I was just reading through the 2nd book of Dead Suns and I got to the part were, if the PCs help them, an NPC rewards them with a pair of ear rings.
This isn't some tribal member or traveling nomad, this NPC is a professor at a university and I can't imagine a situation where I do someone a favor and they say, "Thanks, here have my earings."
The PCs also have the opportunity, by helping another professor, to earn a magic ring. That's a bit more realistic in that its a useful item, but still feels out of place in a sci-fi setting, even if its fantasy/sci-fi.
Does these types of rewards continue to show up in Dead Suns? If so I think i'm going to just up the amount they earn from the Society and skip these rewards.
Treasure is treasure. I mean, the main characters of Star Wars blew up the Death Star and only got medals.
Eh, Earrings would be added to a long list of things I've already had my PC kill for :)
Eh, Earrings would be added to a long list of things I've already had my PC kill for :)
"Starfinder Society - Employing serial killers since the Gap!"
Sad but true :D
Sometimes people want to give a reward and they dont have many credsticks on them. If jewelry can be easily pawned, it might as well be cash.
I removed those gifts, and a few other treasures, and bumped a lot the bank account they can hack at the end.
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I couldn't find any earrings in DS2 either, but there is one NPC that offers a reward in the form of earnings. Based on the description of the professor NPC I'm pretty sure Pax misread "earnings" as "earrings". :)
Yeah, there's a mk 1 ring of resistance on that same page, but that's it for jewelry.
In a non-snark way, I kinda wish you got something virtual/abstract like 'treasure points' that you could put together for various things, sure it could turn into money, but it could turn into almost like the automatic progression stuff from Pathfinder optional stuff, put the boosts more on the character than the gear. Then you could turn guns and stuff into, "you take this one because its more accurate, or has a better crit range, or something' vs 'welp, i need to keep up with the power creep of tiers.'
I mean in the practical sense, it seems better to just use your slightly underpowered gear vs a CR appropriate challenge, and then use all THEIR gear instead of chasing after tier level with your own money.
I couldn't find any earrings in DS2 either, but there is one NPC that offers a reward in the form of earnings. Based on the description of the professor NPC I'm pretty sure Pax misread "earnings" as "earrings". :)
** spoiler omitted **
Ugh! You are correct. I misread that as earrings.
Treasure is treasure. I mean, the main characters of Star Wars blew up the Death Star and only got medals.
And not enough to go around, at that.
The thread necromancers have been out in force. This is an interesting topic to talk about so I figured I'd chime in.
I've just rebalanced the treasure in Dead Suns 2 specifically because I want to try to remove from the players their Greyhawking ways and have something a bit more appropriate to a sci-fantasy setting. I also have 5 players instead of 4 so more treasure is needed anyway.
At no point in Star Wars do you see the heroes strip someone naked, take their stuff to the local pawn shop and sell it for credits. They don't even take people's weapons to sell. They might take a weapon if they need one but that's about it. Firefly is a bit more mercantile, but certainly not to the degree that your average PF murder hobo is.
So I'm looking through the adventure and looking at what treasure the players are realistically (if I have my way) going to take and make sure I put in enough extra treasure to cover it.
So something like earrings (not that there were any) would get taken out. Excessive amounts of credits on bad guys would get taken off without a good reason for them to have it. The mk 1 ring of resistance I think I changed my mind on 5 different times, however Dr Solistarni's armor definitely won't be handed over. Something like a really cool weapon they take off a cultist after killing the cultist definitely is expected to be treasure though. As would some ancient relic from a long forgotten civilisation.
I'm making up the rest of this in forms of payment for services rendered. So in Dead Suns 1 when my players got to the point where they're meeting with Ambassador Nor, they'd taken some weapons and some spare credit chips, but otherwise hadn't done much looting. So they got level 2 worth of treasure right then and there. This will make them a bit overpowered for the akata they face on the Acreon. But given they won't be able to loot anything off the Acreon it will put them at about the right spot of treasure for the Drift Rock. Similar thing will be happening in Book 2. There isn't much room to get useable treasure before they get to level 4. So they'll get some up front treasure that will put them at close to max level 4 treasure with what they find designed to supplement them as they head towards the end of the book.
It's not a perfect system, but it gets the players pretty close to appropriate treasure levels for most combats with sometimes they're over and sometimes they're under (WBL is after all only a guideline).
I'll also be doing the same thing with the ship. The players have a fight on their ship at the start of book 2, and then nothing until the start of book 3. So they'll get some ship equipment at the start of book 2 and then the rest at the start of book 3. This probably isn't by the book. But it will help with my group's verisimilitude vs the ship auto-leveling when the character's do.
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That seems like a lot of effort. In our party I'm doing the party treasurer job, and I've noticed that the money we make from selling loot is practically negligible compared to what we get from random credsticks and such. Finding the occasional armor or weapon we actually want to use is nice but it doesn't happen a lot. We tend to try to have armor that's not too far behind or sometimes a bit ahead, and then most of the armor you find on goons is worse than what you already have.
Basically, if you "thrift" by using a lot of looted gear you could run a bit above WBL, but you're using a lot of below-level stuff.
Eh. Not really. I had to rejig the loot anyway to account for 5 players.
And yes, that's the dynamic I'm going with. I'm assuming that unless the PC's find something of equal level or greater then it's not going to meaningfully impact their WBL. That means less "you find 1,000 credsticks on 4 cultists" and more "you are hired to do X which gives you each 1.5 levels worth of WBL with half up front and half upon completion of the job". Throw in a couple of guns and the PCs are at the right WBL for most of the adventure.
This is different to Pathfinder where a lot of loot comes from stripping every single enemy you find and selling their stuff for half price.
Eh. May be? I haven't crunched the numbers to see if that's true. The only items I assume the players nab are the valuable ones they will actually use.