I just wanted to say how much I appreciate all of your videos being clearly time stamped. It makes the information so much more digestible and easy to reference back to later.
Treasure is a core gameplay loop/mechanic. Adventurer starts with resources. Travels spending some of those resources. Uses abilities in combat. They acquire new/more resources. Repeat ad nauseam, until "win" conditions is met.
I'm a big proponent of giving low level parties incredibly powerful magic items (usually just one). I think people are afraid of doing this because of "balance" but yall are missing out on giving a first level party a Staff of the Magi and just not telling them what it is. Players are very motivated to figure out how it works. Then if they use it too much people are gonna come try to take it, dont use it enough and people might get hurt. The adventure writes itself.
Interesting stuff, and I admit I do find it weird when I put a character's preferred item into the game at some point. What I'll often do is at least tweak that item to give it an additional feature related to its history, to make it seem less character-specific.
I’ve been DMing for decades & I’m still pretty bad about awarding treasure & magic items… I do it a little bit & thankfully my players aren’t mad at me or anything, but I definitely need to get better about dishing out the cool rewards more often.
Same. I like my players having fancy houses and airships and a ton of cool items. They can only attune to 3 at a time no matter much loot they have in their vault
I struggle with the idea of handing loot out in games like 5e or PF2e when the PCs just magically get more powerful. Loot then seems to just be a vehicle to stab others with.
It's an important part of the early versions of the game and can provide really useful motivations for characters beyond story-based motives, which may not fit every character or may be a way to hook in characters to the story later. This is one reason I think the fact that they didn't put in things like masterwork weapons (though they did for armor) was such a missed opportunity at least up into T2. After a while there's nothing to spend money on!
