Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [86]
I am not trying to penalize a character for thinking, planning, and being smart and figuring out anything, I am just accounting for the rarity of an item. Take, for example, your idea of buying undead slaying arrows because you think a vampire is in control of the city. Don’t you think the vampire would be rather irate if his smiths were cranking out undead killing stuff? So, prices will be higher to compensate cost.
We see here that Scott does use the rule books, but that he also changes things as is fitting for his world and his campaign.2 He does acknowledge that undead slaying arrows exist as an item that can be found both in the rule book and in his world. However, since a vampire is in charge of the city, Scott makes it more difficult to obtain this item. His change to the rule book not only is consistent with the world of Sorpraedor, but no doubt signals to Mark that he is correct about the leader of the city being a vampire. The fact that the merchants don’t seem to carry items for fighting undead also signals to Mark (playing Cuthalion) that the people in the city know that their leader is one of the undead, and that they have perhaps had unpleasant encounters with him in the past.
In addition, Scott’s response to Mark on the issue of the game being light on treasure shows that he also adapts the game to fit the players and their needs. Dividing up treasure can be problematic for any gaming group. Rather than being assigned to any one player, the DM usually lets the entire party know what riches are discovered in an adventure and leaves it up to them to divide the spoils. After much deliberation, the Sorpraedor group decided that the total value of all the items would be divided evenly among the players, and then they could decide to either take that gold piece sum or “buy” one of the items found in the treasure from the group. This method worked well in terms of equitable distribution but made it so that it was unlikely that a really valuable magic item would remain in the group since the chance of any one player being able to afford an item were slim.
All of the decisions on how to divide treasure were made through negotiation among the players in the group, and the DM did not vote or express an opinion on how this should be done. However, he did compensate for the decision made by the players in the way that he handed out treasure. Scott explained to Mark:
The way the party divides treasure means that if I put a +3 flaming sword in the haul, even if one of the group wanted it, they couldn’t afford it as their share unless I made everything else in the haul worth 32,000gp each as well. So, I put items that *could* be powerful in a haul, so that if someone takes the right item, it will grow with them.
What Scott alludes to here is a type of item he created called leveled items. He got the idea for this modification from an official Wizards of the Coast publication, Dragon magazine, but made his own items specific for the characters in the Sorpraedor campaign. These items would gain powers as they went, as characters do. Usually when characters meet a challenge in the game, they are awarded experience points. Characters gain experience points and new skills, but items are not usually malleable like this. However, leveled items can be given some of a character’s experience points and can also level up and gain new features. By adding these items to the game, Scott was able to give the party a seemingly low powered item in a haul, but that item might feel special to a particular character and might become more powerful with time. This prevented the players from simply selling all the best magic items. For