The party that wanted to murder their Paladin for gold.

[Molochio]

This is a story of one of the many adventures of my paladin, Count Morgenstein, and his group, who's members changed often over the years. In this tale, the group encountered an evil necromancer in their travels who had enslaved a whole town, and we thought it best to put him to death and bring about emancipation for those people.
The party at this time 6th level and composed of:

Count Morgenstein - 47 year old human paladin of Siamorphe with exception charisma. Morgenstein was actually an old adventurer who won his title, land, and a handsome manor house through service, then retired.
After his wife died in childbirth bearing a son, the son vanished on a paladin quest at age 16, and his daughter became a shadow mage and ran off with a lover, Morgenstein found the peaceful life empty and started adventuring again from lv 1 with various companions.

Darmok - a human evoker with a poor grasp for the radius on many of his spell effects, who became known for often burning, shocking, and freezing members of our group along with the monsters due to negligence or incompetence.

Wren - a monk with a philosophy based on hedonism she was almost always drunk or in search of carnal pleasures with any handsome individual she could find. When not engaged in these things she helped others so that they too might enjoy life.

Allen - a charismatic half elven bard and a dandy, he was always well dressed and carried a trained black hawk upon his wrist.

W.a.l.t. - a Thri kreen alterationist fascinated with alchemy and various sciences, I forget this noble creatures real named because Wren found it difficult to pronounce and opted to call him Walt (wierd alien looking thing.)
Sadly, dispite his protests, the name stuck.

Kareemna - a beautiful elven enchantress. Vain, manipulative, and always willing to exploit the desires of men without ever giving anything of herself.

Now the group had been on the road for some time heading home from a campaign in,late summer when they stopped in a town where the people where depressed and despondent.

After asking around in the local taverns, we came to find why.
A necromancer had discovered that the town was sitting on top of a rich gold mine and decided to exploit that for his own purposes.

After using powerful undead to kill all who opposed him, he animated the fallen and proceeded to have his undead mine gold day and night. This did not dramatically improve town life as he used most if the gold for private purposes and whenever he needed more dead, he would simply murder townsfolk and animate them.

Thus the people lived in misery and fear, never knowing when they might be next due to a cave in at the mine. Seeing how wrong this was our party set out for the mine at once and put all the undead there to the sword.

Upon finding his set up unraveled, the furious necromancer showed up with hulking undead monstrosities and after a long battle, we slew him as well, and none of our companions, save for Allen had been too gravely wounded.
Allen was able to recover with a healing portion.

After it was all said and done we stood there in the gold mine surrounded by a LOT of mined gold. Carts of it!
To which many of the party cheered, "We're rich!"
It was readily assumed that we would take ALL of the gold and spend it at once, Allen, Wren, and Darmok, excitedly discussing all that they would buy and do, when Morgenstein spoke in opposition to them saying, "You can not take ALL of the people's gold! It is their town's livelihood and they will still need it to survive."

Allen argued that it was our reward for saving them from tyranny and Wren that they were in no place to use the gold before we saved them so it's only right that we should enjoy it all, and Darmok nodded in agreement.

My paladin spook his head and said, "To take all of these people's gold is wrong! I will NOT allow it."

At which point the monk stepped forth and uttered the famous words, "Time to die old man!"

The bard and the evoker agreed with her sentiment and our enchantress said nothing.
So Count Morgenstein drew his long sword and prepared for the party's attacks against him.

It was then that Walt spoke, urging for a more reasonable course of action and expressing that it was greatly wrong to murder the man who had taken them into his house as family. The alterationist suggested a compromise of only taking SOME of the gold. A share, split evenly between our party members.

There was some grumbling and bitterness, but eventually everyone agreed on this course and the bulk of the gold stayed with the people, who expressed their gratitude. Then our party continued on their way home.

Sadly, our bard was ambushed and he died shortly thereafter in a manner I shall not disclose because others might find his end disturbing, but the effect gold can have on a group is note worthy.

To this day, as a DM, I do not place adventures in a gold mine.
Instead, I use salt.
It's better to avoid any scenario where more than half the party wants to murder another PC, wouldn't you agree?

[Slade]

I don't know, salt sells for a decent rate. But it will likely cause less greed.

[Judging__Eagle]

I would have killed a mage like Darmok after the second flubbed Fireball that hit any character in 2e games, I would merely beat them into an unconscious mass in more current games. PCs who are acting like amateur bomb builders and own-goaling are.... something that people don't even begin to pretend to deal with in a believable fashion.

If some crazy hobo-murderer is dropping fireballs all over the place, and hitting their "allies", then said hobo-murderer is in for a rude awakening when the their allies teach them about turnabout being fair play. Give a man a fire, and they'll be warm for an evening; set a man on fire, and they'll be warm for the rest of their life. Fortunately for D&D characters; they can soak an alchemist's fire without instant death.

Also, gold is not a problem, if turnip>silver/gold>magic>Extraplanar Currency economy systems are used. Especially not massive piles of gold.

I bet that dropping 10~ million GP in a single pile in the form of a dragon's hoard would have completely unbalanced this game; at any level of game play.

[Cynic]

4Give a man a fire, and they'll be warm for an evening; set a man on fire, and they'll be warm for the rest of their life.

If you set a man on fire, if they are only warm for the rest of their life, I think they got off rather lightly.