I mean if the chest is self is 800 pounds, then add treasure want to say rough math is 50 coins = 1 pound
A standard coin weighs about a third of an ounce, so fifty coins weigh a pound.
You could almost double the weight with coin. But I don't recall a magic item that just adds weight to something. 800 pounds is also not something you just walk out with that is a lot of weight. Also you can do silly things like they need to reinforce the chest to get it up cause the contents and the chest are too much for the handles. You could add bulky things, art work and large gems. Make them pick and choose what they take with them.
You have to identify what you really want to accomplish here. Do you want the chest to be unliftable or you would like to be a challenge to do so, involving a check of some sort? You don't necessarily need to determine the exact weight of the chest if you don't want the party to be able to leave with it, just say any attempt to lift it fails being t oo heavy. If you instead want some challenge, you can require a Strenght check, with disadvantage if they use rope and pull togheter, perhaps advantage to even the roll, If it's being carried, a check to see if the ladder doesn't break could also be required, which could result in more damaging fall etc...
If you're looking for ways to increase weight via magic item, you could insert a Loadstone in the treasure, which is a cursed item that increase encumbrance and reduce speed.
Have the enlarge/reduce effect active on it, and the weight will increase eightfold. You have the added bonus of challenging the players to figure out a way to remove the enlargement in order to carry off the treasure or fit it out the door.
Have the enlarge/reduce effect active on it, and the weight will increase eightfold. You have the added bonus of challenging the players to figure out a way to remove the enlargement in order to carry off the treasure or fit it out the door.
If that's even what you are looking for.
Not going to lie I really like this and never though of it.
So I just checked on the chest statistics, and I could have sworn they were larger than 2×3×2 feet in dimensions...
Well, that means we can just scale it up by a factor of 8 and still fit it in a medium sized space. So a medium 200~300 lb chest can hold ~2400 lb of loot. A large sized 600~1200 lb chest can hold 5000~10000 lb of loot.
Every one has made great suggestions. I failed to specify the true intent. That is my fault. I just want to make the chest too heavy for the Goliath Barbarian to lift even though there is only three spell scrolls, and two potions in the chest.
Every one has made great suggestions. I failed to specify the true intent. That is my fault. I just want to make the chest too heavy for the Goliath Barbarian to lift even though there is only three spell scrolls, and two potions in the chest.
You can just say it is. Who knows why? It's just weirdly heavy. There's all kinds of things in the multiverse of D&D that the PCs don't understand. This is one of them.
The easiest option is to just use a chest that's built super heavy. A chest with a 2'x3'x2' internal volume and walls that are around 3" of iron or 6" of stone will weigh upwards of 5,000 lb (as far as I can tell you only need a bit over 1200 lb -- 20 str, x15 for max carry, x2 for max lift, x2 for goliath counting as a large, is 1,200 lb).
Alternately, leave it weighing 800 lb and make the ladder only able to hold 400 lb. Or make it bigger than the door into the basement. This won't stop a creative party willing to do a bit of engineering work, but it's no longer a simple brute force problem.
Every one has made great suggestions. I failed to specify the true intent. That is my fault. I just want to make the chest too heavy for the Goliath Barbarian to lift even though there is only three spell scrolls, and two potions in the chest.
2 questions: 1)Why would your barbarian take the whole chest when it's contents will fit into a pouch? 2) Why is that a problem?
I assumed you wanted to make a chest full of loot too heavy to move so they had to pick and choose what they could carry instead of drag out the whole chest.
An immovable rod placed on the bottom and turned on would make it non movable. At least until it was found and turned off.
Or just bolt it to the floor.
Or hide it under the floor and build the floor over it.
But as long as it can be opened it doesn't matter. The goods inside can be stolen.
build the floor over it! hah, now i'm imagining one of those annoying "pull the pin, get the treasure" phone-app ads where the player in the video always manages to drop inexplicable hot ceiling lava onto their treasure followed by releasing a pond of water onto that to become solid rock. oh, gee!
...hmm, although maybe it would be fun to give the characters a warm vat of molasses to knock over onto some kobolds only to realize minutes later that most of it drained into a basement. okay, so now we know there's a basement! having done so, is that chest in the back corner of the basement worth the trouble of retrieving it? and how does warm (or, depending on the players' ingenuity, chilled perhaps) molasses interact with pressure plates and floor spike traps...
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Every one has made great suggestions. I failed to specify the true intent. That is my fault. I just want to make the chest too heavy for the Goliath Barbarian to lift even though there is only three spell scrolls, and two potions in the chest.
Most of the time characters take the content not the chest, but even if they do it's not a big deal, a typical chest in the rulebook is worth 5 gp, weight 25 lbs and has a capacity of 12 cubic feet/300 pounds gear so it can be a useful container but is still somewhat limited.
If you really doesn't want them to have the chest, you can always make it much larger and heavier so it 's too bulky to handle, require two hands to carry, doesn't easily pass through doorways etc... this will quickly discourage take out.
I mean a chest of 2x2x3ft measurements for arguments sake would hold 12 cubic feet of material. I did this recently and 11 cubic feet of gold in the real world weighs around 1200lbs. Copper weighs in around 550lb per cubic feet, so I'd just make it a chest full of copper pieces. It'll still seem like a lot, and will weigh 5500lbs with ten cubic feet.
For individual coin if it weighs half an ounce, then this chest would have 176000 copper pieces. Or 1760 gold pieces equivalent.
Personally though, I'd just have the container be immoveable. If it's welded to the floor for example then the items within are going to be difficult to get out of the area. After all an adventurer's backpack only holds one cubic feet/thirty pounds of weight. That isn't enough to manhandle the contents of a chest out. Assuming you haven't granted use of handy haversacks, bags of holding, or portable holes (most of which would circumvent what you're trying to do anyway), then simply falling back on adventurer carry weight and encumbrance means they're actually going to struggle to physically carry whatever it is you're wanting to be difficult to carry.
As an example early on in one campaign I presented a bookcase and had someone say 'I take all of the books'. Great stuff! You sheath your weapon and are now carrying a stack of books so tall you can't see over the top. 'Oh, can't I just put them in my backpack'. You've already put as many as you can in the backpack...you only had room for three. 'Oh, er....will anyone else take some?'. This player had experience but their DMs previously had all either handed out bags of holding like sweets, or just ignored encumbrance and the like.
While, it's cool if your party don't like the limits that encumbrance and weight set upon a party, you're actively making the job as DM more difficult if you intend to make something difficult to get hold of or carry out of an area by ignoring those limits. So, it's a stylistic choice you need to make I guess. Do you got full on harsh inventory, ignore it, or make it situational. Either way, just flag it to the party.
In this case though, I love the floating rod idea. Have the chest be constructed around a floating rod such that you can't see the rod or the button to deactivate it.
Unless it's a dragon hoard with tons of coins, i wounld't bother counting coins weight in loot the party finds. I'm also not fond of placing treasure too heavy to haul both as player and DM. Whenever there's too many coins to carry, copper and silver pieces usually end up ditched anyway.
I wouldn't bother myself with maths. It's time consuming without adding any gameplay value. Being able to just make things the way you like it is one of the best things about being the DM in a high fantasy setting.
You want a medium sized chest to weight 5000 pounds?
By the Grace of My Gracious Dungeon Masterness, Abrakadabra. I now have a magic chest that weighs 5000 pounds despite of its contents. It's yours if you want it. 😉
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As a DM, I have a treasure chest that weighs 800 pounds. I have placed the chest in the basement. The only access to the basement is a wooden ladder.
I would like to find a way to make that treasure chest weigh 5000 to 6000 pounds. (i.e. make it difficult to carry, especially up a ladder)
I seem to remember a magic item that can increase the weight, like a stone that when put inside the chest would make the chest super heavy.
I mean if the chest is self is 800 pounds, then add treasure want to say rough math is 50 coins = 1 pound
A standard coin weighs about a third of an ounce, so fifty coins weigh a pound.
You could almost double the weight with coin. But I don't recall a magic item that just adds weight to something. 800 pounds is also not something you just walk out with that is a lot of weight. Also you can do silly things like they need to reinforce the chest to get it up cause the contents and the chest are too much for the handles. You could add bulky things, art work and large gems. Make them pick and choose what they take with them.
You have to identify what you really want to accomplish here. Do you want the chest to be unliftable or you would like to be a challenge to do so, involving a check of some sort? You don't necessarily need to determine the exact weight of the chest if you don't want the party to be able to leave with it, just say any attempt to lift it fails being t oo heavy. If you instead want some challenge, you can require a Strenght check, with disadvantage if they use rope and pull togheter, perhaps advantage to even the roll, If it's being carried, a check to see if the ladder doesn't break could also be required, which could result in more damaging fall etc...
If you're looking for ways to increase weight via magic item, you could insert a Loadstone in the treasure, which is a cursed item that increase encumbrance and reduce speed.
Have the enlarge/reduce effect active on it, and the weight will increase eightfold. You have the added bonus of challenging the players to figure out a way to remove the enlargement in order to carry off the treasure or fit it out the door.
If that's even what you are looking for.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
An immovable rod placed on the bottom and turned on would make it non movable. At least until it was found and turned off.
Or just bolt it to the floor.
Or hide it under the floor and build the floor over it.
But as long as it can be opened it doesn't matter. The goods inside can be stolen.
Not going to lie I really like this and never though of it.
So I just checked on the chest statistics, and I could have sworn they were larger than 2×3×2 feet in dimensions...
Well, that means we can just scale it up by a factor of 8 and still fit it in a medium sized space. So a medium 200~300 lb chest can hold ~2400 lb of loot. A large sized 600~1200 lb chest can hold 5000~10000 lb of loot.
So seriously, just weigh it down with treasure.
You could sovereign glue it to the floor.
Every one has made great suggestions. I failed to specify the true intent. That is my fault. I just want to make the chest too heavy for the Goliath Barbarian to lift even though there is only three spell scrolls, and two potions in the chest.
You can just say it is. Who knows why? It's just weirdly heavy. There's all kinds of things in the multiverse of D&D that the PCs don't understand. This is one of them.
Nothing is stopping you from just saying the chest seems much heavier then it should be.
The easiest option is to just use a chest that's built super heavy. A chest with a 2'x3'x2' internal volume and walls that are around 3" of iron or 6" of stone will weigh upwards of 5,000 lb (as far as I can tell you only need a bit over 1200 lb -- 20 str, x15 for max carry, x2 for max lift, x2 for goliath counting as a large, is 1,200 lb).
Alternately, leave it weighing 800 lb and make the ladder only able to hold 400 lb. Or make it bigger than the door into the basement. This won't stop a creative party willing to do a bit of engineering work, but it's no longer a simple brute force problem.
2 questions: 1)Why would your barbarian take the whole chest when it's contents will fit into a pouch? 2) Why is that a problem?
I assumed you wanted to make a chest full of loot too heavy to move so they had to pick and choose what they could carry instead of drag out the whole chest.
You could build a false floor in the bottom of the treasure chest and put an Immoveable Rod in there.
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Just make a magic item “immovable chest” that has the same properties as the immovable rod.
build the floor over it! hah, now i'm imagining one of those annoying "pull the pin, get the treasure" phone-app ads where the player in the video always manages to drop inexplicable hot ceiling lava onto their treasure followed by releasing a pond of water onto that to become solid rock. oh, gee!
...hmm, although maybe it would be fun to give the characters a warm vat of molasses to knock over onto some kobolds only to realize minutes later that most of it drained into a basement. okay, so now we know there's a basement! having done so, is that chest in the back corner of the basement worth the trouble of retrieving it? and how does warm (or, depending on the players' ingenuity, chilled perhaps) molasses interact with pressure plates and floor spike traps...
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
Most of the time characters take the content not the chest, but even if they do it's not a big deal, a typical chest in the rulebook is worth 5 gp, weight 25 lbs and has a capacity of 12 cubic feet/300 pounds gear so it can be a useful container but is still somewhat limited.
If you really doesn't want them to have the chest, you can always make it much larger and heavier so it 's too bulky to handle, require two hands to carry, doesn't easily pass through doorways etc... this will quickly discourage take out.
I mean a chest of 2x2x3ft measurements for arguments sake would hold 12 cubic feet of material. I did this recently and 11 cubic feet of gold in the real world weighs around 1200lbs. Copper weighs in around 550lb per cubic feet, so I'd just make it a chest full of copper pieces. It'll still seem like a lot, and will weigh 5500lbs with ten cubic feet.
For individual coin if it weighs half an ounce, then this chest would have 176000 copper pieces. Or 1760 gold pieces equivalent.
Personally though, I'd just have the container be immoveable. If it's welded to the floor for example then the items within are going to be difficult to get out of the area. After all an adventurer's backpack only holds one cubic feet/thirty pounds of weight. That isn't enough to manhandle the contents of a chest out. Assuming you haven't granted use of handy haversacks, bags of holding, or portable holes (most of which would circumvent what you're trying to do anyway), then simply falling back on adventurer carry weight and encumbrance means they're actually going to struggle to physically carry whatever it is you're wanting to be difficult to carry.
As an example early on in one campaign I presented a bookcase and had someone say 'I take all of the books'. Great stuff! You sheath your weapon and are now carrying a stack of books so tall you can't see over the top. 'Oh, can't I just put them in my backpack'. You've already put as many as you can in the backpack...you only had room for three. 'Oh, er....will anyone else take some?'. This player had experience but their DMs previously had all either handed out bags of holding like sweets, or just ignored encumbrance and the like.
While, it's cool if your party don't like the limits that encumbrance and weight set upon a party, you're actively making the job as DM more difficult if you intend to make something difficult to get hold of or carry out of an area by ignoring those limits. So, it's a stylistic choice you need to make I guess. Do you got full on harsh inventory, ignore it, or make it situational. Either way, just flag it to the party.
In this case though, I love the floating rod idea. Have the chest be constructed around a floating rod such that you can't see the rod or the button to deactivate it.
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Unless it's a dragon hoard with tons of coins, i wounld't bother counting coins weight in loot the party finds. I'm also not fond of placing treasure too heavy to haul both as player and DM. Whenever there's too many coins to carry, copper and silver pieces usually end up ditched anyway.
I wouldn't bother myself with maths. It's time consuming without adding any gameplay value. Being able to just make things the way you like it is one of the best things about being the DM in a high fantasy setting.
You want a medium sized chest to weight 5000 pounds?
By the Grace of My Gracious Dungeon Masterness, Abrakadabra. I now have a magic chest that weighs 5000 pounds despite of its contents. It's yours if you want it. 😉
Finland GMT/UTC +2