Theoretical: Weekend w/ No Loot on Monsters

Over the last year, I have done a little bit of this and plan to do a bit more of it in the upcoming season at my chapter (SoMN). It adds a lot to the flavor of the world, plus gives a boost to productionist characters, which is always cool.

1. Make some sheets of some fairly vague tags that can be applied to various different kinds of creature type that can be applied to a variety of mods without needing to get too specific (ie: "Bug Ichor", "Bone Dust", "Chunk of Metal", etc.). If you need a really specific tag for a special kind of creature (ie: "Bloodsilk Spider Saliva", "Fur of the Big Bad Wolf", etc.), then you can simply write up those special tags when the time arises on a blank creature-loot-template tag.

2. Each tag is essentially just coin that can only be spent on a particular production skill (unless someone Merchants it to make it coin usable anywhere, which is perfectly viable for them to do). I pull 200 copper from treasure policy for the event, I can drop 200 production of Bug Ichor. Simple as that. Don't vary their merchant vary from their production value, 'cause as said, that screws up the system. If you plan for it ahead of time (pre-event being ideal), this shouldn't be a drastically big problem, especially if you...

3. & 4. ...keep the specific creature loot tags separate, and don't necessarily do it for every mod/creature. If you rationed out 200 production of treasure policy into 200 production of Bug Ichor, then don't worry about if you go through all of the Ichor on your first of two bug-centric mods. Doing tags like this doesn't need to necessarily replace your current loot-dropping methods; it just augments it and makes it a little more interesting.

It's a little tedious if you try to do it for everything or for mods on the fly, but I think it works out great if you get it all prepped for a small number of specific mods during your weekend ahead of time ("The PCs are going to Snake Cave on Saturday afternoon, so let's take 200 production from treasure and prepare 200 production of Reptilian Scales tags that we'll drop during that mod instead of pulling from our main loot bin." "Sounds great, see you next week at the event!").
 
Yeah, this isn't an on-the-fly thing. It's something you print up and toss in something like this until it's ready to go out. All these will be is an alternative to dropping physical coin that is more thematic and easier to explain than precious metals raining down out of everything in the land. It also makes Merchant quite a bit more viable as a skill by giving it more opportunity to be used.
 
Gettysburg has done this (and very well) for pretty much their entire campaign thus far. It's really cool!
 
JP, in all seriousness, that is a great idea. The problem is that it is a logistical nightmare.
That has not been my experience. My intention isn't to sound like a snooty jerk - this is a thing we've done in both Oregon and Seattle with minimal issue.

1) These tags aren't pre-printed.
Our solution was to preprint the tags. What goes out as crunchies shouldn't be a surprise to the plot team, if they operate from a developed world. How many or how often, sure, but once you've developed a world in which your animal creatures have recoverable loot, it makes sense for your creatures to have the recoverable loot and for your intelligent races to be carrying some of the "creature loot" as well.

2) <snip> every time I put out these tags, I needed to pull an equal value of coins out of the weekend treasure.
I suspect this is probably a cultural issue. My understanding is that many chapters have their treasure policy pulled by logistics rather than by plot. This has never made sense to me. Treasure should be a function of the story, not simply a matter of how many people showed up. Yes, the policy dictates the value of what is put out, but what is put out should be determined by the plot team. When I ran Oregon's plot, Logistics provided me with the amount of prereg policy I had available to me, and I pulled loot based on the story we had lined up for the weekend. Some treasure from that policy was set aside for predetermined encounters, some went into a random loot bucket. Our NPC guild was empowered to pull treasure as needed for their random encounters as made sense to the encounters. In downtime or after the weekend, Logistics gave us the final numbers and if there was excess policy available, it was added to the next event's available policy. If we came up short, it came out of the next weekend's policy. Typically, we had about 100 gold excess floating around, plus maybe a couple items' worth of magic items, so once per year, we ran an in-game auction to clear out the policy. No complaints of too little or too much treasure were ever brought to my attention by our player rep or owner (much less the players themselves).

3) The value added to the game was not equal to the efforts I was putting in. A few players probably noticed and cared, but I basically had to spend my entire weekend doing this (and nothing else) in order to make it happen all weekend.
I can't account for players' appreciation - our players enjoyed the variation and that treasure made sense for the encounters. As for the effort, making that effort before an event definitely is more effective than during.

I am ignoring the fact that monsters should resurrect, thus most of this "treasure" would disappear in five minutes.
Non-sentient creatures do not resurrect - if you eat a burger, you need not fear that someone had to kill a cow somewhere between 3-12 times before they could make the burger. By the same token, if you skin a wolf, you generally shouldn't be worried that your fur loin cloth is going to up and vanish while you're out in the snow - and if it does, then that difference should be noteworthy ("Holy crap, did we kill a werewolf?").

So, to be clear, here's how you do it with minimal fuss and muss, ime:

1 - have an NPC guild: a body of people who have committed to NPCing over the course of a year in lieu of PCing your chapter's events and can be empowered to make low-level decisions for encounters, manage the NPCs, etc.
2 - make sure your world is developed and understood by your plot team and NPC guild so that they can decide what treasure goes where
3 - have Head of Plot work with Logistics to pull treasure prior to the event.
4 - make sure people know how the game world works so that they can help make decisions on the fly as needed
5 - do all your detail-work ahead of time
6 - pick a group of creatures that have recoverable treasure and run with it. i.e. you don't have to make every creature have recoverable treasure - maybe your world is infested with a variety of ants; come up with a variety of ant bits that can be scavenged and do lots of it: ant carapace (cp towards blacksmithing), ant juices (cp towards potions), ant venom (cp towards alchemy), etc. Maybe your world in infested with lizards, and locally the people place value on their scales - laminate a bunch of "scales" with evaluation numbers on them and let players trade or use them at logistics.

Ben mentioned "This are LCO and valued less by the players", which is definitely a thing, but I found that you end up with some characters who end up wanting to be "the expert" on the subject and their treasure, and they end up handling most of the trading in-game; no effort required by Plot and Yay, player interactions!.
 
I will say, after encountering this both in Gettysburg, and in Seattle as a traveling player I have found the following.

1.) As a merchant rabbit (without merchant oddly enough) they are a HUGE money maker for anyone that wants to spend the time. This added to my RP (as I contacted plenty of people to buy them as well as multiple people to merchant them for me) during the Seattle 4-day it was a great addition.

2.) These are HUGE detractors on the last logistics phase of an event. I currently am still sitting on 8 gold or so of tags from Gettysburg that I can't use until I manage to make it back out there (I'm trying trust me!) The last day of the Seattle 4-day was a little wonky because a number of people who got used to the rabbit as an easy sell point for their merchanting widgets got turned away since I couldn't convert them at the end. This led to a wonky out of game feeling that was a small detractor. (I might have spent the coin to not do that, but we are talking likely a dozen gold plus.

3.) I COULD try to convert the merchant tags in other chapters, but I really don't want to ask for SoMI gold for Gettyburgs tags for example, it's not fair to put the coin cost on them. Alternatively I expect I could do this in exchange for my production cost in most chapters without it being an issue so I label this under 'Not really a huge issue'

Looking at all of the above and thinking back to the sum effect on my game when I've encountered this, has been good, it has added to my game. However it has also seemed to really only appeal to a small group and most folks I RP'd with because of it had the feeling of 'I'm glad to get rid of these'.
 
So, yeah - what Dave and Mike and a few others said: we do the "monster-appropriate treasure" thing in GB. If you are willing to take the time to pre-print and account for these things in treasure policy, I'm finding through player feedback these can be fun moneymakers or - in travelling players' cases - occasionally a great way to accumulate lots of pieces of green paper.

We pre-print green tags that are monster appropriate - bandits or mercs might have things like pots of beer (pots?), pornographic illustrations (ugh), clothing, furs, etc. These are used twofold: 1) can be merchanted for their listed coin value; and 2) can be used for guild-related or misc. collection quests (clothes and fabric for Clothiers, beer for Brewers, etc.). These are used in conjunction with coin, production, and treasure because we understand it can occasionally suck to find a million green tags on miniboss X, and generally receive no complaint. I often hear it helps lend some thematic consistency to the world and makes it feel less like finding random gemstones on a ram in Skyrim. I also hear a lot of people derive a certain degree of silly enjoyment out of finding porn on dead guys. This obviously requires collaboration between logistics and plot, but... teams are teams because teams collaborate.

Obviously, if you don't have merchant, this becomes a "rely on your friends" kind of thing, but overall, if you provide enough creative outlets for unloading these, I think it makes it easier to feasibly to a no-coin-loot weekend.
 
2.) These are HUGE detractors on the last logistics phase of an event. I currently am still sitting on 8 gold or so of tags from Gettysburg that I can't use until I manage to make it back out there (I'm trying trust me!) The last day of the Seattle 4-day was a little wonky because a number of people who got used to the rabbit as an easy sell point for their merchanting widgets got turned away since I couldn't convert them at the end. This led to a wonky out of game feeling that was a small detractor. (I might have spent the coin to not do that, but we are talking likely a dozen gold plus.

Such is the nature of LCO items that aren't Magic Items, though. At some point we decided MIs should travel, because people are that attached to them, but don't extend that to other LCO goods except on a case by case basis. On that note, though, you're posting on a board that has an IC communication section with players who -do- play there. Offer 'em for sale to those players IC, and either find a travelling player to serve as a courier or use the good old Postal Service to exchange goods and explain it however fits the circumstances.
 
As the head of logistics at Gettysburg, the green tag treasure has not been a problem. Players have been good about including merchant amounts on their pre-log form and taking care of things Friday night. Saturday logistics sometimes has people drop two fistfuls of uncounted tags to sell which can slow down the line, but if I have a minion I can let them handle adding it up.

Dave, thank you for your feedback. I will make it a point to have logistics open for a period after game is done for people who want to merchant their green tags. I certainly don't want players, especially traveling ones, to feel like we've dumped a bunch of unusable treasure on them that they're stuck with.
 
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