Talking about Treasure Types
For most of my D&D-playing life, I've given very little thought to the Treasure Type tables. You just roll the percentile dice against a creature's listed type and cobble together its treasure hoard, and that's that. Easy-peasy. I never considered whether or not there were reasons behind those numbers in the table, why some types had larger or smaller chances for larger or smaller amounts of particular kinds of coins, why so many entries in the table were "Nil," or why some seemed not to be used at all. If tedious minutiae are your jam, then join me now on a deep dive into the B/X Treasure Type tables! The first thing I did in my analysis was to calculate the average value of each Treasure Type. I had finished this step before I realized the books provide average values already, and I'm glad I did, because the book values seem a bit... wonky. Some of them are right in the same ballpark as my calculations, and could simply be the result of different roundi...