Static and Random Coins in RPGs

 

Is it better to find 3d6 gold coins or 13 gold coins?

Lately I have been working on building an absurdly huge megadungeon for Cairn 2e and it hit me that I was writing a lot of entries like the corpse carries 2d6gp or the sarcophagus contains 3d6 glass coins. That's a lot of rolling, I thought. While it seems consistent with the OSR flavor I'm going for, it also sounded like a lot of work, which is kind of antithetical to the simplicity I love in Cairn and systems like it. 

So I started writing flat values into my room keys. The corpse carries 25gp sounds good, sounds appealing and sounds easy. When the players ask what they find on the dead adventurer, you can just say "25gp" and be done with it.

That also created a new problem. Always finding 25gp (or even 20gp or 50gp) very quickly gets boring. Oh, another corpse with exactly 25 gold pieces in its pocket? Yawn. I bet that corpse over there has 25gp in its pocket too. Best to just tell the Warden you sweep the whole room and want the total number of all gold pieces you'd find by searching every corpse, chest and sarcophagus in your line of sight.

That's also preferable to rolling 3d6 a dozen times in a single room, right? Maybe.

There's a middle road between static and random values for coins found in an RPG. The best places to use static values are in clumps. A chest with 300gp is simple, direct and easy. Boiling down large looting rolls into a single value is also easy. You search all of the corpses in the room and find 87gp total between them is an easy way to keep things interesting without damaging suspension of disbelief. Sure, someone might count out 300gp to put them in a chest, but if you've got four dead adventurers, it's highly doubtful they're all carrying identical pocket change, so the number has to be probable and it has to be interesting.

Likewise, random values can add multiple layers of excitement to the game. 3d6gp means you're gambling that the dice will show something between 3gp and 18gp. 1d20gp is even more swingy, and that may be fun for your players, especially if they're used to the critical successes and critical failures of D&D attack rolls. 

You can also make everything more interesting by rolling for treasure before the heroes even enter a room. Players at my table always perk up when I start rolling dice unexpectedly and without explanation. They get nervous. Their minds start running. They say things like "oh no, oh man, did we just trigger a trap?" and I get to grin mischievously and say "no, don't worry about it."

But they do worry about it. They always worry about it. Here I am just rolling for the number of coins on a corpse they haven't even seen yet and, like it is with a good horror novel, their minds are running over with terrifying possibilities.

But that's just my 2gp on the subject.

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