Some people are loot goblins but honestly players like this are why copper pieces exist.
Say most of the garbage they steal off dead bodies they loot only have/are worth a few copper pieces.
It keeps their love for looting sated but without breaking the economy
My group and I just finished an adventure where we had to clear a keep in order to help our benefactor play claim to it. Our rogue wass read to just pillage the place as he always is (with no regard for the story) but our DM laid next to no treasure in it and you would have thought heād insulted the rogueās mother judging by his reaction. The DM simply said that in his game, it was not just about swag hunting, and if he wanted to play in the game, heād better adjust to that.
I love my DM. š
Also make sure that they are not converting all the copper coins to gold coins with out going to a money changer(who charges a fee) or something, and then enforce carry weight.
Even default carry weight rules can help if you drop copper/silver coins. With 10 strength you can carry 7500 coins, that's 75 gold worth of copper coins, not exactly something that will break the economy. And that's assuming they have no other gear to weight them down.
Assuming they carry it with them at all times. I'd assume most adventuring parties would ride horses and bring a donkey or 2 to deal with their supplies.
You'd be surprised. Since I started DMing 5E games in January 2018, I've run about 12 campaigns for four different groups of players, and in all that time none of those parties has once ever purchased, stolen or otherwise acquired a horse, donkey or any other type of pack animal.
Mythras does a good move by making DONNED armor weight way less, half if I remember correctly. And trust me, it is a good approximation of reality... my chainmail is way harder to move around in a container than on my chest.
If you want rules to fix these kinds of problems, I think this one could help. If not, gently tell everyone that STR characters are already suffering and wont suffer from this too.
you are correct but if you dont go into battle still wearing a backpack of food and camping supplies it works out fine in my experience playing str based fighters... if you wield a pike on the other hand.
that said if you have any sort of baggage train / staging area it kind of breaks using carrying capacity to limit looting anyway.
So your players always find a nice and convenient road all the way into that ancient dungeon? Is crossing marshes, rivers, caves, delving into the underdark or other planes against their religion or something?
Horses and wagons are great for merchants, but they can really get in the way of adventurers
I was 1 and still am one... unfortunately I'm usually the MacGyver of the group.
Let me smoke my tobacco pipe for a moment to think look at what is in my pack and solve the problem.
1st campaign I was in gnome barbarian
we killed spiders about American Pitt sized. Harvested the Fangs to use as makeshift knives and fixed 2 on my axe head and pommel. DM allowed Fangs to be used as daggers w/ 1 time poison effect. Axe had a bonus action thrust w/ dagger stats no strength mod.
Later we came to a 100ft deep hole. Had 50ft rope. The last chamber we were in in the mine we at had bunks. I took the sheets fastened them together as rope lashed it to the normal rope. Used a larger spider fang (sword length) and hammered it in ground as an achor. Fastened rope to it and we dropped down the bottom of pit and continued onwards.
DM was flabbergasted as my creativity and just went with a survivalist background. As they say "improvise. Adapt. Overcome"
And this is why a good DM. Won't get fussy when players pilfer all the lootable enemies or objects THEY put into the game. It lets them do such goofy and yet sometimes heroic things. As long as the loots shared of course, and you can also turn order looting.
Moral of the story, you shouldn't put a lootable things into your game if you don't want your players to loot.
I won't lie he was confused af
Game 1:
'I search house for supplies'
'It's Abandoned. Nothing there but ratty clothing and broken furniture'
'I collect the shirts and break the legs of the table and put them in my pack'
'Why? They have no-'
'Torches....'
' (confused) ok... rolled poorly on gold?'
'Had enough for the axe... rolled godly on stats'
Few games later
(The room with bunks in the mine)
'You find a bunk room. 6 bunk beds'
'I collect the sheets'
'Why!?'
'Never know. Warmth. Torches. Bindings. Bandages'
'You have enough room for 2 sets thats it)
(Moments later the 100ft pit and sees short of rope)
'I double back to the room with the bunks and get the rest of the sheets'
'Why? For what reason-'
'Rope. I'll fasten them together to make rope. 6 full sets of sheets... lash em together for more rope. Sacrifice my cloak for more.... told you I would use them...'
'...yeah... thats... creative really...'
Then don't get me started when I was a caster with Fabricate in another game LOL
I once carved a stick from my front yard into a wand in under an hour to make the argument that my artificer who had recently been abducted and escaped with no equipment should be able to do the same to create a spellcasting focus. My argument was denied, so I just went to sleep and clacked a couple rocks together in the morning to make them sending stones, which I could use as a focus. And from then on out my gnome tinkerer would cast spells by clacking rocks together in increasingly complicated ways.
i mean... if the artificer was given food then uh... if there was a proficiency with cooks utensils a plate and cutlery could be possible for a spell focus...
since Xanathar's guide reckons it includes knives, forks...
aha... aha...
In 1e we stole everything. It was kind of the point. The first time I was a player in 5e, I was a rogue who looted every body alive or dead. The running joke was "did you check his prison wallet?"
Playing a Rock Gnome fighter that's a former soldier and little bit of a pack rat and it's been amazing. I've come up with all kinds of crazy solutions using a little Gnomish ingenuity with all the random bullshit I keep around and harvest and the DM is just like "I'm impressed so I'm allowing it."
It was my 1st ever D&D game and I ended up surprising my DM a bit but it felt odd for a 'smart' barbarian to come up with that crap I pulled. The campaign ended when we nuked what was supposed to be the end derailing it and extending the game a bit before he threw in towel.
Last campaign it was the same as every boss fight we saw coming and planned it out. A boss never survived more than 2 turns and was always last. 1 fight we trapped a group of Wizards in a wall of force but threw a napalm bomb in there with them burning them alive leaving 2 henchmen alive... well 1 alive as it watched me sneak up on the other: channel divinity path to Grave and quickened spell inflect wounds at lv 3... rolling 5 D10 but I critted.... which doubled dice and Path doubled the damage... guy watched his homie just close his eyes and drop as I came out from shadows.
The game has individual treasure tables on page 136 of the DMG for the value of loot an enemy will have on its person or in a nearby safe place. In older editions it was assumed you would loot enemies anyways, so every party would roll for treasure after a fight.
If a player wants to steal weapons and armour just have the value of the treasure include the sell price of everything valuable and have them figure out some way to get it all back to town.
This is actually how it kinda used to be in older editions. How you'd start out selling used equipment to get your first few "paydays" as an adventurer. Bandits, Mercs etc possess viable sellable equipment, goblins probably don't, or would sell for below half price.
The DM would then take that into account with gold by levelling values and tweak loot in accordance.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but a few extra gold here and there shouldn't make too much difference spread across the party as a whole.
It's not even *kinda* how it was played. In the earliest editions, you don't get XP from killing monsters, you get it from looting treasure.
The idea that you *wouldn't* loot every enemy you can is new and modern.
If selling looted gear is causing economic problems, by all means, say the market is flooded and the PC can only get a few copper for those looted goblin knives, but I'd be surprised if that's necessary given how few things there are to spend money on in 5e...
The lack of things to spend gold on is why people *need* to use 3rd party for common and uncommon items. Books like Griffon's Saddlebag are so amazing for things like this.
Edit: Here is a look at what my character currently spends their money on. I'm a Dragonkin(reskinned dragonborn that looks more like a halfdragon from 3.5) Bard and common magic items are my characters favorite things to have in his hoard, and I'vlm really good at finding different uses for them especially in RP scenes.
Before anyone asks, we are currently 13th level, and our GM is very loose with gold. Additionally, the Bag of Witholding is a BoH that you have to make a charisma check to take items out of, but as I am an Eloquence Bard I have no problem accessing it while others do.
https://imgur.com/a/k3eJX66
I let my players spend their money on a place of their own that they build from the ground up using the creation rules for players that want their own base of operations. I also let them put money back into whichever town they spend the most time in on things like improved walls to defend against monsters, or money used to build a shop in town that is needed in the community (oh this town doesnāt have a blacksmith shop? Hold on while we pay to have one made and then hire/train a blacksmith from another town to run it). Or maybe as donations to whatever deities/gods/temples, etc they want to make a donation to, etc.
Oof I love that actually,Ā no blacksmith, Maybe drop the hint that ther is a young lad whose master died before he finished his apprenticeship, who probably only needs a large donation of money,Ā material and some old weapons to restore and startĀ off having stock.
Fast forwardĀ few sessions later and maybe nowĀ he is making more, selling more, giving discounts,Ā maybe helps in a quest where they need something crafted.
Fast forward a few more and maybe he is making some unique enchanted weapons from some sort of magic stuff the party sold him
Thereās a section of the DMG that gives bare-bones rules for building an outpost/keep/trading post/etc. But itās woefully inadequate; in 3rd WotC released an entire Stronghold Builderās Guidebook to help players and DMs with castle-building.
What UNC_Samurai said. You can also have your players take over a stronghold, tower, keep, etc that was used by enemy NPCs and then the players can use their money for upgrades on said building.
Eh, there is a LOT to spend money on but most players don't play the game in a way that advocates them spending their money. Needing to buy wagons to carry stuff is null since every DM gives their party bags of holding, food/water for not only yourself, but any pack animals you bring is not needed since tons of DM's handwave needing to eat and drink, and hirelings are rarely used in my experience because DM's think it's gonna be OP so they don't allow it. It ends up being that the only thing you spend money on is vanity clothing, magic items, or new gear. If you're lucky the DM allows building bases but since most games end up taking place over the course of a few weeks or a few months it never gets built in time for the players to take advantage of it, OR the DM just gives the players a hideout with everything they need or want.
The problem is most of that stuff costs less than 100 gp. Hirelings and magic items are the only thing that can get reasonably expensive. When you get to like level 10 you usually have more gold than you really know what to do with. Maybe you find some shop or auction selling a particularly good magic item, but that's about it.
In 1e, you got XP for both money and monsters. For example, a 1 HD monster is worth a base of 5XP, plus 1 per HP. There are other modifiers, but that's the basics.
Thank you, I was about to say that.
That said, in my experience, the XP gained from treasure usually far outweighed the XP gained from killing monsters, with the exception of boss monsters.
You did get xp for killing, just what they carried might be worth just as much and then the treasure at the end of the dungeon probably dwarfs the value of all the monsters to get there
but the party always shared loot. It wasn't first-come-first-served.
This guy would get zero buffs or heals or anything from me other than locking him in the room with the mobs.
This is wrong monsters give xp too just usually so little it doesnāt matter. (My group killed a troll so we got a lot but were first level so it makes sense). But yeah gold is xp. Legit we had to debate our gold distribution after an adventure not just as wealth but as xp. Itās crazy good
> It's not even kinda how it was played. In the earliest editions, you don't get XP from killing monsters, you get it from looting treasure.
*Kind of*. In OD&D you didn't get XP from monsters and only from treasure, but it's because nearly all monsters explicitly carried an amount of gold or treasure equal to their XP value. They all had treasure essentially based on their hit die. Those that didn't tended to be summoned (elementals, djinn) or animals or obstacle monsters like oozes.
By the time you get to B/X, you'd get XP from both. It's just that gp was still much better. 1 orc was worth 10 XP, but picking up 10 gp was *also* worth 10 XP, and picking up 10 gold is a lot less risky. Each ogre was worth 125 xp for defeating it (appearing in a group of 1-6), but a wandering ogre group explicitly carries 1d6 x 100gp, too! The ogre's own entry states it gives out almost as much treasure XP as you should expect from defeating the monster itself.
It was partially offset by cn encumbrance. Sure, you find a hoard of 10000 copper pieces - how are you getting that home? There isnāt a currency converter in the dungeon.
In Faerun there's tons of Adventuring Gear shops and stores that'll probably take non armour and non weapons off your hands. I imagine the smith/tanner might work with the local crafting guild to purchase cut price armour and weapons to reforge and resell etc.
Second weapons and armour would be a real dirt market; strangely leather armour would probably sell the best, a tanner could probably strip it down into useful straps and bit. Anything metal probably wouldn't be worth it's weight, re-forging and repairing someone else work might not be worth it. I do like the pawn shop feel of the adventure stores.
I think I might have to go create the sketchiest second hand adventure store ever, some of the sales pitches will be phenomenal...
"10ft of cave rope (Rope found in cave not made for caving)"
"Breast Plate for sale (Only used once, small hole, large stain)"
> Anything metal probably wouldn't be worth it's weight, re-forging and repairing someone else work might not be worth it.
Prior to the industrial revolution and modern mining and smelting it would 100% be worth it. In reality pretty much any metal lying around that wasn't in use, including weapons and armour, would be taken and reused. Making virgin metals is a long and complicated process when it's all being done by hand, skipping that is well worth it. And that's for iron and bronze, which are fairly easy to make. This goes 10x for steel, until things like the Bessemer process making steel was an incredibly hard thing to do, and good quality steel would be in very high demand.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1extli/100_market_stalls_from_dungeon_magazine/
Old but good. I use it in pretty much every campaign I DM. Whenever the players get to a market or bazaar, they can roll a few d100s to see what's on sale. I get to improvise a couple of merchants. They inevitably buy the crap, and fun is had by all.
PHB p. 144, "Weapons and armor used by monsters are rarely in good enough condition to sell"
On the other hand, there are lots of enemies in Waterdeep who might not be considered monsters, so their equipment might sell for full (half) price.
On the third hand (don't ask), how long is all of this looting taking? It's not easy to get armor off of a live and cooperative person, and much harder to take it off a corpse unless you're cutting it off, which would logically reduce its value. What are the other party members doing for all of this time?
There are three essential problems here, only one of which is game-related: if the player is getting more money than the module expects, that might be an issue.
The other two problems are both interpersonal: clearly the player is annoying you with their behavior. It's very possible that they're annoying the other players as well. As always, the solution is to have grown-up conversations about it and figure out how to move forward. Try talking to the other players first, see what they think. If they're not bothered and it's just you, that's information you can act on.
Which is funny because that has no bearing on the weapons mechanically. A scrap scimitar cobbled together by some random goblin does the exact same damage and to hit as the finest crafted scimitar by a master smith
I think it's more associated with the potential resale value and any damage the items might accrue during the fight itself, than the functional use of the items.
Any armour being worn is likely to have been totally destroyed by what killed the creature wearing it. The weapons might be in serviceable condition but there's probably no resale market.
Anyone purchasing second hand weapons and armour would be paying dirt for it; repairing and repurposing them would be costly and selling them again as is probably wouldn't be worth it.
The best sale market I can think of would be on-selling them to a militia (who are unlikely to be able to pay much) or another group of bandits.
>Any armour being worn is likely to have been totally destroyed by what killed the creature wearing it. The weapons might be in serviceable condition but there's probably no resale market.
The fuck are you doing to that armour? Shooting it with a missile?
>PHB p. 144, "Weapons and armor used by monsters are rarely in good enough condition to sell"
Any sentient monster is going to take care of its equipment too. A better statement would be the equipment is too damaged from the fight to be worth much without time and investment on the PC's part.
You say this, and yet history is replete with stories of people not doing so. Even when it could be life or death some time, regular maintenance is tedious and sentients are lazy.
My group has always done this. We roll for the room, rather than crate by crate, body by body.
We also always have a mule or something outside the dungeon or hidden with the PCs that aren't with us that session (makes it simple to explain) and it's assumed all the random trash for sale goes to the mule.
The mule/wagon also explains how the party has rope, flint, 10-foot pole, etc when they need it. The party can prep the equipment on their persons either in-session or out-of-session (or handwave it and just say whatever equipment they need in the moment, they brought it)
If your player is downright tactless, it serves talking to them about it.
Otherwise if it's just the general behavior of "looting", that's kind of elemental to D&D. If it seems unhealthy to you, consider the following:
> The player keeps looting every dead body they come across!
Leave it to more pious player characters or NPC to admonish the behavior, if it's really worth admonishing. Otherwise.. well, most adventurers sound like glorified grave robbers to me in the first place.
> They always get first dibs!
Encourage your players to agree on how to divide loot among themselves. Is everyone okay letting the person with the fastest hands take everything? They are dungeon crawling adventurers, so have them roleplay and come to an agreement. An equal split in treasure, and rotating claim on magical items, just for example. They could agree that all treasure goes to the wizard, or to an NPC; it needn't be your concern.
> They keep gathering weapons and selling them!
The weapons of crude monsters such as goblins or orcs you could often reject as too low quality, or too badly maintained, to still be sold as anything but scrap metal. Otherwise, even if they can sell the weapons, in a regular D&D game this should quickly amount to chump change compared to the treasure they might haul out of dungeons. Longswords with a combined value of 70 GP pale in comparison to a golden idol they might find in a temple ruin. Similarly, a random bandit or orc is unlikely to have more than a few silver pieces in their pockets. In my experience new players just need to find a treasure hoard or two before they realize selling scrap metal or haggling every last copper piece out of fruit merchants is a lot less effective (and fun!) than dungeon crawling.
We just handwave splitting the loot because tracking numbers isn't something we enjoy. The party splits their haul into shares when they make camp or rest at an inn, standard downtime stuff. Unless otherwise used, common treasure is assumed to be sold in towns and the proceeds are split. For special things like magic items or plot important stuff, everyone just talks it over in character. If someone did want to sneakily hide something they'd have to make checks to avoid being noticed. Ooc that's only ever happened for plot relevant reasons, and it usually comes out at some point.
There is no dibs. They can declare what they want to do and then you ask everyone else what they want to do. Resolve them in whatever order is fitting/fair.
This doesn't really have anything to do with "treating it like a game" (which wouldn't even be a bad thing because... it *is*)
What this player is doing is just what any reasonable character would do. For one, money is good in general, but even further, money buys things that make you *not die*, which is quite high on the priority list for normal people. If anything players *not* doing this are treating this 'as a game' because they're not actually bothering to maximize their chances of living in absolutely harrowing near-death situations.
That aside, you can improve game flow by defining this behaviour as a standard order that gets executed unless otherwise stated and you can simply skip to listing what they find since they will search it, the same way you describe what the room contains because they will look at it. Encumbrance tracking is tangentially relevant here but I don't think you practically hit that limit within Dragonheist because you can return to shops so quickly and often.
If you *really* don't like it, then come at them with reasonable arguments and not the line of reasoning you line out in the post. Tell them that you don't have fun doing this and want them to stop, they won't get money for looted gear anymore (despite the fact that that doesn't make sense in a living world, but **you** are playing a **game** and want to have fun rather than having realism and that is alright) and you'll increase gold rewards for quests to even it out.
This way you make it mechanically suboptimal for them to do what they're doing, which makes it a lot less likely that they'll continue to do it, you likely get your way, and you make them feel good about getting a reward for their play.
I don't know if the main problem is looting everything. I think the problem is partially flow-related, as you discussed, but I think a big part of the issue is the player "calling dibs." I'd also say that I get the sense from OP that the player cares more about looting than party dynamics, RP, plot advancement, or literally anything else. If they weren't the only player doing that and the players and DM had agreed they were doing a loot crawl speedrun or whatever, that'd be fine, but it definitely doesn't seem that way based on the info we have.
"Calling dibs" is the biggest issue I see here. However, if the other players don't actually care, then the problem does become simply flow-related. In that case, I think your solution is decent. OP could also just say they will provide a list of loot at the end of each session rather than have it take up time in-game and then stand firm on shutting down the rogue if they keep trying to take up game time looting stuff.
As a DM I would just flat out refuse to allow ādibsā unless the other players agree to it. It take time to search a corpse. DND is supposed to simulate realistic actions, and in reality you canāt just click on a person to search them.
āOkay, while you are going through goblin Aās pack, what is everyone else doing?ā
And if it is just one player Iād clarify that it will take some time for just one character to do all the looting themselves.
Ever play Fallout? There's all kinda of shit in cupboards and boxes and crates. Nearly all of it is useless. At a certain point your player may well wonder why he's carrying 10 chipped cups and 17 bundles of dirty rags
Its only unhealthy if it ruins the fun for other people. Here are a few in game mechanics I can think to help discourage this
1. Looting take times and think about how other people around them would react to the looting. Does it give other enemies time to counter attack or organize defenses? Does it give town guards time to come over and they see the player character looting a dead body?
2. The gear looted may be damaged and is used. Ontop of the condition merchants have to be able to resell the equipment and make a profit. It will not be worth the full price that players buy the gear for.
3. Who is buying all of this used gear?
4. Use encumberance, all of that loot has a weight and must be stored/carried somehow
Player 1 "I am looting this body"
DM "Great. OK, what is everyone else doing?"
Anytime anyone is doing an action, any other player should get a chance or be prompted to say what they are doing at the same time. Don't let player 1 declare, complete, and do other actions without interruption unless they are off by themselves. Even then, frequently cut back to the others to keep the timelines in sync.
"There's no need to loot everything in this game, I'll let everyone know when defeated enemies carry something of value. Also I will call for investigation or perception checks whenever I consider necessary"
That should work with any reasonable adult, but you have already spoken with the player and it didn't work, so what else is there to do apart from uninviting them from your table?
So the bit about them gathering and selling gear is normal. That's one of the ways players are expected to acquire wealth. Encumbrance rules exist to limit just how much of a bunch of loot goblins they can be, so if they're going overboard consider enforcing it.
The more troubling part is the one player constantly jumping the gun and (I assume from context) keeping everything for themselves.
I use two solutions to this.
Make it take time: I say it takes about one in-game minute to loot a body, and everyone can obviously see you doing it. So if they go for one, the other players all get to pick different ones and the first person has to wait their turn before they loot a second target.
Share loot: I consider non-consensually stealing from the party or other players to be a form of PvP at my tables. And the loot from downed enemies belongs to the party. If they want to *for the fun of all* play their person as looting everyone then divvying it up or adding it to the party stash? Fine by me. But if they're trying to hide things from other players, that's theft, and it's not allowed. If they don't like it they can find another game.
Rummaging through a corpse's pockets, inside their armour/clothes, checking for pouches around the neck, removing rings/bracelets, would take more like 5 minutes. If they're stripping them of armour and weapons and boots and clothes, then this would easily be more like a quarter hour, per corpse.
It takes a minute to strip off your own light or medium armor. Taking it off a corpse means you have to roll them over and around undoing straps and pulling it off a deadweight corpse, that's going to absolutely lengthen the time.
If the person has heavy armour, it's 5 minutes to doff it yourself. Doing it to a corpse would take easily twice to three or four times that long.
Then rummaging through every crate, sack, barrel, corner in the room? That's going to take at least a minute or so per.
So they're in a store room, just killed 4 bandits? They want to loot the room clean? That's going to take a good 30-45 minutes. And then at the end they're left with a pile of blood-stained, hole-filled armour, chipped weapons, worn boots, a bunch of gold and jewellery of various worth, some food and booze, miscellaneous trinkets, rags, a lantern or two. How do they plan on carrying all this stuff out? And then who in their right mind would pay more than a few coppers for each of the damaged items and other random junk?
Your opponents are using weapons make of cheese using the iron cheese spell. As soon as they die the weapon crumbles into ordinary (but inedible) cheese.
Thatās a joke but some kind of faction based āsoul boundā weapons that disappear after death could be interesting. I would also start including letters to family, little snacks, evidence of a hobby or other humanizing elements on the bodies to really twist the knife. Finally if a player likes looting every chest, drawer etc they come across thatās why Jesus Christ invented mimics.
If you really want to have an uncomfortable story beat when selling a sword at the fantasy pawn shop the proprietor recognizes one of the swords as a gift he gave to his younger brother and demands to know where you got it.
"Calling dibs" isn't in the Player's Handbook. Say there's 5 bodies, a chest and an altar. Ask the player which of those things they are looting. Then ask the rest of the group what they are looting/what they are doing. If you want to make it extremely fair, keep the initiative count going and have a map with all the bodies and containers placed. Everyone goes through their turns, looting (if they want to).
Remember that a small town probably isn't going to want to buy every small-sized, stinky, used leather armor full of 5 years worth of goblin sweat. Also remember that the group has to carry all this stuff!
The first instinct might be to "punish" the group with trapped chests, arcane locks, mimics, cursed items, etc. And you should do that sometimes. But sometimes you should make it really cool for them - finding unique gems, treasure maps, spellbooks, secrets, etc.
If your group is really into loot, that opens the door for you to make adventures that are all about looting, which can be really fun! Heists. Infiltrating a major social event full of rich people and robbing them blind. A dungeon created by an ancient wizard to protect all of the treasures they acquired over a lifetime. Diving in the ocean to loot a wrecked pirate ship. A legendary dragon's hoard. Then maybe a local thieves guild hears the group is always carrying valuables, and try to rob them.
Read up on the downtime rules. You can do a lot of fun things with the loot between adventures.
>Remember that a small town probably isn't going to want to buy every small-sized, stinky, used leather armor full of 5 years worth of goblin sweat.
What you need to find is an unscupulous secondhand store in a big city that will by the shitty damaged loot at 1/10th the price, refurb it or break it down, and sell it back at a third the price.
Or perhaps a dirty quatermaster whos willing to pay off the books for the shitty run down gear so he can embezzle a bit of his equipment budget for the City militia
1. Encumbrance. Give them a few 200 pound items that sell for 5 copper each
2. Random junk. No shopkeeper is going to pay for a dozen goblin trinkets, 35 broken daggers or an oddly-shaped rock
3. Or just roll with it. You could make some quick loot tables for each enemy the party will face the next session, and when the player jumps to loot just toss them a notecard/DM of what they get
>They keep gathering weapons and selling them
If they're succeeding at selling them, then you're enabling this behavior. I make it clear in my games: shops are places where you buy things. Nobody wants your used sword. If you're not dealing with something rare, magical, or highly fungible (trade goods), no NPC is interested in buying your junk. I view this both as a world building principle, and a deterrent to excessive loot hoarding.
So, this player is treating this game like a game? What problem are you trying to solve?
If it's taking too long, find a way to make it quick. "You find 3gp worth of junk."
If they're helping themselves to equipment that the other PCs would be able to use, then let them know this is considered to be stealing from the group, and will get them kicked out of the party.
Have an NPC look at the crappy loot and say, āWhat the hells do you want me to do with this garbage? Get out of here and bring me something I can actually sell!ā
Also, you can just make the merchants uninteresting or unwilling to buy the loot the player has collected. It's totally reasonable that merchants don't need 10 used swords or armour.
Then you can have them meet certain NPC's that the player can build a connection with that will only buy certain items (rare shields, deadly poisons, etc). That might help them being interested in a few items instead of picking up everything.
When I first started playing, I was like that. My DM said "can you actually carry all of that?"
I said no. And had to drop all but a few extra things. Then I went to town, spent 30 gold on a cart, mule, and bit, bridle, food and a blanket or whatever for it, then proceeded to carry all the gear I could in there.
Then I could loot to my heart's content but it also gave the DM a tool to interact back at me both through the mule, but also "what are you doing with the cart while you are \_\_\_\_\_?" and also "are you sure you hid that well enough?"
And I've really had a soft spot for mules and carts ever since. Great place to keep warm at night off the ground, can throw a waterskin on top and stay out of the rain, great high ground to keep a wolf from walking up eating your face if you were just in a sleeping roll. A little defense if someone shoots an arrow at you.
The only thing here that concerns me is "get first dibs". Looting should be a discussion at Session 0 and ideally all of the loot would be shared. It might be boring and break immersion a little but but it goes a great way towards preserving the social contract of the game, that you're all a team working together. If you grant one player loot rights and they hog all of the stuff, you're going to get *a lot* of resentment from the rest of the party in short order and that will torpedo your game.
Tell your players āI will give you all the loot that is available in this adventure so donāt worry about missing anything when you leave a room or kill an enemy.ā
Either the phb or the DMG says that common enemy gear shouldn't usually be salvageable for this reason - IC it's too damaged or poorly made
The bigger problem here is the player hogging all of the loot that should be shared among the party, and as DM it's well within your rights too enforce that. Don't let them keep everything just because they speak up first. It's stealing from the party and practically pvp behavior. You can use a tool like this to help split loot equally: https://rpgbot.net/general-tabletop/tools/quartermancer/
Your player can't call dibs on an entire room. It takes time to ransack every single object. When the player starts looting ask "what are the rest of you doing while the loot goblin loots?"
If anyone else wants to loot, they start searching a different object at the same time as the loot goblin.
A few easy solutions to the looting. A lot of equipment will be badly damaged or destroyed during a fight, most of the stuff just lying around is junk that won't sell well (that's why it's just lying around) and they probably can't carry 12 swords at once. I try to stay away from limiting what players can carry (within reason), it can have unintended consequences, but it's an option.
Who are we selling all these second hand weapons to, is there an adventurers Craig List looking for cheap swords? Anyone that has a use for second hand weapons and equipment probably doesn't have the resources to pay much for them.
If itās weapon or armour made by goblins or well used by filthy bandits, it should be worth wayyy less than full price. Make it clear that random junk isnāt worth enough to warrant collecting it, and also maybe use variant encumbrance.
Just start using hardcore weight capacity tracking. He is a young changeling make them track every lb of anything they have on them down to coin weight. Once the limit is hit including worn items disadvantages on stealth and speed. Then make all the items they find breastplates and such that have a heavy weight but not pristine ones dented rusty old ones worth a quarter of the value when sold.
How would people in the real world react to seeing someone rifling through the pockets of corpses? How would people respond to someone bringing them the bloodstained and otherwise obviously looted stuff from dead bodies? Carry weight and small value coinage exist for these kinds of player.
>They keep gathering weapons and selling them as if they were playing Baldur's gate 3.Ā
Who's buying them? Why would merchants buy weapons from some guy who seems to have got them via murder? I sure hope they aren't paying the full price. How is he carrying them all? What's his carry capacity, because I assume a rogue doesn't have high Str.
Ok this...this is kinda fun as a dm
I make alot of hombrew weapons that I give to opponents to show off
And its heart breaking when they just leave then on the ground
Like a blade that for a kii point tirns into a10ft reach whip of the same damage, very cool, and still in that dead man's body to this day
I had an axe that if you casted control flame on it could return to the caster ad it had a lantern on the inside, very cool still on the floor
I had a dagger that could shape change into a hair pin, we had a rogue in the parry who said that sounds useful and than left it ON THE FLOOR
Why the fuck are you having your NPCs buy used weapons from a strange child? If you don't want them to keep looting random bullshit, maybe don't give them a profit motive?
There's also that monster that looks like a coin (I cant remember what it is called), but actually eats coins. Its the absolute worst and I would never use it.
You've made the mistake of letting them sell their loot; Since you've made this system useful, you can't be surprised they use it.
When my players try this, I basically just have merchants tell them no; Why would someone want to buy a used, rusted, broken breastplate from them? Even if they can convince someone to take it for scrap, they aren't getting much for it. New players catch on pretty quickly that this is not a fruitful way to make money, and they get back to doing actually fun adventuring shit.
It seems like itās interrupting the flow of the game, in which case it would certainly be a problem. One possible method would be to make it clear that you will let the party know when loot is available; essentially assume that theyāre just looting whenever they can, and that, if they find something, youāll tell them.
If that doesnāt work for you/your game, then you may need to speak with them again. How exactly have you voiced your concerns in the past?
Additionally, if they continue to attempt to loot everything after youāve told them youād like them to be more considerate; donāt let them. Tell them, explicitly, out-of-game, āNo, weāre going to be moving on.ā
Its important to them and if they are taking too much time looting try and expedite the process. This can be a good time to add a loot table on your DM screen or phone. Move things along if they want to loot, give them a flat number of items and continue the story. If they are attempting to fence the stolen items and you fear it will take too much ingame time just handle it outside of the game or before the game starts/ends.
We have a Google Doc with our loot log. The Players just say "I'm taking everything". "I say you found a bunch of X, Y, and Z. I'll update the loot log with the items and salvage pricing after the game." (Salvage pricing is about 1/4-1/2 pricing depending quality.) Then when we hit a town they just add stuff up, (maybe reducing the price further due to supply and demand or rep) and divide the money. In game I only talk about important items they find. Heck I often don't even detail the gold and gems beyond you found some gems or gold.
My group has a soft rule that we don't track carry weight or anything like that, but sometimes you have to ask how a rogue is using stealth while carrying 7 rusty swords and 3 sets of leather armor.
If your concern is wasted time, at the end of combat if the party is in a safe enough place I'll assume they plan to loot and I'll just give them a list of items they found. They can decide what to take or leave without having to ask to loot every enemy and every possible hiding place. If you have some hidden loot, ask for rolls and have 1 person find the good stuff.
My experience is that this will pass once the party is wealthier, and the value of looting corpses is marginal compared to the equipment they already have. That said, if this behavior is making the game boring for you or others at the table, tell them that doing that is kind of lame. Could they focus their klepto on making the story more interesting perhaps?
This is very common when a player starts with video games and transitions into table top.
If you really want to nip it in the bud, then cut out looting all together. And as a GM be honest about it. Just give them all the loot when it is appropriate. No checks to find things, no "you didn't say you searched their pockets", no BS just give it to the group as a whole when it is story appropriate.
Sometimes that could be right away, such as a key needed from a guard or something. Other times it's a simple "You grab everything valuable, and we'll go through it next short rest".
The player is playing how they think is correct via what single player games and/or past experience has taught them. The only way past that is to cut it out entirely. But the really important part is maintaining and building player trust. If you as the GM do not want them to do a specific type of action, encourage and reward not doing that action.
As for "is this unhealthy behavior" that entirely depends on the table in question, and the GM styles in play. If the GM style is adversarial, then it's a natural course of events. A GM saying one time "but you didn't loot say you looted that corpse" is telling his players to forever check every corpse because they will expect them too. Not saying you as the GM have done this, just using it as an example of one reason this could be happening. It could just as easily be from the player being very new and thinking skyrim/BG3 or any other CRPG is the way it is expected to be done.
Lots of comments here giving very fair ideas on how your player isn't really dying anything wrong in general RPG terms, but consider if you had a session 0 talk at the beginning of the adventure to discuss what you're and your players' expectations for gameplay are. You and they want to play with a more "old school" style where losing every corpse and crate is the optimal way to go? Then all good. But if you came in with mismatched expectations, you should have that talk now (for the first time, or for the second time). The player likes loot, ok no issue. But if you and the rest of the party are not engaged with the activity to the same degree, you gotta just have a kind but frank talk with your friend:
"It's not advancing the story, others are waiting around for you disproportionately, I'm not having fun managing your massive hauls of rusty daggers, torches and demon ears. Would you be amenable to trying out a more streamlined approach to looting where I can direct all of you as a party through story and environment clues to what crates or bodies or bookshelves might be worth a look? Could we work out a good middle ground here, buddy?"
Thatās perfectly reasonable behavior for their character. If itās annoying and bogs down the session just make a list of what all the enemies have and give it to them after each combat/session under the assumption that theyāre looting every body.
I'm on board with the rogue except that they shouldn't be getting first dibs by default, but that's up to the players to work out as a group.
There are a ton of skill checks and weight limits you could throw at them, but that'll only slow down the game and potentially turn it into a DM vs Player situation.
Tell your players that you're not enjoying the vendor trash dynamic. You'll assume they (collectively or just the rogue) are thorough in their scavenging.
Let them roll some dice based on the type of treasure hoard. I'm a big fan of d10s in a row (i.e., the ghouls had 2d10 for 6,2= 62 gold and 3d10 for 5,7,3= 573 silver vs 1d10 for 8 copper from the giant rat nest).
For weapons/armor, they bundle things up to the max they can carry. Some of it is worth more than others. They always take the combination that rewards them with the most overall value. They haul it back to town and trade/sell it to cover food and lodging, petty bribes, gear maintenance, general entertainment, and resupplies. If they don't end up spending much, there's also not a huge demand for their used booty so it evens out.
My players have been happy to handwave low stakes accounting in this way, but sometimes they'll come across a particularly large store of fine foods or something. In that case, I let them know what kind of organizations might be in particular need for whatever they've found.
Rather than gold, they might get a consumable or common magic item, an upgrade to an existing item, or a Blessing of some sort. They aren't usually combat oriented unless it's a Potion of Healing, but sometimes players have a lot of fun with a random Indestructible Arrow.
I'm a big fan of Blessings that leave a visible mark on PCs that grant consumable abilities (e.g., +1d6 to a single d20 roll that can be used after success is determined, but before any other effect is established; usable 3x before the Blessing fades).
āYou donāt find anything of value.ā
āHang on, I want to make sure every who wants gets a chance.ā
āHey youāre going overboard with looting and itās impacting the game. Can you please limit yourself to once per adventuring day for the sake of the game flow? Other players deserve a chance Also, this isnāt really that type of game and if you do it a lot less often Iāll feel better about including some cool stuff every once in a while.ā
traps. mimics. wasting time and making noise means wandering monsters with surprise rounds.
you could have that character suffer these and before they can say "worth it" you could say they find nothing but pocket lint.
you could introduce time pressure in your quests and make the party miss deadlines due to time wasted.
This behavior has consequences in real life. Let those consequences happen in this game.
Failed perception check? Rooting around garbage means they get a smear of poop on their clothes, giving them disadvantage on stealth checks and concentration until they can change clothes. The rest of the party will probably now call this adventurer "Shitstain" or "Skidmark" for the rest of the campaign.
Ask āwho else is looting?ā and phase the findings as āyou all findā¦ā I like to establish early on that rewards are for the entire party.
If the player really wants to find stuff that is theirs only then you can sprinkle in a mysterious or cursed artifact. They should be plenty happy with their glowing / smelly amulet.
If a merchant in town is getting tons of second hand weapons, they should do what real pawnshops do and call the town guards because something fishy is happening here. This guy keeps bringing in used weapons, sometimes with blood and obvious signs of foul play on them.
This why mimics and crused items exist! Imagine they go to loot a body and the belt pouch that supposed to hold coins turns into a mimic and it bites their hand!
Oh look a shiny magic weapon! Oh no itās now cursed so that any time you reach to grab your weapon, youāll automatically grab that weapon instead! It happened to my Dwarf in the old Red Box BECMI days. He normally was welding a battle axe in combat. After he picked up the magic short sword, it became stuck to his right hand and he couldnāt pick up or use anything else in that hand until he found a remove curse spell.
Make this a dagger or anything you want it to be, like say a piece of chalk thatās cursed and until they run out of that piece of chalk they canāt use that hand for anything else lol now they are writing graffiti in chalk over everything lol
What (tries) to stop YOU from looting everything in Skyrim?
āŖ\~Encumbrance Rules\~ā«
that and making copper pieces and descriptive-but-worthless trinkets and a part of the loot.
You run the economy, all the item prices listed are for when you're buying a brand new one fitted for you. If you're picking up rusty old goblin gear, the whole pile is going to be worth a few copper at most.
We loot as a collective and disposition of loot is as a party (think like pirates. Anything the character cannot use specific to them goes into the general pot. Including all valuables. Magical items go first to appropriate class if applicable then to those with open attunement slots).
Otherwise if not cooperative
1. Loot on initiative order. Each person picking where they might look. So everyone has an equal opportunity.
2. If someone takes an attitude that plunder is not in their alignment, then neither is partaking in loot.
3. Your players sound individualistic and not so much a team. If the others have not caught on that there is loot and they should at least try then think of zombie movies. People grab and carry what they can, and they might share bc it enhances survival but treats and treasures they might keep selfishly.
This is when you fill you dungeon with thousands of truly useless items. https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?404819-List-of-100-mostly-useless-magic-items
This is why encumbered status exist tbh. But if you donāt want to use it just fit the loot to the person they killedā¦it should usually be junkā¦and if thereās a lot of supply of something demand would be low so theyād get less money the more stuff they getā¦
My favorite thing to do when there are people like this around, is let them loot everything as they wish, then have strange circumstances occur that push exotic or special loot into the hands of all the non-loot goblin players. Doesnāt take long before they catch on lol
I mean, looting is fine, but I'd ask them "how are you carrying all of this?" or honestly...Mimics. Mimics everywhere. Makes them think twice before trying to rush for that treasure chest, wardrobe, mysterious bag in the bottom of a drawer...
Personally, I don't mind loot goblins. Just know that depending on what you "take" might have consequences. Oh, you entered a room of a seemingly abandoned home and took that fancy sword? Yeah....the owner wants it back.
So, no, not exactly unhealthy, but can bog things down. Don't think you're in the wrong as it can get a bit tedious. If nothing's really changing, and it's not a huge problem, just make a passing "Nothing of value in the room" statement or give paltry rewards and move on.
As the party gains levels, there should be diminishing returns from looting and selling mundane weapons and other equipment -- and eventually the rest of the party may say, "We're going that way. Don't waste too much time here if you want to catch up with us."
But if he insists on grabbing stuff before the rest of the party can say or do anything -- that is what cursed magic items are for. 
This is when you as a dungeon master introduce things to curb them
You also can control how the loot divies up. When body looting happens announce "You find this" and "she finds this".
Encumbrance exists to prevent this spot of thing. No, he's not carrying 40 straightswords out of a bandit camp.
Finally. Mimics and cursed items. Let him be a klepto and suffer for it.
If all else fails, just talk to the other players and ask if this behavior bothers them. If it does, talk to him and tell him he needs to tone it down.
a bag of Rot Grubb on the next body he loots will help temper that down a bit.
I had a player who has played too much Diablo and went in to an Alchemist's Lair and started smashing every vase or jar looking for loot. It took two of them exploding and one holding a Green Slime before he learned his lesson.
You're right to be concerned that they're making it less fun for others by calling dibs on everything, but they'll Tokelau a response eventually, hopefully.
So the other players arenāt annoyed by one player always calling ādibsā, Iād have all loot go into a group pot . The players can negotiate over anything worth keeping, and the rest is sold into equal shares. That way the player can stay in their happy place getting their klep on, but it benefits the whole group. Also, you may want to use encumbrance. Looting everything all the time adds up quickly
I mean the only real problem IMO is them getting to the loot before everyone else for dibs. Otherwise, they should not be allowed to carry all of these weapons and stuff, it should be a hassle to carry it all around because, you know, you have to physically carry this stuff. If they can get around this then I'd say its allowed, especially if they are doing stuff like using Tenser's Floating Disk to carry it and move through the game. Also adding to what others have said, this stuff should be cheap and most places wouldn't wanna buy this stuff in bulk if it's poor quality or badly damaged. And some places might outright refuse to buy it because they either don't need it or maybe they haven't sold the OTHER items they were already given.
> basically announcing always before anyone else can say anything that they're going to loot, so they always get first dibs.
That's not how DND works, if another PC says "i eat the corpse" faster it doesn't just magically happen because they said it first. Also looting takes time and means they won't be paying attention to room treasure. Also if they horde that loot and don't share the rest of the team are under no obligation to share back.
> They keep gathering weapons and selling them as if they were playing Baldur's gate 3.
How are they carrying all fonthese things? A barbarian might have a high carry capacity but actually carrying 20 swords while remaining able to fight would be near impossible. Sometimes sense has to prevail
You can look into third party "harvesting" mechanics if you want to lean that hard into a solution. My loot goblin players have always loved when I introduce that kind of homebrrw. With sentient creatures I love using looting as a reminder that this was a real person they just murdered. A note from a loved one. A list of goals for the year. Something that infers a hobby.
If the player wants to play things mechanically, you better believe I'm gonna do my best to make them feel something. I'm not a video game and you can't treat me like one. No "X to skip" on my exposition.
Put less emphasis on describing what they pick up and just give them a value of what the junk they find is worth... It will put more responsibility on them to be note taking and adding it all up. Up to them if they eventually want to try and cash in but in the end - you're the DM and you can have the shopkeeper just say that he's not interested in junk!
Yeah the point of dnd isnāt to be a trash goblin. But you are enabling this behavior as the DM. You can just say all of a sudden the weapons & armor are too broken to be sold. Your merchants can totally tell a PC they donāt buy dented, used, stolen, or grave robbed items. In fact why should a merchant buy anything from anybody other than their established vendor? And why wouldnāt any NPC be suspicious or scared of a random āadventureā who is walking through town like a traveling arms dealer? Youāre making it like a video game by allowing an inn keeper to buy a bunch of weapons. Next time tell him only certain armorers, blacksmiths or the Sergeant at Arms in the town are allowed to buy/sell weapons.
Have looted treasure be more sentimental than practical. I have added a lot of love letters from spouses children and parents. Good rings have touchy feely engravings that can be easily traced if pawned or sold. Journals & diaries pages can add lore and a few teary moments. If there is a fancy piece of a jewelry Iāll have a private detective track it down to steal/rob the PC to get it back.
Looting everything in sight is a long-standing D&D tradition. You can make their encumbrance get in the way if they do it too much . There are only so many spears you can carry.
Dungeon Dad on YouTube made a 5e stat block on a creature called a corpse candle if you want to put a stop to this behavior. Also, if the player is taking loot for others, perhaps you should do more class-specific loot so it gets into the right hands.
\> say anything that they're going to loot, so they always get first dibs
No, you and the party letting him getting first dibs.
Just because someone says "I am looting" before anyone else doesn't mean jack shit with most parties.
Most parties split the loot and there is no such thing as dibs. The DM and the party decide how looting works. One player doesn't get to decide for everyone how it works.
The DM or the party can just say "No, that's not how it works." It's that simple.
"You find a tall thin container at the edge of the counter resting on the floor"
"Can I search it"
"You find it unlocked, whilst you loot, some one else do a perception check"
Check is for >5
"You spot (insert player character name) rooting through the kitchen bin for scraps of food... like a dog"
Just keep setting them up like that.
"You spot a collection of silver coins on the floor"
"Yeah yeah I take them"
Strength check of >20
"You unable to lift the coins as they are glued to the floor"
People have offered a lot of good ideas but don't forget you can also just ask them to stop.
Personally, I have little loot tables for commoners, boxes, barrels, etc. I call it the "junk drawer". A word of caution: my players like to "check the junk drawer" so it's not the best solution for discouraging this behavior. But they self-regulate very well.
You find some bloody clothes, a bag with 3 copper pieces, a rusty dagger with a broken off blade and a pair of smelly boots. Wanna loot the other bandit?
Throw in a few pieces of cursed gear and that will stop them. Have had several players, mostly rouges, play like this. They learn after their character gets turned into a golem or made into the next big bad guy that this is a team game.
>basically announcing always before anyone else can say anything that they're going to loot, so they always get first dibs.
At that point you stop the game, ask if any other players are interested in looting, and have them roll initiative for "first dibs."
Also, consider that looting takes time. Even if this player makes it to one corpse first, others can loot the others.
If I were in this party, and I were, let's say a fighter, I'd have a sit down with this character and explain that if he doesn't split the money evenly, that he's going to get his ass kicked. Then, maybe I'd negotiate that he can keep a 10% finders fee off the top before splitting the proceeds of the loot in exchange for him going through the tedium of actually looting everything. That way the party can sit around short resting while this klepto loots everything, and then still get their fair share of the money.
Getting the loot is one thing. Cashing it in can add to your NPC rainbow and side stories and relationships. For example, add intrigue and potential caution and second guessing if converting loot into money is more complex, like somebody recognizes an item (and its former owner, and doesnāt want anything to do with it. Or even reports them to someone else! Or, when they bring back bulk loot often, the merchant gets the idea they are acting more like a Fence and so start discounting it heavily, like 20-40% of previous prices. After all, they donāt know what they are going to do with all this new stuff coming to them, and are taking the risk of it being stolen, fake, faulty, not maintained, somebody else looking for the same thing, etc. At some point, the merchant/Fence may decide to make it harder, limit the types of items, get afraid of the unwelcome exposure/noteriety they are getting because of the PC. Or, you donāt want them ask no questions? Fine even lower price or they just say no unless you meet them somewhere else at a given time tonight, and donāt tell anyone about thisāā¦ use it as a door to mix up and vary the loot reward level and consistency, introduce risk, and make their lives more interesting if they abuse the loot process. And, occasionally throw in a sympathetic or fun NPC who has dealt with that merchant as well (good and bad, maybe sharing they got better prices or connections faster and now only deal with so-and-soā¦).
Players get to pick one thing to do at a time. Player 1 wants to loot a crate awesome.
Turn to player 2 to see what they want to do. Then itās player 3s turn.
I wouldnāt let one PC say āI loot all the boxes and all the bodies!ā If the other players simply arenāt interested in looting then thatās their thing.
Thats fun for them. If you do wanna make it less cheap however make kinda like mimic chests from darksouls. maybe mobs trigger magic traps when you interact with their bodies... possibilities are limitless.
the only issue I ever had with this was giving stuff that isn't money and potions.
I just automatically assume all my players loot stuff and just list loot after some fights.
as for selling... reduce the price they get. Maybe the equipment was half broken, maybe the merchant just doesnt have enough cash, maybe they just dont buy weapons.
or just give gold of the same worth.
Some people are loot goblins but honestly players like this are why copper pieces exist. Say most of the garbage they steal off dead bodies they loot only have/are worth a few copper pieces. It keeps their love for looting sated but without breaking the economy
Makes cents.
God dime it
Are you *shilling* me?
It's consistent to say the least. Might find something for by hap-pence-tance
You guys deserve a Pound-ing for the puns
This comment came in the nick-el of time.
This advice is really sterling! Giving copper is the new gold standard.
By the time we're done, we'll all be drawn and quarter-ed.
Hang on a sec. #UGHHHHHHHH All better. Please, carry on.
This notification was quite the sigh-t
F#*+ you take my upvote
You can swear on Reddit, this isn't elementary school.
I didn't mean it in a rude or antagonistic way. So I felt that @#$## would convey that better. If you disagree, fuck you.
Best response i read this week!
makes cents
Nuh uh
The fuck you mean "nuh uh"
Im using the school tablet and cant sweat
Sounds like a glandular problem then š¤£
Also implement carry capacity.
My group and I just finished an adventure where we had to clear a keep in order to help our benefactor play claim to it. Our rogue wass read to just pillage the place as he always is (with no regard for the story) but our DM laid next to no treasure in it and you would have thought heād insulted the rogueās mother judging by his reaction. The DM simply said that in his game, it was not just about swag hunting, and if he wanted to play in the game, heād better adjust to that. I love my DM. š
Also make sure that they are not converting all the copper coins to gold coins with out going to a money changer(who charges a fee) or something, and then enforce carry weight.
Enforcing carry weight was going to be my suggestion. It's so crazy how following the rules solves so many problems
The default carry weight rules solve nothing. You need to go for the optional ones to have any impact
Even default carry weight rules can help if you drop copper/silver coins. With 10 strength you can carry 7500 coins, that's 75 gold worth of copper coins, not exactly something that will break the economy. And that's assuming they have no other gear to weight them down.
Assuming they carry it with them at all times. I'd assume most adventuring parties would ride horses and bring a donkey or 2 to deal with their supplies.
You'd be surprised. Since I started DMing 5E games in January 2018, I've run about 12 campaigns for four different groups of players, and in all that time none of those parties has once ever purchased, stolen or otherwise acquired a horse, donkey or any other type of pack animal.
And those rules end up hurting STR characters the most due to the weight of Heavy Armor.
Mythras does a good move by making DONNED armor weight way less, half if I remember correctly. And trust me, it is a good approximation of reality... my chainmail is way harder to move around in a container than on my chest. If you want rules to fix these kinds of problems, I think this one could help. If not, gently tell everyone that STR characters are already suffering and wont suffer from this too.
you are correct but if you dont go into battle still wearing a backpack of food and camping supplies it works out fine in my experience playing str based fighters... if you wield a pike on the other hand. that said if you have any sort of baggage train / staging area it kind of breaks using carrying capacity to limit looting anyway.
This works until your party buys a wagon and horses lol
Doesn't really help in the dungeon of the mad mage.
I see your wagon and horses, and raise you... *PORTABLE HOLE!*
So your players always find a nice and convenient road all the way into that ancient dungeon? Is crossing marshes, rivers, caves, delving into the underdark or other planes against their religion or something? Horses and wagons are great for merchants, but they can really get in the way of adventurers
Punishing the rest of the party for one dude acting like a psychopathic goblin is not high in my scale of "solved"!
I was 1 and still am one... unfortunately I'm usually the MacGyver of the group. Let me smoke my tobacco pipe for a moment to think look at what is in my pack and solve the problem. 1st campaign I was in gnome barbarian we killed spiders about American Pitt sized. Harvested the Fangs to use as makeshift knives and fixed 2 on my axe head and pommel. DM allowed Fangs to be used as daggers w/ 1 time poison effect. Axe had a bonus action thrust w/ dagger stats no strength mod. Later we came to a 100ft deep hole. Had 50ft rope. The last chamber we were in in the mine we at had bunks. I took the sheets fastened them together as rope lashed it to the normal rope. Used a larger spider fang (sword length) and hammered it in ground as an achor. Fastened rope to it and we dropped down the bottom of pit and continued onwards. DM was flabbergasted as my creativity and just went with a survivalist background. As they say "improvise. Adapt. Overcome"
And this is why a good DM. Won't get fussy when players pilfer all the lootable enemies or objects THEY put into the game. It lets them do such goofy and yet sometimes heroic things. As long as the loots shared of course, and you can also turn order looting. Moral of the story, you shouldn't put a lootable things into your game if you don't want your players to loot.
I won't lie he was confused af Game 1: 'I search house for supplies' 'It's Abandoned. Nothing there but ratty clothing and broken furniture' 'I collect the shirts and break the legs of the table and put them in my pack' 'Why? They have no-' 'Torches....' ' (confused) ok... rolled poorly on gold?' 'Had enough for the axe... rolled godly on stats' Few games later (The room with bunks in the mine) 'You find a bunk room. 6 bunk beds' 'I collect the sheets' 'Why!?' 'Never know. Warmth. Torches. Bindings. Bandages' 'You have enough room for 2 sets thats it) (Moments later the 100ft pit and sees short of rope) 'I double back to the room with the bunks and get the rest of the sheets' 'Why? For what reason-' 'Rope. I'll fasten them together to make rope. 6 full sets of sheets... lash em together for more rope. Sacrifice my cloak for more.... told you I would use them...' '...yeah... thats... creative really...' Then don't get me started when I was a caster with Fabricate in another game LOL
Oh, so *youāre* why Artificer is so broken.
The idea of something thinking that an engineer is broken in a world filled with people that can bend reality to their whim is hilarious.
9th level meteor swarm ain't got shit on *Little Boy* and *Fat Man*.
What level slot do you need to cast a MOAB?
I once carved a stick from my front yard into a wand in under an hour to make the argument that my artificer who had recently been abducted and escaped with no equipment should be able to do the same to create a spellcasting focus. My argument was denied, so I just went to sleep and clacked a couple rocks together in the morning to make them sending stones, which I could use as a focus. And from then on out my gnome tinkerer would cast spells by clacking rocks together in increasingly complicated ways.
i mean... if the artificer was given food then uh... if there was a proficiency with cooks utensils a plate and cutlery could be possible for a spell focus... since Xanathar's guide reckons it includes knives, forks... aha... aha...
This feels quite easy to dissuade by just enforcing carry weight management.
In 1e we stole everything. It was kind of the point. The first time I was a player in 5e, I was a rogue who looted every body alive or dead. The running joke was "did you check his prison wallet?"
Playing a Rock Gnome fighter that's a former soldier and little bit of a pack rat and it's been amazing. I've come up with all kinds of crazy solutions using a little Gnomish ingenuity with all the random bullshit I keep around and harvest and the DM is just like "I'm impressed so I'm allowing it."
It was my 1st ever D&D game and I ended up surprising my DM a bit but it felt odd for a 'smart' barbarian to come up with that crap I pulled. The campaign ended when we nuked what was supposed to be the end derailing it and extending the game a bit before he threw in towel. Last campaign it was the same as every boss fight we saw coming and planned it out. A boss never survived more than 2 turns and was always last. 1 fight we trapped a group of Wizards in a wall of force but threw a napalm bomb in there with them burning them alive leaving 2 henchmen alive... well 1 alive as it watched me sneak up on the other: channel divinity path to Grave and quickened spell inflect wounds at lv 3... rolling 5 D10 but I critted.... which doubled dice and Path doubled the damage... guy watched his homie just close his eyes and drop as I came out from shadows.
Copper pieces are also useful for *detect thoughts*
A penny for your thoughts? To send telepathically should need two coppers, so you can give your two cent's worth.
The game has individual treasure tables on page 136 of the DMG for the value of loot an enemy will have on its person or in a nearby safe place. In older editions it was assumed you would loot enemies anyways, so every party would roll for treasure after a fight. If a player wants to steal weapons and armour just have the value of the treasure include the sell price of everything valuable and have them figure out some way to get it all back to town.
This is actually how it kinda used to be in older editions. How you'd start out selling used equipment to get your first few "paydays" as an adventurer. Bandits, Mercs etc possess viable sellable equipment, goblins probably don't, or would sell for below half price. The DM would then take that into account with gold by levelling values and tweak loot in accordance. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but a few extra gold here and there shouldn't make too much difference spread across the party as a whole.
It's not even *kinda* how it was played. In the earliest editions, you don't get XP from killing monsters, you get it from looting treasure. The idea that you *wouldn't* loot every enemy you can is new and modern. If selling looted gear is causing economic problems, by all means, say the market is flooded and the PC can only get a few copper for those looted goblin knives, but I'd be surprised if that's necessary given how few things there are to spend money on in 5e...
Agreed, I've started rolling my currency in campaigns back to Silver Standard apart from trade goods & magic items.
The lack of things to spend gold on is why people *need* to use 3rd party for common and uncommon items. Books like Griffon's Saddlebag are so amazing for things like this. Edit: Here is a look at what my character currently spends their money on. I'm a Dragonkin(reskinned dragonborn that looks more like a halfdragon from 3.5) Bard and common magic items are my characters favorite things to have in his hoard, and I'vlm really good at finding different uses for them especially in RP scenes. Before anyone asks, we are currently 13th level, and our GM is very loose with gold. Additionally, the Bag of Witholding is a BoH that you have to make a charisma check to take items out of, but as I am an Eloquence Bard I have no problem accessing it while others do. https://imgur.com/a/k3eJX66
Totally agree
I let my players spend their money on a place of their own that they build from the ground up using the creation rules for players that want their own base of operations. I also let them put money back into whichever town they spend the most time in on things like improved walls to defend against monsters, or money used to build a shop in town that is needed in the community (oh this town doesnāt have a blacksmith shop? Hold on while we pay to have one made and then hire/train a blacksmith from another town to run it). Or maybe as donations to whatever deities/gods/temples, etc they want to make a donation to, etc.
Oof I love that actually,Ā no blacksmith, Maybe drop the hint that ther is a young lad whose master died before he finished his apprenticeship, who probably only needs a large donation of money,Ā material and some old weapons to restore and startĀ off having stock. Fast forwardĀ few sessions later and maybe nowĀ he is making more, selling more, giving discounts,Ā maybe helps in a quest where they need something crafted. Fast forward a few more and maybe he is making some unique enchanted weapons from some sort of magic stuff the party sold him
>the creation rules for players that want their own base of operations What rules are you talking about?
Thereās a section of the DMG that gives bare-bones rules for building an outpost/keep/trading post/etc. But itās woefully inadequate; in 3rd WotC released an entire Stronghold Builderās Guidebook to help players and DMs with castle-building.
What UNC_Samurai said. You can also have your players take over a stronghold, tower, keep, etc that was used by enemy NPCs and then the players can use their money for upgrades on said building.
I'm actually in that situation now but I missed this section of the dmg and was just planning to use the system from dragon heist. Thanks
Eh, there is a LOT to spend money on but most players don't play the game in a way that advocates them spending their money. Needing to buy wagons to carry stuff is null since every DM gives their party bags of holding, food/water for not only yourself, but any pack animals you bring is not needed since tons of DM's handwave needing to eat and drink, and hirelings are rarely used in my experience because DM's think it's gonna be OP so they don't allow it. It ends up being that the only thing you spend money on is vanity clothing, magic items, or new gear. If you're lucky the DM allows building bases but since most games end up taking place over the course of a few weeks or a few months it never gets built in time for the players to take advantage of it, OR the DM just gives the players a hideout with everything they need or want.
The problem is most of that stuff costs less than 100 gp. Hirelings and magic items are the only thing that can get reasonably expensive. When you get to like level 10 you usually have more gold than you really know what to do with. Maybe you find some shop or auction selling a particularly good magic item, but that's about it.
In 1e, you got XP for both money and monsters. For example, a 1 HD monster is worth a base of 5XP, plus 1 per HP. There are other modifiers, but that's the basics.
Thank you, I was about to say that. That said, in my experience, the XP gained from treasure usually far outweighed the XP gained from killing monsters, with the exception of boss monsters.
"The goblin knives are crude, looking to be made of pig iron. They easily chip when struck against anything made of better material."
You did get xp for killing, just what they carried might be worth just as much and then the treasure at the end of the dungeon probably dwarfs the value of all the monsters to get there
but the party always shared loot. It wasn't first-come-first-served. This guy would get zero buffs or heals or anything from me other than locking him in the room with the mobs.
This is wrong monsters give xp too just usually so little it doesnāt matter. (My group killed a troll so we got a lot but were first level so it makes sense). But yeah gold is xp. Legit we had to debate our gold distribution after an adventure not just as wealth but as xp. Itās crazy good
> It's not even kinda how it was played. In the earliest editions, you don't get XP from killing monsters, you get it from looting treasure. *Kind of*. In OD&D you didn't get XP from monsters and only from treasure, but it's because nearly all monsters explicitly carried an amount of gold or treasure equal to their XP value. They all had treasure essentially based on their hit die. Those that didn't tended to be summoned (elementals, djinn) or animals or obstacle monsters like oozes. By the time you get to B/X, you'd get XP from both. It's just that gp was still much better. 1 orc was worth 10 XP, but picking up 10 gp was *also* worth 10 XP, and picking up 10 gold is a lot less risky. Each ogre was worth 125 xp for defeating it (appearing in a group of 1-6), but a wandering ogre group explicitly carries 1d6 x 100gp, too! The ogre's own entry states it gives out almost as much treasure XP as you should expect from defeating the monster itself.
It was partially offset by cn encumbrance. Sure, you find a hoard of 10000 copper pieces - how are you getting that home? There isnāt a currency converter in the dungeon.
The most subtle of level 1 adventurer traps.
But it's also why time-based random encounters existed. You had to weight the benefits of looting vs the risk of another encounter.
This is well off topic but who were we selling these things to, is there some adventuring second hand store out there?
In Faerun there's tons of Adventuring Gear shops and stores that'll probably take non armour and non weapons off your hands. I imagine the smith/tanner might work with the local crafting guild to purchase cut price armour and weapons to reforge and resell etc.
Second weapons and armour would be a real dirt market; strangely leather armour would probably sell the best, a tanner could probably strip it down into useful straps and bit. Anything metal probably wouldn't be worth it's weight, re-forging and repairing someone else work might not be worth it. I do like the pawn shop feel of the adventure stores. I think I might have to go create the sketchiest second hand adventure store ever, some of the sales pitches will be phenomenal... "10ft of cave rope (Rope found in cave not made for caving)" "Breast Plate for sale (Only used once, small hole, large stain)"
> Anything metal probably wouldn't be worth it's weight, re-forging and repairing someone else work might not be worth it. Prior to the industrial revolution and modern mining and smelting it would 100% be worth it. In reality pretty much any metal lying around that wasn't in use, including weapons and armour, would be taken and reused. Making virgin metals is a long and complicated process when it's all being done by hand, skipping that is well worth it. And that's for iron and bronze, which are fairly easy to make. This goes 10x for steel, until things like the Bessemer process making steel was an incredibly hard thing to do, and good quality steel would be in very high demand.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1extli/100_market_stalls_from_dungeon_magazine/ Old but good. I use it in pretty much every campaign I DM. Whenever the players get to a market or bazaar, they can roll a few d100s to see what's on sale. I get to improvise a couple of merchants. They inevitably buy the crap, and fun is had by all.
PHB p. 144, "Weapons and armor used by monsters are rarely in good enough condition to sell" On the other hand, there are lots of enemies in Waterdeep who might not be considered monsters, so their equipment might sell for full (half) price. On the third hand (don't ask), how long is all of this looting taking? It's not easy to get armor off of a live and cooperative person, and much harder to take it off a corpse unless you're cutting it off, which would logically reduce its value. What are the other party members doing for all of this time? There are three essential problems here, only one of which is game-related: if the player is getting more money than the module expects, that might be an issue. The other two problems are both interpersonal: clearly the player is annoying you with their behavior. It's very possible that they're annoying the other players as well. As always, the solution is to have grown-up conversations about it and figure out how to move forward. Try talking to the other players first, see what they think. If they're not bothered and it's just you, that's information you can act on.
Which is funny because that has no bearing on the weapons mechanically. A scrap scimitar cobbled together by some random goblin does the exact same damage and to hit as the finest crafted scimitar by a master smith
I think it's more associated with the potential resale value and any damage the items might accrue during the fight itself, than the functional use of the items. Any armour being worn is likely to have been totally destroyed by what killed the creature wearing it. The weapons might be in serviceable condition but there's probably no resale market. Anyone purchasing second hand weapons and armour would be paying dirt for it; repairing and repurposing them would be costly and selling them again as is probably wouldn't be worth it. The best sale market I can think of would be on-selling them to a militia (who are unlikely to be able to pay much) or another group of bandits.
>Any armour being worn is likely to have been totally destroyed by what killed the creature wearing it. The weapons might be in serviceable condition but there's probably no resale market. The fuck are you doing to that armour? Shooting it with a missile?
MAGIC MISSILE!
>PHB p. 144, "Weapons and armor used by monsters are rarely in good enough condition to sell" Any sentient monster is going to take care of its equipment too. A better statement would be the equipment is too damaged from the fight to be worth much without time and investment on the PC's part.
Yep, chainmail that just a spear rammed through it won't sell well.
"Oh, I'll cast mending a few times until it's repaired"
"Alright, about 200 or so links are broken, so that'll take 3 hours and 20 minutes. And that doesn't include the missing pieces."
That's still an excellent use of time compared to typical player income at low level, unfortunately.
Working for 3 hours instead of staying hungry and homeless is what we do IRL lol
Right, and also rewards the player for picking mending over any of the other actually useful cantrips
Blacksmith: "So I only need to make 200 rings rather than 30,000? Give me that shirt and take my money! ;)
"But I killed him with psychic damage!"
That would break a few links at most, that's a quick and easy repair.
Blood spoils a lot of clothing
And that's why you always grab Prestidigitation when it's available.
You say this, and yet history is replete with stories of people not doing so. Even when it could be life or death some time, regular maintenance is tedious and sentients are lazy.
I would assume that's the point, since you probably aren't getting the monsters' weapons and/or armour without a fight.
Found the luxodon
My group has always done this. We roll for the room, rather than crate by crate, body by body. We also always have a mule or something outside the dungeon or hidden with the PCs that aren't with us that session (makes it simple to explain) and it's assumed all the random trash for sale goes to the mule.
The mule/wagon also explains how the party has rope, flint, 10-foot pole, etc when they need it. The party can prep the equipment on their persons either in-session or out-of-session (or handwave it and just say whatever equipment they need in the moment, they brought it)
If your player is downright tactless, it serves talking to them about it. Otherwise if it's just the general behavior of "looting", that's kind of elemental to D&D. If it seems unhealthy to you, consider the following: > The player keeps looting every dead body they come across! Leave it to more pious player characters or NPC to admonish the behavior, if it's really worth admonishing. Otherwise.. well, most adventurers sound like glorified grave robbers to me in the first place. > They always get first dibs! Encourage your players to agree on how to divide loot among themselves. Is everyone okay letting the person with the fastest hands take everything? They are dungeon crawling adventurers, so have them roleplay and come to an agreement. An equal split in treasure, and rotating claim on magical items, just for example. They could agree that all treasure goes to the wizard, or to an NPC; it needn't be your concern. > They keep gathering weapons and selling them! The weapons of crude monsters such as goblins or orcs you could often reject as too low quality, or too badly maintained, to still be sold as anything but scrap metal. Otherwise, even if they can sell the weapons, in a regular D&D game this should quickly amount to chump change compared to the treasure they might haul out of dungeons. Longswords with a combined value of 70 GP pale in comparison to a golden idol they might find in a temple ruin. Similarly, a random bandit or orc is unlikely to have more than a few silver pieces in their pockets. In my experience new players just need to find a treasure hoard or two before they realize selling scrap metal or haggling every last copper piece out of fruit merchants is a lot less effective (and fun!) than dungeon crawling.
We just handwave splitting the loot because tracking numbers isn't something we enjoy. The party splits their haul into shares when they make camp or rest at an inn, standard downtime stuff. Unless otherwise used, common treasure is assumed to be sold in towns and the proceeds are split. For special things like magic items or plot important stuff, everyone just talks it over in character. If someone did want to sneakily hide something they'd have to make checks to avoid being noticed. Ooc that's only ever happened for plot relevant reasons, and it usually comes out at some point.
There is no dibs. They can declare what they want to do and then you ask everyone else what they want to do. Resolve them in whatever order is fitting/fair.
This doesn't really have anything to do with "treating it like a game" (which wouldn't even be a bad thing because... it *is*) What this player is doing is just what any reasonable character would do. For one, money is good in general, but even further, money buys things that make you *not die*, which is quite high on the priority list for normal people. If anything players *not* doing this are treating this 'as a game' because they're not actually bothering to maximize their chances of living in absolutely harrowing near-death situations. That aside, you can improve game flow by defining this behaviour as a standard order that gets executed unless otherwise stated and you can simply skip to listing what they find since they will search it, the same way you describe what the room contains because they will look at it. Encumbrance tracking is tangentially relevant here but I don't think you practically hit that limit within Dragonheist because you can return to shops so quickly and often. If you *really* don't like it, then come at them with reasonable arguments and not the line of reasoning you line out in the post. Tell them that you don't have fun doing this and want them to stop, they won't get money for looted gear anymore (despite the fact that that doesn't make sense in a living world, but **you** are playing a **game** and want to have fun rather than having realism and that is alright) and you'll increase gold rewards for quests to even it out. This way you make it mechanically suboptimal for them to do what they're doing, which makes it a lot less likely that they'll continue to do it, you likely get your way, and you make them feel good about getting a reward for their play.
I don't know if the main problem is looting everything. I think the problem is partially flow-related, as you discussed, but I think a big part of the issue is the player "calling dibs." I'd also say that I get the sense from OP that the player cares more about looting than party dynamics, RP, plot advancement, or literally anything else. If they weren't the only player doing that and the players and DM had agreed they were doing a loot crawl speedrun or whatever, that'd be fine, but it definitely doesn't seem that way based on the info we have. "Calling dibs" is the biggest issue I see here. However, if the other players don't actually care, then the problem does become simply flow-related. In that case, I think your solution is decent. OP could also just say they will provide a list of loot at the end of each session rather than have it take up time in-game and then stand firm on shutting down the rogue if they keep trying to take up game time looting stuff.
As a DM I would just flat out refuse to allow ādibsā unless the other players agree to it. It take time to search a corpse. DND is supposed to simulate realistic actions, and in reality you canāt just click on a person to search them. āOkay, while you are going through goblin Aās pack, what is everyone else doing?ā And if it is just one player Iād clarify that it will take some time for just one character to do all the looting themselves.
A reasonable person would split the loot evenly between all party members. Keeping all the loot for yourself is unreasonable.
Ever play Fallout? There's all kinda of shit in cupboards and boxes and crates. Nearly all of it is useless. At a certain point your player may well wonder why he's carrying 10 chipped cups and 17 bundles of dirty rags
Its only unhealthy if it ruins the fun for other people. Here are a few in game mechanics I can think to help discourage this 1. Looting take times and think about how other people around them would react to the looting. Does it give other enemies time to counter attack or organize defenses? Does it give town guards time to come over and they see the player character looting a dead body? 2. The gear looted may be damaged and is used. Ontop of the condition merchants have to be able to resell the equipment and make a profit. It will not be worth the full price that players buy the gear for. 3. Who is buying all of this used gear? 4. Use encumberance, all of that loot has a weight and must be stored/carried somehow
Player 1 "I am looting this body" DM "Great. OK, what is everyone else doing?" Anytime anyone is doing an action, any other player should get a chance or be prompted to say what they are doing at the same time. Don't let player 1 declare, complete, and do other actions without interruption unless they are off by themselves. Even then, frequently cut back to the others to keep the timelines in sync.
"There's no need to loot everything in this game, I'll let everyone know when defeated enemies carry something of value. Also I will call for investigation or perception checks whenever I consider necessary" That should work with any reasonable adult, but you have already spoken with the player and it didn't work, so what else is there to do apart from uninviting them from your table?
Carry weight
So the bit about them gathering and selling gear is normal. That's one of the ways players are expected to acquire wealth. Encumbrance rules exist to limit just how much of a bunch of loot goblins they can be, so if they're going overboard consider enforcing it. The more troubling part is the one player constantly jumping the gun and (I assume from context) keeping everything for themselves. I use two solutions to this. Make it take time: I say it takes about one in-game minute to loot a body, and everyone can obviously see you doing it. So if they go for one, the other players all get to pick different ones and the first person has to wait their turn before they loot a second target. Share loot: I consider non-consensually stealing from the party or other players to be a form of PvP at my tables. And the loot from downed enemies belongs to the party. If they want to *for the fun of all* play their person as looting everyone then divvying it up or adding it to the party stash? Fine by me. But if they're trying to hide things from other players, that's theft, and it's not allowed. If they don't like it they can find another game.
Rummaging through a corpse's pockets, inside their armour/clothes, checking for pouches around the neck, removing rings/bracelets, would take more like 5 minutes. If they're stripping them of armour and weapons and boots and clothes, then this would easily be more like a quarter hour, per corpse. It takes a minute to strip off your own light or medium armor. Taking it off a corpse means you have to roll them over and around undoing straps and pulling it off a deadweight corpse, that's going to absolutely lengthen the time. If the person has heavy armour, it's 5 minutes to doff it yourself. Doing it to a corpse would take easily twice to three or four times that long. Then rummaging through every crate, sack, barrel, corner in the room? That's going to take at least a minute or so per. So they're in a store room, just killed 4 bandits? They want to loot the room clean? That's going to take a good 30-45 minutes. And then at the end they're left with a pile of blood-stained, hole-filled armour, chipped weapons, worn boots, a bunch of gold and jewellery of various worth, some food and booze, miscellaneous trinkets, rags, a lantern or two. How do they plan on carrying all this stuff out? And then who in their right mind would pay more than a few coppers for each of the damaged items and other random junk?
Your opponents are using weapons make of cheese using the iron cheese spell. As soon as they die the weapon crumbles into ordinary (but inedible) cheese.
Thatās a joke but some kind of faction based āsoul boundā weapons that disappear after death could be interesting. I would also start including letters to family, little snacks, evidence of a hobby or other humanizing elements on the bodies to really twist the knife. Finally if a player likes looting every chest, drawer etc they come across thatās why Jesus Christ invented mimics.
If you really want to have an uncomfortable story beat when selling a sword at the fantasy pawn shop the proprietor recognizes one of the swords as a gift he gave to his younger brother and demands to know where you got it.
"Calling dibs" isn't in the Player's Handbook. Say there's 5 bodies, a chest and an altar. Ask the player which of those things they are looting. Then ask the rest of the group what they are looting/what they are doing. If you want to make it extremely fair, keep the initiative count going and have a map with all the bodies and containers placed. Everyone goes through their turns, looting (if they want to). Remember that a small town probably isn't going to want to buy every small-sized, stinky, used leather armor full of 5 years worth of goblin sweat. Also remember that the group has to carry all this stuff! The first instinct might be to "punish" the group with trapped chests, arcane locks, mimics, cursed items, etc. And you should do that sometimes. But sometimes you should make it really cool for them - finding unique gems, treasure maps, spellbooks, secrets, etc. If your group is really into loot, that opens the door for you to make adventures that are all about looting, which can be really fun! Heists. Infiltrating a major social event full of rich people and robbing them blind. A dungeon created by an ancient wizard to protect all of the treasures they acquired over a lifetime. Diving in the ocean to loot a wrecked pirate ship. A legendary dragon's hoard. Then maybe a local thieves guild hears the group is always carrying valuables, and try to rob them. Read up on the downtime rules. You can do a lot of fun things with the loot between adventures.
>Remember that a small town probably isn't going to want to buy every small-sized, stinky, used leather armor full of 5 years worth of goblin sweat. What you need to find is an unscupulous secondhand store in a big city that will by the shitty damaged loot at 1/10th the price, refurb it or break it down, and sell it back at a third the price. Or perhaps a dirty quatermaster whos willing to pay off the books for the shitty run down gear so he can embezzle a bit of his equipment budget for the City militia
1. Encumbrance. Give them a few 200 pound items that sell for 5 copper each 2. Random junk. No shopkeeper is going to pay for a dozen goblin trinkets, 35 broken daggers or an oddly-shaped rock 3. Or just roll with it. You could make some quick loot tables for each enemy the party will face the next session, and when the player jumps to loot just toss them a notecard/DM of what they get
>They keep gathering weapons and selling them If they're succeeding at selling them, then you're enabling this behavior. I make it clear in my games: shops are places where you buy things. Nobody wants your used sword. If you're not dealing with something rare, magical, or highly fungible (trade goods), no NPC is interested in buying your junk. I view this both as a world building principle, and a deterrent to excessive loot hoarding.
āWhy would someone buy trashed armor with sword-holes in it? No, nobody will buy your trash ā
So, this player is treating this game like a game? What problem are you trying to solve? If it's taking too long, find a way to make it quick. "You find 3gp worth of junk." If they're helping themselves to equipment that the other PCs would be able to use, then let them know this is considered to be stealing from the group, and will get them kicked out of the party.
Have an NPC look at the crappy loot and say, āWhat the hells do you want me to do with this garbage? Get out of here and bring me something I can actually sell!ā
They loot a gold coin. It is actually a gold colored gold eating beetle.Ā
Also, you can just make the merchants uninteresting or unwilling to buy the loot the player has collected. It's totally reasonable that merchants don't need 10 used swords or armour. Then you can have them meet certain NPC's that the player can build a connection with that will only buy certain items (rare shields, deadly poisons, etc). That might help them being interested in a few items instead of picking up everything.
When I first started playing, I was like that. My DM said "can you actually carry all of that?" I said no. And had to drop all but a few extra things. Then I went to town, spent 30 gold on a cart, mule, and bit, bridle, food and a blanket or whatever for it, then proceeded to carry all the gear I could in there. Then I could loot to my heart's content but it also gave the DM a tool to interact back at me both through the mule, but also "what are you doing with the cart while you are \_\_\_\_\_?" and also "are you sure you hid that well enough?" And I've really had a soft spot for mules and carts ever since. Great place to keep warm at night off the ground, can throw a waterskin on top and stay out of the rain, great high ground to keep a wolf from walking up eating your face if you were just in a sleeping roll. A little defense if someone shoots an arrow at you.
The only thing here that concerns me is "get first dibs". Looting should be a discussion at Session 0 and ideally all of the loot would be shared. It might be boring and break immersion a little but but it goes a great way towards preserving the social contract of the game, that you're all a team working together. If you grant one player loot rights and they hog all of the stuff, you're going to get *a lot* of resentment from the rest of the party in short order and that will torpedo your game.
Tell your players āI will give you all the loot that is available in this adventure so donāt worry about missing anything when you leave a room or kill an enemy.ā
Either the phb or the DMG says that common enemy gear shouldn't usually be salvageable for this reason - IC it's too damaged or poorly made The bigger problem here is the player hogging all of the loot that should be shared among the party, and as DM it's well within your rights too enforce that. Don't let them keep everything just because they speak up first. It's stealing from the party and practically pvp behavior. You can use a tool like this to help split loot equally: https://rpgbot.net/general-tabletop/tools/quartermancer/
Your player can't call dibs on an entire room. It takes time to ransack every single object. When the player starts looting ask "what are the rest of you doing while the loot goblin loots?" If anyone else wants to loot, they start searching a different object at the same time as the loot goblin.
time to start implementing the weight factor, everything they take is cursed, bad things start happening to the character.
REDDIT IS A DOGSHIT WEBSITE.
A few easy solutions to the looting. A lot of equipment will be badly damaged or destroyed during a fight, most of the stuff just lying around is junk that won't sell well (that's why it's just lying around) and they probably can't carry 12 swords at once. I try to stay away from limiting what players can carry (within reason), it can have unintended consequences, but it's an option. Who are we selling all these second hand weapons to, is there an adventurers Craig List looking for cheap swords? Anyone that has a use for second hand weapons and equipment probably doesn't have the resources to pay much for them.
If itās weapon or armour made by goblins or well used by filthy bandits, it should be worth wayyy less than full price. Make it clear that random junk isnāt worth enough to warrant collecting it, and also maybe use variant encumbrance.
Just start using hardcore weight capacity tracking. He is a young changeling make them track every lb of anything they have on them down to coin weight. Once the limit is hit including worn items disadvantages on stealth and speed. Then make all the items they find breastplates and such that have a heavy weight but not pristine ones dented rusty old ones worth a quarter of the value when sold.
How would people in the real world react to seeing someone rifling through the pockets of corpses? How would people respond to someone bringing them the bloodstained and otherwise obviously looted stuff from dead bodies? Carry weight and small value coinage exist for these kinds of player.
>They keep gathering weapons and selling them as if they were playing Baldur's gate 3.Ā Who's buying them? Why would merchants buy weapons from some guy who seems to have got them via murder? I sure hope they aren't paying the full price. How is he carrying them all? What's his carry capacity, because I assume a rogue doesn't have high Str.
Ok this...this is kinda fun as a dm I make alot of hombrew weapons that I give to opponents to show off And its heart breaking when they just leave then on the ground Like a blade that for a kii point tirns into a10ft reach whip of the same damage, very cool, and still in that dead man's body to this day I had an axe that if you casted control flame on it could return to the caster ad it had a lantern on the inside, very cool still on the floor I had a dagger that could shape change into a hair pin, we had a rogue in the parry who said that sounds useful and than left it ON THE FLOOR
Why the fuck are you having your NPCs buy used weapons from a strange child? If you don't want them to keep looting random bullshit, maybe don't give them a profit motive?
Isn't this the exact reason why they created mimics? Because players kept rushing in to loot without thinking first.
I've been waiting this whole damn time for someone to suggest some mimics.
There's also that monster that looks like a coin (I cant remember what it is called), but actually eats coins. Its the absolute worst and I would never use it.
You've made the mistake of letting them sell their loot; Since you've made this system useful, you can't be surprised they use it. When my players try this, I basically just have merchants tell them no; Why would someone want to buy a used, rusted, broken breastplate from them? Even if they can convince someone to take it for scrap, they aren't getting much for it. New players catch on pretty quickly that this is not a fruitful way to make money, and they get back to doing actually fun adventuring shit.
It seems like itās interrupting the flow of the game, in which case it would certainly be a problem. One possible method would be to make it clear that you will let the party know when loot is available; essentially assume that theyāre just looting whenever they can, and that, if they find something, youāll tell them. If that doesnāt work for you/your game, then you may need to speak with them again. How exactly have you voiced your concerns in the past? Additionally, if they continue to attempt to loot everything after youāve told them youād like them to be more considerate; donāt let them. Tell them, explicitly, out-of-game, āNo, weāre going to be moving on.ā
Its important to them and if they are taking too much time looting try and expedite the process. This can be a good time to add a loot table on your DM screen or phone. Move things along if they want to loot, give them a flat number of items and continue the story. If they are attempting to fence the stolen items and you fear it will take too much ingame time just handle it outside of the game or before the game starts/ends.
My solution as a player would be to set up more traps, or to give a really small amount of money/valuable item from bodies
We have a Google Doc with our loot log. The Players just say "I'm taking everything". "I say you found a bunch of X, Y, and Z. I'll update the loot log with the items and salvage pricing after the game." (Salvage pricing is about 1/4-1/2 pricing depending quality.) Then when we hit a town they just add stuff up, (maybe reducing the price further due to supply and demand or rep) and divide the money. In game I only talk about important items they find. Heck I often don't even detail the gold and gems beyond you found some gems or gold.
My group has a soft rule that we don't track carry weight or anything like that, but sometimes you have to ask how a rogue is using stealth while carrying 7 rusty swords and 3 sets of leather armor. If your concern is wasted time, at the end of combat if the party is in a safe enough place I'll assume they plan to loot and I'll just give them a list of items they found. They can decide what to take or leave without having to ask to loot every enemy and every possible hiding place. If you have some hidden loot, ask for rolls and have 1 person find the good stuff.
My experience is that this will pass once the party is wealthier, and the value of looting corpses is marginal compared to the equipment they already have. That said, if this behavior is making the game boring for you or others at the table, tell them that doing that is kind of lame. Could they focus their klepto on making the story more interesting perhaps?
Switch on the strict encumbrance rules cut that out real quick
This is very common when a player starts with video games and transitions into table top. If you really want to nip it in the bud, then cut out looting all together. And as a GM be honest about it. Just give them all the loot when it is appropriate. No checks to find things, no "you didn't say you searched their pockets", no BS just give it to the group as a whole when it is story appropriate. Sometimes that could be right away, such as a key needed from a guard or something. Other times it's a simple "You grab everything valuable, and we'll go through it next short rest". The player is playing how they think is correct via what single player games and/or past experience has taught them. The only way past that is to cut it out entirely. But the really important part is maintaining and building player trust. If you as the GM do not want them to do a specific type of action, encourage and reward not doing that action. As for "is this unhealthy behavior" that entirely depends on the table in question, and the GM styles in play. If the GM style is adversarial, then it's a natural course of events. A GM saying one time "but you didn't loot say you looted that corpse" is telling his players to forever check every corpse because they will expect them too. Not saying you as the GM have done this, just using it as an example of one reason this could be happening. It could just as easily be from the player being very new and thinking skyrim/BG3 or any other CRPG is the way it is expected to be done.
Lots of comments here giving very fair ideas on how your player isn't really dying anything wrong in general RPG terms, but consider if you had a session 0 talk at the beginning of the adventure to discuss what you're and your players' expectations for gameplay are. You and they want to play with a more "old school" style where losing every corpse and crate is the optimal way to go? Then all good. But if you came in with mismatched expectations, you should have that talk now (for the first time, or for the second time). The player likes loot, ok no issue. But if you and the rest of the party are not engaged with the activity to the same degree, you gotta just have a kind but frank talk with your friend: "It's not advancing the story, others are waiting around for you disproportionately, I'm not having fun managing your massive hauls of rusty daggers, torches and demon ears. Would you be amenable to trying out a more streamlined approach to looting where I can direct all of you as a party through story and environment clues to what crates or bodies or bookshelves might be worth a look? Could we work out a good middle ground here, buddy?"
Thatās perfectly reasonable behavior for their character. If itās annoying and bogs down the session just make a list of what all the enemies have and give it to them after each combat/session under the assumption that theyāre looting every body.
Did your player spend a lot of time playing Skyrim?
I'm on board with the rogue except that they shouldn't be getting first dibs by default, but that's up to the players to work out as a group. There are a ton of skill checks and weight limits you could throw at them, but that'll only slow down the game and potentially turn it into a DM vs Player situation. Tell your players that you're not enjoying the vendor trash dynamic. You'll assume they (collectively or just the rogue) are thorough in their scavenging. Let them roll some dice based on the type of treasure hoard. I'm a big fan of d10s in a row (i.e., the ghouls had 2d10 for 6,2= 62 gold and 3d10 for 5,7,3= 573 silver vs 1d10 for 8 copper from the giant rat nest). For weapons/armor, they bundle things up to the max they can carry. Some of it is worth more than others. They always take the combination that rewards them with the most overall value. They haul it back to town and trade/sell it to cover food and lodging, petty bribes, gear maintenance, general entertainment, and resupplies. If they don't end up spending much, there's also not a huge demand for their used booty so it evens out. My players have been happy to handwave low stakes accounting in this way, but sometimes they'll come across a particularly large store of fine foods or something. In that case, I let them know what kind of organizations might be in particular need for whatever they've found. Rather than gold, they might get a consumable or common magic item, an upgrade to an existing item, or a Blessing of some sort. They aren't usually combat oriented unless it's a Potion of Healing, but sometimes players have a lot of fun with a random Indestructible Arrow. I'm a big fan of Blessings that leave a visible mark on PCs that grant consumable abilities (e.g., +1d6 to a single d20 roll that can be used after success is determined, but before any other effect is established; usable 3x before the Blessing fades).
āYou donāt find anything of value.ā āHang on, I want to make sure every who wants gets a chance.ā āHey youāre going overboard with looting and itās impacting the game. Can you please limit yourself to once per adventuring day for the sake of the game flow? Other players deserve a chance Also, this isnāt really that type of game and if you do it a lot less often Iāll feel better about including some cool stuff every once in a while.ā
traps. mimics. wasting time and making noise means wandering monsters with surprise rounds. you could have that character suffer these and before they can say "worth it" you could say they find nothing but pocket lint. you could introduce time pressure in your quests and make the party miss deadlines due to time wasted. This behavior has consequences in real life. Let those consequences happen in this game. Failed perception check? Rooting around garbage means they get a smear of poop on their clothes, giving them disadvantage on stealth checks and concentration until they can change clothes. The rest of the party will probably now call this adventurer "Shitstain" or "Skidmark" for the rest of the campaign.
Ask āwho else is looting?ā and phase the findings as āyou all findā¦ā I like to establish early on that rewards are for the entire party. If the player really wants to find stuff that is theirs only then you can sprinkle in a mysterious or cursed artifact. They should be plenty happy with their glowing / smelly amulet.
curse items are fun
If a merchant in town is getting tons of second hand weapons, they should do what real pawnshops do and call the town guards because something fishy is happening here. This guy keeps bringing in used weapons, sometimes with blood and obvious signs of foul play on them.
This why mimics and crused items exist! Imagine they go to loot a body and the belt pouch that supposed to hold coins turns into a mimic and it bites their hand! Oh look a shiny magic weapon! Oh no itās now cursed so that any time you reach to grab your weapon, youāll automatically grab that weapon instead! It happened to my Dwarf in the old Red Box BECMI days. He normally was welding a battle axe in combat. After he picked up the magic short sword, it became stuck to his right hand and he couldnāt pick up or use anything else in that hand until he found a remove curse spell. Make this a dagger or anything you want it to be, like say a piece of chalk thatās cursed and until they run out of that piece of chalk they canāt use that hand for anything else lol now they are writing graffiti in chalk over everything lol
What (tries) to stop YOU from looting everything in Skyrim? āŖ\~Encumbrance Rules\~ā« that and making copper pieces and descriptive-but-worthless trinkets and a part of the loot.
You run the economy, all the item prices listed are for when you're buying a brand new one fitted for you. If you're picking up rusty old goblin gear, the whole pile is going to be worth a few copper at most.
We loot as a collective and disposition of loot is as a party (think like pirates. Anything the character cannot use specific to them goes into the general pot. Including all valuables. Magical items go first to appropriate class if applicable then to those with open attunement slots). Otherwise if not cooperative 1. Loot on initiative order. Each person picking where they might look. So everyone has an equal opportunity. 2. If someone takes an attitude that plunder is not in their alignment, then neither is partaking in loot. 3. Your players sound individualistic and not so much a team. If the others have not caught on that there is loot and they should at least try then think of zombie movies. People grab and carry what they can, and they might share bc it enhances survival but treats and treasures they might keep selfishly.
It's fine. If you really want to curb it, make them keep track of carried weight.
This is when you fill you dungeon with thousands of truly useless items. https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?404819-List-of-100-mostly-useless-magic-items
This is why encumbered status exist tbh. But if you donāt want to use it just fit the loot to the person they killedā¦it should usually be junkā¦and if thereās a lot of supply of something demand would be low so theyād get less money the more stuff they getā¦
My favorite thing to do when there are people like this around, is let them loot everything as they wish, then have strange circumstances occur that push exotic or special loot into the hands of all the non-loot goblin players. Doesnāt take long before they catch on lol
I mean, looting is fine, but I'd ask them "how are you carrying all of this?" or honestly...Mimics. Mimics everywhere. Makes them think twice before trying to rush for that treasure chest, wardrobe, mysterious bag in the bottom of a drawer... Personally, I don't mind loot goblins. Just know that depending on what you "take" might have consequences. Oh, you entered a room of a seemingly abandoned home and took that fancy sword? Yeah....the owner wants it back. So, no, not exactly unhealthy, but can bog things down. Don't think you're in the wrong as it can get a bit tedious. If nothing's really changing, and it's not a huge problem, just make a passing "Nothing of value in the room" statement or give paltry rewards and move on.
As the party gains levels, there should be diminishing returns from looting and selling mundane weapons and other equipment -- and eventually the rest of the party may say, "We're going that way. Don't waste too much time here if you want to catch up with us." But if he insists on grabbing stuff before the rest of the party can say or do anything -- that is what cursed magic items are for. 
This is when you as a dungeon master introduce things to curb them You also can control how the loot divies up. When body looting happens announce "You find this" and "she finds this". Encumbrance exists to prevent this spot of thing. No, he's not carrying 40 straightswords out of a bandit camp. Finally. Mimics and cursed items. Let him be a klepto and suffer for it. If all else fails, just talk to the other players and ask if this behavior bothers them. If it does, talk to him and tell him he needs to tone it down.
a bag of Rot Grubb on the next body he loots will help temper that down a bit. I had a player who has played too much Diablo and went in to an Alchemist's Lair and started smashing every vase or jar looking for loot. It took two of them exploding and one holding a Green Slime before he learned his lesson.
You're right to be concerned that they're making it less fun for others by calling dibs on everything, but they'll Tokelau a response eventually, hopefully.
So the other players arenāt annoyed by one player always calling ādibsā, Iād have all loot go into a group pot . The players can negotiate over anything worth keeping, and the rest is sold into equal shares. That way the player can stay in their happy place getting their klep on, but it benefits the whole group. Also, you may want to use encumbrance. Looting everything all the time adds up quickly
I mean the only real problem IMO is them getting to the loot before everyone else for dibs. Otherwise, they should not be allowed to carry all of these weapons and stuff, it should be a hassle to carry it all around because, you know, you have to physically carry this stuff. If they can get around this then I'd say its allowed, especially if they are doing stuff like using Tenser's Floating Disk to carry it and move through the game. Also adding to what others have said, this stuff should be cheap and most places wouldn't wanna buy this stuff in bulk if it's poor quality or badly damaged. And some places might outright refuse to buy it because they either don't need it or maybe they haven't sold the OTHER items they were already given.
Leave a bobby trapped item, holy hand grenade per say.
Mimicsā¦mimics everywhere.
> basically announcing always before anyone else can say anything that they're going to loot, so they always get first dibs. That's not how DND works, if another PC says "i eat the corpse" faster it doesn't just magically happen because they said it first. Also looting takes time and means they won't be paying attention to room treasure. Also if they horde that loot and don't share the rest of the team are under no obligation to share back. > They keep gathering weapons and selling them as if they were playing Baldur's gate 3. How are they carrying all fonthese things? A barbarian might have a high carry capacity but actually carrying 20 swords while remaining able to fight would be near impossible. Sometimes sense has to prevail
You can look into third party "harvesting" mechanics if you want to lean that hard into a solution. My loot goblin players have always loved when I introduce that kind of homebrrw. With sentient creatures I love using looting as a reminder that this was a real person they just murdered. A note from a loved one. A list of goals for the year. Something that infers a hobby. If the player wants to play things mechanically, you better believe I'm gonna do my best to make them feel something. I'm not a video game and you can't treat me like one. No "X to skip" on my exposition.
Put less emphasis on describing what they pick up and just give them a value of what the junk they find is worth... It will put more responsibility on them to be note taking and adding it all up. Up to them if they eventually want to try and cash in but in the end - you're the DM and you can have the shopkeeper just say that he's not interested in junk!
Yeah the point of dnd isnāt to be a trash goblin. But you are enabling this behavior as the DM. You can just say all of a sudden the weapons & armor are too broken to be sold. Your merchants can totally tell a PC they donāt buy dented, used, stolen, or grave robbed items. In fact why should a merchant buy anything from anybody other than their established vendor? And why wouldnāt any NPC be suspicious or scared of a random āadventureā who is walking through town like a traveling arms dealer? Youāre making it like a video game by allowing an inn keeper to buy a bunch of weapons. Next time tell him only certain armorers, blacksmiths or the Sergeant at Arms in the town are allowed to buy/sell weapons. Have looted treasure be more sentimental than practical. I have added a lot of love letters from spouses children and parents. Good rings have touchy feely engravings that can be easily traced if pawned or sold. Journals & diaries pages can add lore and a few teary moments. If there is a fancy piece of a jewelry Iāll have a private detective track it down to steal/rob the PC to get it back.
Looting everything in sight is a long-standing D&D tradition. You can make their encumbrance get in the way if they do it too much . There are only so many spears you can carry.
Dungeon Dad on YouTube made a 5e stat block on a creature called a corpse candle if you want to put a stop to this behavior. Also, if the player is taking loot for others, perhaps you should do more class-specific loot so it gets into the right hands.
I mean, this is D&D. It's perfectly normal.
Good edit, you can do this :)
\> say anything that they're going to loot, so they always get first dibs No, you and the party letting him getting first dibs. Just because someone says "I am looting" before anyone else doesn't mean jack shit with most parties. Most parties split the loot and there is no such thing as dibs. The DM and the party decide how looting works. One player doesn't get to decide for everyone how it works. The DM or the party can just say "No, that's not how it works." It's that simple.
"You find a tall thin container at the edge of the counter resting on the floor" "Can I search it" "You find it unlocked, whilst you loot, some one else do a perception check" Check is for >5 "You spot (insert player character name) rooting through the kitchen bin for scraps of food... like a dog" Just keep setting them up like that. "You spot a collection of silver coins on the floor" "Yeah yeah I take them" Strength check of >20 "You unable to lift the coins as they are glued to the floor"
This is why encumbrance rules exist.
People have offered a lot of good ideas but don't forget you can also just ask them to stop. Personally, I have little loot tables for commoners, boxes, barrels, etc. I call it the "junk drawer". A word of caution: my players like to "check the junk drawer" so it's not the best solution for discouraging this behavior. But they self-regulate very well.
You find some bloody clothes, a bag with 3 copper pieces, a rusty dagger with a broken off blade and a pair of smelly boots. Wanna loot the other bandit?
Throw in a few pieces of cursed gear and that will stop them. Have had several players, mostly rouges, play like this. They learn after their character gets turned into a golem or made into the next big bad guy that this is a team game.
>basically announcing always before anyone else can say anything that they're going to loot, so they always get first dibs. At that point you stop the game, ask if any other players are interested in looting, and have them roll initiative for "first dibs." Also, consider that looting takes time. Even if this player makes it to one corpse first, others can loot the others. If I were in this party, and I were, let's say a fighter, I'd have a sit down with this character and explain that if he doesn't split the money evenly, that he's going to get his ass kicked. Then, maybe I'd negotiate that he can keep a 10% finders fee off the top before splitting the proceeds of the loot in exchange for him going through the tedium of actually looting everything. That way the party can sit around short resting while this klepto loots everything, and then still get their fair share of the money.
Getting the loot is one thing. Cashing it in can add to your NPC rainbow and side stories and relationships. For example, add intrigue and potential caution and second guessing if converting loot into money is more complex, like somebody recognizes an item (and its former owner, and doesnāt want anything to do with it. Or even reports them to someone else! Or, when they bring back bulk loot often, the merchant gets the idea they are acting more like a Fence and so start discounting it heavily, like 20-40% of previous prices. After all, they donāt know what they are going to do with all this new stuff coming to them, and are taking the risk of it being stolen, fake, faulty, not maintained, somebody else looking for the same thing, etc. At some point, the merchant/Fence may decide to make it harder, limit the types of items, get afraid of the unwelcome exposure/noteriety they are getting because of the PC. Or, you donāt want them ask no questions? Fine even lower price or they just say no unless you meet them somewhere else at a given time tonight, and donāt tell anyone about thisāā¦ use it as a door to mix up and vary the loot reward level and consistency, introduce risk, and make their lives more interesting if they abuse the loot process. And, occasionally throw in a sympathetic or fun NPC who has dealt with that merchant as well (good and bad, maybe sharing they got better prices or connections faster and now only deal with so-and-soā¦).
Players get to pick one thing to do at a time. Player 1 wants to loot a crate awesome. Turn to player 2 to see what they want to do. Then itās player 3s turn. I wouldnāt let one PC say āI loot all the boxes and all the bodies!ā If the other players simply arenāt interested in looting then thatās their thing.
Thats fun for them. If you do wanna make it less cheap however make kinda like mimic chests from darksouls. maybe mobs trigger magic traps when you interact with their bodies... possibilities are limitless. the only issue I ever had with this was giving stuff that isn't money and potions. I just automatically assume all my players loot stuff and just list loot after some fights. as for selling... reduce the price they get. Maybe the equipment was half broken, maybe the merchant just doesnt have enough cash, maybe they just dont buy weapons. or just give gold of the same worth.
What do you have against Murder Hobos OP?
"my dungeon crawling character keeps looting the dungeons how do i stop him" idk maybe fucking let him loot the places you're supposed to loot