Musings on Incentives and Profit Margins in the World of Dungeons & Dragons

Friend Jon is, by most accounts, a strange bird. As he has become increasingly more familiar with boardroom lingo, he has begun to offer some interesting commentary on nerd-stuff. Here is a taste, to hopefully get the old GDK juices flowing.

"So I've been thinking about it. The reward always ends up being 'friendship, or some shit.'

You know why?

By the time you finally progress enough to the point where you're going to score a bunch of cool shit when you beat the big bad guy, the bad guy encounter invariably always kills 1 person.

So, by heist mathematics, loot + 1 less person with whom to split the loot = win.

But no, you're adventuring bros, and having lived on the road you've done unspeakable things together (both inside and outside of the dungeon), so you don't say 'yea, f that dead guy, more for us' it always is 'aww man, that sucks, let's spend a disproportionate amount of money to bring them back.'

And then the merchants come along and say 'hey, you can't use any of that loot you worked so hard for, you know, the loot your best friend died for. I can help you sell that. FOR A 50% CUT.' Doesn't matter how much the item sells for, it's always 50% margin. Talk about wizards, I wish you could keep a 50% margin on EVERYTHING, now that's magical.

'Don't want to sell it? That's cool, I'll trade you, for an item 50% less than the cost of your item. Think you can do better selling it on your own? Wrong.' Somehow everyone in the world will only pay half price for anything. Except for you. You have to pay full price. Everywhere. Haggle? Congrats you roll a natural 20. You get a 5% discount.

So now you have half the amount (in gold) that your buddy died for. You go to the church and they say, 'No problem we'll help you out, we're the church and we're good. Ok 1 friend back to life. That will be 5,000 gold.' Discount? 'Magic fueled by an immortal deity doesn't grow on trees, dude.' 'What do you mean you 'only have' 6,000 gold to be split 5 ways? I'm not mean, I'm not asking for all your gold. Only what amounts to 5/6 of your already pilfered loot. That still leaves you with 1k gold. At 4th level. I mean, that's still 200 gold per person.'

So next time you want to go adventuring, just go and turn a couple of tricks out behind the back of the local tavern instead. You may still only make 200 gold after getting screwed twice, but at least nobody died.