The book very nicely gives me the XP award for each monster, but not the treasure awards.
This has come up before in another post, but I found the replies to that post unhelpful because they assumed selling equipment/armor for full price, counted consumables, assumed PCs in a campaign should only get around their WBL with those things, and in some cases just said "don't worry about it", which didn't answer my questions.
In our group, there are 5 PCs who blew through the first 2 encounters basically at once, and now I'm trying to figure out how much gp to award.
If I look at the first 2 encounters in Burnt Offerings, I see:
1. 3x goblins of CR 1/3, total gear (excluding "other treasure") worth 151 gp. They're also worth 105 XP.
2. 3x goblins of CR 1/3 + a goblin warchanter of CR 1/2, total gear (excluding "other treasure") worth 286 gp (including a potion of CLW). They're also worth 155 XP.
Together, they give 260 XP, and that's 20% of the way to level 2 (because of the fast advancement track).
Part of this question is: how do I calculate the encounter CR?
First I looked here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/gamemastering.html
a. The table for CR equivalencies tells me 3x goblins is a CR 2 encounter. (And the 2nd encounter is CR 3).
b. If I use XP to calculate the CR, 3x goblins are 405 XP, just over CR 1. (And the 2nd encounter is 605 XP, just over CR 2).
Thus I see 2 different scenarios for the encounters (recall RotR is on the Fast advancement):
a. The treasure for a CR 2 encounter is 800 gp, so the goblins should have 649 gp worth of "other treasure" on them.
And the treasure for a CR 3 encounter is 1200 gp, so the goblins + warchanter should have 914 gp worth of "other treasure" on them.
Then I get 1,563 gp worth of other treasure, +20 from the goblin warchanter (and ignoring consumables and goblin equipment, which sells for half value at the most anyway). Dividing that among 5 PCs, each one gets about 316.6 gp worth of treasure, i.e. 31.66% of their level 2 WBL, which is probably ok (because PCs in a campaign get more than their WBL anyway).
b. The treasure for a CR 1 encounter is 400 gp, so the goblins should have 249 gp worth of "other treasure" on them.
And the treasure for a CR 2 encounter is 800 gp, so the goblins + warchanter should have 514 gp worth of "other treasure" on them.
Then I get 763 gp worth of other treasure, +20 from the goblin warchanter (and ignoring consumables and goblin equipment, which sells for half value at the most anyway). Dividing that among 5 PCs, each one gets about 156.6 gp worth of treasure, i.e. 15.66% of their level 2 WBL, which is worse than their XP growth.
c. If I award no treasure, and the PCs sell off all the equipment they find for 1/2 price, and I don't count consumables, they get 193.5 gp. That splits 5 ways for 38.7 gp per PC, which is pathetic (3.87% of their level 2 WBL).
Now I haven't tried calculating gold for the rest of the encounters yet, so I don't know if they'll compensate for slow GP growth, or not. That's why I'm coming to you all and asking for your help figuring this out.
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It is incredibly rare (and IMO pointless) to evenly distribute lot received among every single pointless goblin. Indeed my players never bothered looting individual goblins it is not worth it. All the treasure is to be found in the various residences, the Qusit below has a dagger worth 8000gp sold for 4000 gp , and there is a lot of other loot down there. There is even more at Thistletop.
What matters is how much money is recieved overall not getting it split up in tiny chunks.
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And if you are going to give treasure in EVERY encounter (changing what's on the Path) and also giving what's indicated there, you are going to get a surplus.
This looks like a lot of book-keeping to me which will eventually slow down the flow of playing immensly.
As my PCs were keen on slicing of the ears of every single goblin to get the reward I assumed they'd take a closer look at them anyways and let the players roll d20+5 for each group encountered. They received the result in gp. This represented all the stuff they would be able to salvage and sell in town. Leveling up, the amount of random gold the PCs increased with a random potion here and there--but was never the main source of income.
This came and comes from the bigger treasure troves described explicitely in the books.
Ruyan.
Thanks for giving me some idea of what's to come.
But does no one know a definite answer? Are there any designers who worked on it and can speak to the original intent?
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I will try to help but a couple warnings first:
- I am a WBL Heretic. I don't care about it. Have run 3.x and PF campaigns for more than a decade and have never paid any attention to it. The only time I look at that silly table is when I get drawn into threads like this.
- The AP provides a milestone advancement method and I encourage you to use it. I did not use it - because I'm a dinosaur and set in my ways - but it dramatically simplifies things and gives the players a story focus instead of a creatures killed focus. So if you're too young to know why wearing a red shirt means your life expectancy is low, I recommend you consider it.
XP is not assigned by CR, it's assigned by creature. So each goblin in the first encounter is 135XP. Three of them is (as you say at one point) 405XP. CR is used to assess encounter difficulty in comparison to your pc level but you should assign XP based on the creatures within the encounter. The AP explicitly states the XP in the monster headers. Here the milestones help us (even if you don't use them) because they are the voice of the designer you want: I've done the math (spreadsheet and all - I'm anal retentive) and if you assign XP as I describe (including the various story events in the AP) the pc's hit each level exactly as the milestones describe. And I've done this for the entire AP - it holds through every book.
The second important point is that the treasure in the AP is not divvied up evenly to each encounter. Think about it - why should the goblins raiding the town be carrying their treasure with them? Further what kind of treasure do we think goblins have? They're scavengers that live off the garbage of other species - poverty is their normal condition. That's why they're raiding the town! If each goblin had 100's of gp of treasure they wouldn't be here.
This is not the first thread of the "There's not enough treasure in this AP!" flavor. I'm too lazy to search for them but the consistent conclusion is: Yes, there is. But you need to look across multiple encounters, assess WBL at the milestone events, and make sure the pc's liquidate all the monster equipment, etc. Your pc's will not be on track after each encounter.
My group is almost done with Book 4 and they are in no way suffering for treasure. And I'm a <word that rhymes with trick> DM - I don't let them sell items that wouldn't have a market in Sandpoint or Magnimar. So, No, no one wants to buy a goblin dog-slicer. No, no one wants to buy a magical ogre hook. And yea, someone will buy the bizarre magical curio/weapon to be found under Sandpoint in Book 1, but not "full price" per the rules because no one can use it. (Though there are some interesting ideas out in the threads here about how users for it can be found.)
Now, you have 5 pc's so you have a challenge - and I'm guessing that's what behind your questions. There is no crisp answer for that - but there are threads out here on that topic as well. You can simply scale up the number of goblins (example) and that gives some scale of treasure. I would suggest playing it by ear to some extent and add more monetary treasure to the key treasure spots in the AP.
For Book 1, examples would be B11 - the Meditation Chamber, C24 - Goblin Treasury, E7 Collapsed Treasury.
What Latrecis said. I've been running the AP for 2 years as of last month for my group of (originally 4) 5 PC's. I have added very little treasure -- I occasionally will swap items (we have a crossbow master so all +X arrows of Y become +X bolts of Y), or give items more suited to my players. I don't give treasure from bestiary entries aside from gear carried and maybe a few gold here and there. That being said, you'll find the treasure in the AP is widely varied and suitable to a party of pretty much any make-up. I also started by granting XP per encounter/creature killed but it's a hell of a lot of book keeping, especially since the AP tells you when the PCs should be at what level. It also lead to my players reasoning things like, "We should go kill it/them, we'll get more XP," which is a horrible thing to hear your players say. I stopped giving out XP and switched to milestone-based leveling after only a few sessions and haven't looked back. My players didn't mind, either.
That being said, my players have never complained about being below WBL nor have they ever truly struggled with an encounter (save, perhaps, Fort Rannick -- but as I understand it, every party struggles with Fort Rannick). I believe they are in fact above WBL, and unlike Latrecis I let them sell most stuff (other than the mwk goblin dog slicers -- who wants those?) at market value (half price), except for the actual treasure items which are meant to be sold at the values listed in the book.