Gold coins, precious jewels, crowns, sceptres, exquisite sculptures, magical weapons, tomes of forbidden knowledge… the pursuit of loot is a time-honored motive for Dungeons and Dragons adventures. But it's all too easy for loot to turn into just another number the players need to keep track of, and for wondrous treasures to become little more than busywork. If loot has lost its lustre in your D&D campaign, these five tips will help you bring the sparkle back.
This article will be most useful to Dungeon Masters, but if you're a player and you like one of these ideas you can always suggest it to your DM (perhaps along with a bribe of snacks). For player focused content, Wargamer's guides to the D&D classes and D&D races are a great place to start.
Make loot the star of the show
Loot can be forgettable because it's anonymous - coins, jewels, and generic magic artefacts are like the green drops in Diablo, something that pops up during an adventure, not the focus of it. But the search for a specific treasure can make an excellent focus for a story: think of The Rod of Seven Parts in DnD; Thorin's Quest for the Arkenstone in The Hobbit; and the search for the Holy Grail in several epics of early European literature (and the best Indiana Jones movie).
The Dungeon Master's Guide only really suggests you do this with Artifacts, incredibly powerful and unique magic items. But you can make any loot more exciting by giving it history, rumors, and aura, starting at the lowest levels.
Say the players are fighting bandits. Rather than giving each bandit a few gold coins, pool it all into a treasure horde. Have a travelling peddler who escaped from the bandits spread tales of this wealth. If you're planning to arm the bandit captain with a +1 sword, give it a name - Backbiter! - and a history - it was unearthed from the tomb of an ancient Orc Warlord, claimed by the first bandit chief of these woods, and taken up as a prize by each new bandit chief after murdering his predecessor. Remind the players how remarkable their actions are!
Make loot into a challenge
When the loot is a small, high value gem, it goes onto the character sheet and the players forget about it. But what if it's a two ton statue made of onyx? Then it's not a reward at the end of the adventure, it's part of the adventure.
Original D&D gave loot weight. Carrying a haul of gold coins meant loading yourself down, slowing down your progress - a significant problem whether you're trying to escape from an angry wyvern, or through the mountains before the pass freezes for the winter. Hirelings could help you carry it, but could you trust them not to try and escape with it during the night?
If you don't want to simulate encumbrance, there are other ways to make loot into a challenge. What if the treasure is an incredibly fragile crystal harp? What if it's a cursed idol that emits necrotic energy that continually drains the party until they return it to holy ground? What if there are other groups after this treasure, who will unerringly pursue the party as long as they have it?
You can even turn an adventure on its head by giving the party the treasure at the start, and then make the challenge holding onto it. The psychology of loss aversion should make everything feel a lot more tense for the players - humans hate to lose things.
Make the loot flow
The Cypher system (first implemented in the game Numenera) has a really interesting approach to loot - just about everything is a consumable, and players receive new loot very often. This means the players always have something new to play with, but they're forced to experiment and get creative with what they find. If your players like the 'ding' factor of picking up a new toy, or you want to make a world feel very high magic, this is a good option.
You can implement this in D&D by simply giving permanent magical items a finite lifespan: it could be one session, one long rest, whatever you like, as long as the players keep finding replacements at the correct rate (and you adjust buy and sell prices accordingly).
If players don't want to have to keep changing the shape of the weapon and armor they're using, you could keep the base item the same but make the magical properties finite - perhaps magical weapons in this world use socketable charge gems, or attune to their wielder after they drink a specific potion.
Give the loot a purpose
Loot can be spent on many things beyond simply upgrading the player characters and buying the occasional diamond for a resurrection - but players won't always think to use their cash this way unless that's an explicit goal. You only have to give them such a goal and it can shape the arc of an adventure, or even a whole campaign.
Original D&D grew out of a wargame campaign system, and it assumed players would spend their treasure building and maintaining a small kingdom. This kind of fantasy lets a player go from a Fighter to a Knight of the Realm to the master of a whole squadron of cavalry, and change the scope of the game from local to global. The Bastion system in the 2024 DM guide provides a generic framework for this kind of play.
Conversely, you can give the players an ongoing expense they must keep on top of if they want to keep adventuring. Paying the bills is basically the core motivator in the sci-fi RPG Traveller, and the TV show Firefly. Maybe the players have a battered old Spelljammer that has to be continually patched up: if they can't keep up with payments, they'll have to choose between launching in a dangerously unsafe vessel, or taking on debts from some very unpleasant characters.
Cash goals for players can have emotional stakes - like buying the orphanage the players were raised in before it's razed by a property developer - or practical stakes for the plot - funding a resistance movement against a dictatorship; aiding magical research into trans-dimensional travel; opening a spy ring in another realm.
Make loot everything
In original D&D and Advanced D&D, and some games inspired by them, the vast majority of experience that players gained was based on the gold coin value of treasure they returned to civilization - in my home games, I define civilization as anywhere you can buy ale and rent a bed by the hour. Some systems require players to pay for trainers to turn experience into levels; others grant additional XP for simply wasting cash on carousing. In the psychedelic hexcrawl The Painted Wasteland, players can convert their cash into XP by buying souvenirs.
This makes loot the most important factor for levelling up characters. It's an incredibly simple and effective hook to motivate player behavior, and you can implement it in 5e simply by inflating the cash rewards to provide enough XP to progress in levels at an appropriate rate.
While the system as it appeared in original D&D tends to promote mercenary behavior, you can simply rewire what the players need to do to turn cash into XP to change the vibes. You can even have each player nominate somewhere that their money will go that reflects their character: the Rogue has a debt to pay; the Paladin makes donations to their temple's poor fund; the Wizard is contributing to a new High Magic Laboratory as part of the magic academy. Nicely, this connects the players into the world, giving the DM plot hooks to play with, a source of NPCs, allies, and antagonists, and a way to give a concrete reflection of the players' progress.
What do you think? Do you or your DM use any of these systems in your games? Are you going to try any of them in your next adventure? Do you have some top tips of your own? We'd love to hear them in the official Wargamer Discord community!