Treasure Tables for ADG

02 Oct, 2024

I'm writing treasure tables for A Dungeon Game, or at least I'm trying to, and it's unsurprisingly quite difficult when you're writing a game that uses gold (or in my case, silver) for XP.

Also, a slight content warning here. I'm going to say some mildly complimentary things about Rules Cyclopedia. Just brace yourselves for that. (Also I should note that every time I refer to 2nd Edition here, I'm using the Revised 2nd Edition from the mid 90s rather than the original 2nd Edition from the late 80s purely because it's the edition I grew up playing and the one I most often have to hand.)

Many of the numbers for ADG come from AD&D 2e. I'm using the same hit dice for monsters, converting their AC to my system, and my XP thresholds are based in large part on the XP thresholds for 2e's Mage/Specialist ¹. So when it came to writing treasure tables it made sense to start with 2e, especially because it's got those famous lettered tables that are very granular.

There are a couple of problems that make direct conversion of these tables to ADG tricky (which is fine, because direct conversion was never the aim here, I just wanted a base to work from). The first is the obvious one - 2e doesn't award XP for treasure, so the treasure tables in that edition don't need to account for how awarding loot will impact XP and character advancement. That's fine, though. I was always going to massage the numbers anyway, and using 2e's tables as a reference is just a way for me to get something on the page as a starting point rather than reinventing the wheel.

The second problem is that 2e uses gold as the standard currency, whereas ADG uses the silver standard. My currency conversion is 10 copper to 1 silver, and 50 silver to 1 gold. 2e, on the other hand, uses copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum, and conversions look like this:

• 100 copper to 1 gold
• 10 silver to 1 gold
• 2 electrum to 1 gold
• 5 gold to 1 platinum

Bear the difference between electrum and platinum in mind, too. That's going to be important soon, but we'll get to that.

The third issue is a problem of my own making, which is that ADG only uses 20- and 6-sided dice. That's a very deliberate choice, and I'm not going to start introducing new die types to the game. I also want to keep "weird things" to a minimum. I could use d10s by telling players to roll 1d20 and half even results, much like we do for 1d3 with a d6, but I don't want to. 2e's treasure tables give a range of values for the amount of coins that are found in a hoard - 1,000-3,000, or 2,000-20,000, or whatever. They don't give any dice expression for how to generate numbers in these ranges, though most are pretty easy to figure out if you have access to all of the polyhedral dice.

I don't, of course. So that becomes an issue. Not an insurmountable one by any means - I just have to do some arithmetic and figure out how to get as close as possible to the ranges with just d6s. (I decided I don't want to use d20s to generate the amount of treasure. Don't ask me why, because I don't know.)

2nd Edition gives columns for the following things in a treasure hoard: Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum or Electrum (GM's choice - and, again, we'll talk more about this shortly), Gems, Art Objects, and Magic Items. Since my main coin is silver and 2e's is gold, it made sense to make use of the values in the Gold column to dictate the values that would go in my silver column. Thus 2e's silver values became my copper values, and their Platinum values became my Gold. Because my gold is worth 50x my silver and AD&D's Platinum is worth 5x its gold, I took 10% of the values in this column. I based the values of my gems and my art objects on those in 2e, converting gold directly to silver, and then I set about writing the table and figuring out dice expressions for the quantities of coins. This was my first pass.

(I'm doing something different with magic items in A Dungeon Game, but I'll write about that another time).

With this done I figured I should work out the average values of each hoard and compare them to the average values of the hoards in 2e. Those dice expressions don't get to exactly the same ranges as in AD&D, and I wanted to see how close I'd come. I assumed, given that I'd omitted one of the coins entirely (albeit the least valuable one) and erred on the side of allowing lower maximum quantities with my dice expressions, that I'd come in at lower values than 2e for most of these.

Spoiler alert: no. Not the case at all. But we'll get to that, because first I realised something very strange about 2nd Edition's treasure tables that in 30+ years of playing I've somehow never thought about.

When I calculated my average hoard values, I went to find the table in the 2e DMG that gives their average hoard values and I found that there isn't one. This was strange, I thought (though it's not the strange thing I just mentioned). Even Rules Cyclopedia has an average treasure value table, and that's the worst book ever written. How can that book be getting something right that my beloved 2e is fucking up?

But I needed to know how much treasure 2e is giving out, and so I sat down and worked out the values of each hoard if we assume that every type of treasure appears in the hoard and we always roll average results when we check for quantities and the value of gems and art objects. And this is where I noticed the weird thing, because the "Platinum or Electrum" column has a little asterisk next to it that points to a footnote that says "DM's choice".

And this, my friends, makes zero fucking sense. An electrum piece is worth as much as half a gold piece. A platinum piece is worth as much as five gold pieces. They are not the same. They are not, should not be, interchangeable. I have no idea why this decision was made. And because I'm autistic, I sat down and worked out the average values for each hoard type depending on which coin type we chose. And then I took the average of both of those values to give us a true "average hoard value" for 2e's treasure table. Here it is.

That variance in value depending on whether or not you choose Electrum or Platinum is wild. This is, obviously, a symptom of the game no longer using gold for XP, because what semblance of balance 2e has (lol) is no longer linked to wealth, and so it just doesn't matter.

But anyway. As a comparison, because we're ostensibly talking about A Dungeon Game here, this is what my average treasure hoard values look like. (And I'll be putting this table in the book, because it's one of the few good ideas Rules Cyclopedia had.)

Overall I've come in much higher in value than AD&D. I haven't yet sat down and figured out how these will impact advancement. In order to do that I'm need to figure out which monsters have which types so that I can work out which levels of the dungeon these are likely to appear on so I can &c. &c. and that's just a lot of work I haven't got the energy to do just yet. (I'm also going to be arranging my treasure tables in ascending average value order when I'm done with them because this ordering make very little sense).

I was interested to see how different the 2e average values are to a game that uses gold for XP and also has very granular treasure tables like 2e, and that once again meant turning to my nemesis, Cyclopedia. These are the average values for each hoard type in RC, which I didn't have to work out myself because even a stopped clock is right twice a day:

I'm not sure entirely what I expected, but this table surprised me a little. I had anticipated that the values would either be uniformly lower than 2e (because XP for gold) or else track quite closely to 2e for reasons I can't really pin down. But there's just not really any correlation between the two (and that probably shouldn't be surprising, since they are in fact two different games).

But what this helps with is realising that my average values are very much too high. And that's fine! This was the first pass and it was always the intention that I'd change things once this basic framework was in place.

Really I should revisit my dice expressions and bring them closer to RC, but I am absolutely loathe to base anything in ADG on Cyclopedia because I have a baseless hatred of that edition and I've spent the past year making it my entire personality. Whatever happens, though, I've very glad that I've finally got the ball rolling on these tables. I'm very interested to see what they look like, and how they compare to this first draft, when I'm finally satisfied with them.

#adungeongame