An annoying and sometimes humorous habit players get into is looting everything that isn’t nailed down. Really ingenious players will start looting things that are nailed down. I’m talking doors, blankets, cooking pots and random household items. If they think that they can carry or even hire/steal wagons from a nearby village they will haul off anything. And it’s just not about the money. Like a bunch of starving college students dumpster diving, more than one party of adventurers has furnished their keep with furniture they looted from the local dungeon.
1. Encumbrance: It’s a pain in the ass to keep track of but even if distributed among five characters 30 short swords, 20 suits of leather armor, 10 suits of chain mail and 50 pairs of boots can get pretty heavy and at least really bulky.
2. Cosmetic Appeal: Just because it’s a a masterwork sword doesn’t mean local blacksmith will buy it. Dwarves have no need for giant weapons. Elves wouldn’t be caught dead brandishing a bunch rusty orc swords.
3. The Local Economy: The locals just might not have enough money to buy the stuff.
4. Breaking stuff: Nothing ever breaks. No matter how much damage or what type. Paper scrolls never burn. Potion bottles never break, Armor is never shattered or destroyed. And villains never use the stuff that they’re carrying. Break it. Use it. Burn it.
5.Time pressure/Reinforcements: They can’t loot if they don’t have the time.
And finally:
6. Naked goons: All of your goons can be evil nudist monks. But then the PC’s would probably just try to sell goons’ organs on the black market.
Mar 112009
Chuck on 
Banesfinger on 
You’re missing the point. None of those things will work. In a culture where mass manufacturing doesn’t exist belts and boots become extremely valuable and there will always be a market for them and thus a reason to loot. Morals don’t often come into play because in a medieval culture it’s about survival, and thus someone being looted obviously didn’t.
What you can do however is not put your goons in a Vaccuume. If goons attack in a city then there are guards who will immediately be coming to investigate the commotion which means looting will be restricted to only the most frisky rifling through pockets or grabbing dropped weapons. Or you can institute a caste system that the goons are from. It also becomes very hard to pawn looted goods when everyone knows the goons you murdered and pawning their personal possessions tells everyone you were the one who murdered them.
As for dungeon looting… well dungeons in the traditional sense are granite rock walls some iron shackels and straw on the floor. Oh and maybe a bucket for a chamber pot if the king is generous. More ruinous passages I’d say would be more like an archeology mission. You put pretty mosaic’s on the walls, most normal explorers will definitely go to the trouble to carve them out and put them on a cart to sell to a collector. Sure the explosive runes will deter them the first time and the 2nd if they’re really stupid but if they’re persistant and care for wealth at all they’ll be diffusing those annoying traps and walking off with the ropes, spikes and blades that made them. After all if they’ve lasted the past 200 years they must be really good quality.
Actually, I wasn’t all that serious about this post. My tongue was planted firmly in cheek.
Most rpg systems (starting with D&D…) reward this behaviour. Kill things, loot thier stuff, repeat.
You don’t get XP for passing by a big pile of gold. Instead, you take that gold, buy more powerful items, which in turn lets you kill more powerful creatures (which have bigger treasures).
Why punish the players for playing ‘smart’?
I think if you want to play ‘more realistically’ like your post suggests, you would need to examine the game’s rules for reward (XP)…
Wonderful insight