I'm running a campaign (homebrew) and one of the things that annoys me is that my players have a voracious scavenger mentality and will take absolutely everything of any value. Now, when it comes to taking the weapons, armor, and valuables from the foes they slay, I can understand it (in most cases) but when it comes to stripping dungeon fixtures is where it crosses the line for me.
For example, I'm designing a dungeon right now for an upcoming session and due to it being pretty far underground, I'm considering having it lit by everburning torches since oxygen is a potential issue. Unfortunately, I'm forced to take the value of the torches into account (100gp each) when placing treasure because it's likely the PCs will recognize them as everburning torches and take them to sell later. I hate this. I don't want to have to consider the value of every potential dungeon fixture because insatiable greedy PCs may want to take them. I've thought about banning Bags of Holding and Portable Holes because they exacerbate the problem, but even then if the PCs are determined enough they'll simply make multiple trips if necessary.
Thank God they haven't resorted to butchering every creature they kill in an attempt to harvest potentially valuable organs; I'd probably go crazy if they started doing that.
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Nail down everything, Use encumbrance rules, Don't use adamantine doors.
Most importantly, have a chat with them about how your not a big fan of them looting literally everything. Calm voice, but let them know its taking away from your ability to GM and that they get more valuable things if they don't loot literally everything.
Coincidentally, the other day it actually bothered me players weren't looting things. They actually left armor on the corpses. The worst part is... they were level one.
Replace the torches with bioluminescent anaerobic bacteria.
Start putting curses on stuff.
Have fixtures be made of valueless materials like stone enchanted so they're as hard as adamantine, they glow, other such things, and have the enchantment break when they're removed.
Start putting curses on stuff.
Cursed items make great loot... It doesn't cut into your WBL either! Give me that!
Start putting curses on stuff.Cursed items make great loot... It doesn't cut into your WBL either! Give me that!
They're only great loot and free if you're doing it wrong.
Nail down everything,
Crowbars are cheap.
Use encumbrance rules,
I already use encumbrance. See the aforementioned multiple trips.
Don't use adamantine doors.
That's the problem. Sometimes an adamantine door (or any other potentially valuable fixture) may make sense and I don't want to have to come up with an alternative just because I have to worry about PCs stripping the place.
Most importantly, have a chat with them about how your not a big fan of them looting literally everything. Calm voice, but let them know its taking away from your ability to GM and that they get more valuable things if they don't loot literally everything.
I really want to do this, but they're already a bit behind the recommended WBL (kind of; they're ahead of WBL if you count the +1 stat books each of them received as a reward for recovering a powerful artifact) so I worry they'll use my plea as a means to pressure me into giving them more treasure.
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That's the problem. Sometimes an adamantine door (or any other potentially valuable fixture) may make sense and I don't want to have to come up with an alternative just because I have to worry about PCs stripping the place.
A thick stone door accomplishes the same effect an adamantine door does and appears a bit more imposing.
As for the light source underground, fungal glowing stuff is a pretty common fantasy background. If picked, it rots after a few days/hours.
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Personally I use Magical Encumbrance rules, which are home-brew rules. I employ some variation from what's outlined there, but same basic premise.
What's great is by putting an effective cap on how much magic players can use at once, you can give them extra loot for them to purchase non-combat magical items that they normally wouldn't purchase. And you don't have to worry about giving them too much wealth and upsetting the balance of power.
I'm running a campaign (homebrew) and one of the things that annoys me is that my players have a voracious scavenger mentality and will take absolutely everything of any value. Now, when it comes to taking the weapons, armor, and valuables from the foes they slay, I can understand it (in most cases) but when it comes to stripping dungeon fixtures is where it crosses the line for me.
For example, I'm designing a dungeon right now for an upcoming session and due to it being pretty far underground, I'm considering having it lit by everburning torches since oxygen is a potential issue. Unfortunately, I'm forced to take the value of the torches into account (100gp each) when placing treasure because it's likely the PCs will recognize them as everburning torches and take them to sell later. I hate this. I don't want to have to consider the value of every potential dungeon fixture because insatiable greedy PCs may want to take them. I've thought about banning Bags of Holding and Portable Holes because they exacerbate the problem, but even then if the PCs are determined enough they'll simply make multiple trips if necessary.
Thank God they haven't resorted to butchering every creature they kill in an attempt to harvest potentially valuable organs; I'd probably go crazy if they started doing that.
Curses are go.
Add spirits haunting certain items.
Let them have everything.......at a cost.
Your dungeon is OLD. Things come off the wall and then the ceiling starts to come down on the players. They want to take things, they have to be creative.
Better yet, when they get to the surface, they find out all the stuff they stole was painted lead fixtures! Hey, maybe there is a layer of gold on them, but not enough to be worth much.
In the end the whole place has fallen down behind them and there is no way they are going to be able to go back in and get the (maybe) good stuff. Of coarse leave some real things in the dungeon so it isn't a total disappointment....
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My players were super pissed the first time I told them the local village had no use for 13 sets of kobold size leather armor. All jokes aside, I stopped having mundane loot on my dead monsters years ago. Now they find a pouch with the gold they would have made by selling all the crap the monsters had so there is no need to track it all. Obviously, as levels increase I'll start to add more magic items into the mix because, lets face it, players like to find cool loot.
I stick to my rule as a GM though, if the players think stripping all the copper piping out of every dungeon is going to be a good use of their time they are going to be sorry when it comes to market time. I explain early on that ill make sure they get the gold they have coming and the opportunities to spend it. Fortunately for me over the years my players have caught on and stopped worrying about every copper.
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The simplest solution is to limit buyers of junk. Who is going to purchase 50 everburning torches? Sure they can salvage that adamantine door, but nobody in town knows how to work adamantine. They'll have to cart it 50 miles to the city, even then they're only going to get scrap rates for it (like 1/10th value). Shops tend not just purchase any junk you bring them. And places that do, like pawn shops, give really low rates, much less than the standard 50% that pathfinder assumes.
The second solution is limiting time. Sure the door might be worth 1,000g but the villain is getting away as you try to dismantle it. Most adventures have some time constraints that keep you pressing ahead and unable to spend hours carting off everything thats not tied down.
And the third solution, like many have already suggested, is to adapt to your players. If they like taking everything and the kitchen sink, then just factor that in as part of the treasure you assume they will get and reduce other treasures to balance it out.
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Another thought on this: I've found my players would scrounge for extra money when they felt like they weren't getting enough. Games where I gave out lots of goodies, they'd ignore the mundane junk lying around. Games where I was stingy with the loot, they would take every last bit of junk they could carry.
Might be worth talking to your players and see why they feel the need to take everything.
Alternative to everburning torches: the entire wall is enfised with the ability to give attached torches and lanterns light. Alternatively it could be a set of permanancied dancing light spells cast by a long dead wizard (long before the current inhabitants moved in or some similar justification)
If there isn't enough Oxygen for torches... then there probably wasn't enough for the inhabitants either.
Instead of valuable magical light sources I would either have
1) Air vents in the dungeon that allowed it to have regular torches.
2) No light except what the people brought down with them. Really, Perhaps the people living there had darkvision or ion torches or knew the light spell or something else personal on them... doesn't need to be set up for PCs to see down there 2000 years later... In it's heyday there was light... that was then! :D
3) Something NEW. Come up with something that does something similar... that can't be removed without breaking it. Some kind of fragile crystal that glowed or the
4) CERTAINLY give them SOME reason that multiple trips aren't feasible. Unless they plan on making this place their new base of operations, have the blasted thing collapse or something on their way out.
Honestly, I don't have much issue with looting as long as it isn't annoying. This sounds annoying. Monitor the bags, enforce the encomberance... keep the adventure on track. :)
I've had players insist on gutting every creature they come across, sapient or not, in case it had swallowed anything valuable.
Let them have everything.......at a cost.
Your dungeon is OLD. Things come off the wall and then the ceiling starts to come down on the players. They want to take things, they have to be creative.
Better yet, when they get to the surface, they find out all the stuff they stole was painted lead fixtures! Hey, maybe there is a layer of gold on them, but not enough to be worth much.
In the end the whole place has fallen down behind them and there is no way they are going to be able to go back in and get the (maybe) good stuff. Of coarse leave some real things in the dungeon so it isn't a total disappointment....
This is good advice. You can also combat the loot-everything mentality by insisting on roleplaying every instance of selling centuries old dungeon junk with the local scrapman. If players are spending more than 50% of their session bargaining over copper pieces, they might rejig their priorities.
The simplest solution is to limit buyers of junk. Who is going to purchase 50 everburning torches? Sure they can salvage that adamantine door, but nobody in town knows how to work adamantine. They'll have to cart it 50 miles to the city, even then they're only going to get scrap rates for it (like 1/10th value). Shops tend not just purchase any junk you bring them. And places that do, like pawn shops, give really low rates, much less than the standard 50% that pathfinder assumes.
I like this answer the best. In fact my players are already used to it a little; they've been traveling through a country that's been ravaged by war and I've made it a point to tell them that the people are poor and money is scarce.
2) No light except what the people brought down with them. Really, Perhaps the people living there had darkvision or ion torches or knew the light spell or something else personal on them... doesn't need to be set up for PCs to see down there 2000 years later... In it's heyday there was light... that was then! :D
I mostly want the torches there for ambiance. In fact most of the dungeons they've been through so far have been completely devoid of any light they don't bring themselves, so I want to change things up a little.
Seriously, if it's a home-brew campaign, this is a non-issue. If you're willing to take on the huge task of running a home-brew campaign, you've signed yourself up for the job of adjusting your material if it's not having the desired effect. "Sometimes I want to have an adamantine door and don't want to come up with an alternate" is just not the job you've volunteered for.
Making stuff valueless (IE the stone door instead of the adamantine) isn't that hard.
The idea that shopkeepers just don't care to buy 20 ever burning torches at a time is completely reasonable.
The ever burning torches losing their magic when they leave their sconce is completely reasonable.
Instead of breaking down each item, keep track of how much money you want them to have, and say "you sell all your stuff and end up with 1800 gp each."
All that said, why not just tell them?
"Look, guys. If you continue to loot every damn piece of scrap metal in the dungeon, it makes me have to do things like make vendors not want to buy it, or make it valueless. Instead of making my life harder, I want you to try and be mindful of only looting the stuff I clearly intend you to loot. One way or another, you're only going to get the money I want you to get -- so let's just make my job easier, huh?"
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Nail down everything,Crowbars are cheap.
Use encumbrance rules,I already use encumbrance. See the aforementioned multiple trips.
Don't use adamantine doors.That's the problem. Sometimes an adamantine door (or any other potentially valuable fixture) may make sense and I don't want to have to come up with an alternative just because I have to worry about PCs stripping the place.
Most importantly, have a chat with them about how your not a big fan of them looting literally everything. Calm voice, but let them know its taking away from your ability to GM and that they get more valuable things if they don't loot literally everything.I really want to do this, but they're already a bit behind the recommended WBL (kind of; they're ahead of WBL if you count the +1 stat books each of them received as a reward for recovering a powerful artifact) so I worry they'll use my plea as a means to pressure me into giving them more treasure.
There it is. Players only act this way when they feel under-geared.
I had a party try to take a courtyard-size magical fountain with them once. They ended up breaking it in the process, rendering it powerless. After that, they scaled back their more ridiculous attempts. There's no reason why the above torches couldn't be crafted such that they can't be removed without destroying them--or without extreme care, if they should be at least theoretically removable.
Parties raising dungeons will literally take anything that is takeable. Send the party to a ball at a castle and have them root out spies in the queen's court. If they start pocketing goodies from the guest quarters, they're likely to end up swinging themselves.
The above tactic regarding Pathfinders being instructed to preserve historical sites is another good method of curbing such behavior. Any time there's a patron involved, the patron sets the rules, and the party ignores them at their own risk.
Looting graves is especially fun. Even otherwise good spirits often take exception to being desecrated. This isn't real life where the dead won't miss their stuff.
But make sure that, occasionally, the party finds a truly unclaimed treasure and has the go-ahead to take it. That candy store feeling is what gets many adventurers (and players) into the business, after all,
The idea that shopkeepers just don't care to buy 20 ever burning torches at a time is completely reasonable.
It is, but it doesn't really help with the underlying cause. They'll continue to carry them around and try to sell as many as they can in each settlement, wasting more time.
Better to go with the 'everything here has an enchantment that stops working if you move it' gimmick.
Have the PCs loot a place, sell everything, and then all of a sudden that town starts getting mysterious accidents as the cursed items they unwittingly brought back start to haunt people
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1) have consequences for stealing stuff, maybe the pathfinder society doesn't take kindly to having historical artifacts looted for the near worthless brass. Pharazma takes 'special notice' of the group that defiled her grand temple by stealing all of her art.
2) enforce the town money policy. Little hamletville's shopkeeper only has 50 gp to buy stuff with, and he's not particularly up for buying rotting old chairs that they've hauled up from the nearby dungeon. Next town is a few days away, and the next big city where you could actually sell this stuff is two weeks away.
3) put them under a time crunch. They need to get mcguffin x to NPC y in two days, or bad thing z will happen (and they won't get paid.). Sure they COULD take the time to pry down everything and make multiple trips to sell it, but not if they want to make the deadline.
4) Make things permanent. Instead of ever burning torches, use permanancied light cast on gargoyles (the not-alive kind) worked into the walls. A crowbar isn't going to pry that off, and if they try to break it off it'll just break the enchantment.
5) Let them do it. Just abstract it out and include it as part of the treasure. "Looting everything you can from the ruins results in about 25 gp worth of junk and it weighs around 500 pounds. Also, everyone make dc 15 fort checks or be exhausted from a day of pulling light fixtures and hauling up scraps."
This is easy.
- use cheap alternatives to expensive furnishings. (gold plating instead of solid gold, stone instead of adamantium, lamps fed by an oil reserve in the wall, ect) There are numerous examples people have already provided you.
- enforce encumbrance rules. (You already do this? ok cool)
- make return trips pointless. Lets face it after the heroes have cleared out the monsters from a lair it becomes safe to visit for MANY local parties including lesser monsters, other adventurers, and/or local villagers. It is totally believable to have others move in and clear out any valuables the PCs leave behind on their first trip out. When the PCs return they find it stripped bare.
- Don't ever place magic bags or portable holes as treasure. This keeps the pack rats down to just the crafter in the party.
- Make some of your richer dungeons difficult to bring mules or carts to. Like a lair accessed ONLY via a man sized portal in an area known for hungry goblins.
This is easy.
- make return trips pointless. Lets face it after the heroes have cleared out the monsters from a lair it becomes safe to visit for MANY local parties including lesser monsters, other adventurers, and/or local villagers. It is totally believable to have others move in and clear out any valuables the PCs leave behind on their first trip out. When the PCs return they find it stripped bare.
Plus, if the party are obviously carrying valuables (which they will be if it's in large quantities) and selling them in town, word will get out very quickly. People hearing of the available riches will quickly go and exploit what's left, and maybe try to get hold of what the adventurers are carrying - either by surreptitious theft or direct robbery. (The first shopkeeper you try to sell to may have thieving relatives, or he might just be a gossip).
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I've had players insist on gutting every creature they come across, sapient or not, in case it had swallowed anything valuable.Dammit, Fifth Element!
It's older than that. The original Moathouse in Temple of Elemental Evil had a +1 shield in the stomach of something.
I take note of the weight of every item added to the dungeon, and when they loot something, i make sure the weight is noted aswell.
Im very carefull with encumbrance. My players got so annoyed of being overweight that they crafted three holding bags to carry loot, but they spent a lot of gold there.
The simplest solution is to limit buyers of junk. Who is going to purchase 50 everburning torches? Sure they can salvage that adamantine door, but nobody in town knows how to work adamantine. They'll have to cart it 50 miles to the city, even then they're only going to get scrap rates for it (like 1/10th value). Shops tend not just purchase any junk you bring them. And places that do, like pawn shops, give really low rates, much less than the standard 50% that pathfinder assumes.
The second solution is limiting time. Sure the door might be worth 1,000g but the villain is getting away as you try to dismantle it. Most adventures have some time constraints that keep you pressing ahead and unable to spend hours carting off everything thats not tied down.
And the third solution, like many have already suggested, is to adapt to your players. If they like taking everything and the kitchen sink, then just factor that in as part of the treasure you assume they will get and reduce other treasures to balance it out.
Adamantine?
I would have to get a blacksmith from Volantis to work that. No sale.--
Everburning torches? Yeah there was a crafter selling them by the dozen six years ago. He made a mint. I'll give you 10 gold for the lot.
Seriously, if it's a home-brew campaign, this is a non-issue. If you're willing to take on the huge task of running a home-brew campaign, you've signed yourself up for the job of adjusting your material if it's not having the desired effect. "Sometimes I want to have an adamantine door and don't want to come up with an alternate" is just not the job you've volunteered for.
Making stuff valueless (IE the stone door instead of the adamantine) isn't that hard.
The idea that shopkeepers just don't care to buy 20 ever burning torches at a time is completely reasonable.
The ever burning torches losing their magic when they leave their sconce is completely reasonable.
Instead of breaking down each item, keep track of how much money you want them to have, and say "you sell all your stuff and end up with 1800 gp each."
All that said, why not just tell them?
"Look, guys. If you continue to loot every damn piece of scrap metal in the dungeon, it makes me have to do things like make vendors not want to buy it, or make it valueless. Instead of making my life harder, I want you to try and be mindful of only looting the stuff I clearly intend you to loot. One way or another, you're only going to get the money I want you to get -- so let's just make my job easier, huh?"
Respectfully disagree....
While the DM can do that, i dont think they should.
By removing the reward for inovative thinking, you penalize the players for playinc creatviely. The game would devolove to people playing yatzee.
I've had the same group for over 10 years now. At times they name their adventuring company "If ain't nailed down." then change their name mid campaign to "It's nailed down get the crowbar." We all understood the game style and they changed up when they got it out of their system.
I've had players insist on gutting every creature they come across, sapient or not, in case it had swallowed anything valuable.
I didn't realize that I had played in any of your games. ;)
I'm running a campaign (homebrew) and one of the things that annoys me is that my players have a voracious scavenger mentality and will take absolutely everything of any value. Now, when it comes to taking the weapons, armor, and valuables from the foes they slay, I can understand it (in most cases) but when it comes to stripping dungeon fixtures is where it crosses the line for me.
For example, I'm designing a dungeon right now for an upcoming session and due to it being pretty far underground, I'm considering having it lit by everburning torches since oxygen is a potential issue. Unfortunately, I'm forced to take the value of the torches into account (100gp each) when placing treasure because it's likely the PCs will recognize them as everburning torches and take them to sell later. I hate this. I don't want to have to consider the value of every potential dungeon fixture because insatiable greedy PCs may want to take them. I've thought about banning Bags of Holding and Portable Holes because they exacerbate the problem, but even then if the PCs are determined enough they'll simply make multiple trips if necessary.
Thank God they haven't resorted to butchering every creature they kill in an attempt to harvest potentially valuable organs; I'd probably go crazy if they started doing that.
Is your group old enough to remember when you got XP for loot? Missed loot equaled missed XP.
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Man, I had the opposite problem for such a long time.
See, I'm the kind of player that drives OP nuts. I'm the guy who kills the orcs, strips them down, and sells their armor, weapons, boots, gold fillings, and so forth. (I usually tack a N or LN alignment when I'm being the Jerk of Efficiency).
As a DM, I give treasure out that way.
So I had a party that had a literal ship's hold worth of magical geegaws, trade goods, furniture, random items, saddles, and stuff that basically made their treasure horde look like grandma's attic.
And they didn't sell any of it. Not a damn bit.
They took the liquid cash and anything made of a precious metal and occasionally sold those, but..
It resulted in an endless cry of 'we are under equipped for our level' when I knew they had rooms cluttered with their precious WBL.
When they finally did break down and sold all the crap (requiring two metropoli after they had waited /9/ levels) the individual windfall was spectacular, something to the tune of 195,000 each (imagine if you didn't get paid at your job for like 10 years and then got it all in one lump). Ironically they got more cash this way because they used the summoner's 13th level prof merchant check for the cut they got and ended up getting 75% of listed value .
I admit, in a somewhat undignified way, that its just a bad habit for the money obsessed adventurer. I remember one poor DM made the mistake of mentioning the copper piping that was in some rickety ghoul haunted mansion, and his distress when we set about ripping it out of the walls.
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--Read Nodwick
--Hire a Henchman from the Henchman's Local Union to schlep everything
--EEEEEVVVVVERRRRYYYYYTTHHHING!!!
The idea that shopkeepers just don't care to buy 20 ever burning torches at a time is completely reasonable.
Except the settlement size and base value/purchase limit rules make it clear that you CAN sell those things in most circumstances.
The ever burning torches losing their magic when they leave their sconce is completely reasonable.
Except then they are not everburning torches, they are something else. If it's magical sconces, then the players will likely figure it out real quick and sell those instead. If it's the wall, they may well try to sell that!
If you want to go ahead and invent a bunch of house rules, that's fine, but don't be surprised when your players throw up their arms in frustration because their GM isn't following the expected rules everyone else is.
(In other words, explain your house rules up front, don't ambush players with them.)
I had a party try to take a courtyard-size magical fountain with them once. They ended up breaking it in the process, rendering it powerless. After that, they scaled back their more ridiculous attempts. There's no reason why the above torches couldn't be crafted such that they can't be removed without destroying them--or without extreme care, if they should be at least theoretically removable.
Parties raising dungeons will literally take anything that is takeable. Send the party to a ball at a castle and have them root out spies in the queen's court. If they start pocketing goodies from the guest quarters, they're likely to end up swinging themselves.
The above tactic regarding Pathfinders being instructed to preserve historical sites is another good method of curbing such behavior. Any time there's a patron involved, the patron sets the rules, and the party ignores them at their own risk.
Looting graves is especially fun. Even otherwise good spirits often take exception to being desecrated. This isn't real life where the dead won't miss their stuff.
But make sure that, occasionally, the party finds a truly unclaimed treasure and has the go-ahead to take it. That candy store feeling is what gets many adventurers (and players) into the business, after all,
These are much better suggestions, I think, as they further the fun and adventure without coming off as heavy handed and forced.
The simplest solution is to limit buyers of junk. Who is going to purchase 50 everburning torches? Sure they can salvage that adamantine door, but nobody in town knows how to work adamantine. They'll have to cart it 50 miles to the city, even then they're only going to get scrap rates for it (like 1/10th value). Shops tend not just purchase any junk you bring them. And places that do, like pawn shops, give really low rates, much less than the standard 50% that pathfinder assumes.I like this answer the best. In fact my players are already used to it a little; they've been traveling through a country that's been ravaged by war and I've made it a point to tell them that the people are poor and money is scarce.
Until they get teleport anyway.