Question posed as per the title.
GMs, how do you solve this issue? The most expedient option seems to have it buried with them, but that does not stop the PC in question from granting it to others in their will, or from the other PCs in simply taking it from them.
My second thought was that if the party decides to keep the loot, to keep the GP value as a deficit on further loot drops. But that seems kind of meta.
Of course, the "ideal" situation is one in which the body is not immediately recoverable, such as if the rest of the party is forced to retreat. By the time they get back, the body has already been looted.
Anyway, I would be grateful for hearing suggestions on how to handle this potential inflation of party wealth.
Thanks!
Give them less stuff in the future if their stuff makes them too strong, like you suggested. Alternatively, just make the monsters stronger if you think they can handle it.
A CR-appropriate encounter is meant to consume about 25% of the party's resources. Spells, HP, potions, and other such stuff all count as resources. If CR = APL no longer does that, try a few CR+1 encounters, see how much they consume. If that doesn't work, increase CR by 1 again until the encounters drain 25% of their resources on average. Use that as the new baseline. Remember, multiple lower-CR monsters are often more effective than one high-CR monster due to the action economy.
If it wasn't destroyed during the character's death, we recycle a dead character's gear within the party. We'll use items, save items for later or sell items as it suits our purposes best and the DM adjusts the value of future loot hauls to keep everything close to the proper WBL.
When we sell stuff, we usually get somewhere between 25-60% of list value and when we buy things we usually pay at least 120% of list and as high as 200%. We also do not craft in our game at all; there's just never enough down time for it. These are other ways the DM helps maintain proper WBL.
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I usually let the players decide and react accordingly.
This has had interesting results. There was one time a party insisted a character be buried with everything except his sword and armor, both of which were returned to his family so they could be passed on.
Most of the time, they just give it to the player's next character.
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it's fine for them to keep the loot. Usually it doesn't really change much, as everybody tends to run party where someone is playing a specific role, it is very unlikely that they would find anything valuable from their dead partner (Look its a magical holy symbol but we have no cleric...yup), if most of his items haven't been destroyed of course(dying from a disintegrate ray for example).
I use the normal trading rules, so buy items at 120% most of the time, sometime lower depending on loyalty. Npc buy back items at 45-50% of their value most of the time.
In my games we have a meta-agrement that gear is lost along with the character, unless the item in question is plot-relevant, or has very specific position in the setting (some of navigtion-aiding gear in our current Skulls & Schackles-campaing).
We'll find in-game solutions depending on the character in question. I've seen burials with gear, donations to churches or charities, given to grieving families, or confiscated by the local authorities. This, of course, in addition to bodies lost or magically disappered.
Usually plot-items are miraculously giving to another party member before dying. Otherwise we usually bury our characters with their gear or donating their gear to an associated temple/organization for a greater good.
