gold. I dont want to have to figure the EQ of the creatures into the encounter gold because this will only encourage this EQ gathering. So I was thinking of making a rule saying if you kill for example a commoner his cloths and weapon will be stained by his blood. The weapon will be easier to clean than the cloths and will have a lower DC for whatever check I tell them to do. My question is how would I create this 'skill' or what skill could I use? What stat would used for this skill? What would give circumstances bonuses (water, lye, wash basin, wash board, ext.) and would there be sucess levels? By doing this Im hoping that my players wouldnt take a bunch of blood stained items into a shop and try to sell it, if they do I could have hte merchant flato ut refuse to buy it. Thanks for your time.
Toloran 04-17-07, 08:47 PM	A couple quick points: Keep in mind that selling used equipment (even in top condition) will sell for a maxium of 50% its buying price. Take into account it probably isn't (expecially weapons and armor), and you are looking at around 40-45% buying price. Also, this is already (partially) factored in to the suggested wealth per level. The loot tables are just for what they have in ADDITION to what they are wearing. The game also assumes not everything will have valueable equipment (monsters for example, and monks at lower levels). Another thing to consider is weight: All that junk will weigh a TON after a while.
GoriceXII 04-18-07, 07:43 AM	What was said above is in my opinion good advice. Also too you can frankly make it an unpleasant rping experience to do this. I mean--hardened as pcs might be the fact is people foul themselves often when they die, battle axe wounds are not pretty and so on. I remember one game where a fireball had turned about every opponent in a room into either crispy critters or worse semi living groaning things. Some of the pcs were not that keen to loot, especially when one of them in trying to move a body cracked the flesh of the abdomen open and failed a roll to avoid vomiting in horror.
Kouk 04-18-07, 10:41 AM	Equipment that is on an NPC is supposed to be factored as loot. When (if) you outfit an NPC, you "spend" his money on equipment for him. The players sell it for half value as normal, if they want, but they also might keep it if it is useful. I have never considered clothing as something you can sell personally. Every character has a "free" set of clothing that just sort of exists somewhere. It is perfectly fine to just say they can't sell the clothes, or that they are only worth 1 copper, and so half of that would be nothing. The trade-off of looting the bodies is the potential weight of the items, but that is a built in part of the game. It also seems easier than making up a skill just to "clean" the equipment. The DMG talks about in the treasure section that if you throw mostly NPCs at the party they will eventually have more treasure than the tables indicate, and if you throw mostly animals and "naked" monsters that don't rely on gear at them then they will have less money. You balance it out that way. They also don't have to have the exact figures every level of their careers, sometimes more, sometimes less money. If you dislike having to calculate the values of the equipment on the NPCs, many DMs outfit the "grunt" enemies exactly the same so that they all have longswords and chainmail for example. That way you know what the value of their stuff is. If you want to eliminate looting gear entirely (which I think is part of the fun of killing things) then just place an amount of gold on their bodies that gets "auto-looted". Of course, then animals also have to have gold for some reason and it gets right back to WoW.
_Jayne_Cobb_ 04-18-07, 10:45 AM	The answer is simple: tell them that the loot value listed for the creature represents everything on it of any value converted to coin. If they wish to strip clothing and boots and whatnot then the value of those items will be subtracted from the coinage they get from the kill until such time as they manage to sell it, and in the meantime they have to cart around several hundred pounds of filty, festering, bloody gear. Tell them you are willing to use this sytem if they so wish, but that you would prefer they just take the coins as-listed and get on with playing the game and assume that the coins looted includes, in an abstract way, taking anything of value and selling it later rather than actually going to the bother of doing all that tedious inventory management and bookkeeping.
spectralphoenix 04-18-07, 11:12 AM	Past a certain point, most of the mundane stuff isn't worth looting - clothing constitutes a rounding error (even a first level encounter has a suggested treasure of 300 gp, so 2 gp extra for clothing isn't going to matter,) and anything else gets heavy quickly. Make sure you're using the encumberance tables. Note that the flip side of this is that if you give your NPCs magical or high-quality equipment, the players are going to want it. Most of an NPCs treasure is their gear, and it's not fair for them to use a sword of glowy death +12 against the players and have it just disappear afterwards. Figure out how much an encounter is worth, and give the NPC that much equipment.
Sereno 04-18-07, 01:47 PM	It seems there might be a disconnect between the understanding of the DM (OP) and the players. NPC wealth is supposed to *include* all of the gear the NPC has ... not the amount of cash they get *after* being outfitted.
CryoSilver 04-18-07, 02:11 PM	Just enforce carrying limits; by the time the PCs have enough cash for Bags of Holding, it won't be worth their time to farm weaker creatures for pocket change.
Kouk 04-18-07, 03:17 PM	Just enforce carrying limits; by the time the PCs have enough cash for Bags of Holding, it won't be worth their time to farm weaker creatures for pocket change. I'm not even sure how it is possible to farm in a final fantasy way. DM doesn't want any random encounters, "You wander around in the forest all day, but don't find anything." the end.
Etarnon 04-23-07, 01:13 AM	All these things that they are killing... Have many more of their relatives come after the party. Sounds to me like you are not challenging them enough. Make healing, etc hard to get access to, and expensive. Someone owns the places that they are running rampant through. Have that someone hunt them down with an army. This looting of bloody clothes, it's definitely time for a chaotic alignment change. Have some paladins hunt them down for being corpse-robbers. Good luck.
Tytalus 04-23-07, 02:44 AM	Keep in mind that a suit of armor taken from a foe that died a very violent death (at the hands of the PCs) might not be in working condition any more. There's also the issue of demand. Who's going to buy all this used equipment? Unless it's in excellent condition and laughably cheap, I don't think shopkeepers would bother. And if they plan to sell to the average person - this will take time and effort. Both most likely more profitably spent adventuring.
Voran 04-23-07, 04:14 AM	Cost listings are always good as starting estimates of what things go for. But in play, you can make prices and values fluctuate. I've personally gone the route of "Eh you guys get about 30 gp worth of salvageable gear, plus <magic item> <weird trinket> and some rations" When I do that, I go easy on the players, in that if I said they've got about <x> gp of lewt, they get <x> gp if they sell it. Don't have to consider what type of lewt it is, what it weighs or whatever. Now, on the other hand, if you run into a group of player packrat accountants that want to audit every body and shake its naked corpse to make sure there isn't a gp in the ear or something, feel free to make it as time consuming and indexed as possible. Then add extra potential fun because they're attracting so much attention by clattering their way through the forest with every bit of weapon, armor and metal they looted off that pack of orcs.
Cifer 04-23-07, 08:31 AM	Keep in mind that a suit of armor taken from a foe that died a very violent death (at the hands of the PCs) might not be in working condition any more. I disagree. As soon as you do that, you'd also need to make up breaking rules for armours and weapons used by the PCs, which is something I wouldn't like to do. All in all, the others have it right: The equipment enemies are using is supposed to be part of their treasure and will (in the case of mooks) be a pittance in a few levels anyway. Remember the "sell for 50%" rule and you should be pretty much set. Looting fallen enemies is standard for D&D and moving the game from Morrowind towards World of Warcraft ("The enemy we fought used a greatsword to beat us - why don't we find one when we search his corpse?") and detract from fun and immersion in the game.
Varia 04-23-07, 08:44 AM	Part of the problem is that 3.5 is waaaay too **** about the wealth by level thing in combination with the unrestricted purchasing of gear. Unrestricted purchasing means every penny goes into gear, which requires careful control of player income, and thats tedious and unsatisfying for the players since there's no benefit for doing anything to earn cash besides whacking monsters. Run a business for extra cash? Why bother, the DM will just balance out your income so you dont profit by it and throw the balance off. And because you arent allowed to earn any extra cash then all your cash must go to gear to avoid falling behind, which means you have no money for starting a business or a barony or whatever else, which cuts down on the players options and their fun. I suggest a better way is to limit the buying of magic items, (while insuring sufficient numbers of them from adventuring to meet the wealth guidelines, which permits them to have extra cash for rp. businesses, baronies etc.
Cromag 04-23-07, 11:05 AM	Pillaged equipment from fallen enemies goes back far before RPG's. When knights would joust in the days of yore in tournaments our battle the losing knights equipment would become the property of the victor. If the knight lived they would become a hostage and be expected to be sold back to their family for a ransom. there were specific prices depending on the area and profession that just about any soldier/bowman/knight/etc. would be sold back at. As far as not using the equipment of the fallen, that's used alot more for starwars games and modern style games, I see no reason why the average mideval citizen would be squeamish about a little blood on the goods from someone that is a known hero. Plus if it was a huge deal, I would have the party wizard cast prestidigitation on the equipment as -cleaning- is one of the listed functions of the spell.
Senevri 04-23-07, 01:37 PM	You've gotten some good replies already. Here's what I think: It Just Does Not Work That Way. There is no spawning. If they take out the predators, the prey will multiply and cause famine, for an example. If they clear out a goblin cave, it STAYS cleared, for the most part. If they go after innocent farmers and such... well, this is a world of HEROES, and they've just become bandits. It's hard to sell stuff when your faces are on wanted posters.