I'll be honest. I hate giving out magical treasure nearly every game. But the players in my Thursday group practically pout if there's only money, gems, or other mundane treasure. The way I GM giving out magic doohickeys is the quickest way towards power bloat, and I don't like that style of play. I try to give out some magic every game, but they're starting to complain; "In my other game the GM gives us blah blah blah....".
What's a guy to do?
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Do Your Players Expect Treasure?
Well... yes. It's sort of one of the points of playing. ;)
But apparently, they don't "expect" it to the degree that your players do... Do they expect treasure? Yes. Do they expect it every encounter? No. Do they expect it every session? No, not even that.
As to your problem... you could talk to them about it. Explain - as specifically as possible - why you give out treasure they way you do, and why giving it out other way(s) will cause problems (and how it will cause problems). Again - specific.
I tend to hand out a lot of mundane treasure, and they can decide where to go with it from there. If they want to sell it and buy magical items, fine. If they want to melt it down and craft magic items themselves, fine.
At low levels, sometimes I have handed out flavor magical items, like self heating cooking pots or everfull mugs of ale or magical maps (silent image) or whatever. As time goes by, though, magic becomes a given as the system expects certain levels of gear.
I tend to give out treasure only if it makes sense in the campaign setting's context. If they're doing something like raiding a wizard's tower, then of course they're going to find a boatload of magical stuff. But other times they're not going to find much beyond some gold and some mundane items.
If the players want more money to buy stuff, then they should think outside of the box. My favorite group that I GMed for, when they ran short of money, decided to go on tour in a large city and conduct dramatic renditions of their past exploits for money. One of the party members took up crafting. At one point, they just staright-up robbed some traveling vendor and managed to fence 14,000 GP worth of stolen magical goods.
Every group is different, and many players are going to expect to have loot of a certain value by a certain level.
I like 'fun' treasure.
Fun treasure can be either magical or mundane... I would take a fancy woven rug or a golden statuette over yet another +1 sword anyday...
To make mundane treasure fun first of all, 1) they can't be underpowered. If the game insists on having a +3 headband by this point... and the player gets nothing but a bag of silver or copper... then yeah, he'll feel cheated.
One of the things we did in a game or two was to have a base of operations and decorated it with the weapons of our enemies and the statues/art/stuff we had found. Really gave a feeling of immersion.
But again... either they have to A) have enough magic stuff to be competitive... or B) have a tight grip on what can or can't be bought for cash at the store...
Keeping that 5/000gp canvas of the thassalonian empire is a lot of fun... but not if it's being counted against you for WBL... Then you start HAVING to make mechanical decisions that hurt the RP decisions.
Like Te'Shen, I give out mundane treasure, supplies, and better (again, mundane) gear on a regular basis. Magical treasure is rare and often dangerous. My players generally aren't walking around with +5 weapons, bands of armor +8, rings of evasion +29, chokers of CHA +8, ear hoops of diva +13 to AC vs. Press, greater cloaks of elvenstealth, and boots of hobbitskin at level three; at level three, they've got a few pieces of masterwork gear and maybe a magical trinket or two and they're damn careful about what rooms they charge into.
When I see threads about "no you gotz to have specialshiny3.9" or "mah GM wont let me haf 'wand of glittery deth' at lvl 1 help plz" I just leave. I feel like we're not even playing with the same set of rules.
The best thing about 3.0 was that the magic items were in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
I like 'fun' treasure.
Fun treasure can be either magical or mundane... I would take a fancy woven rug or a golden statuette over yet another +1 sword anyday...
To make mundane treasure fun first of all, 1) they can't be underpowered. If the game insists on having a +3 headband by this point... and the player gets nothing but a bag of silver or copper... then yeah, he'll feel cheated.
One of the things we did in a game or two was to have a base of operations and decorated it with the weapons of our enemies and the statues/art/stuff we had found. Really gave a feeling of immersion.
But again... either they have to A) have enough magic stuff to be competitive... or B) have a tight grip on what can or can't be bought for cash at the store...
Keeping that 5/000gp canvas of the thassalonian empire is a lot of fun... but not if it's being counted against you for WBL... Then you start HAVING to make mechanical decisions that hurt the RP decisions.
This too.
Stand you ground DM Cal. it's your game and you have your reasons for the amount of treasure you give. As long as the encounters are fair for the resources you've provided then I wouldn't change it. If it's becoming too big an issue to ignore then take a few minutes before your next session to briefly explain why you choose to do this. Hopefully once your players understand where you're coming from they will accept it and just play.
I'm currently running a low magic game where magical items are relatively rare and it hasn't been an issue. I was very upfront about what I intended before we started the game. So far it's been going smoothly.
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Mundane Treasure all the way. My group loves it when I crack open "The Mother of All Treasure Tables" and start rolling for a big stack of nonmagical goodies for them to fuss over. There's always some trinket or other small object that a player latches onto for no explicable reason. Every campaign. Every time.
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umh, no, or at least, not anymore.
a few months ago my group was stranded in the darklands with no equipment, not even their clothes. Not the civilized, drow inhabited darklands. More like deep caves with rampart aberrations.
I have to say there have been quite a long phase of realization, after a couple of sessions of having them with no equipment I found out most players still had their old equipment listed in their sheets, for "when we get it back".
I explained to them that it wasn't going to happen, that there was no chest somewhere in the darklands with their equipment intact and ready to be recollected.
Of course they eventually managed to get out of the darklands.
They had to eat spider meat and strange molds, they had to fashion their weapons and armors with the objects they managed to find and the monsters they managed to kill.
But then eventually came out of the darklands, returned to civilization, started to earn money back and build themselves more or less the equipment expected for someone of their level.
But certainly they do not "expect" treasure.
Also don't see this as "punishing the players" they really had a blast trying to figure out how to survive in an extremely hostile environment equipped with a stick and some stones. Even if they were a pretty martial party with no full caster (anti-paladin, fighter, rogue, bard)