Monty Haul
My references are old and I feel old. This one is worth knowing anyway.
The “Monty Haul” problem is a play on Monty Hall‘s name. If you’re unfamiliar, that’s the host of the long-running game show Let’s Make a Deal. And if you’ve ever heard the phrase, “I’ll take what’s behind curtain number one!” then you know the show. While I’d encourage you to read through this excellent article from the D&D Lore Wiki, the TLDR of Monty Haul is simple. Whenever you hand out too much reward for too little effort, you risk turning off player motivation. Overpowered PCs running roughshod over a game world is a symptom. And often, the only solution is to restart the campaign. If you’ve heard me complain about the difficulty of managing complexity in high-level play or nostalgia for first level, the Monty Haul problem figures into it.
The most on-the-nose example I can think of from my own gaming career is not from the tabletop, but from my singular LARPing experience. I’m petty sure I saw the light of fantasy die in a young boy’s eyes. It was I who killed it.
You see, I’d been recruited by Plot for NPC work. Most of my first night was spent in the form of a mountain lion. You could tell I was a mountain lion because, if you put your fist on top of your head and shouted, “What do I see?” I would dutifully shout back, “A large feline creature with yellowish fur.” My voice got hoarse from screaming “two normal damage” every time I struck a fellow nerd with a foam bat. It was… not for me.
The next morning was better though. Instead of a wandering puddy tat, I got to be a wandering ice imp. This time I shouted “five ice damage,” and my bat was blue instead of red. That turned out to be a lot more effective. Me and my fellow ice imps lurked outside campers’ adventurers’ cabins, ambushing them as they foolishly split their parties to prepare their morning spells. We actually managed to KO some kids before a bunch of brave heroes banned together to put us down.
For the first time that weekend, I was feeling pleased with myself. It had been a bracing bit of cardio in the cool mountain air. I’d actually managed to have fun. And so, once the battle was over, I picked myself up off the dirt, wiped down my ice-blue tabard, and trotted over to the victors. With a smile on my face I said, “Here’s your treasure,” holding out a little slip of paper with the words “shard of true ice” on it.
“Such a peculiar creature,” said someone’s dad, not wanting to break character. “I’ve never seen a beast rise from death only to hand over its treasure.”
Apparently I was supposed to play dead until somebody nudged me with a boot and said, “I search the bodies.” Instead, I’d given treasure to one of the kids who’d been KO’d. I don’t know what kind of social convention I violated, but that kid was close to tears. He knew he hadn’t earned that shard of true ice. The world was suddenly a little cheaper for him, the dream of immersion a little farther away.
Powerful treasure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We all dream of rolling hot on the random loot table and coming away with the big score. But if you’ve ever found 5,000 gp on a dead goblin or a wolf inexplicably carrying the Deck of Many Things in its coin purse, you understand how offputting this biz can be.
You’ve heard my tale, but what about the rest of you guys? Have you ever given too much loot too quickly? Did it unbalance your game and undermine your world? Or did you have the opposite experience, and discover that your players enjoyed hitting the jackpot early in the campaign? Whatever your take on Monty Haul, tell us what’s behind the Door #1 down in the comments!
My favorite non-monty haul example is a named macguffin whose description gets more intense with each Gather Information check. Ultimately, it turns out to be a run-of-the-mill horn of goodness/evil. Most parties keep it, throw it in the sack until later. One party dutifully brought it to a quest-giver, who bought it from them, but asked them to keep their success a secret, as the added tourism from all of the would-be treasure seekers was doing wonders for the local economy.
My least favorite experience was a D&D session from middle school: we killed a couple of lizard men in Dunwater and suddenly had a Deck of Many Things. (The DM swore it was random.) A few die rolls later and half the party was dead and the other half were living gods. I left the table to get more pizza–the whole session kind of disintegrated after that and we switched to something else.
So, Blaze Redscale is going to be drawn in future comics driving a bangin’ cool car, right? Or will it be converted to a car-shaped bed/mobile hoard transport vehicle?
Fighter will jack it an crash it into a tree.
I’m trying to remember if the Handbook has already had a comic about PCs getting overpowered loot, and the DM having to take it away from them…
Ok, so I have been browsing the archive and I haven’t found a comic with that theme but I have been reminded of that time Fighter drove a tank.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/too-exotic
Maybe it will be a head-on collision instead of a carjacking.
Keep looking. There must be something! Drive up my metrics! 😛
I kinda have problems doing both.
In most campaigns I start bareling giving more treasure that what the enemies carry with them. Frustrating players that expect to update their level 1 equipment or be able to buy heal potions.
Then I get selfconscius and give the players all the money that they should have for that level at the same time, boosting their strenght radically and making me afraid of giving them more treasure. Then after some ssessions I feel bad, give them way more treasure, feel afraid, don’t give them anything, feel bad, give them way more treasure… Grind and repeat.
I’m not good giving loot in general.
In my experience of losing immersion from great treasures comes not so much from the value of the treasure as from it not making sense enough for the treasure to be there.
For instance taking the example with the wolf carrying a Deck of Many Things in a coin purse. It’d likely be just as disappointing if it had instead had an appropriate to it’s CR value healing potion in it’s inexplicable coin purse.
If on the other hand the Deck had been found in the hands of the soulless body of a traveler (from drawing The Void) after fighting the wolf that had claimed them as dinner, well then I think that feeling would be much much less damaged.
(The Deck of Many Things itself can often be a bad thing for a campaign from the sheer randomness of it’s effect, but that’s separate from how easily it’s gotten).
There can be some problems from too much stuff, mainly if the rest of the world can’t provide the degree of challenge or acknowledgement that you in particular want. (Through I have found that challenge is much less essential than I once believed).
The inverse can also be a problem.
Was in a game where we were very cash poor, but had a few decent magic items from a couple lairs, but it became very apparent that we had no “real loot” when we killed a dragon in their lair and… got nothing.
It was made worse by the fact that there was loot to get, we just couldn’t get it (ice dragon, loot in ice, no way or time to unfreeze it, had to run fast for next plot thing… etc)
I don’t know if it was the party, the plot, or the DM that were “at fault” in the situation, but no matter who is “to blame” for lack of loot or too much loot too quick, the issue always seems to be balance.
Find the balance, find the fun 🙂
Were you playing Rise of Tiamet? I ask because I’m running that module and my party got the loot via bombing the dragon and melting the ice mid-combat. But that’s what happens when your party makes homemade bombs from troglodyte stink and oil. Long story.
I had a friend who was in a campaign where he once heard someone say “I bring out MY Maul of Titans.” They had to be specific because there was more than one in the party.
On the other hand, I’m in a campaign right now where we are all 7th level and the most powerful magic item in the group is a Bag of Tricks.
Back when I still DM’ed live, my players did complain once that they wanted to level faster (as in, at all) and find more treasure.
O recall one time I deliberately broke immersion and it turned out for the best.
My niece had asked me to teach her an online adventure game I played a lot at the time. She was still very young at the time, so her mom – my sister – asked me to let her use a secondary character on my account and chaperone her, rather than get her an account of her own.
It all went pretty well; she was having fun, choosing where to direct her character, fighting battles… and then she took her shiny new hero into a low-level labyrinth and was defeated before she could get out. She looked at me, tears in her eyes and said: “Oh no, now we’re DEAD!”
Faced with the specter of having made my niece cry, I told her no, all she needed to do was click here, and her hero was back outside the dungeon, down to 1 HP but otherwise fine. Nothing a healing potion couldn’t fix.
“But how did that happen?” she asked.
Well, I said, thinking fast. That was down to Hero Insurance(tm)! If a hero is defeated inside a dungeon, the monsters carry them back to the start and give them back 1 hp. It’s all part of the arrangement between adventurers and monsters; the game wouldn’t be fun if your character could actually die.
“Oh,” my niece replied, quite happily. “So the monsters are actually nice!” Then she frowned. “But what about the monsters we defeat?”
They’re fine too, I told her, because they get Monster Insurance(tm).
Surprisingly (to me), this went over very well.
…I sense the beginnings of a comedy series about monsters and adventurers who nonlethally defeat each other and then hang out at a bar when they’re off the clock. It’s all just entertainment for the gods, who decreed that they have to fight each other, but didn’t specify that it had to be fatal.
My homebrew is very much open world. The group knows that I will never let them get so overpowered there won’t be challenges. It also helps that a LOT of “monsters” in my world are always level adjusted to the party.
This means that if the group is running around with +2 weapons and specialized armor, then so will what they run into. The group of orcs they just ran into will be USING the +2 weapons and their specialized armor isn’t going to fit anyone in the group. They will also have archers and shamans after a certain level
And you’d be absolutely amazed how many sub-species there can be that fall under the generic “beholder”. As long as you keep it consistent and fair, it can make for a game that smoothly ramps up in power over literal years.
The thing about the idea of handing out too much reward for too little effort is that it’s like the taste of Soylent Cola… it varies from person to person. And you can’t tell from looking at someone whether they enjoy the puzzle that can be keeping beginning characters alive, or if they want to go straight from character creation into being an action-movie badass. And for a lot of games, treasures and magic items are what allow beginning characters to kick ass and take names; in effect, they create the “training montage” that some players want to skip over on their way to feeling competent and powerful for having wiped the floor with a lich.
For me, the problem with being a Monty Haul GM (which I was for a time in my youth) wasn’t that the players felt they hadn’t earned the loot. (If anything, they tended to be disappointed easily when an encounter didn’t provide enough upgrades over the previous haul.) It was that the game escalated really quickly, because the players complained when monsters went down too easily.
In the end, it’s about knowing the players and having a coherent group. Generally speaking, I won’t bring someone into a game I’m running, if they want to play a world-beating badass right out of the gate, or otherwise tend to strongly identify with their character’s successes and failures, because experience tells me that they won’t mesh well with my more low-key style of GMing and handing out items.
So I have an inverse problem, particularly as game mechanics relate to actual play, and that is that low level characters *can’t roll for beans.* They can’t do damage, they can’t hit things-they feel like toddlers waving rattles at things.
So, I’m like, well… I’m the GM. I’m going to make some *adjustments.*
In the second dungeon, I hid a very cursed axe under a pile of very strong magical weapons. They were +7 weapons (at level SIX!) and when the party found them, there was a moment of ‘huh this is kind of Monty Haul’ at the table, but everyone dove for their +7 shiny. And as our favorite master of wheels within wheels would say, Just As Planned.
The campaign was conceptualized around a 130% power scale compared to normal Pathfinder; but that made the low level part of the campaign very lethal. So my solution was to give them all +3 to hit things and make a bunch of high powered, but poor playing magic items. They had situational abilities on them, they weren’t optomized toward enemies they would actually fight, etc.
“But why would you give them that much treasure? Then they could just buy whatever they wanted!”
Well, first off… restricted in town purchase lists. And secondly, the +7 weapons were plot items that sealed the power of the very cursed axe, which occasionally roared out and caused random encounters (it was bloodthirsty). They didn’t know the sealing ritual; but they were stuck with the components until they otherwise figured out how to deal with their super cursed weapon.
The axe was ridiculously strong and well optimized. No one dared use it because they were terrified of the curse’s full properties, which they never managed to roll high enough to figure out.
I’ve got reverse-Monty-Hall-ism. None of my Pathfinder characters have ever been at even half WBL after their first level up.
The Monty Haul problem is not to be confused with the Monty Hall problem, despite their shared etymology. One is solved by communication and intuition, the other by rephrasing the same math over and over until you find the explanation that clicks with people.
I typically run games in D&D 4e when I’m GMing and the “Fixed Enhancement Bonuses” system there actually functions.
This means I’m mostly free to give however much loot I feel like is appropriate instead of worrying about budgeting loot drops for an obtuse ‘wealth by level’ table; the party’s combat prowess is almost entirely linked to character level.
A pile of 5 million gold at level 1 won’t let them buy even so much as a +1 shiny stick, and 0 gold at level 20 just makes them moderately inconvenienced on the utility front.
The campaign I’m in has us basically having all the resources of an entire kingdom at our disposal, more or less (as long as we can justify that it’s needed to save said kingdom), but on the flip side the last time we got XPs to increase our characters’ innate power must have been back in 2021 if not 2020, so it’s kind of a wash.
I played in a 3.5 game where we almost never got loot but we got XP like it was candy. It was frustrating, hanging onto spell scrolls that my wizard spent levels waiting to scribe into his spell book.
In a 5E game I had sort of the opposite problem. We got tons of cash but never found anything to spend it on. We couldn’t upgrade any equipment, buy magic items, or even buy real estate. At least building a cool fort or something would have given us something to do with all our gold pieces.
I learned DnD off of a Monty Hall DM & that is the way I operated for my first 5 major campaigns. I also implemented the “treasure pick ladder” (everyone rolls 1d20, highest starts at the top moving down to the bottom, bottom picks twice & then the turn order moves back up the ladder.) Unfortunately for at least 2 of the games this method of generating too many items has led to so much of my efforts of research & homebrew items ignored and forgotten.
Which I have found isn’t actually needed in a group of well adjusted adults.
In fact my latest 2 campaigns have had very little in the way of permanent treasures & have been rocking pretty hard in player investment so far. It has taken me a long time to unlearn the Monty Haul method of treasure generation. Now I do smaller bespoke treasure & gp prizes with players able to ask me about items they want to track down. This with a single homebrew item a session at most has been working a lot better.
This mess is a craft, and we all figure out DM one mistake at a time.
Got any particularly cool homebrew bits to share? 🙂
Well, i think this issue is table dependent, because i am at one where half the PCs get several times more gold than the Average per level, and the DM gives them whatever they want, and they are very happy with it. I have some guesses as to why:
– They are new to roleplaying and that’s why they do not find strange to have so much gold around and the fights being very easy.
– They think that this is like on a Diablo-alike videogames and having more money that one can spend and finding great magic items anywhere is normal, same with killing dozens easily (even before the coin/item surplus).
On my case, more than undeserved treasure, i like less undeserved level up, as in lvling up several times faster. It breaks immersion faster and makes the game feel more like a videogame instead of roleplaying.
On the other side, i am at two tables where all, or half the PCs barely get any treasure.
– On the first case, we have cleared three missions and all we got was when insisting the GM to loot around and took him by surprise, but it was nothing important. I suspect it has to do with the GM not being familiar with DnD alikes.
– On the second the PCs that get less get so little that any new PC begins with quite more gold than any of those veteran PCs have gotten till that moment. Or that the gold my PC have gotten after 5 lvls while adventuring is lower than the one gotten through downtime honest work, or the one that got when i OOC created a auction to sell my Inspiration points. I am half-joking tempted to suicide myself and do the old trick of leaving everything to my son to have a PC with double gold.