When the chests are more valuable than its contents...

[Whitewings]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That strikes me as a bad feature on anything but a peculiar sort of vault (one to hold things you’d rather destroy than give someone else access to them, but are willing to risk someone particularly skilled having access to them rather than destroy). It’s probably not a good thing if the Demon King can get nuked by having someone mess with the door to his castle, even if that someone has to be willing to die to put an end to him (and depending on the nature of how you can trigger the blast, there may be ways around the saboteur dying). He’s probably safe if all he has to worry about are money-hungry murder-hoboes, of course.

In Exalted, a magical building is a bit like a hydroelectric plant and a bit like a microchip: It channels huge amounts of energy, and it's built to very tight tolerances. Mess with the structure too much and it will fail, often catastrophically.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

I would guess that, historically at least, this isn't that unlikely

It isn't unlikely now really. If the drawers holding your underwear or office supplies, or the cabinet you are keeping your boxed instant meals in aren't worth at least a substantial fraction of the contents you might want to rethink your budgeting. Most people didn't own chests to hold treasure - they didn't have any treasure - they kept stuff like the winter blankets, or tools they didn't use regularly because they were too worn out, in them.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It isn't unlikely now really. If the drawers holding your underwear or office supplies, or the cabinet you are keeping your boxed instant meals in aren't worth at least a substantial fraction of the contents you might want to rethink your budgeting. Most people didn't own chests to hold treasure - they didn't have any treasure - they kept stuff like the winter blankets, or tools they didn't use regularly because they were too worn out, in them.

Dunno … there's some cheap ass furniture out there, especially in the private rented sector … of course we have a lot more furniture these days (anyone too poor to own chairs, for example, is probably homeless and has nowhere to put them) and things like fixed furniture are a lot more common which confuses stuff a bit.

Historically, the most common chest in medieval Europe was probably the grain-ark and/or flour chest depending on culture: every household had one because without it your staple diet spoiled and you starved to death. It could, indeed, be virtually the only piece of furniture some peasant families owned. After that, yes, chests were used to store pretty much everything else - and often used as beds or bench seats as well.
Treasury coffers were reserved for those who were actually able to hoard money - aristocrats, wealthy merchants and organisations such as churches, monasteries and guilds. And even then there was a substantial chance they'd be mostly full of high end robes and important documents rather than cash and jewels.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

In Exalted, a magical building is a bit like a hydroelectric plant and a bit like a microchip: It channels huge amounts of energy, and it's built to very tight tolerances. Mess with the structure too much and it will fail, often catastrophically.

Reminds me of that webcomic Digger where the titular wombat is grumbling about the stupidity of dwarves using magic in their engineering...

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Dunno … there's some cheap ass furniture out there, especially in the private rented sector

Yes, but consumables (say, office supplies, or bulk food) are also very cheap. The value over time of the consumables exceeds the container, because they are replaced many times over the container's lifespan, but the value at any given time may well be lower.

[Fred Brackin]

Eberron (D&D 3.5) module "Shadows of the Last War". It's quite good and I have successfuly run it more than once. However, once you start tossing the abandoned staff quarters ot the dungeon/research compound the PCs will find a "bronzewood armoire".

The problem is that "bronzewood" is an Eberron specific quasi-magical amter ial that nouveau riche Druids are suposed to be having plae armor made out of. It goes for 500 GP a pound and since I was DM I had to figure out what the armoire weighed.

On the way out the group passed through solid adamantine doors. Guess who had to figure out what those were worth?

The PCs already had a wagon. See, they ran into a squad of thugs from The Emerald Claw and all of them had a standard equipment pack which included 2 sunrods for each and every one of those 12 soldiers.

Then some supply master back at Claw Central decided that those soldiers would be expending both of those sunrods every day. So to keep that squad in the field you had to send a wagon with them that held...well let's just call it a _lot_ of sunrods. It even had some room left over for the PCs to move their exotic dungeon reno materials.

The players in that game still tell armoire and sunrod stories.

[Black Leviathan]

I built the traps in a magician's tower based on Magic Items. I put "staff" enchantments on rugs or doorframes with enchantments to activate them when people walked on or through them. The tower had some very valuable books and some normally valuable books, a decent amount of coin and some pretty common magical items. The players came back from the South with their haul of treasures and were planning their next adventure when someone started doing the math on the cost of the Doorframe that cast glue and create fire in the room behind you and realize that the powerstones alone that powered those traps were worth more than the treasure they got.

[GasMan]

We have indeed a lot of cheap and abundant furniture these days.
But they're not the end all be all.

For example, KräpShøøt, a cardboard box like living room cabinet made from pressed and glued together woodchips, that once assembled requires several rituals that are akin to turning a furniture item into a lich to have any hope of dis and reassembling it propely after a move.

Versus some oak wood cabinet that's been in someones family for generations now and that was inherently designed to be long lasting, good looking and has all the fixings on it that makes dis and reassembly as painless as possible.

Granted, not exactly dungeon loot, but I'd snap the latter up in a more modern setting any day of the week, even if there's just kitschy tat or an old sock in it.

If people from back-in-the-days could have afforded those things then they would probably have gone with them, instead of crude boxes and whatnot.

Might be culturally different, though. Some might put more focus into decorating things and other cultures could care very little about it, going for utility.
This is the mundane angle, though. Magic? Yeah, quite different.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

I built the traps in a magician's tower based on Magic Items. I put "staff" enchantments on rugs or doorframes with enchantments to activate them when people walked on or through them. The tower had some very valuable books and some normally valuable books, a decent amount of coin and some pretty common magical items. The players came back from the South with their haul of treasures and were planning their next adventure when someone started doing the math on the cost of the Doorframe that cast glue and create fire in the room behind you and realize that the powerstones alone that powered those traps were worth more than the treasure they got.

And this is why you use the Power enchantment for traps like this.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by GasMan

For example, KräpShøøt, a cardboard box like living room cabinet made from pressed and glued together woodchips, that once assembled requires several rituals that are akin to turning a furniture item into a lich to have any hope of dis and reassembling it propely after a move.

And, of course, the proper Ritual of Banishing such items is to haul them out to the curb after the particle board gets wet or broken. From there, they go to the landfill and gradually degrade into methane gas and microparticles of plastic, thus reinforcing their death-aspected nature.

Originally Posted by GasMan

Versus some oak wood cabinet that's been in someones family for generations now and that was inherently designed to be long lasting, good looking and has all the fixings on it that makes dis and reassembly as painless as possible.

OT: You can't give away most types of late Victorian era furniture these days. If you want to make your dwelling's interior look like 221B Baker Street or a Steampunk paradise you can do it on the cheap.