Been reading encumbrance rules.
Been reading encumbrance rules. The most boring subject in RPGs maybe? I made this quick and dirty tracker for 5e. I’d either laminate these or put them in sleeves so you could use an erasable markers. The only thing I changed from the basic rules was water. A gallon of water a day? Whoever wrote that rule must be one of those people who drinks water constantly and has perfectly clear pee. I also tweaked the weight of a waterskin, whether four pints of water weighs four pounds or not, it’s easier if they match.
Another thing I noticed comparing Basic 5e to the PHB, the spell list in Basic does not have create water or purify food and drink. Hardcore dungeon delving is a lot harder in Basic than full 5e.
Another thing I noticed comparing Basic 5e to the PHB, the spell list in Basic does not have create water or purify food and drink. Hardcore dungeon delving is a lot harder in Basic than full 5e.
"Whoever wrote that rule must be one of those people who drinks water constantly and has perfectly clear pee." YOU'RE NOT STAYING HYDRATED SOLDIER! DRINK SOME MORE WATER AND GIVE ME 20!
ReplyDeleteYou will be happy to know that a pint of water does indeed weigh a pound. :)
ReplyDeleteOh man I love thinking about encumbrance rules. (Not kidding.)
ReplyDeleteThe 5E approach kind of makes my eyes bleed though. Anything that has people considering explicit weights is too fiddly for me and I would be stunned if it's not hand waved most of the time.
And I was just reading your Hazard rules again, Brendan S. Do you have anything on encumbrance on your blog?
ReplyDeleteI was also looking at the Anti-Hammerspace item tracker and Torchbearer's character sheet.
ReplyDeleteI actually drink about 80 oz of water a day. I'd probably drink more if I were adventuring, right? But a gallon weighs 7 lbs, so I'm not going to carry the WHOLE gallon. More like carry 32 oz and refill that a few times a day.
ReplyDeleteThat matches what I looked up last night, Lex Larson. What I didn't look up since it was late was what a minimum intake with no major side effects was.
ReplyDeleteI'm now going to look through the adventure I've been reading and see where there's a water source. This is why clerics are important. That create water spell is just as important as healing spells if you're tracking things like hunger and thirst.
Quick googling indicates fighting about water intake in survival situations is worthy of flame wars. The upside is that I no longer care about careful tracking of food and water.
ReplyDeleteI'm one of those weird crazy bastards who loves encumbrance. Having to figure out how to pack everything and perfectly distribute weight is a dream come true.
ReplyDelete...I'm really fun when helping people move.
Do you just go by whatever system you're using, N. Phillip Cole, or do you have a favorite method you use all the time?
ReplyDeleteI prefer the old coin weight system the most, but rarely drift it into other systems. Most of the time I do a "gear slot" system. You have X worn gear slots, Y carried gear slots (immediately usable), Z accessible gear slots (just one action away), and Q carried gear slots. Each is a combination of simple factors, usually STR (how much you can carry) plus INT (how well you can organize your stuff). Varies from game to game. Many items take up more than one slot, too.
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteCasey G. I have a few posts with various ideas about how to handle encumbrance. My current state of the art is:
ReplyDeleteCarry a number of significant items equal to your strength score without penalty. Each additional item imposes a cumulative -1 penalty on any task that could conceivably be affected by carrying crap (attack rolls, saving throws, ability checks, whatever).
I don't worry about the difference between (for example) a flask and a sword (both count as one item for simplicity's sake). In practice it tends to average out anyways, and the purpose of the rule is to facilitate trade-offs regarding what to carry, not model anything exactly.
It seems to me that treating encumbrance as an Advantage/Disadvantage would simplify it greatly.
ReplyDeleteHave chart to determine when a person is under, at, or above capacity.
If they are under, and it's relevant, they get to roll an extra die, and keep it if it's better.
If they are at, no extra die.
If they are over, they must roll an extra die, and keep it if it's worse.
T to the E to the O I don't like that approach personally because the binary nature of disadvantage means that once a person is encumbered there are no more interesting choices or trade-offs. They just carry all the crap and the system relies on some sort of know-it-when-you-see-it ridiculousness threshold. While all non-fiddly systems probably depend on some degree of ruling (for example, mine relies on distinguishing between significant and insignificant items), some sort of graduated effect or penalty is needed for me so that carrying an extra thing is always a real choice.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of encumbrance giving advantage/disadvantage in chases or escapes.
ReplyDeleteBrendan S, the chart can add more dice on either end. To extend the ridiculousness:
ReplyDeleteNaked = add three dice, and pick the best.
Unencumbered =add two dice...
Underencumbered = add one...
At capacity = add none.
Slightly over = add one, and pick the worst.
Moderately over = add two...
Way over = add three...
I wouldn't bother to try, and convince you to do this, but the potential exists, and whether this sort of mechanic is appealing is about as personal a thing as whether broccoli tastes good. There is huge pile of evidence I could site as to why eating it might be a good thing, but none of that will change the taste.
To me, it's all about how much time I have, and allocation of that finite resource. When I was young, I had a lot of free time, so I obsessed about such things. My favorite systems were those that made D&D seem simplistic.
At this point in my life, limits imposed on my time have made me take a more keen appraisal of what I like about RPGs, and accounting for weight isn't on the Top 10 list.
I just don't have time for it.
My experience with those who run D&D exclusively is that they tend to ignore encumbrance, to some degree, unless players are abusing that permissiveness. Another route that seems popular is to make sure the players get some sort of extra dimensional storage capacity early.
To me, that suggests, whether I like encumbrance, or not, that most players don't care about it, and are quite happy when a GM doesn't either.
My current angle on dealing with encumbrance is to steer clear of collecting as being a key point of the game. I like to focus on the PCs doing things, and things happening to them. That's not to say that one can't squeeze in more focus on weight, but I can't.
People who think that makes me a poor GM have lots of alternatives that aren't as ridiculous : )
As it stands, I think carrying a lot of weight, among other things that are treated as constants, doesn't have the predictability, or effects that many rule systems suggest. In fact, if one was to exceed their weight capacity on a regular basis, that is exactly how they would eventually become able to carry more, in RL.
Choosing to carry a little more regularly should lead to gaining STR, not just be a punishable offense, but that's not how it's treated. It seems to me that is also a question of how much time people want to devote to such things.
T to the E to the O I agree with all of that, and minimizing the explanation and bookkeeping while maintaining a tradeoff involving what to carry is the goal. Everyone I play with seems to enjoy the problem solving limits that come from an easy to administer encumbrance system so I've never experienced the type of player ("...those who run D&D exclusively...") you are describing.
ReplyDeleteIn practice, players under this system almost never carry enough items to take a penalty (why would you, when it takes so much work and XP to earn that attack bonus and saving throw bump?) and I suspect disadvantage would be the same in that way actually, though it would be a bit easier to game.
Conceptually, I still prefer the graduated penalty, but any slot based system is way better than what most game books suggest. I just wanted to explain the reasoning behind a game system I feel has been pretty much ideal in play for me in dungeon-crawling OD&D and related hacks.
That's an interesting point right there. If carrying too much would make the game interesting, but a given rule discourages doing so, can it be said that such a rule is making the game more interesting?
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that making the effect of carrying too much a gamble, rather than an assured penalty, would increase the likelihood that players might test their limits.
To me, it really comes down to how into resource management a group is though. I've found that accounting for the accumulation, and loss of things takes up more time than I care to sacrifice.
Dealing with that sort of accounting does present a certain type of real life problem though. I like dealing with numbers in other circumstances, but when playing an RPG, I'd rather have my players act like their PC would. Few people calculate how much they can actually carry, because most don't really know. What they do know is that sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes they can't, and that some known variables tip probability in their favor.
One thing I am liking about using more dice to rep encumbrance is that you could just call them encumbrance dice, make them a whole different color, and be stacking them on the players' character sheets as the pick stuff up. It'd be a visual rep of how burdened they were, and relate analogously to "Wow, that's a lot of stuff!"
Hmmm, instead of using them as Advantage/Disadvantage they could simply be added, or subtracted from the roll. The type of die could be different, depending upon circumstances (race, class, etc.).
BTW, is it really true that you've never run, or played in a game where encumbrance was all together ignored Brendan S? That's kind of amazing, to me.
I'm a bit promiscuous about who I will play with, because I like to see how other people run, and play, so I've seen all sorts of stuff, and not using certain rules, especially encumbrance, seems a very popular thing to do.
T to the E to the O I've played many games where encumbrance was ignored, usually because most encumbrance systems are onerous, unspecified, or unclear. All the players I game with seem to be excited about procedures and rules to allow this sort of thing to enter gameplay efficiently. This is, admittedly, a group of self-selected players who have come to my game either through reading my blog or following me on G+. I don't really go to game shops and drop my rules on random samples of contemporary D&D players, which is why I pushed back a bit on your characterization of D&D players.
ReplyDeleteI would say that from my perspective, carrying too much does not make the game more interesting. Limitation makes the game interesting, because it makes people prioritize. Like making a Magic deck and deciding what to include. Limiting carrying capacity also rewards gathering info about the environment and challenges beforehand to decide, for example, whether bringing a water-proof light source is more important than a flask of antitoxin or extra quiver of ammo. Incentivizing players to test the limits of the system would be a negative for me.
Also I should emphasize again and more directly that I don't care at all about simulating anything (like characters getting stronger from carrying a lot of things often). My priority is a game system that works well and does not conflict with players reasoning and making decisions based on the game world fiction. The threshold of how many items to carry is somewhat arbitrary (I find = strength to work well) but the idea that at some point carrying stuff is going to interfere with effectiveness proportional to the number of extra things is the important diegetic takeaway.
I like your use of the word diegetic. "Narrative" gets a bit of overplay : )
ReplyDeleteI tend to think of player preference in terms of a qualitative to quantitative spectrum.
That would be a "Conan is so strong that he can carry the burdens of several men at once." to "Conan can carry 300lbs." spectrum.
The older I get, the more I want the games I play to be like the stories that spawned them. I've read a lot of Conan, but have no idea how much he can carry, or how many items it would take to grind him down.
It has nothing to do with sim, for me.
Having a system that allows a character like Conan to get away with lifting ungodly amounts of weight... sometimes... seems more in line with the sort of fantasy I am a fan of.
I'd be even more a fan of having Inspiration points, and/or HP used as fuel for defying imposed limits. That would allow players to invest in outcomes they'd like to see occur.
Having such things translated into consistently known values takes a bit of the mystique out of it, for me.
Fantasy, to me, should be a bit unpredictable.
This makes me want to min-max encumbrance on a character in a Casey G. game. Let's see, the only way to troll him more would be to tell him that encumbrance is an accounting game so it should be in a google sheet, not a google doc. Also I must find a way to rolling percentile dice that almost always come out to 5% blocks. (almost)
ReplyDelete