Inspired both by The Dice Bag’s post on equipment and my recent dive into Fallout 3, I’ve come to the realization that encumberance rules bug me.
There are several paradigms that I’ve run into:
- The standard D&D one, which pretends to have some semblance of realism by tracking the weight of all your gear, and imposing penalties if you go over the weight you can carry by strength. This leads to all sorts of wackiness if you actually think about it.
- The one that goes for maximum realism by making characters track exact weights and locations of all the items they are carrying, and is annoying as hell to keep track of.
- Systems that don’t track your carrying capacity, leading to players carrying everything they’ve ever found.
- Forced restrictions. “You can wear one set of clothing and wield one weapon, and that’s all.” Usually only in video games.
All of them have their issues, as you can probably tell. I lean more towards the more abstract, less-bookkeeping intensive systems for a variety of reasons (I hate tracking ammo and food, too).
In my last D&D campaign, the players invested in mules and a cart to cover it, though that meant having to keep track of it when they went sailing, into dungeons, and so on, while also having to keep track of what items were in the cart and which ones were on someone’s person. At least I never asked them to calculate how much weight the cart was carrying.
The “pack-rat” tendencies of players are pretty interesting though. In some games, it’s simply a part of the economy. You will kill hundreds of goblins, and you are expected to pick up all their suits of armor and spears and sell them to your local blacksmith as part of the expectation of gaining money. (In my current game, I tend to make it clear that monster equipment is generally worthless).
But then there’s the Chekhov’s Gun or Self-Fufilling Chekov’s Gun principle: every item, especially the weird or obscure ones, will either be important to the story later or the player will come up with an important way to use it.
The latter is one of the really fun parts of RPGs: finding unexpected uses for things. That’s something I want to preserve. I just wish it meant that the players didn’t carry around a lot of, excuse the expression, dead weight all the time. Especially in combat. I prefer my badass heroes to be relying on their weapons and armor, and not have to think about how the halfling rogue is carrying around a ten foot pole while tumbling all around the battlefield.
There are a few suggestions, like “bulk points”, giving away bags of holding freely, or just plain old DM fiat (“no, you can’t carry an anvil with you.”) When thinking about it in summation, I’m not looking for more game rules to cover it. I’m looking for some shift in the meta-game that makes players care about how their character looks and operates while supposedly carrying all that gear. Until then, I’ll just have to settle for pseudo-abstractions.
Any recommendations?
I remember a DM in a game I played in was forced to enforce the encumberance rules when one PC insisted on carrying a grandfather clock through the desert for an extended period of time. But usually DMs never enforced them. That led to the obvious question of why the encumberance rules were even written in the book to begin with. I still don’t know the answer…
I just about always issue a bag of holding once the amount of equipment starts to make my eyes bleed. You can pretty easily enforce encumbrance rules with the ol’ bag, its just a bitch when the “Bag Holder” gets separated, or if the Bag Holder betrays the party, or if you have two strong characters that argue about bag holding, or if someone turns the Bag inside out…
Good post, Dave.
Me, I just use common sense. I’m not a fan of encumbrance rules in general, but if they’re quick and don’t get in the way too much (the D&D ones, I like) then I’m happy if the players want to use ’em.
greywulf´s last post: Greywulf’s Games of the Year 2008
Honestly, at my game table its usually overlooked until something BIG comes along, like an anvil or grandfather clock. Anything that you can carry in one hand easily is usually not worried about — it slows the game down with uneccesary bookeeping. My players want to focus on the fantastic, not the mundane, so I usually follow suite. Now, there are cases where size and encumberance are problems, but then I just leave it up to a skill challenge to resolve the problem. (snarky? yes.)
For instance, the players recently plundered the tomb of some gnomish arcomancer who believed he was a leprechaun. After searching everywhere, all they found was a huge pot gold bars . 500 lbs of gold bars that had been melted together by the party’s wizards critical-hit fireball. While it was a major piece of loot, getting it out of the tomb was not easy…
jonathan´s last post: The Statistics of 4E Skill Challenges
I like realism but dislike too much detail. I think I’d go for some sort of abstracted system with DM discretion. Like limiting characters to one or two moderately-larger objects (captured weapons, small statues, large books), no grandfather clocks or pots of gold, and a large number of small pocket-sized items. Anything more would incur severe penalties. Also, to avoid disputes over “that’s exactly the type of item my character would have picked up,” I’d borrow the principle of instincts from Burning Wheel. This allows players to set default actions for their characters.
David´s last post: Warball: Marbles and CCG
Dave, as a player, I have a little bit of OCD, so I usually keep pretty careful track of my equipment. If it got too crazy, it’d ruin my immersion factor. However, as a DM, I try to just use common sense. I make sure that everyone knows what the maximums are, and then don’t worry too much about how the characters cart about the wealth. Anything exceptionally large (statues, shipping crates, etc.) I ask the players, “How are you going to carry this again?” If they can give me an answer that seems reasonable, I’ll allow it.
Great post!
Dead Orcs´s last post: Blog Carnival: Round 5 — Coming Full Circle
The issuing of bags of holding has always been very defeatist in my eyes. If the party actually comes across one by chance then fair enough but I’ve always felt that if two groups of adventurers came across each other in the wilds then the chances of both of them having a bag would be as slim as a very slim thing.
Bob´s last post: Equipment Lists
Considering “some shift in the meta-game that makes players care about how their character looks and operates while supposedly carrying all that gear” – what I will try the next time we play is have NPCs comment on the party’s looks.
“Old man, need some help carrying those five quivers? Harr harr!”
“Yes sir, of course sir. I will oversee the unloading of your cart in person. No servant will touch it, I assure you.”
Alex Schröder´s last post: The Magic Is Gone
Jonathan: You’re just begging your players to dismantle the grandfather clock into hand-sized pieces and reassemble it when needed.
Oh wait, when the F will a party actually need a grandfather clock?
Dave, I guess I am (once again) in a minority position, but I am pretty strict with the encumbance rules in the system we use, as well as the townsfolk’s response to PC’s returning fully laden.
We use a character spreadsheet that calculates the movement rate of a character based on weight. And also a very dangerous campaign, so the players run away sometimes…
So both my main groups have been known to cache piles of coinage or other heavy valuables (complete with Treasure maps) to come back to later. (not to mention when they have to find a source that won’t notice ancient mintings coming into the city…)
LordVreeg´s last post: Spell List
Depends on the campaign for me. As a player, I tend to keep rough track and just personally veto things like staves/spears that are somehow “packed away.”
As a GM – well, there was one campaign where a lot of it was a spelunking-style trek through the Underdark. I enforced encumbrance strictly and it added to the drama; what do you take with you, that extra food, that piece of equipment, or that shiny gold amulet thing? Some of the time they resorted to a bound “stretcher” that two of them would use to carry bulkier items, and you better believe we kept track of who was carrying it and where it was in combats.
In most generalized campaigns, though, I found our group’s PC parties tend to secure the crap out of the area and then make as many trips as is needed to denude it of anything even potentially valuable. They like establishing bases/keeps/inns/strongholds/etc themselves, so even things like furniture are high on the hit list. For some reason, every mage in the world has a big comfy four-poster bed in their remote lair. Well, someone got it in there in the first place, so fair enough I reckon.
mxyzplk´s last post: Animals in D&D
I always went by the rule of “This is not Final Fantasy you can’t carry 99 of everything with you” =p
While true, chalk has no weight. 😛
If I has, say, 2 gp left during character creation, I would occasionally purchase 200 pieces of chalk, just for the purpose of mocking the D&D encumbrance rules.
Where did I carry them? It was so ludicrous, nobody ever asked.
Buying a menagerie of senseless cheap animals was always fun in second edition (Guinea Hen, Mongoose, etc)…
Well, along those lines is my Chicken Mage. I decided to write that one up here.
C’mon, click it. You know you want to!
I’m currently designing a system that uses the character’s strength and his containers (ie backpacks and such) to come up with a Capacity Limit, and assigning items Carry Points (name definitely needs some work) based off their weight and the difficulty of carrying them (ie odd shapes, like the 10-ft pole). I’m using the system in an RPG I’m creating so I’m not sure if it would work well for D&D, but perhaps if you just doubled the weight of items that are hard to carry while fighting, like 10′ poles, ladders, extra weapons beyond maybe four and stuff with a lot of shifting weight, like an extra shield kept in the backpack.
This is just an off the collar idea, I’ll think about it a little more and create a more in depth response.
I like the idea of meta-gaming and trying to encourage the players to actually care about how their characters look and act with all this gear.
To that end, why not bring along a bunch of cardboard boxes, pieces of furniture/TV foam, pink backpacks, fuzzy hats, some high-heel shoes, etc. Whenever your characters insist on carrying with them stuff that makes them look stupid in-game, insist that the players, themselves, carry on their persons (for the rest of the evening) whatever absurd real-life things you brought with you as a token of the stupidity.
In terms of mechanics, I planned on introducing a couple of new rituals: Salvage and Dimi (Diminutive).
Salvage would allow players to turn found objects into a small percentage of their sell value. Dimi would allow players to turn large objects into small, cute, little miniature versions of the same object which could be instantly transformed into the original versions with the utterance of a secret word. The mini versions of the objects would have the same material characteristic of the original. i.e. if you turned a suit of platemail into a mini, it would be steel or iron. If you turned a large mirror into a mini, it would be made of glass and easily breakable – thus, destroying the larger version.
I wanted to add some other catches to Dimi to ensure players only used it when they felt an item would be USEFUL as opposed to VALUABLE. Valuable items should be equipped and or used. At the very least, they should be salvaged. Dimi items should be used on items that could be beneficial to a situation.
Or, you could take Bethesda’s approach and assign a small domesticated pet to each player that, upon command, will go out into the dungeon and bring back exactly ONE of the item you tell it to search for… such as a potion or suit of plate mail… all of which will be carried in its mouth of course.
I don’t really GM that often, but as a player (D&D 3.5 mostly) I always felt it to be a personal responsibility to pay attention to the weight of my items, and use the encumbrance rules. I also enjoyed the challenge of getting around them! I like to play mid level games so that I have room to play with templates and such that require LA, and many of my characters (Such as Thak the Half-Ogre Goliath, or my not yet named six armed two headed Goliath) are capable of carrying a small house with them if they so wished. I also tend to use my laptop when I game, because I have writable PDF character sheets that auto-calculate. It takes a lot of the work out of “paper” work. 😀