Monty Haul - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Monty Haul

Mode: Monty Haul. Any campaign where the gamemaster doles out huge amounts of experience/treasure/power/other rewards. Usually becomes stupefyingly pointless after the player characters become the most wealthy/powerful beings in the universe.

— Jason Sartin, RPG Cliches

Monty Hall (note the lack of a "U") was the host on the game show Lets Make A Deal, which was cancelled before some of you were born. The show could give away massive amounts of prizes to the lucky (or cunning or destined-to-win or however they pick winners on game shows).

A Monty Haul campaign (with a "U") was the generic label for a Game Master (and his/her campaign) who would run adventures that were like game show giveaways, except the questions weren't as hard. Players would end up staggering under the loads of gold and gems (except the encumbrance rules often were ignored as well) and cherry-picking which magic items they wanted to keep because they had so many to choose from. Think of Conan The Barbarian with a Star Destroyer.

Also, in the first and second editions of Dungeons And Dragons, you got experience based on how much money you looted, one to one. So the Monty Haul characters would also end up with stratospheric levels, which led to situations like characters assassinating ''gods'' like Thor to gain their nifty weapons.

This is a situation greatly deplored by most gamers, and discouraged sternly in the gamemaster's section of all later games, but it is assumed that everyone went through this stage at some early point in his gaming "career."

In some other cases though, the Monty Haul game master may be a case of Suspicious Game Master Generosity since sometimes they may take it to bring upon an already dangerous foe and give him a slew of new tricks or has their stats tweaked for whatever to get ready for a tougher battle.

Naturally, no troper here ever descended so low.

Note that this trope doesn't quite apply to video games or computer RPGs, because in those, someone else set up the world. Also, many video games seem to either encourage or require the sort of player (or the sort of game play) who would take a broom to a dungeon, to make sure he swept up all the coins.

The opposite to this is the Killer Game Master, who delivers death and horror to the PCs in place of treasure and godlike power.

Examples:

Western Animation

Dee Dee from Dexters Laboratory, after being allowed into a party consisting of Dexter and his friends. The final segment of the game was even illustrated as a game show.

Video Games

High Rate Private Servers are more often then not Monty Hauls meant to fuel a player's armory with the weapon needed to fight big bosses and most of all each other.