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Hey, welcome to GMing! It really depends on how "realistic" you want to go. I generally hand-wave a lot, but I've had players in the past purchase donkeys or ponies for pack animals; train up stray dogs for the same purpose; rent carts; even one time the party made a deal with a griffin.
I say make it easy on yourself and them. One word: HIRELINGS. Maybe its as simple at 1st level of hiring a driver and 2 porters who are meant to accompany the party close to the dungeon then set up a base camp. Every so often the party arrives with loot and the hirelings load up the cart.
If the party is feeling saucy you throw them a unique hireling. Perhaps they come across Nyvendra (CN f h-elf adept 2/expert 1), a self-professed witch willing to accompany the PCs for a price. She staunchly refuses to enter the dungeon with them mind you, but she possesses a bracelet that provides it's wearer with 1 hour of floating disk. The disk appears as a monstrous living brazier of force and looks wierd, but otherwise conforms to the spell.
The witch is capable of holding down camp and will sell other services to the party as needed. If they return in need of basic or long term healing Nyvendra is there... for a few extra coins. If on the other hand they want her to whip up some potions for their next run she can with a little financial incentive.
Depending on the level of RP you and your group is comfortable with these hirelings might become part of the ongoing flavor. Nyvendra uses feminine wiles to help with her healing skills; the cart is run by Bursus and Sons - a lame dwarf and his 2 boys who are also capable of tinkering and maintaining the party's gear; maybe they meet a ratfolk ranger with a cadre of trained porter rats - dire rats with pack saddles.
Last but certainly not least you should have a conversation with the party about all this. Even at first level the party has ways to combat the logistic issues such realism presents: masterwork backpacks, hirelings, pack animals, scrolls of Floating Disk and Unseen Servant, and lots of cheap sacks.
My party has a magical coin-purse-of-holding that has a coin-sized slot on the top, can hold any number of coins, can dispense coins from it as desired, and will disappear if they even try to consider using it for anything other than a hand-waving GM contrived convenience device meant to make everyone's life easier.
They also have a bag of holding that holds all the loot they find but whose capacity is only considered if they try to do anything cute like carry a few bodies.
My party tends to purchase Handy Haversack and other magical bags ASAP specifically to carry loot.
Also once we get access to 5th level spells, we have a habit of picking up Treasure Stiching to help carry loot. You can stick a stitching into a portable hole which really lets you carry around mass amounts of money.
It's funny, because if your GM lets you make a stitching permanent (houserule) you could literally make a mattress out of money and play that guy who doesn't trust banks :P
My party tends to purchase Handy Haversack and other magical bags ASAP specifically to carry loot.
Also once we get access to 5th level spells, we have a habit of picking up Treasure Stiching to help carry loot. You can stick a stitching into a portable hole which really lets you carry around mass amounts of money.
It's funny, because if your GM lets you make a stitching permanent (houserule) you could literally make a mattress out of money and play that guy who doesn't trust banks :P
...right, for pretend; PLAY that guy that doesn't trust banks... (makes mental note to go home and bury mattresses)
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...right, for pretend; PLAY that guy that doesn't trust banks... (makes mental note to go home and bury mattresses)My party tends to purchase Handy Haversack and other magical bags ASAP specifically to carry loot.
Also once we get access to 5th level spells, we have a habit of picking up Treasure Stiching to help carry loot. You can stick a stitching into a portable hole which really lets you carry around mass amounts of money.
It's funny, because if your GM lets you make a stitching permanent (houserule) you could literally make a mattress out of money and play that guy who doesn't trust banks :P
Well, the benefit of the Banks in Pathfinder is that if they swindle your money, they turn into XP. You can go and forcefully get your money back and level up all at the same time.
It's the best kind of withdrawal!
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I only worry about my players' coinage when,
(a) they are low level (so don't have plenty of hand-wavey options that you can assume)
(b) they are far from civilization (either deep wilderness or a ways into a dungeon too large for them to have "cleared" yet)
(c) they have a quite large amount.
Bulky / heavy loot, like tapestries or trade goods or [AP name omitted], where the players end up collecting dozens of pounds of precious metals, require some consideration, but I don't treat coinage as an issue past about 3rd level. Up to this point, loot-hauling can be a pretty interesting adventure in and of itself, but at later levels it can safely fade away.
This has been my general approach for about 25 years, and I've never regretted it too much. :)
I still vote for hirelings.
Back when I DMed, my two players would buy donkeys/horses/mules/other-beast-of-burden, plus a wagon or cart (sometimes multiple) to cart around loot. I had thought about creating a hireling fashioned after Nodwick from the comic that used to appear in Dragon Magazine.
Of course, I wasn't one of the DMs that would slaughter or steal/kidnap the animals or hirelings/followers while the group would enter a dungeon. Of course, if you wanted, you could always make that "Potion of Recall" that existed in the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games (and also something presented similarly in many dungeon crawl games like Torchlight, and also similar to the Hearthstone found in World of Warcraft, but that's a bit much, for me). Or, you could do like many GMs seem to do and just handwave all the encumbrance and "How are we carrying all of this?" stuff and chalk it up to "it's Magic!" or "Don't feel like tracking that."
I personally like the more realistic approach over the handwave approach. It gives Strength some significance outside of "I use it to hurt things." But, like with many things, its all up to the DM as to how realistic or abstract they handle this. And Mark Hoover's suggestions are good ones.
After our low level party killed a band of ogres, they had a large number of copper and silver pieces, well more than we could carry. One of our casters used Prestidigitation on the ogres cookpot, and we loaded it with the coins and dragged the whole thing back home. We ended up selling the pot to a merchant that passed through our village.
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A couple campaigns ago the PCs entered a ruined monastery. I made a point of describing the once-beautiful fixtures in the chapel; tapestry faded and worn, wrought-iron candle-stands tinged with rust and a Bloodoak (homebrew unique material) lectern expertly carved but snapped in 2. The party then did the whole adventure and found meager treasure. On their way back out of the dungeon they stopped in the chapel, grabbed these items, rolled the tapestry around them, bound them with rope and finally lugged them back to town.
There they used Mending, Prestidigitation and Knowledge skills to identify the religious significance of the items. Finally, after they had mended, cleaned, and identified the items they went to the town church, used Diplomacy and doubled the wealth they'd found in the dungeon.
I know this thread is about transporting the loot but the moral of the story is that so long as you're creative you can always hit WBL if you really try.
As for realism in transporting loot, that same party used Survival at level 2 several times when stuck in a swamp. They made emergency transports; not the kind you'd make with Craft skills but rather more like a dragging litter, lashed-log rafts and carrying rack. All of these they used not just to survive traveling in the wilds, but also haul back several sacks and a backpack full of treasure.
This came up in a 2nd ed. game I ran in high school. After a mighty battle in which two of the six perished, they claimed a great treasure horde. So many coppers and silvers and electrum, plus some magic, gems, gold and platinum. They actually ended up burying the bulk of it and carrying off what valuable stuff they could. They really seemed to enjoy figuring out how to get it back to civiliazation and converted to higher value coin. In all, they spent an hour or two role-playing and problem solving. It was fun at the time but it is an experiment I have not repeated in the years since, as things like this tend to be novel only once.
Let them play through it until they get bored, then you can speed up the remainder. Its hard to tell what some players will enjoy doing. One guy I gamed with for years really, really enjoyed describing the food at our post-adventure feasts. I don't think there was anything else he got quite so riled up over when he ran a game. Some people dig riddles and puzzles, while others won't even participate. Some people love role-play, others consider it a hurdle to get through so they can kill stuff again. Pay attention to the people in your group and do what you can to give everyone something that is fun for them. This seems to be rather obvious advice, but a GM too ambivalent or too in love with his own creation can loose sight of it.
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We routinely leave behind large amounts of copper; it's just not efficient to carry it for the return you get on it. Of course we will carry it if there is room but as soon as we get low on space, copper coins are the first to get dropped.
In one adventure, we gave all the copper to the hireling. He ended up betraying us. I'd prolly do the same if my boss paid me in pennies.
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We routinely leave behind large amounts of copper; it's just not efficient to carry it for the return you get on it. Of course we will carry it if there is room but as soon as we get low on space, copper coins are the first to get dropped.
In one adventure, we gave all the copper to the hireling. He ended up betraying us. I'd prolly do the same if my boss paid me in pennies.
But Copper is so easy to make into piles of money!
1,000 gp = 10,000 sp = 100,000 cp = huge pile of money!
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We routinely leave behind large amounts of copper; it's just not efficient to carry it for the return you get on it. Of course we will carry it if there is room but as soon as we get low on space, copper coins are the first to get dropped.
In one adventure, we gave all the copper to the hireling. He ended up betraying us. I'd prolly do the same if my boss paid me in pennies.
But Copper is so easy to make into piles of money!
1,000 gp = 10,000 sp = 100,000 cp = huge pile of money!
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I've gotten to the point where I intentionally set up the hand wave first with how I describe treasure found. My standard line is "you find (x) gold worth of mixed coins, trade bars and ingots" along side other gems, items and magic. I can't remember the last time I detailed out how many ACTUAL coins the party found.
Roll Touch AC attacks for every cp they want to pick up. /RAWNAZI
Agreed, NPCs/monsters carrying personal wealth will carry it in a form that makes sense 99% of the time, which may be gemstones.
If you are fighting large numbers of lower tier enemies, their wealth may be in a form that you wouldn't prefer,
and/or that takes up alot of weight/volume when you lump together the loot from all the enemies.
Then you have creatures who are just horders, or whose wealth was presumably derived from many lesser opponents,
or received from lower tier NPCs such as tax revenue, and/or normally has a short-term usage in paying many low tier NPCs, etc.
If the NPC/monster holds wealth to save for high end purchases then it will mostly be in 'dense' format,
if they mostly use wealth to pay for large amounts of low end purchases then it will mostly be in 'non-dense' format.
The only thing I tend to handwave is the 1 pound = whatever amount of coins. Each character gets, as MurphysParadox mentioned, a "Pouch of Infinite Coin Storage" that holds an infinite amount of coins.
The players typically are given a cart with a horse and dedicated warrior at first level. Those can only be used for transporting treasure. The warrior guards the cart.
Typically. Some campaigns are intended to be more challenging and that doesn't happen.
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As a player I once stuffed my huge sized eidolon full of mundane wealth to carry home. He still couldn't carry all of the wealth, but the fact that I was walking around with a massive snake full of money was reward enough for me. :D
Hirelings? Mark Hoover, you want me to pay gold to some schlub to carry my crap?
Here's my suggestion: Enslave some of the local populace, I suggest Halflings or children. Buy a few whips and hook some rickshaws to them. You can also build chariots and eliminate the need for horses.
The other suggestion, run a game in which paper money is in effect. That's what I wanted to do for my Western Pathfinder game. Gold and all that stuff would be really rare, and a big deal if found.
This is one of those things that seems to get some form of hand-wave quite often. (The other thing being food and water.)
I always ask my DM's how they handle them, but it's rare (in my experience) to find anyone that deals with them in any depth, or with any consistency.
If I'm running a game I take my cues from the players behavior and their character sheets. If they don't have any food / waterskins on them when they finalize their level one sheets, I just hand wave it unless there's a good environmental reason to make it important. If they don't make an effort to track initial coin in their gear weights, I let coinage weight slide, unless it's something like a giant golden Buddha statue.
No point forcing them to keep track of what are essentially mundane and inherently non-adventurous stuff unless doing it appeals to them.
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credit card
Aura faint conjuration; CL 5th
Slot: none; Price: See Fine Print; Weight -
Chariots are horse drawn...
That's why you whip them until they gallop.
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The most cost-efficient method of transporting coins is an efficient Quiver.
Make hollow 'javelins' and 'staves' you can slide coins inside. At 18 of the one and 6 of the other, figure 3 feet long and 6 feet long, 10 coins to the inch, you can transport 90x12x10 = 10,800 coins, with no extra weight, and actually make use of those extra compartments on your Quiver.
Much cheaper then a Bag of Holding.
I believe someone once calculated the capacity of a Portable Hole to be right around 1 Million coins.
==Aelryinth
Vampastic, earlier you suggested that people build chariots so that they could "eliminate" horses
Chariots are horse drawn...
Horses are unskilled, they can't take ranks in craft:(drawing). Even if they could, they wouldn't draw chariots, they'd draw lumps of sugar, or perhaps carrots.
Carry on.
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Vampastic, earlier you suggested that people build chariots so that they could "eliminate" horses
Oh. No no, I didn't mean assassinate. Don't worry.
Chariots are horse drawn...
Not Chariots of Fire - they're pulled by spirit.
Wait what's going on? Are we talking about a fantasy game? Oh oops...