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

The greatest danger Gabriel's characters are likely to face is literally drowning in their platinum wealth.

—Penny Arcade, DM 101

Monty Hall (note the lack of a "U") was the host on the game show Let's 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.

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.

This doesn't have much to do with the Monty Hall Problem, a probability puzzle whose name also comes from the game show host.

Examples of Monty Haul include:

Comics

Knights of the Dinner Table the seasoned regular Game Masters generally either run balanced campaigns or go the opposite direction of this trope. However, when Bob or Dave step behind the screen to run a game, it goes this route.

Literature

This trope plays an unusually huge role in the book, Slathbog's Gold.

Tabletop Games

The biggest perpetrator of this has been Dungeons and Dragons, mostly because it's the only game that new players have heard of and because most new Game Masters have no idea what it takes to run a fun and balanced game. That being said, this trope is frequently and incorrectly invoked when a player of an older edition encounters a newer edition (the complaint running along the lines that the new edition is all Monty Haul compared to the good old days). This fails to take into account several things:
- Each edition is its own game, balanced around its own set of expectations.
- This trope cannot be described in absolute terms, but is entirely relative to the expectations of the game.
- While each advancing edition has objectively made magical items more and more common, they have also become increasingly required in order to function at the expected level. Any magical items at all were only a bonus in AD&D, while fourth edition made a steady treadmill of ever-more-powerful weapons and armors a mandatory part of not dying horribly. Trying to apply a fourth edition approach to AD&D would indeed result in Monty Haul gameplay, but someone taking the AD&D approach to fourth edition would instead be a Killer Game Master.

Webcomics

Referenced briefly but used incorrectly in Goblins. Forgoth mentions that Minmax cannot simply walk into a blacksmith shop and buy a magic sword, as that would be too Monty Haul, but that's exactly what PCs are expected to do with their treasure. (If you look in the DM's guide, it clearly says a PC can generally buy any magic item on the list, though they need to look for a seller.) Monty Haul only comes in when PCs have too much money for their level.
- However, at the same time, the campaign itself definitely is Monty Haul. All the heroes are low-level, but have improbably powerful magic items that even the playing field. The paladin has an axe that acts as the can for a world-destroying demon, the cleric has a spear that multiplies when thrown and then returns to his hand, and the minmaxer recently got a sword made out of oblivion.
  - Which is perhaps fair enougth, concidering everything else.
Jerry Holkins (Tycho) accuses Mike Krahulik (Gabe) of this in Penny Arcade. Tycho decides to balance it.

Western Animation

Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory, after taking over DM-ship of Dexter's game. Considering that Dexter was a Killer GM, they were much happier with Dee Dee.

Video Games

The Diablo series and the majority of its clones tend to be like this in the end game. Bosses and major loot caches will often release a screen-filling fountain of gold and enchanted gear- from which players will pick the one or two very best pieces and leave the rest lying on the floor.
- Slightly subverted in that at early levels, the player will want to keep anything that's better than the standard vendor gear. For a game where the whole point is to constantly upgrade your equipment, the progression is fairly even.
High Rate Private Servers of any given MMORPG 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.
A lot of user-created modules or modifications for The Elder Scrolls and Neverwinter Nights are simple dispensers of XP and loot. Many of them who have actual plot can also fall into this due to being made by non-professionals.
Many badly made designs for Unlimited Adventures shower the characters with money. One design in particular (From Beggars to Heroes) was content to throw thousands of money at you for the meekest reason. (For example, as poor beggars in the starting town, you can walk around and meet an unlimited number of rich people every few steps who will shower you with riches every time.) Oh, and you get experience for these, too.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. also had its share of mods which purported to 'improve' the gameplay but in the process dumped some of the game's best weapons and gear into the player's arms near the very beginning. Kind of ruins the 'scavenge and survive' experience when your stuff is already better than everyone else's...
- Brutally averted with some mods such as MISERY, which makes things like food and ammo painfully scarce.
Dungeon Siege encouraged this by adding pack mules and Traggs, creatures with above normal carrying capacity, but minimal fighting capabilty. Naturally it's a trade off between combat power and hauling size.
Fable, while in itself the game isn't a Monty Haul, if you spend an hour or two doing a job to afford some real estate, the returns on the investment are used to buy more real estate (which pays you every five minutes) eventually become so huge that you have so much money you have no idea what to do with it all.
Fallout 3's Operation Anchorage DLC takes the player through a short, relentlessly linear, and relatively easy (depending on character build) campaign, at the end of which you're awarded with a treasure trove of goodies not available anywhere in the core game.
- Many Fallout players consider Fallout 3 to be a Monty Haul campaign in general, especially compared to previous installments and the sequel New Vegas.
- The Black Jack tables in New Vegas (and more so the slot machines if you have high luck and too much time on your hands) are ridiculously easy ways to clean out every casino that has these minigames and earn up to 100,000 caps.
- The treasure at the end of the Dead Money DLC is 37f gold bars worth 10,000 caps each (though each weight 35 lbs and there's a time limit before the vault self-destructs). However, that is a subversion: not only are you expected to just leave 'em there, they are also worth less (per pound) than many other items. The weapons and equipment found as well are good, though not completely game-breaking. Finally, by beating the DLC the player gets access to a Matter Replicator vending machine that takes the special Sierra Madre chips which you get a bunch of every 3 days. On the other hand, killing Fiends is much more fun and rewarding, unless you need very special items.
Borderlands is this, but it's an odd example since Vendor Trash, Randomly Drops and (at the end of the game) Money for Nothing/Money Sink are all in play
Dragon Age Origins has the "Soldier's Peak DLC". Accept a quest, spend 10 minutes mowing down underpowered Mooks, proceed to a vendor offering the best weapons and armor in the game. Granted, you might have to spend another 10 minutes mowing down money spiders and selling off their Vendor Trash...
- The DLC takes about an hour to get through and is fairly difficult. And by the time you'll be able to afford and use that vendor's high-level equipment, you'll damn well need it.
- The Awakening expansion also throws more money at the player then he may know what to do with. This is in stark contrast to the original campaign, where money is quite tight (barring DLCs and a single developer oversight that requires a lot of loading screens). Players new to the expansion may be shocked to find quest related NPCs requesting of them things on the order of dozens of gold pieces to commission some sort of order—a small fortune in the original campaign, pocket change in Awakening. With so much money available, you wonder why the Warden doesn't just hire a couple hundred mercenary soldiers to build up his otherwise vastly outnumbered forces.
The Architect Entertainment buildings in City of Heroes were created to allow players to write their own story arcs for other players to enjoy. Among most of the community, however, it's better known for its "farm" missions, as they're called. It's gotten to the point where some farms have earned "Hall of Fame" status for having so many favorable ratings among players. The earliest farms would take advantage of exploits to allow characters to go from creation to level cap in a single day of beating up defenseless enemies for disproportionately high XP. Naturally, the devs did not take kindly to this, and closed such loopholes whenever they find them, even banning the most Egregious exploiters of them. Newer farms aren't quite as efficient, and are not cracked down upon as forcefully, however.
In the MMO Star Trek Online, it is ridiculously easy to gain the best gear and equipment for little risk via earning special ingame currency, and via crafting said gear using easiy farmed resources called "data samples". Also any dropped gear that's rare but you don't need can be sold on the player exchange for insane amounts of ingame currency. Many players become multi-millionaires this way, making said currency practically worthless - save for some special items like rare bridge officers that boost your in-space abilities (only one type which is so rare that it sells for millions on its own).
- Subverted now for crafting when the game went free to play, as crafting high level items now requires Dilithium. Which can only be produced in quantities of 8,000 a day, and most items require around 12,000 Dilithium to craft. Only players willing to spend real money on the game to trade it to others for Dilithium can really craft the high level items.