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valadil
2012-09-02, 06:53 PM
So I’ve had this idea for a different way to do encumbrance kicking around in the old noggin for a while. Then I read What’s in your backpack? A healthy dose of reality (http://dungeonsmaster.com/2012/08/whats-in-your-backpack-a-healthy-dose-of-reality/) and started thinking about it again.

What it comes down to is this. I don’t like weight as an abstraction for how encumbered you are. It should be a factor for sure, but you shouldn’t be able to carry a dozen 10 foot poles without issue just because they’re light weight.

What I do like as an inventory system is the grid based inventory CRPGs use. I think the first one I saw was in Diablo. Long items took up more space. And that axe head protrudes down from the rest of the axe. And you get to sort all that stuff to make it fit.

Well, that’s great for computer games but not so great in pen and paper. As a general rule, I’d like my mechanics to simplify things. Fitting stuff in a grid simplifies nothing. I haven’t found a way to satisfy the shape element of the grid inventory. Instead, lets use the size part. Different items take up different amounts of space. You have a limited number of slots to store things…

Why not treat a line of text as a slot? You get one item per line. And you have a number of lines equal to the size of your backpack. Let’s just call a backpack 10 items. Write backpack on your sheet, draw a box around the next 10 lines. Done.

Well, not quite. Items need some level of size. I don’t think D&D’s approach of weighing each item is any good. Too much math for anyone to want to recalculate it. But I also don’t want a backpack full of chainmail to encumber you the same as a backpack full of feathers.

So items will need some sort of size. Let’s go with small, medium and large. Instead of item weights, you’ll just use their encumbrance value. This is an abstraction of weight, size, unwieldiness, etc.

Now let’s go back to the backpack. Instead of holding any 10 items, let’s say it’s a container that holds 10 medium items. The backpack itself would have to be large. Maybe one of the medium items is a first aid kid, which itself is a container of small items.

Basically you’re getting a number of slots to fill in with items of varying sizes. This doesn’t seem as obnoxious as tallying object weights and looking up an encumbrance chart.

But what about actually carrying these things? Well, I think the way to do that is to give the body itself slots for carrying. If a person has 3 large slots, that’s a backpack, armor, and weapon. To give a bit of realism, lets make that number of slots a variable. In D&D parlance, we’ll use the strength modifier. Give each PC a number of large item slots equal to his strength mod plus one (with a minimum of one, or else the weaklings can’t carry anything). Packs and weapons occupy large slots. I imagine donning armor would occupy a slot as well (maybe more than one for certain types of armor? If so, this would be the first system I saw that made you take off your backpack because it didn’t fit around your armor). I might even introduce more types of containers, just so the strong characters get to carry more. ie, the backpack carries 10 medium items and occupies 1 large slot, but the hiking frame carries 16 medium items at the cost of 2 large slots.

On paper this would look something like
{table="head"]Body (L)
Backpack
Armor
________
[/table]

{table="head"]Backpack (M)
Dagger
Book
Medkit
Rope
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
[/table]

{table="head"]Medkit (S)
Gauze
Morphine
Needle/Thread
Scalpel
_______
[/table]

I know I’m biased, but this seems a lot simpler than keeping track of the weights of all your items. It would automatically keep you from carrying stupidly unwieldy things by factoring size as well as weight. The container business might be a little over-engineered, but it was the best I came up with. (The alternative was to say that large items took up more slots. Saying a greataxe is worth three swords is fine, but I don’t really want to know how many eyes of newt correspond to a single tower shield.)

Anyway, if you find this usable please let me know. I’ve gone a year without RPGs and that’s not likely to change. Someone else will have to beta test this one for me.

As a sidenote, I had D&D in mind when I was thinking about this, but it's generic enough that the system shouldn't really matter.

TuggyNE
2012-09-02, 09:33 PM
This seems pretty good on the whole. You might get some cross-pollination going on with Justin Alexander's system based on stones (http://thealexandrian.net/?p=4006).

Yitzi
2012-09-02, 11:01 PM
On the flip side, you also shouldn't be able to fill your backpack with lead weights and expect to be able to move around without consequence (well, unless you're really strong, and have a really sturdy backpack.) Encumbrance by weight and by volume serve different purposes, and you might want to consider using both.

Kane0
2012-09-02, 11:27 PM
Y no tetris inventory?

But seriously, maybe the weight as well as a number of inventory points it takes up, with differing containers having different limits of inventory points?

Yitzi
2012-09-03, 12:00 PM
Y no tetris inventory?

But seriously, maybe the weight as well as a number of inventory points it takes up, with differing containers having different limits of inventory points?

Sounds good. Some things like poles (long and skinny) might have few inventory points (since anything that can hold one pole can probably hold a dozen), but have a limit on what they can be put in.

valadil
2012-09-03, 07:24 PM
On the flip side, you also shouldn't be able to fill your backpack with lead weights and expect to be able to move around without consequence (well, unless you're really strong, and have a really sturdy backpack.) Encumbrance by weight and by volume serve different purposes, and you might want to consider using both.

I wanted to stay away from specific weights, but I agree that what I've got so far doesn't really work in this use case. Without weighing items, I think the best way to handle this would be to say some items use up more than one slot. Maybe a lead ingot takes three slots? That'd fit three in a backpack, which seems reasonable to me. To take this idea a little further it might make sense to impose a limit on the number of slots an item can take up in a single container. By that I mean the backpack might be able to only hold items that use one or two slots. The lead ingot is too dense would rip right through the canvas. Personally I think this is a little too tedious, but it might appeal to players who like bean counting more than I do.


Sounds good. Some things like poles (long and skinny) might have few inventory points (since anything that can hold one pole can probably hold a dozen), but have a limit on what they can be put in.

So one thing I was considering was to also track how much access you had to items. That was one of the complaints in the link at the top of the post. The way I'd represent this is with a dotted line somewhere in the container. Items above that line are on top and easily accessible. Items below it require some rummaging to get to. I didn't include this option original because it takes place at a level of detail I don't usually play with. I'd like it in some games, but in D&D it would just encourage me to get a Handy Haversack that much sooner.

Anyway, as it relates here, I'd treat the pole and bundle both as large items, but the bundle would have no accessibility - everything in it would be below the dotted line so you'd have to rummage to get things out.

The big disadvantage I'm seeing for the whole system so far is that it's binary. You can carry or you can't. I'm not sure what sort of penalties to impose if you carry too much. (I suppose that might change if I picked a system so I could have penalties... The obvious idea to me is that you can carry additional large items and each one imposes some penalty or another.) It's more of a container/storage system than encumbrance system at this point.