Tangent Thread: The Value of Encumbrance (or lack thereof)

[Pleh]

Over in this other thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?612643-You%92re-allowed-one-errata-what-is-it), I was getting a side dialogue about the ways Encumbrance adds importance and value to the Strength stat. I hadn't made a separate thread yet because it kept feeling like the tangent could die off at any time, but recently it picked up some momentum, so it seemed prudent to go ahead and give it a thread.

Small disclaimer, I realize that in 5e Carry Capacity is default RAW while Encumbrance is an optional rule variant. In general, when I say Encumbrance, I am mentally lumping them both together for simplicity of speech. If we get to a point where the distinction is relevant to the discussion, I'll start using more careful language.

I feel like my basic argument is that Encumbrance, as laid out in 5e mechanics, is fundamentally just as "complex" as tracking initiative, making skill checks, and tracking HP loss and gain through combat, yet for some reason, as players we all seem to feel (on some level) like it is more of a burden to track than these others.

I point to Bethesda games for success with encumbrance rules. There's no getting around the point that encumbrance is a limiting factor to the game, forcing players to choose between things that are all theoretically good to keep with you, but then so is Skill allocation (along with Initiative) and HP management. These other examples are excused as being, "part of the game," so they're allowed to be extra complex because they are core gameplay.

Tanarii pointed out that in older versions of D&D, Gold looted from dungeons was how you earned XP, making encumbrance a core gameplay mechanic. That brings me back to what I feel is my intended point.

The Core Gameplay (if it is to be used as a reason that some mechanics are fun while others are a chore) is whatever we define it to be. There is SOME consideration for how the rules IMPLY the game is to be played, but at that point, Carry Capacity is equally as RAW as Initiative or HP tracking is (even if Encumbrance is optional).

All systems in the game, including Initiative, Skill Check rules, and HP tracking, can be handwaved away or replaced with less complex systems that trivialize them, if players don't care about that aspect of the core gameplay and want to keep it from bogging down their sessions. There are some obvious questions at that point about whether or not you actually want to use this particular system if you go that far, but this just goes to my question about why we are so quick to dismiss Encumbrance.

Maybe to come at the question from the other side, why would players WANT to incorporate Encumbrance into their games? Shouldn't it be a question of verisimilitude, helping keep the core gameplay somewhat grounded and helping the players get into their characters? Isn't this more or less the concession given to Initiative or HP tracking, to offer a neutral set of rules to mediate disagreements between players about what the characters are capable of?

Feels like the counter argument comes back down to something like, "there generally aren't disagreements about what characters can carry, barring more absurd exceptions (like sticking a chest that is larger than your character and full of gold coins into your pocket and expecting no change to mobility)."

So if the problem is people generally don't care about it (as they do with HP, Initiative, or Skill Checks), I still don't exactly know why. I confess I often omit Encumbrance in my games for the same reasons, but something about the argument seems incomplete. Why is THIS an unfun detail to manage while the others are somehow exciting? It seems to have the same justifications for being part of the system rules, but for some reason, it's a part of the system we avoid rather than pursue. We want to loot the dungeons, but not to consider exactly how we manage to get the loot out of the dungeons.

[Tanarii]

I also made the point that 5e's encumbrance implementation is pretty bad. However looking back I see I was wrong. D&D Mentzer Basic was more tolerant than I thought.

Speed = load
40ft = up to 40 lbs
30 ft = up to 80 lbs
20 ft = up to 120 lbs
10 ft = up to 160 lbs
5ft = up to 240 lbs

That said, the 3 important things were:
- treasure carried out of the dungeon was XP
- coins were 10 to the lb, making it much harder to carry treasure out of the dungeon.
- the weights above were expressed in "coins" not lbs, making it immediately clear the primary purpose of encumbrance was limiting how much treasure you could carry.


In 5e, treasure is not XP. And coins are 50 to the lb. So the primary purpose is now providing a semi-reasonable limit to how much gear you can carry. (Edit: ie verisimilitude)

Given that, there's two basic approaches that work fine for 5e encumbrance, without being too fiddly.
- tally up your basic gear encumbrance before the game, determine free weight limit. The free weight capacity is used as a ballpark to figure out how much you can carry during the session. You don't recalculate every time you pick something up.
- DM handwavium. DM fiat. Whatever you want to call it. If you don't want to tally up your encumbrance before the game, you're implicitly accepting that the DM can tell you it's all too much for you to carry at any point. No arguing when you can't lift your plate mail and shield and lift a ten lb sack of treasure with your Str 18 character.

[PraetorDragoon]

Once my players found a large hoard of gold. They then made plans to carry it away using carts and summons to pull them. At no point came the encumberance rules in play. At no point there was any discussion or thoughts that they could carry the hoard. It was accepted that it was too big and heavy.

Had we used encumberance rules, everyone had to track a lot of numbers, from gear, from tools, from wealth, from the hoard of treasure, and would have come to the same conclusion. So you have to keep track for a number of things, have the encumberance not matter most of the time, and when it does matter it provokes thoughts of "Gee, thanks number. I can see I can't carry this large treasure, who would have known?" making it feel a lot of busywork for no gain.

[MrCharlie]

So, encumbrance is necessary to prevent stupidity but not to restrain equipment.

Adventurers should care more about easily moved and liquidated wealth more than unwieldy and heavy objects. The kings throne is probably as valuable as his crown, assuming it's pimped out with jewels and filigree like most thrones are in fiction, but the fact that you can't move it impacts how you should loot it. And if we ignore encumbrance entirely, characters will happily just carry every treasure chest out of a dungeon and open them all in a safe place, which I have seen before (the wizard went through the trouble of making what amounts to a biological hazard room, even!). There is nothing wrong with that per say, but no one ever once bothered to ask "wait, I'm carrying ten chests on my back how?".

Encumbrance exists to provide a limit on the unreasonable, not act as a gotcha for players. If handled in that manner, it's fine.

The reason why enbumerance so annoying in practice is because A. Any reasonable amount of equipment can be carried by the party, but you have to start a serious saga of bookkeeping to figure out who is carrying what, no ones notes are ever good enough, and someone gets blamed for it, B. Any unreasonable amount of equipment is obviously unreasonable and thus worrying about it is foolish, C. It almost never, ever influences party decisions besides making them value bags of holding and other such items unless its come up as a specific problem to be solved in which case it's back to the "Limit to the unreasonable" thing.

The final and biggest reason, D., is that it's something only the players characters have to worry about, enemies never deal with it, NPCs never deal with it, it never helps them, it only limits them. There are other aspects of the game that work like this, but other bookkeeping issues like HP, initiative, etc. all either impact NPCs or feel like they do, which is part of the reason we tolerate this bookkeeping. In a similar vein, food tracking is actually often omitted for precisely the same reason; it never actually helps the party in any way. This is why keeping track of gold is viewed as a good thing (and why, when AL stopped letting you, there was uproar), because Gold does help the party and can (at least theoretically) get you good things, despite being one of the biggest time sinks in terms of bookkeeping. XP also gets a soft pass under the same logic, although more and more groups are either implementing milestones or having the DM just keep track of group XP and telling people when they level for similarish reasons.

Finally, I have seen players specifically engage with the encumbrance rules in-depth to prove a point-specifically, a party sat down and figured out how to loot every single thing of any value including the furniture and appliances from a hostile NPC's home, just for the sheer "F you" that implied, and sat down for 30 minutes to figure out how to do that including how many labourers to hire, mules and carts to equip, blocks and tackles needed, etc. But it was always to tackle a specific problem, not to deal with it constantly.

[Pex]

We had this conversation topic last month. Generally those who don't care for encumbrance don't want to deal with the minutiae of bookkeeping. It's enough only to worry about bulk. Common sense says you can't carry 10 sets of armor the bad guys were wearing when looting the bodies, but it's not necessary to keep track of every little thing you carry down to how many ounces your torches weigh. Too much realism can ruin the fun. However for those who do enjoy this sort of thing have at it. Simulation realism, survivalist inventory, having to choose what to leave behind, some people find that fun. Go for it.

[djreynolds]

Encumbrance can add another layer to challenging players.

If you don't want to enforce this layer okay.

But it does increase the challenge. It can make exhaustion a real threat.

Running around in anything more than 40lbs is crazy tough... it adds in another layer of realism to the game.

The unfortunate aspect of 5E IMO is that point buy or standard array makes having a lower stat a reality and strength is dumped and hence encumbrance is often handwaved because of this... everyone is sporting a 10 or an 8 or a 12.

But IRL having to lug around heavy loads is real... From soldiers to refugees. Fatigue becomes another layer.

[greenstone]

I'm on the "I don't see why people have a probem with encumbrance" side of this discussion.

OK, its a number on the character sheet, and you have to do math (addition and subtraction) sometimes, and math is hard, but "number on the charcter sheet" is what Hit Points is, and no-one ever says "I don't like maths so I'm going to stop traking hit points."

Why do I like encumbrance rules? Because I like it when your choices have consequences. Dump STR? The consequence is you can't carry much. I also like it when PCs buy pack animals or porters, giving an opportunity for "useless" skills and backgrounds (animal handling, vehicles, etc).

The last big game I ran, I said I wouldn't sweat encumbrance. Many months in, I discovered that every single character had 10 or less STR, yet the party was carrying multiple sets of armour, many weapons, lots and lots of arrows, weeks of food and water, and so on. When I challenged them, they had the cheek to ask for a portable hole. :-)

[Zhorn]

Like any game mechanic, it will only have meaning and value when there are conditions and consequences tied into it that are not ignored.

Hand waving away mechanics you don't like is fine, follow the game you find most fun, but also be ready to accept other aspects also being hand waved away and ignored because the system that gave then consequences was removed.

Most of the time I see the whole "encumbrance brings nothing to the game" threads, the examples tend to indicate a whole lot of other rules and concepts are also being ignored in their games so it makes sense that they'd find no value in encumbrance.
Again, not a bad thing if that's the game you enjoy.

Current game; our DM is slowly turning back on rules he was previously hand waving. We got a bunch of flying mounts, so questions about feeding them, finding water, rests and maximum travel times, exhaustion, defensible camp sites, night watches, how much weight they can carry, hunting and foraging, are now coming up. All those things were being ignored for a few weeks running while we were ground-bound on horses, but now that we can fly, so many of the previous challenges of travel have been trivialised to the point of long distance travel was becoming a "fade to black you arrive 4 days later".
Meanwhile, the Honor ability score variant rule he introduced is barely getting any use or having any impact on the game. They are not giving it uses and consequences, so it doesn't have any true meaning or value in our current game.

[Tanarii]

We had this conversation topic last month. Generally those who don't care for encumbrance don't want to deal with the minutiae of bookkeeping.
Clearly the solution is for the DM to decide automatic failure, automatic success, or pick a DC off the DMG table and have the player roll against it to see if they can carry their load for some period of time. Free form encumbrance 5e style, with maximum DM freedom and table variation. :smallamused:


OK, its a number on the character sheet, and you have to do math (addition and subtraction) sometimes, and math is hard, but "number on the charcter sheet" is what Hit Points is, and no-one ever says "I don't like maths so I'm going to stop traking hit points."

You'd be surprised at how many times I've heard complains about how much math is involved in tracking hit points. Or rolling an attack / save. And especially in figuring out a Constitution (Athletics) ability check.

[Zevox]

I feel like my basic argument is that Encumbrance, as laid out in 5e mechanics, is fundamentally just as "complex" as tracking initiative, making skill checks, and tracking HP loss and gain through combat,
I disagree with that premise. Initiative is a single modifier that rarely changes and is rolled only once at the start of any combat. Skill checks rarely require anything more than knowing your base stats and whether or not you're proficient. Both are substantially less complex than encumbrance, which you need to constantly track and change every time that you acquire a new item, or expend, drop, give away, or sell one you've been carrying, which is a very frequent occurrence. This results in a lot of time used to do it, as you're often looking up weight numbers, since there's so many of them. Moreover, many items simply don't have set weights, since the game can't possible assign such values to every item you could possibly encounter, so there's a lot of ad-hocing involved. And at the end of the day, unless you're the sort who really likes the versimilitude that encumbrance provides, it's really not adding anything to the game experience - you're going to keep your weight carried below your maximum, it's just a nuisance needing to track the numbers to be sure you're doing that.

You could maybe compare it to tracking hp, but even that I don't think is nearly as complex since it's confined to combat and rolling damage is much simpler, quicker, and more enjoyable than looking up weight numbers. Moreover, it is obviously a necessity for the combat portion of the game, providing the measure of how well or poorly you're doing in a fight, where encumbrance isn't doing anything comparable to that.

[Greywander]

I had been using a Google Docs spreadsheet for a character sheet that would automatically tally up your encumbrance as long as you put in the weight of each item and how many you had.

I've recently created my own spreadsheet to use as a character sheet, and it goes a bit more in depth with the encumbrance system. It automatically calculates your carry capacity, including the limits for variant encumbrance, and shows you where you're at on the encumbrance scale. It tracks the weight of coins and tells you how many pouches you need for all those coins (as well as the weight of the pouches). Each container tells you how much weight you can hold, as well as how much weight is in that container, and there's a spot to put stuff strapped onto the outside of your backpack (inside only has a 30 lbs limit). Lastly, there's a button to drop your pack, removing that weight from your encumbrance (e.g. during combat).

I guess what I'm saying is that I kind of like sorting out this sort of minutia, and with an automated spreadsheet it becomes a lot easier to keep track of everything. Doing it by hand would be more of a pain, for sure, but I'm not convinced it would be unmanageable (as others have pointed out, it's not so different from tracking things like HP or spell slots).

Could the encumbrance system be better? Probably. I've seen alternative systems that use item slots instead of weight, where the focus was where the item is on your person. This helps subvert the video game-style hammerspace inventory by placing each item in an actual physical location on your body. Personally, I don't think weight should be completely ignored, but perhaps there's a happy middle ground. Maybe a slot-based system where each slot has a weight limit, so an item that is heavier takes up more slots, even if it isn't physically bigger.

Edit: Also, it's been said before, but Strength becomes a lot more valuable if you're running variant encumbrance. I understand not wanting to deal with the hassle, but it makes the high-STR characters feel good about choosing a STR build over a DEX build. It also gives a reason for non-STR builds not to dump STR completely. A character with 8 STR and medium armor will be pretty close to lightly encumbered with just their armor alone. I guess what I'm saying is that if you accept variant encumbrance, it adds a lot of value to having some STR, but most people don't see it this way; they see it as a penalty to low-STR builds. IMO, variant encumbrance should have been presented as the default, while standard encumbrance was the variant rule. This would have reframed variant encumbrance from being a penalty, to default encumbrance being a buff.

[Tanarii]

Could the encumbrance system be better? Probably. I've seen alternative systems that use item slots instead of weight, where the focus was where the item is on your person. This helps subvert the video game-style hammerspace inventory by placing each item in an actual physical location on your body. Personally, I don't think weight should be completely ignored, but perhaps there's a happy middle ground. Maybe a slot-based system where each slot has a weight limit, so an item that is heavier takes up more slots, even if it isn't physically bigger.
Most of the inventory slot systems I've seen are a heck of a lot more restrictive in terms of what you can carry than any version of D&D ever has been. Of course, I tend to read a lot of OSR-derived games, where the goal is to make encumbrance a huge issue.

[Pex]

Clearly the solution is for the DM to decide automatic failure, automatic success, or pick a DC off the DMG table and have the player roll against it to see if they can carry their load for some period of time. Free form encumbrance 5e style, with maximum DM freedom and table variation. :smallamused:


Imagine there were no rules for encumbrance and DMs had to make it up on their own. Two characters with 18 ST in different games would have different weight capacities while a character with 10 strength in a third game can be Atlas. It's better to have rules for encumbrance and not use them than to want them but not have them. A DM not using the encumbrance rules can inform his players. If they are used players have the rules to work with to plan accordingly. If three DMs use the rules both 18 ST characters have the same weight capacity and the 10 ST character a lot less yet the same if there are 10 ST characters in the first two games.

In games that don't use encumbrance it is almost DM fiat. Players want to loot the bodies, but the DM says they can't take all the armor because of its bulk. However, the 10 ST rogue doesn't have to leave behind a vial of acid when he gets a healing potion. Actually, even in games that don't use encumbrance strength matters because carrying and lifting capacity matter and are specified. It can matter when a PC wants to push a statue or carry a small boulder. The rules specify if they can. Not using the encumbrance rules just means it doesn't matter how many ounces per food ration you're carrying.

[Kane0]

I've only had one player come up against carry capacity problems, when they tried to take four tapestries and carry them around. Granted he had 20 str and no real equipment to carry but it was the size more than the weight.

I (as DM) just had to say 'even rolled up those are too bulky to carry around, especially travelling multiple days cross-country. You're going to want to find a way to transport them' and that was it. The party fashioned a makeshift sled and lashed it to the paladins mount and they were on their merry way.

I don't think breaking out the encumbrance rules and calculations would have made the scene any more entertaining, and the actual decision of 'too much to carry, how to we take it?' remained.

[Warwick]

Encumbrance would seem to be a more relevant mechanic in exploration-centric games, where it impacts how fast you can move, how long you can stay out, and how much stuff you can take back. If your campaign mostly entails traveling between known points or bumming around a major city, you probably don't care about tracking encumbrance because you're never carrying enough stuff to actually worry about it and it doesn't impose any relevant constraints on your decisions. It's not so much about realism as whether or not there's any planning or decision making to care about. If a low carrying capacity means you have to get a wagon and slow yourself down, avoid rough terrain, and raise your chances of getting mugged by goblins, having a big guy who can carry a lot without slowing down starts to look more like a feature.

The thing is, from what I can tell, not many people play exploration heavy games any more. It seems like the more typical approach is a 'plot heavy' campaigns where you're either in settlements or traveling relatively uneventfully to known points of interest, so a lot of players only ever experience encumbrance as an accounting nuisance.

[Kane0]

Encumbrance would seem to be a more relevant mechanic in exploration-centric games, where it impacts how fast you can move, how long you can stay out, and how much stuff you can take back. If your campaign mostly entails traveling between known points or bumming around a major city, you probably don't care about tracking encumbrance because you're never carrying enough stuff to actually worry about it and it doesn't impose any relevant constraints on your decisions. It's not so much about realism as whether or not there's any planning or decision making to care about. If a low carrying capacity means you have to get a wagon and slow yourself down, avoid rough terrain, and raise your chances of getting mugged by goblins, having a big guy who can carry a lot without slowing down starts to look more like a feature.

The thing is, from what I can tell, not many people play exploration heavy games any more. It seems like the more typical approach is a 'plot heavy' campaigns where you're either in settlements or traveling relatively uneventfully to known points of interest, so a lot of players only ever experience encumbrance as an accounting nuisance.

Very true. All but one or two 5e adventure books are like that. If you had a handful that really pushed wilderness exploration and travel you'd rub up against the encumbrance rules a lot more often.

At least until it's bypassed by magic.

[MrCharlie]

Encumbrance can add another layer to challenging players.

If you don't want to enforce this layer okay.

But it does increase the challenge. It can make exhaustion a real threat.

Running around in anything more than 40lbs is crazy tough... it adds in another layer of realism to the game.

The unfortunate aspect of 5E IMO is that point buy or standard array makes having a lower stat a reality and strength is dumped and hence encumbrance is often handwaved because of this... everyone is sporting a 10 or an 8 or a 12.

But IRL having to lug around heavy loads is real... From soldiers to refugees. Fatigue becomes another layer.
RAW you can run around in full plate with 8 STR and have no consequence for exhaustion.

Is it a reasonable homebrew that being near your encumbrance is exhausting? Sure! But nothing in the rules has this effect.


I'm on the "I don't see why people have a probem with encumbrance" side of this discussion.

OK, its a number on the character sheet, and you have to do math (addition and subtraction) sometimes, and math is hard, but "number on the charcter sheet" is what Hit Points is, and no-one ever says "I don't like maths so I'm going to stop traking hit points."

Why do I like encumbrance rules? Because I like it when your choices have consequences. Dump STR? The consequence is you can't carry much. I also like it when PCs buy pack animals or porters, giving an opportunity for "useless" skills and backgrounds (animal handling, vehicles, etc).

The last big game I ran, I said I wouldn't sweat encumbrance. Many months in, I discovered that every single character had 10 or less STR, yet the party was carrying multiple sets of armour, many weapons, lots and lots of arrows, weeks of food and water, and so on. When I challenged them, they had the cheek to ask for a portable hole. :-)
The thing is, it's almost impossible to actually run out of carrying capacity.

Your carrying limit is 15 X your strength. An 8 STR character can carry 120 pounds of gear. An explorers pact contains all necessary equipment for wilderness survival, and weighs 59 LBS. That means you've got 61 LBS for weapons, armor, and random stuff. On the weakest characters.

Yes, if you use the variant rules, things almost matter. Even then, the biggest weight sinks are torches, which are negated by a cantrip, food, which is negated by a first level spell (goodberry is the best choice but there are multiple), the bedroll which has no actual effect, and rope. Put simply, the player can ditch enough equipment that weight doesn't actually limit player behavior-such a small amount of equipment matters. That which does is a small, incremental weight per unit-so if a single person has enough STR to carry anything excess, they can carry all the extra food and rations easily. Or they can just buy a mule, which can carry it's feed, water, and a ton of rations, at minimal cost.

Chances are, your party simply didn't want to calculate their equipment weight-if they had, they could likely have carried everything. Weapons are rarely more than 6 pounds, 100 arrows is only 5 lbs, and an inefficient gear loadout is 60 lbs. As an adventurer carries a ten-day of rations in their base gear, another week is reasonable.The only iffy part is the poorly defined armors and the water, both of which might be impossible if they had 8 STR. If they actually had a good STR score-if anyone in the party did-it's even more reasonable.

Put simply, it's barely possible to actually overload you with mundane equipment. You either need to be doing something weird, like carrying water, some specific piece of heavy equipment, or a true armory of weapons and armor, or you need to be filthy rich and carrying all the loot as the found coinage instead of converting it into platinum or gems.

Finally; To all those people pointing to variant encumbrance as balancing, say, heavy armor-A character with 8 STR receives exactly the same penalty from variant encumbrance as in the base rules for wearing full plate, namely -10 movement speed. Yes, they might go over medium encumbrance-but by the time they're buying full plate they're bound to have enough money to buy a mule to carry their food. The second you start actually trying to plan around encumbrance, you find it's trivially easy.

[LudicSavant]

I had been using a Google Docs spreadsheet for a character sheet that would automatically tally up your encumbrance as long as you put in the weight of each item and how many you had.


Heh, I made a weight calculator spreadsheet too (you didn't have to type in the weight of each item, you could just type in the items, it'd parse it and tally it for you).

It's probably not a good sign that it was easier to make a spreadsheet like that than to actually tally up encumbrance using the books...

[Kane0]

To be fair, I do all my characters in spreadsheet form anyways.

[Aussiehams]

I think their are a couple of issues with encumbrance.
It's not an issue until it is, and then it can become adversarial between the players and the DM. The DM is basicly telling the players they can't have something they want which can cause friction;
It can eat up a lot of time for no benefit as the players debate what to keep and what to drop;
Their are so many ways to make it trivial;
HP, initiative, skills etc. are all active mechanics with dice rolls and player input. Encimbrance is static and completely ignored until its a problem, which the player can't really influence positively.

All that said, if you want to play a survival/exploration game and everyone is on board, it can add a fun layer of challange.

[Necroanswer]

5e de-emphasizes encumbrance. Pick your starting equipment from your class: weights aren't listed. Choose an explorer's/priest's/whatever pack, go to pg 151 in the PHB: no weights listed. Look up encumbrance in the PHB index: no page number, it tells you "see under lifting and carrying". It feels like the developers are telling you that you should give 0 fs about encumbrance.

Encumbrance is also punitive towards players, but almost never to anything else in the game world; if you're using the variant encumbrance rules PCs could be slowed to 20' move or worse and standard enemies will still have a speed of 30'.

I'm not arguing that tracking encumbrance is bad, but I am trying to point out why it tends to be hand-waved away.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Encumbrance would seem to be a more relevant mechanic in exploration-centric games, where it impacts how fast you can move, how long you can stay out, and how much stuff you can take back. If your campaign mostly entails traveling between known points or bumming around a major city, you probably don't care about tracking encumbrance because you're never carrying enough stuff to actually worry about it and it doesn't impose any relevant constraints on your decisions. It's not so much about realism as whether or not there's any planning or decision making to care about. If a low carrying capacity means you have to get a wagon and slow yourself down, avoid rough terrain, and raise your chances of getting mugged by goblins, having a big guy who can carry a lot without slowing down starts to look more like a feature.

The thing is, from what I can tell, not many people play exploration heavy games any more. It seems like the more typical approach is a 'plot heavy' campaigns where you're either in settlements or traveling relatively uneventfully to known points of interest, so a lot of players only ever experience encumbrance as an accounting nuisance.

This, basically. Going into the frontier away from civilization isn't really something I have my parties do. At most, they're going out on an overnighter.

And since carry weight is so high, and stuff actually carried so much less, I don't really feel tracking encumbrance is super important. They usually just total up their gear and make sure their gear is underweight, and mostly ignore treasure picked up. They also basically don't pick up much in the way of treasure anyway.

And as someone mentioned Elder Scrolls... when I'm playing Skyrim, I pretty much only take the gold and fancy stuff. I used to take everything and walk out and/or weight what had the best value to weight, but like bent forks and rags don't sell for anything and the shopkeeps run out of money to buy the crap anyway so I'm more practically limited by estimating when the crap I've got equals the amount of money in the merchants of Whiterun [or wherever the nearest town is] than actually hitting my fairly ridiculously high carry limit.


So it really just comes down to people will forget about it if it never comes up.

[Knaight]

On comparability to hit points - one thing that's being ignored here is the extent to which the GM is required to quantify the setting to interact with the rules.

For hit points, you need an abstract number for describing any character that ends up in a fight. That's a relatively niche situation, and one where a high level of abstraction is a given which gives a lot of leeway.

For encumbrance you need a real world measure for every time a character carries, picks up, or puts down an item. For certain objects (e.g. rations) this isn't even a constant, so there's that interaction. Thankfully 5e's system does abstract away some things (there isn't a separately tracked wet/dry weight), but what you're asking the GM to track quantitatively is still comparatively prohibitive, and it demands a level of precision hit points absolutely doesn't.

For instance, say you get attacked by a bandit: How much HP do they have? A GM might say 16, they might say 50, but both of those numbers can be correct. During the fight you pick up something described as a head sized rock to throw at the bandit - how much does it weigh? Now there's a substantially tighter viable correct range, accessible to anyone at the table, if they just want to do enough research and calculation, or you can eyeball it with a risk of being actually incorrect in a way that doesn't apply to the bandit.

This sort of thing comes up over and over if using this sort of quantified encumbrance. We have a videogame example earlier, which is notable in that a) the number of objects is inherently more limited than it would be in a table top game, b) everything you interact with has been made already and can have that tagged as one of many things that had to be done to make it, c) a computer routinely does calculations that are completely unreasonable to ask someone to do at the table (if I see matrix multiplication in a game I'm out), and d) is still considered a nuisance by a lot of the players.

The mechanical cost of operating this encumbrance system on the GM side is vastly, vastly higher than operating a hit point system. That's potentially worth it if you find the questions it asks engaging, but that's also going to be a struggle for a lot of players. "Which character survives this fight?" has inherently interesting stakes if you care about the characters at all. "How exactly do these characters remove this long list of loot from a mine" really doesn't. If that's what your group finds interesting about a game, by all means go into detail there, but it's not surprising that a lot of people don't.

If you don't particularly care about the questions asked by encumbrance it makes a lot of sense to just cut the system entirely and work on a judgment basis instead - which also applies just as much to combat systems, though finding people who don't care how a fight goes in game is likely somewhat harder than finding people who don't care about the details of who's carrying what when and how to extract loot. If you do care about that there's still a lot of good reasons to consider a more abstracted system that cuts down on the accounting and pushes towards the actual decision points more, e.g. Torchbearer's slot system.

One last point - actual units getting involved is a known danger area for rules producing particularly absurd results. 5e's already walked into this a little bit (the encumbrance and size rules produce absurd results, some of the weights given for objects are completely ludicrous, considering mass but not volume with encumbrance produces ridiculous results when applied to large, low density objects), but in game after game you'll get abstracted mechanical systems which at least basically make sense paired with claims involving actual units that are completely ridiculous. Hell, I'd even say that mass specifically is a common issue, though this is likely at least partially because it's one of only a handful of measures likely to show up in the first place.

If you ignore the rules that interact with these measures, you can also ignore the measures. Which means that when D&D gives you a dragon carcass of ludicrous weight, or Starfinder tries to sell its ridiculous aerogel star needle numbers as spaceship masses* you can just ignore those numbers.

*Well, they explicitly say weight, but that's a whole different issue and still doesn't excuse things like 15 km long ships that somehow only weigh 8000 tons.

[Morty]

I've played several games, in a few different systems, where nobody bothered with encumbrance even if the system had rules for it to begin with. At no point did anyone try to abuse it by carrying an excessive amount of equipment or valuables. Everyone just carried their own personal gear plus whatever the situation necessitated. If we had to carry or transport something heavy, we dealt with it in that situation.

[Guy Lombard-O]

My opinion is that encumbrance is usually too much of a pain to track on a day-to-day basis. It's nice that it's there to stop the most ridiculous abuses of PCs trying to carry way too much, and it can be dragged out and calculated at the time that the PCs start trying to do something stupid.

That said, I'd be much more willing to keep more regular track of it if the rules for swimming weren't so stripped down and streamlined. Because as it currently stands, there basically no interaction at all. Being heavily encumbered involves zero additional chance of drowning or any additional penalties for swimming and water combat, as far as I can tell. Both for exploration and combat purposes, if the rules for encumbrance interacted with the swimming rules in a more meaningful (and realistic) way, then both would be more fun to play. I mean, the Str-based plate armored fighter swimming with his shield strapped to one arm and holding a greataxe in the other, weighed down with another 10 pounds of gear in his pack, is probably still more capable at swimming across a river and fighting anything he encounters, than the 8-Str ranger wearing leather armor and holding his rapier.

If the rules for swimming and underwater combat took encumbrance into account in even the simplest way, it could make encumbrance become far more relevant to the game in a life-and-death sort of way which might make tracking it feel worthwhile.

[LudicSavant]

Does anyone know of a TTRPG system that handled encumbrance particularly well? Beyond simply not using it, that is.

[Aett_Thorn]

So I think that for me, Encumbrance is a nuisance for a couple of reasons, some of which are mentioned above, such as the bookkeeping and variability on enforcement, so I won't go into those. But the one other thing that really bugs me about it is that it's a non-combat stat, that only has effects on combat.

What do I mean by this? Well, you're really only tracking encumbrance in non-combat situations. Can you loot that thing, or can you carry that item from spot to spot? If you do track encumbrance, then you're really only seeing if the value of gear that you're carrying "X" is equal to or greater than the necessary value, and updating that when you pick up something new. But if you're carrying more than that, your speed drops by 10 feet. But that only really matters in combat. Outside of combat, speed is a much more nebulous thing, where parties of Wood Elves and Gnomes move at roughly the same speed, and is determined more by what activities you're taking in addition to moving than anything else. Maybe you have a DM that says that you're encumbered and so have a harder time keeping up with the group, but I've never seen this happen in 5e.

But how many times in combat has your character had to move something (say, a candle from one sconce to another to open a secret door), and your DM said to you, "Okay, you pick up the candle and go to move it, does that make you encumbered?" Probably zero. So something that only has a combat effect usually isn't being hugely tracked in combat unless you're lifting something heavy and needing to move it, at which point the lift/carry rules are more likely to come into play.

This also assumes that characters fight with all of their gear on them. Would you likely fight off a small horde of Orcs with a backpack filled with 50 pounds of gear in it? Or would you likely remove that backpack before the fighting began to give you the most freedom of movement? Sure, maybe if you were caught off guard or knew that you'd need to run away you might keep it on, but if you know that you're about to get into a fight that you think you'll be safe enough, you'll likely stash it first. But there's really no rules for that, and there's no "combat carrying weight" vs "non-combat carrying weight" values for issues like this. It's just assumed that whatever you have on you stays on you all the time, and once you enter combat, that's the value that determines how fast you move.

It just feels "off" to me. Not annoying, or too much bookkeeping, or too much math, although they do feed into it. It just feels like it's not quite right.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

I sew the value in it when I played a Loxodon instead of a 7 str caster(I always get a 7 when I roll stats).
The difference is amusing.
From needing help moving your bag onto the flouting disk to carrying the party above freezing water(was the one to test them, pass the save and the skill check to identify the danger).

[Democratus]

Does anyone know of a TTRPG system that handled encumbrance particularly well? Beyond simply not using it, that is.

Torchbearer does a pretty good job.

I suppose one of the characteristics of 5e is the trivialization of things that used to have much more importance:
- Encumbrance
- Light/Dark
- Highly limited magic availability

The game has moved from a gritty system of survival while trying to strike it rich to a game of epic fantasy storytelling.

Not necessarily a good or bad thing. Just different.

[LudicSavant]

Torchbearer does a pretty good job.

What does Torchbearer do?

[Democratus]

What does Torchbearer do?

There are slots on locations on your body. You can only have so many things there. So your belt might have 2 slots, and you use one for a scabbard and one for a pouch. Your chest might have two slots. So you can wear light armor (1 slot) and have a backpack (1 slot), or wear heavy armor (2 slots) with no pack.

Each kind of item (bag, pouch, pack) can hold only so much and each will have a list of what is in it. The order you write the list is the order they are in the pack. The top of the list is whats at the top of the item. And if a hole is torn in your pack, the item on the bottom will the first to fall out (perhaps without you noticing it till later).

It seems involved, but it really plays into the whole system at large and you get used to it quickly.

[LudicSavant]

There are slots on locations on your body. You can only have so many things there. So your belt might have 2 slots, and you use one for a scabbard and one for a pouch. Your chest might have two slots. So you can wear light armor (1 slot) and have a backpack (1 slot), or wear heavy armor (2 slots) with no pack.

Each kind of item (bag, pouch, pack) can hold only so much and each will have a list of what is in it. The order you write the list is the order they are in the pack. The top of the list is whats at the top of the item. And if a hole is torn in your pack, the item on the bottom will the first to fall out (perhaps without you noticing it till later).

It seems involved, but it really plays into the whole system at large and you get used to it quickly.

Thank you for your answer, Democratus!

[Nifft]

My experience is that when a tool does the calculation for me, such as a video game will tend to do, then Encumbrance is worthwhile.

If you have to do the upkeep work yourself, it's ... cumbersome.

[Pleh]

Lunch break is too short for everything now, but hopefully there will be time later to catch up.

"HP is abstract, Encumbrance requires real world measurements."

No, it can be just as abstract. You just want the weights to be believable, not necessarily realistic. A 1lb crowbar and a 6lb crowbar might both reasonably exist and have more or less the same stats. One is bigger than the other. DMs can estimate on the fly.

Heck, finding a lighter tool that is just as effective is one way to *reward* players.

"Players can't positively impact encumbrance."

Untrue. They can purchase carts and pack animals. Notably, they can increase their strength score (one of the main reasons this came up was giving strength more importance in the game). They can use magic to supplement carry capacity. This is where they use resources to creatively (maybe not perfectly) overcome problems. That is the game in a nutshell.

"Magic trivializes it."

Sure, but magic trivializes the entire game if you let it. Encumbrance isn't much of an issue for the 15 minute adventuring day, either. Force the party to go further between rests and then being able to carry loot further becomes more important and having enough spell slots left over becomes more challenging. There are rituals, but you gotta guard the caster for 10 minutes.

[Chaosmancer]

The final and biggest reason, D., is that it's something only the players characters have to worry about, enemies never deal with it, NPCs never deal with it, it never helps them, it only limits them. There are other aspects of the game that work like this, but other bookkeeping issues like HP, initiative, etc. all either impact NPCs or feel like they do, which is part of the reason we tolerate this bookkeeping. In a similar vein, food tracking is actually often omitted for precisely the same reason; it never actually helps the party in any way. This is why keeping track of gold is viewed as a good thing (and why, when AL stopped letting you, there was uproar), because Gold does help the party and can (at least theoretically) get you good things, despite being one of the biggest time sinks in terms of bookkeeping.

This right here is a huge reason for people not wanting to deal with encumbrance. It is never a positive for the players. It is always either negative (because we are tracking it you can't do what you wanted) or neutral (tracking it or not tracking it doesn't change what is possible to do). I have never seen a single rule or discussion that has Encumbrance as a positive factor (because we were tracking it, you can do something you normally couldn't do)

And hp always comes up, because hp is never positive either right? Except, low hp on monsters is good. Tracking hp allows us to effect monsters, there are even spells that trigger specifically based off a monster's hp.

But monsters are never encumbered. They never have to deal with the negative effects of the system, only the players do.



Encumbrance can add another layer to challenging players.

If you don't want to enforce this layer okay.

But it does increase the challenge. It can make exhaustion a real threat.

Running around in anything more than 40lbs is crazy tough... it adds in another layer of realism to the game.

The unfortunate aspect of 5E IMO is that point buy or standard array makes having a lower stat a reality and strength is dumped and hence encumbrance is often handwaved because of this... everyone is sporting a 10 or an 8 or a 12.

But IRL having to lug around heavy loads is real... From soldiers to refugees. Fatigue becomes another layer.

Except, in 5e, no it isn't.

An 8 strength allows you to run around with 120 lbs of gear with no problem, no exhaustion, nothing. For 40lbs to even matter you need a strength of 2.



"Players can't positively impact encumbrance."

Untrue. They can purchase carts and pack animals. Notably, they can increase their strength score (one of the main reasons this came up was giving strength more importance in the game). They can use magic to supplement carry capacity. This is where they use resources to creatively (maybe not perfectly) overcome problems. That is the game in a nutshell.

That isn't a positive impact. That is avoiding a negative impact.

Compare your new options from purchasing a donkey to your old options of not having a donkey in a game where you track encumbrance and where you don't.

In the game where you track encumbrance the only new impact the donkey has is increasing the limit of your encumbrance. Which is not a positive when compared to the game without encumbrance, because that is something they aren't tracking. To put it another way, if you aren't tracking the penalties on the player's actions, then giving them a way to remove those penalties is a moot point. They didn't exist to be removed.

[sithlordnergal]

I think the issue most people have with encumbrance is the math involved. Most items are nice and easy, they either deal in whole numbers, or they use 1/2 or 1/4 pounds. And honestly, I bet people wouldn't have as much of an issue with that if they had kept that formula for every item...but they didn't. Instead, they made the two items that change the most, money and ammunition, weigh really weird numbers.

Each Gold, Silver, Copper, and Platinum piece weighs 1/3 of an ounce...well right off that bat that's no good. If we wanted to convert that into a nice fraction with pounds, we need to do some analysis. 1/3oz. (1lbs./16oz.)= 1/48lbs...ok, so one GP is technically 1/48th of a pound, but they rounded that to 1/50th, that's nice of them. But ok, we're using fractions and already we have a bit of a problem. If we wanted to add, say, (9/50)+(1/2), that's gonna be really annoying to do, and we haven't even touched on ammo yet. So lets swap over to decimal points, which are much, much easier:

With decimal points in play, most items are whole numbers, 0.5, or 0.25. Ok, that's not so bad...But Gold and Ammo toss in yet another irritation. Gold now weighs 0.02lbs, ammo that come in packs of 20 weigh 0.05 each, ammo that come in packs of 50 weigh another 0.02, caltrops are 0.1lbs each, iron spikes are .5lbs, Silk Rope is 0.1lbs per foot, and Hemp Rope is 0.2lbs per foot. Ok, those numbers are much, much cleaner, but they're still annoying to deal with. Especially during transactions and/or right after combat. Heck, I know some players who hate bothering with decimals so much that if something costs 2 Silver, they'll just pay 1 GP to avoid having to divide the gold into 10 silver.

As for the comparison to the math you do with HP, skills, attacks, and damage, consider this: You never bother with decimals with any of those things. You always just round up or down. Did you save for half? Well you don't have to worry about the exact number for 35/2, just take the 17 points of damage.

[Democratus]

This right here is a huge reason for people not wanting to deal with encumbrance. It is never a positive for the players.

It's very much a positive for players if they enjoy tracking encumbrance.

Maybe you're trying to say that it's never a positive for characters? But that's not an issue. Bad things happen to my characters all the time - monsters, disasters, assassination schemes - and I enjoy the heck out of it.

I don't think I'd enjoy a game very much if nothing "negative" ever happened to my character.

[Zevox]

It's very much a positive for players if they enjoy tracking encumbrance.
That's some circular logic right there. Of course anything that players enjoy is a positive for them - but this entire conversation is based on the fact that there's a sizable number of players who don't enjoy encumbrance, to the point of preferring not to use it in the game at all.

[Tanarii]

That's some circular logic right there. Of course anything that players enjoy is a positive for them - but this entire conversation is based on the fact that there's a sizable number of players who don't enjoy encumbrance, to the point of preferring not to use it in the game at all.
No, the point was he was countering the idea that encumbrance is always a negative for players.

If it's sometimes a positive for players, or a positive for some players, it's not always a negative for players.

[Necroanswer]

No, the point was he was countering the idea that encumbrance is always a negative for players.

If it's sometimes a positive for players, or a positive for some players, it's not always a negative for players.

I think most of the posters here represent different attitudes that I think typical TTRPGers would have. If a GM announced the he was going to strictly enforce encumbrance rules and everyone better make sure they track it down to the ounce I would expect groans from all around the table. What you wrote is true I guess, it could be a positive for some players (because they like tracking numbers?), but those players probably are a small minority.

[Asisreo1]

I think most of the posters here represent different attitudes that I think typical TTRPGers would have. If a GM announced the he was going to strictly enforce encumbrance rules and everyone better make sure they track it down to the ounce I would expect groans from all around the table. What you wrote is true I guess, it could be a positive for some players (because they like tracking numbers?), but those players probably are a small minority.
I mean, I know some table groan when the DM says "roll for initiative." It's probably what you say and how you say it.

"I'm tracking encumbrance to the T, don't forget your calculators and bring your unit converters too." Just sounds like homework. "Keep your carry capacity in mind. I won't be strict but I'll check it every so often and/or after each session." Would probably have shrugs.

But man, won't it feel awesome for the Bulky characters to lift whole treasure chests by themselves.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I mean, I know some table groan when the DM says "roll for initiative." It's probably what you say and how you say it.

"I'm tracking encumbrance to the T, don't forget your calculators and bring your unit converters too." Just sounds like homework. "Keep your carry capacity in mind. I won't be strict but I'll check it every so often and/or after each session." Would probably have shrugs.

But man, won't it feel awesome for the Bulky characters to lift whole treasure chests by themselves.

I groan when the GM says "roll for initiative" :).

I would probably also groan if I had to bring a calculator for encumberance.

I would also groan if I as the GM had to track it for each player.

[Nifft]

It's very much a positive for players if they enjoy tracking encumbrance.

Maybe you're trying to say that it's never a positive for characters? But that's not an issue. Bad things happen to my characters all the time - monsters, disasters, assassination schemes - and I enjoy the heck out of it.

Would you still enjoy it if you were the only player tracking encumbrance?

If so, you can track your own encumbrance harmlessly while the rest of the table ignores it, and then everybody is happy.



I groan when the GM says "roll for initiative" :).

I would probably also groan if I had to bring a calculator for encumberance.

I would also groan if I as the GM had to track it for each player.

Were you trying to be stealthy when the initiative declaration fell upon you like a volley of arrows?


== ==== ==

Anyway, I think the main issue with encumbrance -- beyond the annoyance of tracking it without a tool, or the annoyance of all tools I've seen so far -- the main issue is genre.

Encumbrance is interesting in a survival or skillful genre game (wilderness, dungeon infiltration, urban heist, etc.).

Encumbrance is not interesting in a door-kicking action genre game.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Were you trying to be stealthy when the initiative declaration fell upon you like a volley of arrows?


== ==== ==

Anyway, I think the main issue with encumbrance -- beyond the annoyance of tracking it without a tool, or the annoyance of all tools I've seen so far -- the main issue is genre.

Encumbrance is interesting in a survival or skillful genre game (wilderness, dungeon infiltration, urban heist, etc.).

Encumbrance is not interesting in a door-kicking action genre game.

No. I just hate D&D combat. It's a great way to bring a session to a grinding halt and make things go from moving along and fun and interactive to spending 4 hours doing nothing starting at a board that doesn't change turn to turn while someone else stares at the board going "uhh.... should I Sharpshooter this one?" This is why I bring miniatures and paint to sessions so that I can do something when it's not my initiative step.


I just think that encumbrance is insignificant. It's so high that nobody's wargear is remotely close to their limit, even for pretty strength-poor characters. It would matter and be worth tracking if it were lower and mattered sometimes, but nobody is ever carrying anywhere near the limit of it so it's just book keeping for the sake of book keeping.

[Zevox]

But man, won't it feel awesome for the Bulky characters to lift whole treasure chests by themselves.
Speaking as someone currently playing one of those - no, still feels like annoying busywork that would be better off dispensed with. At most it gives me mild amusement, but that's entirely at the fact that our party's strong character is a Halfling. Which would still be true even if I didn't need to track encumbrance.

[Asisreo1]

Speaking as someone currently playing one of those - no, still feels like annoying busywork that would be better off dispensed with. At most it gives me mild amusement, but that's entirely at the fact that our party's strong character is a Halfling. Which would still be true even if I didn't need to track encumbrance.
It feels good to me. Like I'm the party mother that shakes their head and goes "What would you all do without me?" It's not all that busy of busywork if the DM already knows how much the chest weighs and If I already have my encumbrance calculated.

I definitely use an online automatic calculator. I'm not blind to see that encumbrance can be a headache if players weren't prepared.

But you'll be surprised how often encumbrance comes into play in a real game. As a DM, I put a harmless weapon superior to their old weapon and they realize that it is too heavy to equip without dropping something they want to keep. You don't want to drop your rations and torches and they might not be enough to help anyways. Suddenly you're dropping weapons and armor.

When they get back to the city, they have incentive to lighten their pockets because they can't carry more otherwise. They can't be little hoarders anymore. I do roll for treasure in the DMG and they can be particularly cruel in how many copper pieces you get that starts weighing you down. I just rolled on the treasure hoard for cr 1-4 and got: 2300 cp, 1100sp, and 800 gp. That's already 84 pounds of coinage. Mostly in copper. Sometimes you can go back to get them but sometimes you can't. You'll have to weigh those options down.

The players soon learned when the ruins they thought they would save for later collapsed in the ground and made the treasure hoard nearly impossible to get. Some things just can't wait until later.

[Zevox]

It feels good to me. Like I'm the party mother that shakes their head and goes "What would you all do without me?" It's not all that busy of busywork if the DM already knows how much the chest weighs and If I already have my encumbrance calculated.

I definitely use an online automatic calculator. I'm not blind to see that encumbrance can be a headache if players weren't prepared.

But you'll be surprised how often encumbrance comes into play in a real game. As a DM, I put a harmless weapon superior to their old weapon and they realize that it is too heavy to equip without dropping something they want to keep. You don't want to drop your rations and torches and they might not be enough to help anyways. Suddenly you're dropping weapons and armor.

When they get back to the city, they have incentive to lighten their pockets because they can't carry more otherwise. They can't be little hoarders anymore. I do roll for treasure in the DMG and they can be particularly cruel in how many copper pieces you get that starts weighing you down. I just rolled on the treasure hoard for cr 1-4 and got: 2300 cp, 1100sp, and 800 gp. That's already 84 pounds of coinage. Mostly in copper. Sometimes you can go back to get them but sometimes you can't. You'll have to weigh those options down.

The players soon learned when the ruins they thought they would save for later collapsed in the ground and made the treasure hoard nearly impossible to get. Some things just can't wait until later.
I'm in a real game, and it really doesn't, at least not the way we play. My teammates have low strength, but as dex-based Ranger and a Druid, they have little need for anything particularly heavy anyway. My Paladin has the heaviest items between his various weapons and full plate armor, but with 18 strength his carry capacity is plenty.

Part of this though is certainly a matter of personal opinion. For instance, even if I were ever forced to decide on dropping something to carry something new, I doubt it would be a difficult decision for me, as items just aren't the part of the game that I find interesting. Necessary equipment and powerful magic items stay, everything else is pretty readily expendable. Money is frankly very low on the priorities list - it's only as useful as the DM makes it, after all, given how little the actual books give you to do with it (unless you're a Wizard trying to add spells to his spellbook, anyway; that's a legitimately big money sink). Who needs a treasure hoard you can't spend? (Hell, my current Paladin wouldn't prioritize money much just for IC reasons, even more so than I would as a player.) Besides, our group doesn't even use copper or silver pieces, since nobody likes those - it's like tracking your wealth in dimes and quarters in the real world.

Also, thankfully I at least don't have to worry about rations, my DM doesn't make us track food and water. Technically I have some, but only because they came with the starter equipment pack I bought. Torches are obsolete now too since I just found a Driftglobe, and the other party members have Darkvision anyway.

[Zhorn]

...in a real game....
...I'm in a real game...
Heh. I just love how this highlights one of the biggest challenges of assessing something's value in a game.
You are both playing a real game; the exclusion or inclusion of certain rules doesn't make the game any more or less of a 'real' game of D&D (although I would argue there needs to be at least two dungeons and two dragons in a campaign for the name to at least be accurate).

I side more with Asisreo1 in terms of the type of game I personally prefer to play in, but for players like Zevox I agree that mechanics like encumbrance shouldn't be in their games.

It all comes down to supporting the use of the mechanics.
If you don't ever travel that far from civilisation, don't bother with food/water/hunger/dehydration.
If your world operates as if everything is reachable as though it's a flat plane, climbing equipment is out.
If the DM runs their combats with a war-gamer mindset; scrap the entire concept of illusion spells from the magic system.
etc, etc etc

If you can't see encumbrance as anything other that just 'needless math' or your DM doesn't give meaningful situations, choices, and consequences that utilises weights and carry capacity, then it's never going to be a mechanic for you.
But don't mistake your experiences at the table being indicative of everyone's experiences at every table.
Some table don't make encumbrance work.
Some table do make encumbrance work.
Encumbrance is not a bad/broken system in 5e, it's just a mechanic you have not figured out how to use in a meaningful way, or the type of game you know it can work for isn't compatible with the style of game you find the most fun.
Its no different than with LordCdrMilitant combat example. At their table; the types of combats being presented and the types of players that they have alongside them mean combat is a long, drawn out process. Combat isn't the root cause of their problem, they are just in a situation where combat doesn't add to their overall fun.

[Zevox]

If you don't ever travel that far from civilisation, don't bother with food/water/hunger/dehydration.
Just in case you've misunderstood me, that's not why my group doesn't track those. We just don't have anyone in the group who finds the idea of tracking when our characters eat or how much food and water they're carrying to be a fun sounding one, so we hand wave it and assume it to not be an issue. We've certainly traveled out away from civilization at times, we just don't worry about tracking food any more then than we do when we are around it.


If you can't see encumbrance as anything other that just 'needless math' or your DM doesn't give meaningful situations, choices, and consequences that utilises weights and carry capacity, then it's never going to be a mechanic for you.
But don't mistake your experiences at the table being indicative of everyone's experiences at every table.
Certainly - obviously there are those who enjoy that sort of detailed simulationist element, and that's fine for them. I'm only offering the perspective of someone who doesn't, and why that would be.

Give me opportunities to roleplay, a story to engage with, or a fight to participate in, and I'm very happy playing the game. But inventory management? I don't even like that in video games where it's considerably easier, much less a tabletop game where everything needs to be tracked by hand. So the less of that I need to deal with, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

[Pex]

It feels good to me. Like I'm the party mother that shakes their head and goes "What would you all do without me?" It's not all that busy of busywork if the DM already knows how much the chest weighs and If I already have my encumbrance calculated.

I definitely use an online automatic calculator. I'm not blind to see that encumbrance can be a headache if players weren't prepared.

But you'll be surprised how often encumbrance comes into play in a real game. As a DM, I put a harmless weapon superior to their old weapon and they realize that it is too heavy to equip without dropping something they want to keep. You don't want to drop your rations and torches and they might not be enough to help anyways. Suddenly you're dropping weapons and armor.

When they get back to the city, they have incentive to lighten their pockets because they can't carry more otherwise. They can't be little hoarders anymore. I do roll for treasure in the DMG and they can be particularly cruel in how many copper pieces you get that starts weighing you down. I just rolled on the treasure hoard for cr 1-4 and got: 2300 cp, 1100sp, and 800 gp. That's already 84 pounds of coinage. Mostly in copper. Sometimes you can go back to get them but sometimes you can't. You'll have to weigh those options down.

The players soon learned when the ruins they thought they would save for later collapsed in the ground and made the treasure hoard nearly impossible to get. Some things just can't wait until later.

That's adversarial DMing. Here's the treasure; too bad you can't take it. It does nothing but tease players giving the DM jollies. It happens a lot. The players find a treasure room in the dungeon, but it's all coins and gems lying around too many to count or carry. The players agree to come back later when they finish the Adventure Mcguffin and have all the time in the world to take the coins, but they never do. Not because they don't want to but because the DM won't let them. The party gets magically teleported out of the dungeon. At some point during the dungeon the pathway behind them collapses , and they can never go back. After finishing the Adventure Mcguffin the dungeon is self-destructing or getting flooded the party needs to leave RIGHT NOW! There's always some excuse the party can't go back. See the quote where the ruins collapsed by DM fiat after the party left to come back later when they could take the treasure. That is how using encumbrance starts to become annoying and unfun, more than the bookkeeping. It's DM gotcha.

Another way it's done is for the treasure to be a gem of extreme value, but it's The Key. It must be used to open something - a portal, a secret door, a vault to the McGuffin. Afterwards the gem turns to coal or dust or has to remain in the lock because of Adventure Fail since you must enter what was opened. However, that doesn't use encumbrance.

[Tanarii]

I think most of the posters here represent different attitudes that I think typical TTRPGers would have. If a GM announced the he was going to strictly enforce encumbrance rules and everyone better make sure they track it down to the ounce I would expect groans from all around the table. What you wrote is true I guess, it could be a positive for some players (because they like tracking numbers?), but those players probably are a small minority.
Since you missed the point while quoting the point, I'm going to repeat it.

Someone posted that encumbrance is always a negative for players.

Someone else responded it is a positive for some players.

If it's sometimes a positive for players, or a positive for some players, it's not always a negative for players.

[Zhorn]

@Pex (but mostly for others, since you were in the last thread on this topic), that kind of behaviour is just like with players that resort to edge-lord "that's what my character would do" mentality, or the stereotypical bard "I roll to seduce everyone". It isn't a mechanical issues, just a player/DM issue with goals, expectations, and prioritising one person's fun over the groups.
Like I said in the last thread, when you have these types of mentalities at your table, don't yield and push on through to demonstrate their antics will not be allowed to slide.
When dealing with players; the old 'actions have consequences' mantra is applied to snap those players out of that mindset (some folks learn faster than others, but outside of RPG horror stories; most people grow out of it with enough time and effort).
Apply the same principle to the DM. Always come back to the dungeon. They cannot stop you unless they end the game or destroy their own campaign story.

DM "you are teleported out of the dungeon"
Party "we come back"
DM "you escape and the dungeon collapses"
Party "we come back with an excavation team"
DM "the treasure turns to ash"
Party "we dedicate out lives to the study of transmutation to restore the treasure"

If you make that antic of teasing players with treasure they can't have unfun for the DM, they'll learn to stop. Make them aware that doing such things will grind their campaign to a halt, and make sure they are aware of why it is happening.

[LordCdrMilitant]

It feels good to me. Like I'm the party mother that shakes their head and goes "What would you all do without me?" It's not all that busy of busywork if the DM already knows how much the chest weighs and If I already have my encumbrance calculated.

I definitely use an online automatic calculator. I'm not blind to see that encumbrance can be a headache if players weren't prepared.

But you'll be surprised how often encumbrance comes into play in a real game. As a DM, I put a harmless weapon superior to their old weapon and they realize that it is too heavy to equip without dropping something they want to keep. You don't want to drop your rations and torches and they might not be enough to help anyways. Suddenly you're dropping weapons and armor.

When they get back to the city, they have incentive to lighten their pockets because they can't carry more otherwise. They can't be little hoarders anymore. I do roll for treasure in the DMG and they can be particularly cruel in how many copper pieces you get that starts weighing you down. I just rolled on the treasure hoard for cr 1-4 and got: 2300 cp, 1100sp, and 800 gp. That's already 84 pounds of coinage. Mostly in copper. Sometimes you can go back to get them but sometimes you can't. You'll have to weigh those options down.

The players soon learned when the ruins they thought they would save for later collapsed in the ground and made the treasure hoard nearly impossible to get. Some things just can't wait until later.

What are you even carrying? And even that wealth table roll with 84 lb of coins winds up being like 21 pounds or less per character [and of that, only 2.4% of it's value is in the 55% of it's weight that is in copper]. A S8 character can carry 120 pounds of crap. That's a lot of crap, astronomically more than I ever carried backpacking or day hiking, and can easily split that with the party and haul it all out with many pounds to spare.

AEthelwyn the Sorceress [my character] carries about 50 pounds of stuff when she leaves the ship [10 wands, her rod, binoculars, polaroid camera, hostile environment kit, crossbow, spear, bolts, notebooks, pens and pencils, rope, mess kit, stove, fuel, top ramen, clothes, and a few other pieces of crap], and she's carrying the most out of anybody in her party on the routine basis.

She has 141 total pounds of categorized stuff [not including a thrust test stand and arbitrarily heavy things like crates of notebooks and laboratory tables and a bed she uses a dolly to move around], 53.18 of which is in coinage [mostly platinum and gold with 3 silver and 33 copper pieces]. She has a S of 13, giving her 195 pounds of carry weight, so even if she had to carry all her categorized crap simultaneously, she'd have 50lb left over to pick up random garbage.


This is why I basically never track encumbrance. As a GM, it's not worth my time to double check my players or look up weights, and as a player the limit is so high it's irrelevant. It's either "I can pick that up and carry it" or "It's too heavy and I'll need a dolly to move it far or a S check to move it a short distance", and my encumbrance is never consulted.

[Necroanswer]

Since you missed the point while quoting the point, I'm going to repeat it.

Someone posted that encumbrance is always a negative for players.

Someone else responded it is a positive for some players.

If it's sometimes a positive for players, or a positive for some players, it's not always a negative for players.

I'm not really disagreeing with you. Some people here have said tracking encumbrance is a positive for them and I believe them (I still don't see the 'fun' factor in it, but I believe them when they say it adds to the game for them). So, yes, for some it is a positive, but in the wider community of TTRPGers I believe these people are a minority (and probably a pretty small one at that).

I had one GM make me track individual spell components, not just the ones that had a gp value, but things like guano (this wasn't 5e, so no foci). It wasn't fun and added nothing to the game (I just made sure to get plenty of components for spells I would often cast). All it did was create busywork for me. Generally, tracking encumbrance is 5e amounts to the same thing, creating busywork that won't affect the game unless you're carrying around silly amounts of stuff and then you should be called on it anyway.

[Tanarii]

I'm willing to bet if coins were ten to a pound, variant encumbrance was the default rule, it took 6-7 times as much XP to level, combat XP remained the same, and GP was XP, that players would find overcoming the challenges of encumbrance far more engrossing.

[Zhorn]

@Tanarii.
I get where you are getting at, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Change the numbers and the scale you work with, it will still mean nothing unless the DM makes that aspect of play relevant in the first place. Like others have noted, the interaction with the exploration pillar is where encumbrance really has a place to shine. Setting up the gear requirements for traversing difficult environments, needing supplies, having the right tools to get into the dungeons, and having the capacity to get stuff out.
It's not just one single mechanic that makes or breaks encumbrance, it's a multitude of smaller interactions and challenges that build up to a whole.
I enjoy using the encumbrance mechanic, but the more I hear about how others play their games, I can see more why they never have fun with it. They cut away all the parts where it matters, hand wave away those smaller bits that add up to a whole.

[LordCdrMilitant]

@Tanarii.
I get where you are getting at, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Change the numbers and the scale you work with, it will still mean nothing unless the DM makes that aspect of play relevant in the first place. Like others have noted, the interaction with the exploration pillar is where encumbrance really has a place to shine. Setting up the gear requirements for traversing difficult environments, needing supplies, having the right tools to get into the dungeons, and having the capacity to get stuff out.
It's not just one single mechanic that makes or breaks encumbrance, it's a multitude of smaller interactions and challenges that build up to a whole.
I enjoy using the encumbrance mechanic, but the more I hear about how others play their games, I can see more why they never have fun with it. They cut away all the parts where it matters, hand wave away those smaller bits that add up to a whole.

Yeah. The games we play are a very different from what players like Tanarii are presumably playing, and from the way D&D began.

We tend to be playing more story driven games about characters and their lives and stories than single-unit wargames with treasure even as a goal. "Dungeon" and "treasure" aren't even necessary features.
The last "dungeon" I ran for a party had literally 0GP worth of lootable objects in it, and this isn't a unique trend. In the game I'm playing in taking monetary loot from dungeons also isn't really a thing, almost everything we take is recovered for plot purposes [ancient books, relic blades, lots of information, etc.]

Encumberance is certainly something that would be a valuable addition to a game about explorers or frontiersmen who might be away from civilization for extended periods of time, but that isn't our game. And you might have to ban some things to trivialize some of the problems such expeditions might encounter.

[Asisreo1]

That's adversarial DMing. Here's the treasure; too bad you can't take it. It does nothing but tease players giving the DM jollies. It happens a lot. The players find a treasure room in the dungeon, but it's all coins and gems lying around too many to count or carry. The players agree to come back later when they finish the Adventure Mcguffin and have all the time in the world to take the coins, but they never do. Not because they don't want to but because the DM won't let them. The party gets magically teleported out of the dungeon. At some point during the dungeon the pathway behind them collapses , and they can never go back. After finishing the Adventure Mcguffin the dungeon is self-destructing or getting flooded the party needs to leave RIGHT NOW! There's always some excuse the party can't go back. See the quote where the ruins collapsed by DM fiat after the party left to come back later when they could take the treasure. That is how using encumbrance starts to become annoying and unfun, more than the bookkeeping. It's DM gotcha.

Another way it's done is for the treasure to be a gem of extreme value, but it's The Key. It must be used to open something - a portal, a secret door, a vault to the McGuffin. Afterwards the gem turns to coal or dust or has to remain in the lock because of Adventure Fail since you must enter what was opened. However, that doesn't use encumbrance.
I don't do it on purpose. As I said, I roll on treasure tables. They tend to give a lot of coins. The players happen to have an egregious amount of coins weighing them down already. They leave it in.

If the players have something like Dimension Door, they're free to go back in uncontested. Depending on the way it collapsed, I might've even let the barbarian dig up the entrance from the rubble. I've made it clear that the ruins were bound to collapse all the way back at the village they got the quest from. I don't adjust anything to the players. I make the world, give some events that resemble the start of a story, and I let players do what they want with that. I have no love or hate for their characters and I won't baby them. If they feel it's too hard, they need to pay attention more.

Sometimes, ruins collapse. I don't do it to cut them off from treasure. If they had brought a cart inside or used Tenser's, they'd easily keep the gold. Because the goal really wasn't to teach them a lesson, they just happened to learn it.

My players now invest their gold into the world rather than hoard because while doing nothing with gold weighs them down, using gold in ways like lifestyle expenses or downtime activities gives them a chance to actually interact with the world in their own way rather than wait for me to tell them what their characters must do.

Though, that's a side effect of me giving the characters plenty of downtime to prepare my next adventure by seeding hooks.

[Democratus]

Would you still enjoy it if you were the only player tracking encumbrance?

My entire table plays by the same rules, because we're all playing the same game.

The entire table also enjoys tracking encumbrance. Some because it is part of the resource management aspect. Some because it's fun from a storytelling standpoint.

I'd say maybe 1 in 5 tables I've run/played at have been against tracking encumbrance. My sample size is only a few hundred tables, so it might be too small to draw any conclusions.

[Tanarii]

@Tanarii.
I get where you are getting at, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Change the numbers and the scale you work with, it will still mean nothing unless the DM makes that aspect of play relevant in the first place. Like others have noted, the interaction with the exploration pillar is where encumbrance really has a place to shine. Setting up the gear requirements for traversing difficult environments, needing supplies, having the right tools to get into the dungeons, and having the capacity to get stuff out.
It's not just one single mechanic that makes or breaks encumbrance, it's a multitude of smaller interactions and challenges that build up to a whole.
I enjoy using the encumbrance mechanic, but the more I hear about how others play their games, I can see more why they never have fun with it. They cut away all the parts where it matters, hand wave away those smaller bits that add up to a whole.The mechanics that it takes is XP for GP, a meaningful rate of expected XP gain, time having meaning (e.g. Wandering monsters), and a meaningful encumbrance mechanic. 5e has none of those.

Unless you're teleporting PCs from encounter to encounter, you're already playing an exploration game the moment you set foot on an adventuring site.

I think we agree, the reason encumbrance seems so pointless is all the things that were core parts of the game for very good reasons got stripped out. Typically in favor of doing exactly that, teleporting from encounter to encounter, often in a linear path. Because heroics! Gotta save the world or whateva. (Edit: Note that 4e also had this problem, but in spades.)

The second you try and use 5e in a hex crawl or wilderness adventuring site exploration or dungeon exploration all the flaws come leaping to the fore. And I used it that way for several years. I'm intimately familiar with 5es flaws because of it.

[Zevox]

I'm willing to bet if coins were ten to a pound, variant encumbrance was the default rule, it took 6-7 times as much XP to level, combat XP remained the same, and GP was XP, that players would find overcoming the challenges of encumbrance far more engrossing.
No, then I'd just be that much happier that my table switched from xp to the milestones system of leveling years ago. That's another one of those bookkeeping elements that seems better left by the wayside, IMO.

[Tanarii]

No, then I'd just be that much happier that my table switched from xp to the milestones system of leveling years ago. That's another one of those bookkeeping elements that seems better left by the wayside, IMO.
Then you're Doing it Wrong(TM):smallamused:

Seriously though, XP is another wonderful tool that's purpose has been lost, and ditching it as 'bookkeeping' just results in a lesser game.

Also https://theangrygm.com/how-to-xp-good/

[jjordan]

That's adversarial DMing. Here's the treasure; too bad you can't take it. It does nothing but tease players giving the DM jollies. It's only adversarial DMing if you're constantly yanking stuff away from the players after they make choices. Giving players choices to make is part of the game.

For example: I've got a dungeon setting that's slowly being overtaken by shadow creatures. It includes the library of a legendary magician. Most of the magic in the library has been consumed by a nothic (modified to make it a thaumovore) but there are still some treasures to be found. The players can take time to fight the nothic and search for the treasures in the knowledge that the shadow creatures are actively trying to reclaim this space or they can use that time for other activities (helping the inhabitants escape, looting the armory, trying to fix the wards to stabilize the dungeon and prevent chunks of it being reclaimed by the shadows, or doing something else entirely; I'm always open to players coming up with their own ideas). This is more meaningful for my players because in a previous adventure they were 'forced' to leave the villagers behind and they've regretted it ever since. And resented the NPC that forced that choice on them.

Making choices is just more resource management. And to bring this back to topic, I do periodic encumbrance checks when it's necessary. Such as? Party is loading up to head into the wilderness? Do a quick encumbrance check for me, please. Oh, you're going to start experiencing exhaustion due to the load you're carrying? Good to know. Let's proceed. When are you going to run out of food? Two days away from where you think your objective is based on the rough map? I'm not saying everyone needs to work out all the niggling details but they do need to engage in some general problem solving and manage their resources. Using magic to reduce/eliminate the need for much of this planning? Fine, that's a perfectly acceptable use of resources.

Trying to jump across the chasm? Ok. Say, how encumbered are you? Perfectly reasonable use of encumbrance and can present the players with choices. Leave the pack behind? Hide it and come back for it? Etc...

[Chaosmancer]

Crap, closed the wrong tab and lost all my replies


It's very much a positive for players if they enjoy tracking encumbrance.

Maybe you're trying to say that it's never a positive for characters? But that's not an issue. Bad things happen to my characters all the time - monsters, disasters, assassination schemes - and I enjoy the heck out of it.

I don't think I'd enjoy a game very much if nothing "negative" ever happened to my character.


I meant characters, just shortened PCs.

Running through the list of your examples of other "bad things" though

Monsters -> source of XP, source of loot, source of plot, allows for the use of cool abilities, allows for the use of clever plans to gain advantages, can be fought directly, involves the entire party.

Disasters (natural?) -> large scale destruction, source of plot, effects the entire party, allows for the use of cool abilities, can be used to show moments of "small heroics" by rescuing civilians, source of rewards for rescuing people

Assassination plots -> I note that this is not "being assassinated" I don't think anyone is having fun when the DM declares a week into the wilderness that a player drops dead, because they failed a con save back in town when someone poisoned their drink and now they are dead. So, plots, we have a source of plot, involves the entire party, allows the use of cool abilities or clever plans to gain advantages, source of rewards for saving the assassination target, leads to combat which involves everything from monsters category.


Now, look at encumberance tracking -> Does not involve the entire party, does not involve the use of abilities or plans that lead to advantages (compared to not tracking encumbrance, all plans and abilities end up neutral state), prevents the gaining of loot and rewards, only effects the plot when it prevents the plot (this plot item is too heavy to carry), doesn't affect the larger world.

The only positives I see people bring up are "I like doing math" and "but we were able to prove that we could carry it all" even the survival stuff in the previous thread I showed that other than water (which is stupidly heavy) a standard array party of 4 could carry every supply needed for a 2 week trip through the wilderness with space to spare. Water was literally the only item they could not carry a two week supply of. And no amount of gear dropping could change that, because the water weighed more than every single other item they were all carrying combined.





I definitely use an online automatic calculator. I'm not blind to see that encumbrance can be a headache if players weren't prepared.

I've noticed this a lot, thought maybe it is always the same person? But the majority of people I see saying that they love tracking encumbrance also have a digital sheet that does all the work for them.

We try and have no tech at the table. Doesn't always work, but we try. So, this isn't something we have, and it isn't something I feel the need to build even if I knew how.

But I will agree, encumbrance is far less annoying to track if you don't need to track it yourself.




But you'll be surprised how often encumbrance comes into play in a real game. As a DM, I put a harmless weapon superior to their old weapon and they realize that it is too heavy to equip without dropping something they want to keep. You don't want to drop your rations and torches and they might not be enough to help anyways. Suddenly you're dropping weapons and armor.

When they get back to the city, they have incentive to lighten their pockets because they can't carry more otherwise. They can't be little hoarders anymore. I do roll for treasure in the DMG and they can be particularly cruel in how many copper pieces you get that starts weighing you down. I just rolled on the treasure hoard for cr 1-4 and got: 2300 cp, 1100sp, and 800 gp. That's already 84 pounds of coinage. Mostly in copper. Sometimes you can go back to get them but sometimes you can't. You'll have to weigh those options down.

The players soon learned when the ruins they thought they would save for later collapsed in the ground and made the treasure hoard nearly impossible to get. Some things just can't wait until later.


I wondered how the heck your group had to keep dropping weapons and armor, then I saw the bit about the coinage. I also read your other post about just using the treasure tables.

My first thought is that if you stopped handing out treasure, and just let adventurers buy on credit with the town based off their deed, that you would suddenly see a lot less about encumbrance.

The second is like LordCdrMilitant said, your players should just ignore parts of the loot. That 2,300 cp weighs 46 pounds, but is only worth 23 gp. 1,100 sp? 22 lbs and worth 110 gp. The 800 gp (86% of the value of the hoard) weighs only 16 lbs

So, if weight is a big deal, they just don't take the chaff.

But then, I imagine the next part is exactly what happened in the last thread "So, does the party take all the time to sort it out? The coins are mixed together after all" and then either dropping the ruins on their head or rolling for random monster attacks to force the players to just take less money and leave.

You know, that reminds me of something, we were playing the Mad Mage with a DM and we ended up cowing a tribe of goblins into working for us. then we came upon the room with about a dozen barrels full of copper bars and the room with the copper floor. DM said we couldn't loot it, it was clearly too much material for us to move. I pointed out that we had an entire tribe of goblins as a work force. The game died due to players leaving, but this is an example in the opposite direction. We didn't have a plot beyond "make money" and a copper bar is worth 5 silver. We had a workforce willing to work for next to nothing, and literally thousands of pounds of copper.

The designers expected encumbrance to stop this, but even if we played with it, we could still do it.

Last point. Why do people use torches in games with encumbrance?

A torch grants an hour of light for a lb of weight. A lantern and a vial of oil grant 6 hours of light for 3 lbs of weight. With another 6 hours for every pound. If I was ever forced into a game with encumbrance that would be my go to mundane light source. Instead of lugging around 240 lbs of torches I could carry only 80 lbs of oil and a 2 lbs lantern.

[Deathtongue]

I'd value encumbrance a lot more if D&D actually made it so that you care about it narratively and/or in gameplay.

Torchbearer makes you agonize over bringing an extra torch or two, which makes sense because of how weak your party is in comparison to D&D. This punitive direction might not be the direction that 5E D&D wants to go, so I propose that 5E D&D makes mundane items a lot better. Give the party a reason for them to be carrying anvils and sets of block and tackle and luxurious tents and spare pairs of boots. For example, having extra sets of clothes gives people a morale boost or saves against disease. Eating Cheer Food like chocolate bars and marzipan lets them recover more hit dice on a long rest. And of course you want to give the party rogue to be packing like ten different kinds of specialized arrows.

[Telok]

I liked encumberance in the older Elder Scrolls games because you could affect enemy stats. Enchant a nice fast striking dagger with strength damage and shank a heavy armor enemy three or four times. Suddenly they're encumbered and can't chase you. Time to practice your archery.

Encumberance without purpose is a nuisance. With real decisions and results, especially something pcs can use against enemies, with a decent encumberance system is useful.

[Knaight]

Then you're Doing it Wrong(TM):smallamused:

Seriously though, XP is another wonderful tool that's purpose has been lost, and ditching it as 'bookkeeping' just results in a lesser game.

Also https://theangrygm.com/how-to-xp-good/

It results as a lesser game if you're playing in certain styles - in plenty of other styles it is nothing but excess bookkeeping, best avoided.

[Deathtongue]

Encumberance without purpose is a nuisance. With real decisions and results, especially something pcs can use against enemies, with a decent encumberance system is useful.Encumbrance is most often going to be a PC worry. Most of the time, the fortress guards or the tribal warriors or the elite shocktroopers or the slave patrols aren't going to be carrying so much that it weighs them down. Even if there's a good narrative reason (i.e. these bandits are also poachers and they're loaded down with meat and furs) it's just metafictionally not important enough for the game to go out of its way to support. Maybe if we were playing Torchbearer, but even in a game that fussy about inventory and weight limits it's not really an issue for NPCs.

[Asisreo1]

My first thought is that if you stopped handing out treasure, and just let adventurers buy on credit with the town based off their deed, that you would suddenly see a lot less about encumbrance.

The second is like LordCdrMilitant said, your players should just ignore parts of the loot. That 2,300 cp weighs 46 pounds, but is only worth 23 gp. 1,100 sp? 22 lbs and worth 110 gp. The 800 gp (86% of the value of the hoard) weighs only 16 lbs

So, if weight is a big deal, they just don't take the chaff.

But then, I imagine the next part is exactly what happened in the last thread "So, does the party take all the time to sort it out? The coins are mixed together after all" and then either dropping the ruins on their head or rolling for random monster attacks to force the players to just take less money and leave.

You know, that reminds me of something, we were playing the Mad Mage with a DM and we ended up cowing a tribe of goblins into working for us. then we came upon the room with about a dozen barrels full of copper bars and the room with the copper floor. DM said we couldn't loot it, it was clearly too much material for us to move. I pointed out that we had an entire tribe of goblins as a work force. The game died due to players leaving, but this is an example in the opposite direction. We didn't have a plot beyond "make money" and a copper bar is worth 5 silver. We had a workforce willing to work for next to nothing, and literally thousands of pounds of copper.

The designers expected encumbrance to stop this, but even if we played with it, we could still do it.

Last point. Why do people use torches in games with encumbrance?

A torch grants an hour of light for a lb of weight. A lantern and a vial of oil grant 6 hours of light for 3 lbs of weight. With another 6 hours for every pound. If I was ever forced into a game with encumbrance that would be my go to mundane light source. Instead of lugging around 240 lbs of torches I could carry only 80 lbs of oil and a 2 lbs lantern.
Well, yes. The party soon has to decide "should we take all the treasure, or just the most valuable ones? Do we need 23 extra gp? It makes gold actually feel like a bigger currency, too.

And exactly. Why bring a torch when you can bring a lantern? So then, buy some lanterns and oils and use those instead. It makes sense that lanterns are more efficient than torches. They're slightly more expensive so your first outing probably won't involve lanterns unless a rogue chose the burglar's pack but from that point forward, lanterns are the best nonmagical light source.

[Nifft]

My entire table plays by the same rules, because we're all playing the same game.

The entire table also enjoys tracking encumbrance. Some because it is part of the resource management aspect. Some because it's fun from a storytelling standpoint.

I'd say maybe 1 in 5 tables I've run/played at have been against tracking encumbrance. My sample size is only a few hundred tables, so it might be too small to draw any conclusions.

It looks like you're trying to talk a circle around saying that no, you would not enjoy tracking encumbrance if other people were permitted to ignore it.

That could mean you don't enjoy it in itself, you enjoy something about your relative competence against others when it is imposed.

If you enjoyed encumbrance in and of itself, you'd enjoy it being imposed on you even if others were free of it.

[Tanarii]

It results as a lesser game if you're playing in certain styles - in plenty of other styles it is nothing but excess bookkeeping, best avoided.
Eh, fair. There are some gameplay styles where it's unnecessary, the uses of it have been properly replaced by something else.

But more often, it's tossing out an important DM tool and then complaining about the negative affects tossing it out had on the game.

[Deathtongue]

It looks like you're trying to talk a circle around saying that no, you would not enjoy tracking encumbrance if other people were permitted to ignore it.Being a fussbudget over encumbrance is fun in Pathfinder and 4E, but it's a waste of time in 5E D&D. When I'm fussing over encumbrance in Pathfinder, I'm worried about masterwork toolkits and adventurer guides and special rations. In 5E D&D, I'm mostly fussing over mundane items where 95% of the time the DM won't even ask us if we have enough rations to cross the desert. It's rather boring and I can understand why some tables want to cut it.

[Nifft]

Being a fussbudget over encumbrance is fun in Pathfinder and 4E, but it's a waste of time in 5E D&D. When I'm fussing over encumbrance in Pathfinder, I'm worried about masterwork toolkits and adventurer guides and special rations. In 5E D&D, I'm mostly fussing over mundane items where 95% of the time the DM won't even ask us if we have enough rations to cross the desert. It's rather boring and I can understand why some tables want to cut it.

For me it depends on genre.

Are we going to just narrate 2 weeks worth of crossing the Forbidden Desert because it's an opportunity cost in time invested before we kick in the gates of the Forbidden Tomb and stab its horrible denizens right in their forbidden treasures?

Or are we spending 2 weeks of survival horror trying to get through the desert, each day our resources dwindling but our hope burning strong against the depredations of our relentless pursuers, trying to balance speed against security?

In the latter case, encumbrance matters and is part of the fun.

In the former case, not so much.

[Knaight]

Eh, fair. There are some gameplay styles where it's unnecessary, the uses of it have been properly replaced by something else.

But more often, it's tossing out an important DM tool and then complaining about the negative affects tossing it out had on the game.

That's not been what I've seen at all, but we clearly move in dramatically different RPG circles. I like XP as a pacing mechanism, but if you're using something with levels milestone leveling works just as well for that. XP as reward has usually been more trouble than it's worth in my experience.

[Chaosmancer]

Well, yes. The party soon has to decide "should we take all the treasure, or just the most valuable ones? Do we need 23 extra gp? It makes gold actually feel like a bigger currency, too.

And exactly. Why bring a torch when you can bring a lantern? So then, buy some lanterns and oils and use those instead. It makes sense that lanterns are more efficient than torches. They're slightly more expensive so your first outing probably won't involve lanterns unless a rogue chose the burglar's pack but from that point forward, lanterns are the best nonmagical light source.

Okay, so with those two statements.

Encumbrance leads to players taking less treasure and makes gold feel important (even though it is already the standard currency for adventurers)

Causing players to buy a different mundane light source.

So drop copper and silver coins, and what use do you have for further encumbrance? You seem to agree with the solutions to the issue of "how do we carry all this" are to have less treasure and erase torch and write lantern.

And, I'll remind you, your post mentioned that players are debating dropping weapons to carry more loot. Are you seriously seeing people say "well, I think I could drop this 50 gold greatsword (worth 25 to sell) and carry that 23 gold worth of copper" That is ludicrous right?

So where is the value for the players?

[Lupine]

RAW you can run around in full plate with 8 STR and have no consequence for exhaustion

False. For plate armor, you are required to have str15, or you're speed is dropped by 10 feet. In fact, all armors weighing more than 40lbs have a requirement on str

[LordCdrMilitant]

Then you're Doing it Wrong(TM):smallamused:

Seriously though, XP is another wonderful tool that's purpose has been lost, and ditching it as 'bookkeeping' just results in a lesser game.

Also https://theangrygm.com/how-to-xp-good/

I read that. That guy is full of crap.

At my table, if our GM reverted to XP, we'd probably ask him to cut it out and just tell us when it's time to level. Actually, we did just that. Our GM started out with XP, but nobody knew how much XP it took to level in the first place and nobody cared, so the GM now just tells us when we level up when he thinks we've accomplished things. We like this much better.

We don't build megadungeons or whatever sort of awful wargaming-with-1-unit exercise where the players are only invested in the next level up and being rewarded in incremental improvements to their playing pieces he's playing. [What does wealth and treasure and encumbrance even matter then either, really, if the only thing motivating you is a level up?]

And honestly, if I think a "hex crawl" or "dungeon clearing exercise" with no plot other than "kill the monsters, take the treasure, get XP, repeat" were pitched to me, I'd probably leave it stand unless I was desperate.
I love wargames, I've got no less than 12 armies for WH40k, Flames of War, and Dropzone Commander, and I own a bunch of old and new board "war"games from very-definitely-a-classic-wargames Panzer Leader/Blitz and Tobruk to really departing from the mechanics but with most of the same feel like Twilight Struggle. And I can play RTS games, because I have like 20 of them. And if I want to play a wargame, I will play a wargame, not a second-rate one where I only have one piece.



I wondered how the heck your group had to keep dropping weapons and armor, then I saw the bit about the coinage. I also read your other post about just using the treasure tables.

My first thought is that if you stopped handing out treasure, and just let adventurers buy on credit with the town based off their deed, that you would suddenly see a lot less about encumbrance.

The second is like LordCdrMilitant said, your players should just ignore parts of the loot. That 2,300 cp weighs 46 pounds, but is only worth 23 gp. 1,100 sp? 22 lbs and worth 110 gp. The 800 gp (86% of the value of the hoard) weighs only 16 lbs

So, if weight is a big deal, they just don't take the chaff.


I didn't quite say exactly that, since I also said that the 84 pounds of treasure isn't actually that much when split among four players [or even more, since most games I've seen have been 6+, but presumably you'll award more treasure for more players anyway].

You don't have to leave any of it behind, because like even a S8 character has 120 pounds of carry capacity. If the entire party is S8, and they split 21 pounds a person and carry about 50-70 pounds of adventuring gear, they're not even close to having to drop anything and can take a whole another haul of that sort before having to return to town or something [which they were probably going to do anyway between adventures.]

I totalled up all the weight my character had, including the stuff she doesn't carry anywhere and her wealth, and it still came out to leaving 50-60 pounts to spare to pick up useless crap.

[Asisreo1]

Okay, so with those two statements.

Encumbrance leads to players taking less treasure and makes gold feel important (even though it is already the standard currency for adventurers)

Causing players to buy a different mundane light source.

So drop copper and silver coins, and what use do you have for further encumbrance? You seem to agree with the solutions to the issue of "how do we carry all this" are to have less treasure and erase torch and write lantern.

And, I'll remind you, your post mentioned that players are debating dropping weapons to carry more loot. Are you seriously seeing people say "well, I think I could drop this 50 gold greatsword (worth 25 to sell) and carry that 23 gold worth of copper" That is ludicrous right?

So where is the value for the players?
No one's going to drop their main damage dealing weapon for copper coin. They may drop their javelins or spears to carry a couple more hundred gold. Which means they have less ranged weapons. It's not too big of a deal until it is.

Eventually they'll run out of those, too. Now they'll have to choose between essentials or treasure. Or should they risk not grabbing the treasure now? Or should they just ignore the treasure altogether?

Gold isn't all that useful anyways, until they see a magic item on sale worth more than their weight in gold. They can pool the money together and still not have enough. If they're really good, they might get away with stealing the magic item. But if it's worth so much, there's no way it isn't heavily guarded by multiple strong people. The item might be there for the next adventure, so now they have incentive to grab more treasure. But if they take too long, someone else might just buy it instead.

But who knows, I set things up without really adjusting for my players. Because my players are fluid. They might retire, get themselves killed, or become permanently cursed as an uncontrollable thing. With that, my adventures need no adjustment to the new adventurers. Didn't matter if there was a barbarian or not, the raging river still requires a DC 21 athletics check to swim across safely. Your bonuses are your bonuses and my DC's are my DC.

[Zevox]

Then you're Doing it Wrong(TM):smallamused:

Seriously though, XP is another wonderful tool that's purpose has been lost, and ditching it as 'bookkeeping' just results in a lesser game.

Also https://theangrygm.com/how-to-xp-good/
Got a couple of paragraphs into that link before closing the tab. If you feel there's a cogent point in there, feel free to try making it yourself, but I'm not wading through that much angry rhetoric to get to it.

As to it resulting in a "lesser game," nonsense. It's legitimately the only change that a prior DM for our group made that everyone was happy enough with to keep after we wound up dropping him. As players, we're quite happy knowing that we'll level up at appropriate-feeling moments throughout a campaign, rather than whenever our xp hits the next threshold. And while I only have a small amount of DMing experience, I can readily see what a big benefit it would be there, as calculating experience is not the easiest thing to do and was a nuisance at best when I did have to do it - and that was a for short adventures that were never going to see the PCs level up by the end. I can readily imagine it making a true campaign harder to plan as you not only to do those calculations for every encounter, but need to keep aware of when the PCs' experience will likely hit the next level and manage planning encounters accordingly. Much easier to simply know when you intend to have them level up and not need to worry about it happening at a potentially inconvenient time. And anything that can make the DM's job easier with no drawbacks is a godsend, I'd say.


Eh, fair. There are some gameplay styles where it's unnecessary, the uses of it have been properly replaced by something else.

But more often, it's tossing out an important DM tool and then complaining about the negative affects tossing it out had on the game.
:smallconfused: I legitimately cannot imagine what negative effects it could have on a game. I suppose a bad DM could have such a poor sense of pacing that he goes too long between levels, or makes them occur too rapidly, leading to player dissatisfaction one way or the other, but even the bad DM my group dealt with didn't really have that issue, and that's despite a plethora of other pacing issues.

[Tanarii]

That's not been what I've seen at all, but we clearly move in dramatically different RPG circles. I like XP as a pacing mechanism, but if you're using something with levels milestone leveling works just as well for that. XP as reward has usually been more trouble than it's worth in my experience.
XP as a motivation, due to being a reward, is what needs to be replaced. There are many ways to steer motivation, of course. But XP is one of the best. Whatever you reward XP for is going to be what the game is about.

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.

In that regard, it's the opposite of encumbrance, where most players will do without just fine.

[Asisreo1]

I read that. That guy is full of crap.

At my table, if our GM reverted to XP, we'd probably ask him to cut it out and just tell us when it's time to level. Actually, we did just that. Our GM started out with XP, but nobody knew how much XP it took to level in the first place and nobody cared, so the GM now just tells us when we level up when he thinks we've accomplished things. We like this much better.

We don't build megadungeons or whatever sort of awful wargaming-with-1-unit exercise where the players are only invested in the next level up and being rewarded in incremental improvements to their playing pieces he's playing. [What does wealth and treasure and encumbrance even matter then either, really, if the only thing motivating you is a level up?]

And honestly, if I think a "hex crawl" or "dungeon clearing exercise" with no plot other than "kill the monsters, take the treasure, get XP, repeat" were pitched to me, I'd probably leave it stand unless I was desperate.
I love wargames, I've got no less than 12 armies for WH40k, Flames of War, and Dropzone Commander, and I own a bunch of old and new board "war"games from very-definitely-a-classic-wargames Panzer Leader/Blitz and Tobruk to really departing from the mechanics but with most of the same feel like Twilight Struggle. And I can play RTS games, because I have like 20 of them. And if I want to play a wargame, I will play a wargame, not a second-rate one where I only have one piece.


This kind of talk is always made when talking about XP and quite frankly, it's making wild assumptions. There's nothing wargamey about xp or hex crawls. Yes, it's a mechanic with numbers but that doesn't make it a wargame.

That's like saying HP and AC are war-gamey and the DM should only have vague notions of when someone dies including your characters. "Hm...you got hit with the spear, the guy is good with his weapon too...I'll say you got stabbed in the stomach and currently bleeding out. Can you be healed? Hm...I'll say cure wounds is too weak of a spell because it's only low level. So, you're bleeding. He stabs you in the neck killing you, sorry game over."

It's so strange out of all the videogame mechanics of TTRPG's and the fact everyone already knows it's a game, a system that shows you how you've grown from being a poor farmer guy with a stick to a masterful swordmans is somehow too unrealistic and gamey when you literally have numbers to your name.

The DM can be just as much of an ******* with milestone. You seem to already understand it's all just an illusion.



I didn't quite say exactly that, since I also said that the 84 pounds of treasure isn't actually that much when split among four players [or even more, since most games I've seen have been 6+, but presumably you'll award more treasure for more players anyway].

You don't have to leave any of it behind, because like even a S8 character has 120 pounds of carry capacity. If the entire party is S8, and they split 21 pounds a person and carry about 50-70 pounds of adventuring gear, they're not even close to having to drop anything and can take a whole another haul of that sort before having to return to town or something [which they were probably going to do anyway between adventures.]

I totalled up all the weight my character had, including the stuff she doesn't carry anywhere and her wealth, and it still came out to leaving 50-60 pounts to spare to pick up useless crap.
It's funny how people think I'll just have one treasure hoard per adventure before the characters return to safety. I'll usually have 3-5 of them in an adventure (not just an adventuring day.) This actually makes the treasure a bit more fun interesting. As you find new treasure coves and weight starts weighing you down, you'll trade your copper for silvers and your silvers for gold.

I also give magic items, some of which aren't immediately useful to the party. But because of how rare they are, they're still worth a fortune to sell. They get heavy if you keep hoarding all the magic items.

[LordCdrMilitant]

XP as a motivation, due to being a reward, is what needs to be replaced. There are many ways to steer motivation, of course. But XP is one of the best. Whatever you reward XP for is going to be what the game is about.

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.

In that regard, it's the opposite of encumbrance, where most players will do without just fine.

Interesting. Out of uh.... [counts on hands] at least 50 something people I know, to my knowledge 0, maybe 1 or 2, of them are openly in favor of XP over just getting levels, especially after having gotten used to it.

Also, like why should XP be the reward? When I run Black Crusade/Dark Heresy [where there are no levels and XP actually has value towards progression], I award a flat 500 per session. It's not a reward for anything, it just happens. Rewards are things like Infamy/Influence, followers, postings, NPC's indebt to you, strategic gains against the Imperium/Chaos, planets and armies under your control, evidence, and favor.

Like, an in character reward that feel special and themed and important to the character is always better than an out of character reward of XP. Gold is always a better reward than XP, and special things like castles and pointy magic sticks and new friends are even better than gold usually [because players treasure getting things like "my new castle " or "my new NPC friend" and just throw gold into the bag somewhere and forget about it]




It's funny how people think I'll just have one treasure hoard per adventure before the characters return to safety. I'll usually have 3-5 of them in an adventure (not just an adventuring day.) This actually makes the treasure a bit more fun interesting. As you find new treasure coves and weight starts weighing you down, you'll trade your copper for silvers and your silvers for gold.

I also give magic items, some of which aren't immediately useful to the party. But because of how rare they are, they're still worth a fortune to sell. They get heavy if you keep hoarding all the magic items.

Interesting. I recieve, maybe uh... 1 piece of treasure per party per story arc. Usually one person gets a thing for each short arc we undertake.
As GM, there's usually nothing for you to keep in the dungeon, except the stuff the bad guys are carrying or if your decide to not give whatever object you were sent there to get to whoever sent you there to get it. You get paid afterwords when you get to town. Sometimes the reward is a castle, land, or something else fun like that.


Also, like 3-5 treasure hordes just in general sounds like an abnormal amount of treasure for a dungeon. It may be skewed experiences, but most dungeons have like 1 treasure horde, maybe 2 if it's huge and it's the whole adventure arc, and an adventure is rarely more than 1 or 2 dungeons [and nothing says that you can't unload your crap when you get to town anyway]. And I guess, for point of reference, that horde is just under 1k GP, basically an entire level's worth of treasure for a PC at the levels it would be awarded. And even then for non S8 characters hauling out the entire 84 pound horde is pretty much trivial.

Also, past level 4 Copper stops being a significant element of randomly generated treasure hoards. A quick check at the table looks like:
Weight of the horde is lowish at 1-4 [100lbs, 1kGPe], highish at 5-10 [200lbs, 4kGPe], very low at 11-16 [65lbs, 20kGPe], and then extremely high at 17+ [1400lbs, 325kGPe]

[Knaight]

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.
This gets back to my comment on us moving in very different circles - I know almost nobody who particularly likes XP in real life, and a lot of people who consider XP as implemented in D&D as tedious bookkeeping. XP as a motivating factor is something I basically only know of from the internet and to a lesser extent videogames (which frequently can't fulfill many of the motivational parts of RPGs). Advancement is frequently liked, and I default to XP as a way to do that (mostly because I tend to GM levelless games, were I GMing 5e milestones would work just as well as it would still produce advancement).

[Asisreo1]

Interesting. I recieve, maybe uh... 1 piece of treasure per party per story arc. Usually one person gets a thing for each short arc we undertake.
As GM, there's usually nothing for you to keep in the dungeon, except the stuff the bad guys are carrying or if your decide to not give whatever object you were sent there to get to whoever sent you there to get it. You get paid afterwords when you get to town. Sometimes the reward is a castle, land, or something else fun like that.


Also, like 3-5 treasure hordes just in general sounds like an abnormal amount of treasure for a dungeon. It may be skewed experiences, but most dungeons have like 1 treasure horde, maybe 2 if it's huge and it's the whole adventure arc, and an adventure is rarely more than 1 or 2 dungeons [and nothing says that you can't unload your crap when you get to town anyway]. And I guess, for point of reference, that horde is just under 1k GP, basically an entire level's worth of treasure for a PC at the levels it would be awarded. And even then for non S8 characters hauling out the entire 84 pound horde is pretty much trivial.
You may have misread me. I don't put that much gold in a dungeon unless it's a megadungeon and those will have a maximum of 3 treasure hoards.

I said I put 3-5 treasure hoards an adventure. Which is a bit of an understatement. I actually put roughly 8-10 in an adventure, the party usually only gets to half.

The adventure starts when they step out of the town. That's when interesting stuff starts. Every couple of miles should have something interesting and plot-relevant. Sometimes, they find a goblin camp that has been mooching off the dragon's lair and knows a secret entrance. Sometimes, they find ancient ruins with a particular magic item that would be perfect to kill the dragon, like a fabled Dragonslayer, alongside other treasures. Sometimes, they'll find a wyvern's nest who is sick and helping it tames them for the ride. I don't exactly know where they'll go first or where they'll go at all. They tell me where they're interested, I'll see if they get lost, if they make it successfully, they get to do whatever they came to do.

The dragon's lair probably isn't a well-known area. People might know the general location like "in the heart of the forest" but they probably couldn't give you a map with X-mark's the spot. Unless they've worked or are working for the dragon.

It's a style of game that seems to have been lost for an admittedly less time-consuming version where the adventure doesn't start until you're knocking on the dragon's door. It's my preferred style of game, though.

[LordCdrMilitant]

You may have misread me. I don't put that much gold in a dungeon unless it's a megadungeon and those will have a maximum of 3 treasure hoards.

I said I put 3-5 treasure hoards an adventure. Which is a bit of an understatement. I actually put roughly 8-10 in an adventure, the party usually only gets to half.

The adventure starts when they step out of the town. That's when interesting stuff starts. Every couple of miles should have something interesting and plot-relevant. Sometimes, they find a goblin camp that has been mooching off the dragon's lair and knows a secret entrance. Sometimes, they find ancient ruins with a particular magic item that would be perfect to kill the dragon, like a fabled Dragonslayer, alongside other treasures. Sometimes, they'll find a wyvern's nest who is sick and helping it tames them for the ride. I don't exactly know where they'll go first or where they'll go at all. They tell me where they're interested, I'll see if they get lost, if they make it successfully, they get to do whatever they came to do.

The dragon's lair probably isn't a well-known area. People might know the general location like "in the heart of the forest" but they probably couldn't give you a map with X-mark's the spot. Unless they've worked or are working for the dragon.

It's a style of game that seems to have been lost for an admittedly less time-consuming version where the adventure doesn't start until you're knocking on the dragon's door. It's my preferred style of game, though.

Interesting. That's a lot of treasure, 8-10 level 1-4 hordes is enough to take a party of 4 from level 1 to level 3 in WBL.
It sounds to me like the difference here might be "how many adventures do you have per level?" Usually, I would have multiple adventures, maybe 2-4 per level. More at higher levels. The party never levels up in the field, I only give out a level after a couple of adventures and when they get back to their base of operations.

In the game I play in, we're level 9 going on 10, and we've had at least 3 adventures this level [and we're expecting to level up when the one we're in concludes]. if we received 8-10 treasure hordes per adventure, we'd be so filthy rich... As for our actual treasure rewards, across these adventures this level we have received: 1 magic relic sword [my sorceress's], 500GP that was split between two players for being murderhoboes and killing a traumatized guy, and maybe an enhanced set of hostile environment gear. Plus the favor of a tribe of people who were driven from their lands who we're currently restoring to their lands and some information on the activities of the dragon cultists we've been on the trail of.


I think most adventures I run start at town too:


A rider, the town sheriff, rode into town half-dead with a nasty looking chunk of razor-sharp crystal in his shoulder. The adventure began with the party saving him.
He revealed that he had gone to check on a farmer's cowfield since the farmer had said that a crystal plant monster attacked his cows and turned one into crystal plants, and he deputized them to sort the matter out.
So the party went out there and found the monster, slew it, observed that it had smashed a hole in the fence from the adjacent forest, and then returned to Sheriff Dan [who was still in definitely no shape to stand much less walk] with the information.
He postulated that the witch of the woods had sent it to harass the farmers because she had been accused of sending bears and other wild animals to destroy the farmer's tractors and livestock before [whether or not she actually did or it was simply because habitat destruction was leading the bears and other animals to prey on the livestock was left unexplored, but it's probably just habitat loss]
So the party went into the woods to find with witch of the woods following the trail of destruction. The witch was, in fact, a cloud giant druid who was investigating the monster that had infected some of the trees in the wood and was trying to save them. They talked to her, and she told them that she tracked it back to a government laboratory up the mountainside, and that the government men didn't like her and shot at her when she tried to investigate their construction site several months ago. [The party was actually surprisingly peaceful and insightful. I had expected them to kill the druid and be rewarded by the town for killing the witch of the woods, only for the problem to not be solved and them to go out and find the laboratory by themselves.]
She took them to the laboratory, which they investigated and found it had a broken wall and was overgrown with fey plants and shadow crystal, with all of it's staff killed. They had 2 encounters with another crystal-plant monster and some crystal-plant-ified staff, and then withdrew to town to report to the sheriff after making sure that anything else was confined to the lower levels of the facility [which was a mineshaft].
He informed the government, gave them a bit of cash, and they went out the next day to try to clear it out ahead of time because the druid didn't like the laboratory and they wanted to help her out and keep the government from doing more bad things there. They swept out one more regular crystal-plant monster plus a lot of crystalized staff. Trapping one big one in the lowest level and throwing some explosives at it, then returned to town.
The army showed up the next morning and was questioning the sheriff, and the party decided, "uhh... maybe we should deal with that last one we tossed in the basement with a bunch of bangalores yesterday before the army gets to it," so they went back and got there while the army was still questioning the villagers, and killed the last monster, then left the dungeon for good as the army was arriving.
The druid was fighting the army truck when they came out of the laboratory, the party lent her a hand and then escaped back to town, thus ending the adventure.


You can see why Encumbrance doesn't really matter to us. Very little treasure was awarded. The main rewards were that the townspeople like them and the druid likes them.

In a previous adventure, the party was rewarded with a castle and friendship with a noble lord.

[Asisreo1]

Interesting. That's a lot of treasure, 8-10 level 1-4 hordes is enough to take a party of 4 from level 1 to level 3 in WBL.
It sounds to me like the difference here might be "how many adventures do you have per level?" Usually, I would have multiple adventures, maybe 2-4 per level. More at higher levels. The party never levels up in the field, I only give out a level after a couple of adventures and when they get back to their base of operations.

In the game I play in, we're level 9 going on 10, and we've had at least 3 adventures this level [and we're expecting to level up when the one we're in concludes]. if we received 8-10 treasure hordes per adventure, we'd be so filthy rich... As for our actual treasure rewards, across these adventures this level we have received: 1 magic relic sword [my sorceress's], 500GP that was split between two players for being murderhoboes and killing a traumatized guy, and maybe an enhanced set of hostile environment gear. Plus the favor of a tribe of people who were driven from their lands who we're currently restoring to their lands and some information on the activities of the dragon cultists we've been on the trail of.


I think most adventures I run start at town too:


A rider, the town sheriff, rode into town half-dead with a nasty looking chunk of razor-sharp crystal in his shoulder. The adventure began with the party saving him.
He revealed that he had gone to check on a farmer's cowfield since the farmer had said that a crystal plant monster attacked his cows and turned one into crystal plants, and he deputized them to sort the matter out.
So the party went out there and found the monster, slew it, observed that it had smashed a hole in the fence from the adjacent forest, and then returned to Sheriff Dan [who was still in definitely no shape to stand much less walk] with the information.
He postulated that the witch of the woods had sent it to harass the farmers because she had been accused of sending bears and other wild animals to destroy the farmer's tractors and livestock before [whether or not she actually did or it was simply because habitat destruction was leading the bears and other animals to prey on the livestock was left unexplored, but it's probably just habitat loss]
So the party went into the woods to find with witch of the woods following the trail of destruction. The witch was, in fact, a cloud giant druid who was investigating the monster that had infected some of the trees in the wood and was trying to save them. They talked to her, and she told them that she tracked it back to a government laboratory up the mountainside, and that the government men didn't like her and shot at her when she tried to investigate their construction site several months ago. [The party was actually surprisingly peaceful and insightful. I had expected them to kill the druid and be rewarded by the town for killing the witch of the woods, only for the problem to not be solved and them to go out and find the laboratory by themselves.]
She took them to the laboratory, which they investigated and found it had a broken wall and was overgrown with fey plants and shadow crystal, with all of it's staff killed. They had 2 encounters with another crystal-plant monster and some crystal-plant-ified staff, and then withdrew to town to report to the sheriff after making sure that anything else was confined to the lower levels of the facility [which was a mineshaft].
He informed the government, gave them a bit of cash, and they went out the next day to try to clear it out ahead of time because the druid didn't like the laboratory and they wanted to help her out and keep the government from doing more bad things there. They swept out one more regular crystal-plant monster plus a lot of crystalized staff. Trapping one big one in the lowest level and throwing some explosives at it, then returned to town.
The army showed up the next morning and was questioning the sheriff, and the party decided, "uhh... maybe we should deal with that last one we tossed in the basement with a bunch of bangalores yesterday before the army gets to it," so they went back and got there while the army was still questioning the villagers, and killed the last monster, then left the dungeon for good as the army was arriving.
The druid was fighting the army truck when they came out of the laboratory, the party lent her a hand and then escaped back to town, thus ending the adventure.


You can see why Encumbrance doesn't really matter to us. Very little treasure was awarded. The main rewards were that the townspeople like them and the druid likes them.

In a previous adventure, the party was rewarded with a castle and friendship with a noble lord.
Yeah, you level up around 2-3 times per adventure in campaigns I play. Those level ups might be way too slow for me. Huh, no wonder some people feel like martials aren't exciting if you don't get anything new within 2-3 sessions. It's also no wonder no one gets to high levels.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Yeah, you level up around 2-3 times per adventure in campaigns I play. Those level ups might be way too slow for me. Huh, no wonder some people feel like martials aren't exciting if you don't get anything new within 2-3 sessions. It's also no wonder no one gets to high levels.

Wow. Uh... that's really fast. [Also, casters don't get anything new faster than martials do?]

I think the last time we leveled up was in January or February. A new player joined in october or november right before we leveled up to 8. Now we're about to level up to 10.

I've played 1-20 a small number of times. Sometimes, for shorter campaigns like summer campaigns, we plan the entire thing at one level and nobody levels up at all, or at most once at the halfway point.

A session usually last from 6:00/7:00 [the first part of sessions is always just chitchat between friends for like an hour] to 11:30, so like 5 hours or so.



Encumbrance is tied to two things: supplies for long-endurance exploration, and treasure. Long endurance exploration expeditions are uncommon at least in games I've played, and in games that feature them usually both a lot of work goes into the encumbrance system and it receives much greater fleshing out because the stuff on you ship, your mules, and your cadre of followers is all tracked carefully as you adventure into the steaming jungle away from society.
So that leaves treasure, which is very much related to level, how fast you level up relative to how long it takes you to clear dungeons. Let's move away from awarded levels to look at XP and home invasion & robbery:
It takes between 5 and 15 at-CR encounters to level up, averaging around 8, according to https://rpgbot.net/dnd5/dungeonmasters/campaign_planning/. Levels receive between 1 and 3 or 4 treasure hoards per level. At that rate, you can go between "easily carrying the entire adventure's worth of treasure with space to spare" to "8 STR characters are overburdened with their loot and their gear, but pretty much everybody else has lots of weight to spare"

The only real exception is the hilariously heavy hordes for level 17+ characters who might not be able to port out one horde [but they also have lots of magic items and teleportation and stuff to extract it]

From myself earlier: Weight of the horde is moderately low at levels 1-4 [100lbs, 1kGPe], highish at 5-10 [200lbs, 4kGPe], very low at 11-16 [65lbs, 20kGPe], and then extremely high at 17+ [1400lbs, 325kGPe]

[Chaosmancer]

False. For plate armor, you are required to have str15, or you're speed is dropped by 10 feet. In fact, all armors weighing more than 40lbs have a requirement on str

Reduced speed does not give levels of exhaustion, which was what the quote was referring to



No one's going to drop their main damage dealing weapon for copper coin. They may drop their javelins or spears to carry a couple more hundred gold. Which means they have less ranged weapons. It's not too big of a deal until it is.

Eventually they'll run out of those, too. Now they'll have to choose between essentials or treasure. Or should they risk not grabbing the treasure now? Or should they just ignore the treasure altogether?

Gold isn't all that useful anyways, until they see a magic item on sale worth more than their weight in gold. They can pool the money together and still not have enough. If they're really good, they might get away with stealing the magic item. But if it's worth so much, there's no way it isn't heavily guarded by multiple strong people. The item might be there for the next adventure, so now they have incentive to grab more treasure. But if they take too long, someone else might just buy it instead.

See, but by the time you get to that point, things are already a little out of control. Copying and pasting from the previous thread on this


Four man party from classic DnD artwork. Human Cleric, Halfling Thief, Dwarf Fighter, Elf Wizard. Standard arrays give us strength scores of 16 (dwarf), 14 (human), 10 (halfling) and 8 (wizard).

Group's total carrying capacity is 720 lbs. Their max drag is 1,440.

Cleric starting gear: 105.3 (including two sets of vestaments, two holy symbols, ect, because I just copied what was gained)
Copying fighter gear for 111.7 (subtracting food and water to be added in later)
Rogue starting gear: 66.8 (duplicate tools, crowbar, and such from background kept in)
Wizard starting gear: 24.325

So, 308.125 lbs of 720.

Buy and carry 2 weeks of food and water. 112 food, 560 water.

Ah, broke the bank. 2 weeks of water is impossible for us to carry. We'll just reduce to two waterskins each and hope a single day of water is enough, which is 40 lbs total

So, food, a days worth of water, brings us up to 460.125

We have multiple torches and a lantern already, 100 ft of rope.

Let us grab a grappling hook, sledgehammer, climber's kit, shovel, and a dozen healing potions. Brings us up to 497.125 lbs

Subtraction means we have 222.875 lbs left. And the only thing I can really think of grabbing is just more water, at 40 lbs per day.

Going to ignore water, as I said, it is just crazy heavy and is a major outlier.

This group with their gear at level 1 can carry 220 lbs before they leave town. Let us say week in, week back. that means by the time they hit the dungeon, they are closer to 276. And this is with zero optimization for weight, literally just copy and paste even duplicated items. That is 13,800 coins (every coin is 50 per lbs) without dropping a single thing.

And before they drop weapons, why not their bedrolls? Those weigh 5 lbs apiece and have no mechanical benefit. That is another 1,125 coins.

So, 1st level, unoptimized adventurers. We are only ignoring water which is so heavy they need special equipment to carry enough anyways, and they can carry 14,925 coin coins by only dropping their bed rolls. Bet they could drop some extra clothes to get up to 15,000.

How many level 1 adventurers get and carry 15,000 coins. Not just gold, any coins? 3,510 coins was what you said the hoard you rolled was. This is nearly 5 times that size. Which again make me wonder what people are carrying (water?) that is making this so hard for them to carry all their stuff.



It's funny how people think I'll just have one treasure hoard per adventure before the characters return to safety. I'll usually have 3-5 of them in an adventure (not just an adventuring day.) This actually makes the treasure a bit more fun interesting. As you find new treasure coves and weight starts weighing you down, you'll trade your copper for silvers and your silvers for gold.

I also give magic items, some of which aren't immediately useful to the party. But because of how rare they are, they're still worth a fortune to sell. They get heavy if you keep hoarding all the magic items.

Because unless you force them to push on there is little reason to assume they don't clear an area then return to town?

And, if they are about the same size as the one you posted, it still takes until the 3rd or 4th one to start impacting basic carrying capacity.

[heavyfuel]

@ anyone saying it's "just math: It's not.

Rolling a die and adding your bonus is just math. Having to flip through pages of book looking for the weight of an item, erasing your current value and writing the new one is boring and time consuming, not to mention, likely to eventually rip your character sheet.

If you have to alter your current carried weight for every single potion drunk, every ration eaten, and every gold piece acquired or spent, I can't see any sheet of paper lasting too long.

Once it finally rips, you now have to redo your whole sheet, or carry around a separate one just for encumbrance.

Nobody deserves to track encumbrance. Just eyeball it.

[Asisreo1]

Reduced speed does not give levels of exhaustion, which was what the quote was referring to




See, but by the time you get to that point, things are already a little out of control. Copying and pasting from the previous thread on this



Going to ignore water, as I said, it is just crazy heavy and is a major outlier.

This group with their gear at level 1 can carry 220 lbs before they leave town. Let us say week in, week back. that means by the time they hit the dungeon, they are closer to 276. And this is with zero optimization for weight, literally just copy and paste even duplicated items. That is 13,800 coins (every coin is 50 per lbs) without dropping a single thing.

And before they drop weapons, why not their bedrolls? Those weigh 5 lbs apiece and have no mechanical benefit. That is another 1,125 coins.

So, 1st level, unoptimized adventurers. We are only ignoring water which is so heavy they need special equipment to carry enough anyways, and they can carry 14,925 coin coins by only dropping their bed rolls. Bet they could drop some extra clothes to get up to 15,000.

How many level 1 adventurers get and carry 15,000 coins. Not just gold, any coins? 3,510 coins was what you said the hoard you rolled was. This is nearly 5 times that size. Which again make me wonder what people are carrying (water?) that is making this so hard for them to carry all their stuff.




Because unless you force them to push on there is little reason to assume they don't clear an area then return to town?

And, if they are about the same size as the one you posted, it still takes until the 3rd or 4th one to start impacting basic carrying capacity.
They can go back to town, but then they've gotta start over. And that's only if there's not a time pressure put in place. They also have to not get lost which gets difficult depending on the terrain.

And it's not like I purposefully made it a mechanic. It's how I design my adventures. I also don't have a problem with them trying to do the one-a-room long rest thing if the dungeon permits. Problem is that the dungeon often does not permit.

[LordCdrMilitant]

They can go back to town, but then they've gotta start over. And that's only if there's not a time pressure put in place. They also have to not get lost which gets difficult depending on the terrain.

And it's not like I purposefully made it a mechanic. It's how I design my adventures. I also don't have a problem with them trying to do the one-a-room long rest thing if the dungeon permits. Problem is that the dungeon often does not permit.

I do see how it's an issue for you though. I don't think it's a factor of not being able to quit the dungeon to rest between days, but because you level up really fast and award a lot of treasure. I and my group may be slow and award less treasure than normal, but you're like 2 or 3 times as fast as the base rate is if you're leveling up every 2-3 sessions.

I know sunless citadel has in-dungeon leveling up, but in actual play I don't think I've ever had a mid-dungeon level up, so that puts a general upper limit on the amount of gold that can be expected to be recovered per trip to and from town, which at around 200-600 pounds of gold is easily split among a party of 4 without running afoul of encumberance.

[Zevox]

XP as a motivation, due to being a reward, is what needs to be replaced. There are many ways to steer motivation, of course. But XP is one of the best. Whatever you reward XP for is going to be what the game is about.

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.

In that regard, it's the opposite of encumbrance, where most players will do without just fine.
:smallconfused: XP as a motivation? I'm not sure that I follow. As a player, I'd presume that your motivation for playing is enjoying the game. Probably some combination of its many elements, whether it be the RP, the combat, hanging out with the other players, the stories involved, the inventory management apparently, etc; but certainly not just any one thing. And from that perspective, XP is only used to level up, and while that's almost certainly part of the fun of the game for most of us you'll still do that even without it, so... what would the issue be?

Honestly the only thing such a concept brings to mind for me is my experience playing Fallout 3, where my desire to play the game dropped dead the moment I hit the maximum level. But that made me realize that I wasn't actually enjoying the game, I'd just wanted to see the character build I'd planned out before I even started playing through to the end, so after that I never touched the game again.


Yeah, you level up around 2-3 times per adventure in campaigns I play. Those level ups might be way too slow for me. Huh, no wonder some people feel like martials aren't exciting if you don't get anything new within 2-3 sessions. It's also no wonder no one gets to high levels.

Wow. Uh... that's really fast. [Also, casters don't get anything new faster than martials do?]

I think the last time we leveled up was in January or February. A new player joined in october or november right before we leveled up to 8. Now we're about to level up to 10.
Maybe it's a matter of your adventures being shorter than Asisreo's? Because that sounds like a similar leveling pace to what my group has (we just leveled for the first time in our current campaign, and started it back in February, playing weekly aside from a few weeks that were missed due to scheduling issues), but I'd still refer to our pacing as leveling several times per campaign/adventure. Our previous campaign took us from level 1-5, but that lasted most of a year, for instance (and going from 1 to 2 was pretty quick, just a few sessions in, since nobody likes staying at level 1 for long).

[LordCdrMilitant]

:smallconfused: XP as a motivation? I'm not sure that I follow. As a player, I'd presume that your motivation for playing is enjoying the game. Probably some combination of its many elements, whether it be the RP, the combat, hanging out with the other players, the stories involved, the inventory management apparently, etc; but certainly not just any one thing. And from that perspective, XP is only used to level up, and while that's almost certainly part of the fun of the game for most of us you'll still do that even without it, so... what would the issue be?

Honestly the only thing such a concept brings to mind for me is my experience playing Fallout 3, where my desire to play the game dropped dead the moment I hit the maximum level. But that made me realize that I wasn't actually enjoying the game, I'd just wanted to see the character build I'd planned out before I even started playing through to the end, so after that I never touched the game again.



Maybe it's a matter of your adventures being shorter than Asisreo's? Because that sounds like a similar leveling pace to what my group has (we just leveled for the first time in our current campaign, and started it back in February, playing weekly aside from a few weeks that were missed due to scheduling issues), but I'd still refer to our pacing as leveling several times per campaign/adventure. Our previous campaign took us from level 1-5, but that lasted most of a year, for instance (and going from 1 to 2 was pretty quick, just a few sessions in, since nobody likes staying at level 1 for long).

I mean, Asisreo said they level up once every 2-3 sessions, which is legitimately really fast. As I observed, "average" or "expected" based on XP-to-level from at-cr encounters gives like 8 average [6-15] encounters per level. That gives about 2-3 months per level, shorter at low level and longer at mid-higher levels.

My group is pretty slow. We go several, like 4 months per level, so we have a lot of time to get more adventures in even if they are the same length. If we both experience about 1 adventure per month/2 months, they'll be leveling up twice to four times every adventure, the expected at-CR encounter XP rate party will experiences 1-2 adventures per level, and we'll experience 2-4 adventures per level, which pretty much lines up with what the two of us were saying about how much treasure an adventure rewards and how hard it is to extract treasure.

Assuming that we were all awarded an appropriate amount of treasure per level, a normal party would be extracting 1-4 hoards per adventure, which would put them for the most part under their encumbrance limits except in the extreme cases. My party/s extracts much less, like 1-2 hoards, which means that as far as things go, our encumbrance is so far away it might not even exist. For Asisreo's party though, he's drawing out a lot more treasure per adventure because he levels so much faster, and even strong characters might be struggling with encumbrance.


As for adventure timing: if you level up at our rate, once every couple of months, or take a year to go from level 1 to level 5, which sounds pretty normal, but you also level up mid-dungeon often, I would suspect that you have really long adventures [or if you're leveling up mid adventure and only play 1-5, are conflating "Adventure" and "Campaign", which would be kind of like an extended one-shot in my mind more than a whole campaign].

[Chaosmancer]

They can go back to town, but then they've gotta start over. And that's only if there's not a time pressure put in place. They also have to not get lost which gets difficult depending on the terrain.

And it's not like I purposefully made it a mechanic. It's how I design my adventures. I also don't have a problem with them trying to do the one-a-room long rest thing if the dungeon permits. Problem is that the dungeon often does not permit.

Can you see what I am saying though?

You need literal tens of thousands of coins before there is even a thought about dropping anything. And you seem to be dropping four hoards every time they leave town, which still should be barely making them push their limits. And all of this is with a party of 4. My groups usually have 5 or 6 people, which adds another fifty to a hundred pounds of extra space.

[Asisreo1]

Can you see what I am saying though?

You need literal tens of thousands of coins before there is even a thought about dropping anything. And you seem to be dropping four hoards every time they leave town, which still should be barely making them push their limits. And all of this is with a party of 4. My groups usually have 5 or 6 people, which adds another fifty to a hundred pounds of extra space.
It was actually a party of 5, all but two of them dumped strength to be 8 score. So maybe that made it more apparent.

Honestly, it doesn't feel like that much gold even with the people that didn't dump strength. They pick up weapons alot, too, though. They'll try to pick up 8 shortbows and 8 scimitars, too. And 5 maces, and 3 mauls, and a couple of handaxes. My players are some little hoarders, so maybe that also has something to do with it.

Either way, I let them play how they like, I just ask they put stuff into their online inventory which sorts out the carrying capacity anyways. I was pretty surprised how often I heard "oh, I need to drop something" and they try to switch what they have with other party members and so-on.

[Asisreo1]

I mean, Asisreo said they level up once every 2-3 sessions, which is legitimately really fast. As I observed, "average" or "expected" based on XP-to-level from at-cr encounters gives like 8 average [6-15] encounters per level. That gives about 2-3 months per level, shorter at low level and longer at mid-higher levels.

My group is pretty slow. We go several, like 4 months per level, so we have a lot of time to get more adventures in even if they are the same length. If we both experience about 1 adventure per month/2 months, they'll be leveling up twice to four times every adventure, the expected at-CR encounter XP rate party will experiences 1-2 adventures per level, and we'll experience 2-4 adventures per level, which pretty much lines up with what the two of us were saying about how much treasure an adventure rewards and how hard it is to extract treasure.

Assuming that we were all awarded an appropriate amount of treasure per level, a normal party would be extracting 1-4 hoards per adventure, which would put them for the most part under their encumbrance limits except in the extreme cases. My party/s extracts much less, like 1-2 hoards, which means that as far as things go, our encumbrance is so far away it might not even exist. For Asisreo's party though, he's drawing out a lot more treasure per adventure because he levels so much faster, and even strong characters might be struggling with encumbrance.


As for adventure timing: if you level up at our rate, once every couple of months, or take a year to go from level 1 to level 5, which sounds pretty normal, but you also level up mid-dungeon often, I would suspect that you have really long adventures [or if you're leveling up mid adventure and only play 1-5, are conflating "Adventure" and "Campaign", which would be kind of like an extended one-shot in my mind more than a whole campaign].
I can assure you, I don't do anything special according to the DMG. It takes roughly 2-3 adventuring days to level up (adjusted xp) so I'm roughly on-schedule. And I sincerely believe the game starts to get stale, especially in terms of martials, when leveling up takes irl months.

I can't imagine playing in a game where it took more than 5 weeks max irl to level up, I'd be bored out of my mind. Even in a milestone campaign, I would appreciate some sort of indication that I'm close to a level up so I can think of my next options rather than having it sprung up on me.

But it's not like they go from 1-10 in 20-30 in-game days. I give huge amounts of downtime, at later levels it gets to years. Makes sense because the more skilled you are, the less likely people will ask you for your (probably expensive or hard to obtain) services for help unless something worthy of your time appears. It's my way to allow those personal character projects to manifest, like magic item creation or hiring retainers/mercenaries for a stronghold. I prefer doing it one-on-one with players so in-session time isn't wasted but they enjoy seeing and hearing what other characters are doing. Occasionally, I even have an urban encounter where two or more players happen to meet up and it usually segways into the next adventure's seed because they're available during the downtimes.

And when you do downtime in years, living expenses get extremely costly.

[Pex]

XP as a motivation, due to being a reward, is what needs to be replaced. There are many ways to steer motivation, of course. But XP is one of the best. Whatever you reward XP for is going to be what the game is about.

And of course, there's that the VAST majority of players love XP. Super emphasized because it's overwhelmingly in favor of XP in my IRL experience. I'll meet DMs in favor of milestones, but almost never players who like it. I'd call such players chimeras, except for folks here claiming to like it. I still hear (or at least did before everything went down) constant screaming about adventures league dropping it. That hurt official play attendance so very badly.

In that regard, it's the opposite of encumbrance, where most players will do without just fine.

I'm fine with either. So far the DMs I've played with who use milestones are doing so at appropriate moments. I can sort out the chapters that culminate in a big deal BBEG fight, and we level afterwards. Sometimes a factor is how many game sessions since the last level up. I have more an issue with the DMs who give out XP. It's given out per game session, and it feels too little.

Part of the factor is I'm used to old school when XP was only given out at the end of an adventure arc. You play two or three sessions of it then given a large number. You level after two or three adventure arcs. Today's DMs I play with when giving it out after every session I cringe because it feels so low. I consider the bad guys we face and the number of players, so I get the math behind it, but there's real world time and energy spent playing the game. I accept at face value when the DM says he gives XP for roleplaying, but the XP total is to me subjectively low I feel devalued. This is in general, not personally and the DM is not being "tyrannical".

It might be emotional, but give me the big number at the end of an adventure arc or use milestone. They're almost the same thing anyway.

[Zevox]

As for adventure timing: if you level up at our rate, once every couple of months, or take a year to go from level 1 to level 5, which sounds pretty normal, but you also level up mid-dungeon often, I would suspect that you have really long adventures [or if you're leveling up mid adventure and only play 1-5, are conflating "Adventure" and "Campaign", which would be kind of like an extended one-shot in my mind more than a whole campaign].
No leveling up mid-dungeon - we use milestones, not xp, so that wouldn't happen. We don't only play 1-5 either, that just happens to be what we did last year, starting a campaign in a new homebrew setting our DM created.

I was using Adventure and Campaign interchangeably there though. So by "Adventure," you just mean a shorter adventure that only lasts a couple of months of real time? Interesting if so. My group has done something like that occasionally (although shorter than it sounds like yours are; the longest ones only lasted a month and a half to two months, and the shortest was 3 sessions), but only as something that those of us that don't normally DM for full campaigns run in between the full-length campaigns. It's a combination of giving other members of the group a chance to try the whole DMing thing, and giving the regular DM more time to cook up the next full campaign. We've never leveled up doing those though, that's always wound up being a campaign-only thing (albeit I suppose that only by chance before we switched to the milestones system).


I mean, Asisreo said they level up once every 2-3 sessions, which is legitimately really fast.

I can assure you, I don't do anything special according to the DMG. It takes roughly 2-3 adventuring days to level up (adjusted xp) so I'm roughly on-schedule. And I sincerely believe the game starts to get stale, especially in terms of martials, when leveling up takes irl months.

I can't imagine playing in a game where it took more than 5 weeks max irl to level up, I'd be bored out of my mind. Even in a milestone campaign, I would appreciate some sort of indication that I'm close to a level up so I can think of my next options rather than having it sprung up on me.
Huh. Yeah, that does sound very strange (and very fast) to me, I must admit. Leveling is fun, but it certainly doesn't matter to me nearly that much. As long as it happens occasionally and the campaign doesn't feel like it's dragging, I'm good.

[Asisreo1]

Huh. Yeah, that does sound very strange (and very fast) to me, I must admit. Leveling is fun, but it certainly doesn't matter to me nearly that much. As long as it happens occasionally and the campaign doesn't feel like it's dragging, I'm good.
Here's a question for you, then: have you ever played a class and felt underwhelmed with their options? Like you'll never really get to experience when the class actually gets powerful and you're entirely stuck with what you have?

Like you have to retire your character because it didn't get what you were hoping for soon enough?

That's essentially what a faster leveling system solves. Now, it doesn't have to be XP. It can be just as good in milestone. But there's really no reason to slow leveling down too much. Especially since you probably have a mastery of the system and the small amount of incremental boosts per level-up aren't going to make you confused.

As for how to make it in a story setting, if you want, you can have them do the "training while downtime to level up" variant that makes it so you can't level up without training a bit, even with the necessary exp. They can train on their travel times and when they have a short breather in a settlement.



As a side, milestone is a bit of a misnomer. Currently, it basically means "anything that isn't xp." But it actually means they get experience for doing stuff besides combat. Most people that run xp in modern games are actually running with milestones.

What people mean by "milestone" is level advancement without xp. It's understandable it has a shortened version because of how long it is but there's actually 2 versions.

The first is very rare, gaining a level per session. That's kinda fast even for me but it might depend on the session. If it's 6 hours long and the pace is very fast, it might make sense.
The second type is plot-based advancements and it's by far the most common, at least of the xp-less rewards. It's also the simplest, yet it's apparently also the slowest. I've played in plot-based advancements and it does make my character feel very static in growth, relying more on new magic items rather than my own strength since it's unknown how long it'll take to level up.

Personally, it also feels very hand-holdy or railroady since it feels like we will get nothing but harm doing anything but exactly the plot-based stuff. Like, why should I even talk to NPC's and risk saying something bad if I could just go directly to the boss? And why not cheese the entire dungeon until the final boss like a coked-up speedrunner if everything in between only gets me coins which aren't going to be spent and enemies that are more trouble than they're worth?

[LordCdrMilitant]

No leveling up mid-dungeon - we use milestones, not xp, so that wouldn't happen. We don't only play 1-5 either, that just happens to be what we did last year, starting a campaign in a new homebrew setting our DM created.

I was using Adventure and Campaign interchangeably there though. So by "Adventure," you just mean a shorter adventure that only lasts a couple of months of real time? Interesting if so. My group has done something like that occasionally (although shorter than it sounds like yours are; the longest ones only lasted a month and a half to two months, and the shortest was 3 sessions), but only as something that those of us that don't normally DM for full campaigns run in between the full-length campaigns. It's a combination of giving other members of the group a chance to try the whole DMing thing, and giving the regular DM more time to cook up the next full campaign. We've never leveled up doing those though, that's always wound up being a campaign-only thing (albeit I suppose that only by chance before we switched to the milestones system).

Huh. Yeah, that does sound very strange (and very fast) to me, I must admit. Leveling is fun, but it certainly doesn't matter to me nearly that much. As long as it happens occasionally and the campaign doesn't feel like it's dragging, I'm good.

A campaign is composed of adventures and downtime. Each adventure is like a story arc [typically lasts a couple of sessions], between the adventures are downtime. The campaign I'm in right now has been going for about a year and a half now, and we're level 9 going on 10 and started at level 1. We've had many adventures.

We also have short single-adventure-campaigns like I think you're describing, for summer activities or things.



Here's a question for you, then: have you ever played a class and felt underwhelmed with their options? Like you'll never really get to experience when the class actually gets powerful and you're entirely stuck with what you have?

Like you have to retire your character because it didn't get what you were hoping for soon enough?


Uh... no? Usually we just play and are generally pretty happy. We take our level ups between sessions after we're told to level up.

That said, waiting for stuff to come online is why we often start at level 5 for short campaigns so that you start at the point where your signature features are online.

[Zevox]

Here's a question for you, then: have you ever played a class and felt underwhelmed with their options? Like you'll never really get to experience when the class actually gets powerful and you're entirely stuck with what you have?

Like you have to retire your character because it didn't get what you were hoping for soon enough?
No, I haven't. Though I also don't think I'd retire a character because they didn't feel powerful enough - combat is only one part of the game's fun, after all, and there's a strong likelihood that even if I felt underwhelmed by my combat performance, I'd be enjoying RPing the character.

I mean, hell, that's most of what I've been doing in my current campaign. As I mentioned it's been going on since late February, mostly weekly, and it's had all of two fights. One of which barely counts because we'd so thoroughly lead our enemies into a trap and sabotaged them in so many ways before it happened that it was basically over before the first blow was struck. During all the rest of the time we've done a lot of RPing, some shopping, exploration, investigated a murder mystery and participated in a trial for it, investigated leads on some villains we haven't caught up with yet, plus had some travel time of course. All a lot of fun, but at no point in it did combat capability matter, and what level we were only mattered insofar as our skill checks went.


As a side, milestone is a bit of a misnomer. Currently, it basically means "anything that isn't xp." But it actually means they get experience for doing stuff besides combat. Most people that run xp in modern games are actually running with milestones.

What people mean by "milestone" is level advancement without xp. It's understandable it has a shortened version because of how long it is but there's actually 2 versions.

The first is very rare, gaining a level per session. That's kinda fast even for me but it might depend on the session. If it's 6 hours long and the pace is very fast, it might make sense.
The second type is plot-based advancements and it's by far the most common, at least of the xp-less rewards. It's also the simplest, yet it's apparently also the slowest. I've played in plot-based advancements and it does make my character feel very static in growth, relying more on new magic items rather than my own strength since it's unknown how long it'll take to level up.
The second is what I've been assuming we all mean in talking about it. I've never heard of the first, which just sounds crazy to me.


Personally, it also feels very hand-holdy or railroady since it feels like we will get nothing but harm doing anything but exactly the plot-based stuff. Like, why should I even talk to NPC's and risk saying something bad if I could just go directly to the boss? And why not cheese the entire dungeon until the final boss like a coked-up speedrunner if everything in between only gets me coins which aren't going to be spent and enemies that are more trouble than they're worth?
Because leveling up isn't the sole (or even primary, at least to me or my group) goal of playing the game, it's just one of many fun parts of it? Because it would just be less fun to do that? I can't imagine even considering doing such a thing, personally.

[Asisreo1]

Uh... no? Usually we just play and are generally pretty happy. We take our level ups between sessions after we're told to level up.

That said, waiting for stuff to come online is why we often start at level 5 for short campaigns so that you start at the point where your signature features are online.
Alot of people who hate certain classes/subclasses don't like the fact they don't have any changes to their character for the majority of the campaign.

Have you noticed why wizards are a favorite? It's because they make decisions that affect their playstyle per long rest while spellcasters like sorcerers are stuck with their spell selection until level up where they can swap one. Eventually, you'll be playing exactly the same tunes over multiple encounters and you'll wonder if that's all the class/subclass has to offer.

Fighters are very dependent on level ups to make choices. They get tons of ASI's and feats but only if they can get to higher levels which might feel very static and unlikely when you haven't leveled up the past 2 months and the wizard gets to play with his toys and switch them around all he likes in a day.

I think it may actually be good for balance if a character levels up once per 3-4 in-game days because it will make the wizard's long rest preparations not as super good compared to other spellcasters. They only get a new spell and get to swap an old one but it isn't after 2 months of waiting and wishing you never chose false life over magic missile. Then the DM has to permit you to change spells and you're convinced both spells and sorcerers suck without DM input.

[Moxxmix]

Three different long-term adventures, with three different GMs, had us leveling up roughly once every 4 sessions.

The longest running one had us reach level 14 in 2 years 7 months, playing 2 out of every 3 weeks. That's a level gained (1–14 is 13 gained levels) about every 4.25 sessions.

The other games that ran weekly had us leveling up somewhere around once per month, so about the same. The recently started game is 8 weeks in, and we're level 3, but we did get to level 3 a couple weeks ago, so maybe 6 weeks? ~3 weeks per level. Seems reasonable for early levels, especially when some of that time was getting used to a VTT.

For encumbrance, we don't really track it. We're more likely to worry about, "You can't swing your polearm in this cramped tunnel", and "How many times do you have to cast Create Food and Water each day to feed the party and all the horses?" Also, "Cool! A lamp that lets us see invisible! Who's got some oil?" ... /crickets

But, I'll also caveat: 90% of early levels is spent in the city, in pretty much every game I've been in. There's no spending a couple weeks in the wilderness trying to weigh food vs gold or whatever. The gold you accumulate is more likely to be stored in your house... where you have to worry about thieves, not encumbrance rules.

[Asisreo1]

No, I haven't. Though I also don't think I'd retire a character because they didn't feel powerful enough - combat is only one part of the game's fun, after all, and there's a strong likelihood that even if I felt underwhelmed by my combat performance, I'd be enjoying RPing the character.

I mean, hell, that's most of what I've been doing in my current campaign. As I mentioned it's been going on since late February, mostly weekly, and it's had all of two fights. One of which barely counts because we'd so thoroughly lead our enemies into a trap and sabotaged them in so many ways before it happened that it was basically over before the first blow was struck. During all the rest of the time we've done a lot of RPing, some shopping, exploration, investigated a murder mystery and participated in a trial for it, investigated leads on some villains we haven't caught up with yet, plus had some travel time of course. All a lot of fun, but at no point in it did combat capability matter, and what level we were only mattered insofar as our skill checks went.

That's, to me at least, downtime. Yes, you can get in fights in downtime and yes they can be hard, but it's still seeding for the next adventure, as it seems you described it. Of course, you can have a full urban encounter like in Waterdeep but there usually isn't much time to relax during an adventure because of either an explicit or implicit time pressure. "Save the noble" isn't a specific time pressure but you can't leave him there if he's very important and eventually things might get out of hand, like more demons showing up or criminal activity spiking.

But also, adventures can link and merge into and out of downtime. For instance, your players might not realize that when you skip over travel, they have downtime. The wizard might be able to safely make a first-level spellscroll for further use or the barbarian might recuperate from a specter's life drain.




The second is what I've been assuming we all mean in talking about it. I've never heard of the first, which just sounds crazy to me.


It's actually from the DMG on the same page "milestone" is.




Because leveling up isn't the sole (or even primary, at least to me or my group) goal of playing the game, it's just one of many fun parts of it? Because it would just be less fun to do that? I can't imagine even considering doing such a thing, personally.
Getting stronger is a very strong reason for me to play. Maybe me and my DM are weird but we suck at interesting stories. We've tried making these really cool stories and they always fall flat because players don't buy into it, or pacing sucks, or there's no reason to even pursue the hooks. And as a player, we're supposed to play nice but we've lost interest after "Ah! The dragon was actually a frog dressed as a dragon! Wow! This story is so cool and it isn't hard to keep track of at all. But wait, my notes say the frog is the prince? Is the dragon a prince? Oh, it's a secret...alright then, keep your secrets."

I mean, maybe it's also the fact that I'm a gamer who is okay with story but doesn't want it to bog down the fact that it's a game. Like, I don't see what exactly is wrong with playing the game like it's a game. I'm not interested in my OC & gang's antics as much as I am feeling like a grandmaster chess player when I make exactly the right moves in combat or feel like I'm in skyrim discovering new things when I explore and even getting xp for uncovering secrets.

So I don't really have a problem with the game-side of the game.

[Zevox]

That's, to me at least, downtime. Yes, you can get in fights in downtime and yes they can be hard, but it's still seeding for the next adventure, as it seems you described it. Of course, you can have a full urban encounter like in Waterdeep but there usually isn't much time to relax during an adventure because of either an explicit or implicit time pressure. "Save the noble" isn't a specific time pressure but you can't leave him there if he's very important and eventually things might get out of hand, like more demons showing up or criminal activity spiking.

But also, adventures can link and merge into and out of downtime. For instance, your players might not realize that when you skip over travel, they have downtime. The wizard might be able to safely make a first-level spellscroll for further use or the barbarian might recuperate from a specter's life drain.
The only part of it that I could see being called downtime was the very beginning, when we did that shopping and got the initial adventure hooks. The rest of it was a whole subplot that we just solved with very little fighting because our party Ranger is a mad genius who enjoys schemes that manipulate and humiliate his opponents and seems to have the dice gods on his side - hence sabotaging our opponents so thoroughly that we were able to defeat them without any real resistance. Plus we also avoided another fight entirely through persuasion checks, so I guess that was a third potential fight.


Getting stronger is a very strong reason for me to play. Maybe me and my DM are weird but we suck at interesting stories. We've tried making these really cool stories and they always fall flat because players don't buy into it, or pacing sucks, or there's no reason to even pursue the hooks. And as a player, we're supposed to play nice but we've lost interest after "Ah! The dragon was actually a frog dressed as a dragon! Wow! This story is so cool and it isn't hard to keep track of at all. But wait, my notes say the frog is the prince? Is the dragon a prince? Oh, it's a secret...alright then, keep your secrets."

I mean, maybe it's also the fact that I'm a gamer who is okay with story but doesn't want it to bog down the fact that it's a game. Like, I don't see what exactly is wrong with playing the game like it's a game. I'm not interested in my OC & gang's antics as much as I am feeling like a grandmaster chess player when I make exactly the right moves in combat or feel like I'm in skyrim discovering new things when I explore and even getting xp for uncovering secrets.

So I don't really have a problem with the game-side of the game.
Nor do I, and there's nothing wrong with playing like that if that's how your group wants to. It's a just a foreign one to me personally. I like combat and leveling up in D&D, but like RP and collaborative storytelling just as much, so I feel little need to do the former with great frequency.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Getting stronger is a very strong reason for me to play. Maybe me and my DM are weird but we suck at interesting stories. We've tried making these really cool stories and they always fall flat because players don't buy into it, or pacing sucks, or there's no reason to even pursue the hooks. And as a player, we're supposed to play nice but we've lost interest after "Ah! The dragon was actually a frog dressed as a dragon! Wow! This story is so cool and it isn't hard to keep track of at all. But wait, my notes say the frog is the prince? Is the dragon a prince? Oh, it's a secret...alright then, keep your secrets."

I mean, maybe it's also the fact that I'm a gamer who is okay with story but doesn't want it to bog down the fact that it's a game. Like, I don't see what exactly is wrong with playing the game like it's a game. I'm not interested in my OC & gang's antics as much as I am feeling like a grandmaster chess player when I make exactly the right moves in combat or feel like I'm in skyrim discovering new things when I explore and even getting xp for uncovering secrets.

So I don't really have a problem with the game-side of the game.


Nor do I, and there's nothing wrong with playing like that if that's how your group wants to. It's a just a foreign one to me personally. I like combat and leveling up in D&D, but like RP and collaborative storytelling just as much, so I feel little need to do the former with great frequency.

Huh. I do not enjoy feeling like a grandmaster chess player in D&D. As I've mentioned, I have no less than 12 armies of miniatures and a good number of old fashioned wargames for that feeling.

I play and run RPG's for the storytelling and having a make believe character to play as. I pretty much try to avoid combat because I find D&D combat deeply unsatisfying, slow, and boring compared to both other RPG systems and being a wargamer in general

The game [i]is the story.


Anyway, this is kind of even further tangential to the topic of encumbrance. How we run our games and how our levelling pace and rate of adventures/level is intrinsically tied to treasure gain which is basically the purpose of encumberance and explains why you encounter encumbrance often and I never see it, because I just don't collect treasure at nearly the same rate because I don't level at nearly the same rate.

[TigerT20]

The first is very rare, gaining a level per session. That's kinda fast even for me but it might depend on the session. If it's 6 hours long and the pace is very fast, it might make sense.

Based off the DMG: It is not every session. Getting to level 2, sure that's one session. But the DMG then says immediately after that that level three is two sessions after level 2. The number of sessions between them keeps changing, with some levels being longer than others - tiers two and three should be longer than one and four in general

They aren't blitzkreiging the game, they're just using the number of sessions played as the baseline for levelling.

[Tanarii]

Based off the DMG: It is not every session. Getting to level 2, sure that's one session. But the DMG then says immediately after that that level three is two sessions after level 2. The number of sessions between them keeps changing, with some levels being longer than others - tiers two and three should be longer than one and four in general

They aren't blitzkreiging the game, they're just using the number of sessions played as the baseline for levelling.
LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
SESSION-BASED ADVANCEMENT
A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO :smallamused:), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

-------------------

Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right. :smallamused:

[Asisreo1]

LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
SESSION-BASED ADVANCEMENT
A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO :smallamused:), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

-------------------

Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right. :smallamused:
I also want to get this out of the way. Because people get it wrong, including me.

Nowhere in the DMG does it say that 6-8 encounters is recommended for an adventuring day. 6-8 encounters is a hard maximum to what they believe players can handle before needing a long rest.

For 1st level players, they can only really handle 4 hard encounters between a short rest. The encounter difficulty threshold is continuous so it's possible to have a medium encounter without the adjusted xp being exactly 200 for a medium encounter. As long as it is lower than 300, it still counts as medium. This means that 6 encounters a day is a cap, not a baseline, unless you put in easy encounters in-between.

I believe LMoP's first fight is 4 cr1/4 creatures. It's interesting because that is definitely a "deadly" encounter for 1st level players and it's infamous for making the players seem weak at first level. It's actually funny that they claim the PC's defeat to be "unlikely" with such a deadly encounter. Especially with supposed newbies.

Despite the encounter being "deadly," it's not tpk-worthy since deadly encounters could be lethal enough to lead to 1-2 character deaths. The party does risk defeat, though.

I don't think an adventuring day is actually supposed to be 6-8 encounters. You're still playing "correctly" or RAW if you have less or don't even hit the XP threshold. Session-advancement is probably too fast even at first level but I can start to see it being reasonable past 3rd-4th level since it's generally the pace I go with adventuring day exp.

With adjusted exp, it usually does go roughly 2-3 adventuring days to get a level up and I can eek an adventuring day's worth of exp in a single day.

[kyoryu]

Since you missed the point while quoting the point, I'm going to repeat it.

Someone posted that encumbrance is always a negative for players.

Someone else responded it is a positive for some players.

If it's sometimes a positive for players, or a positive for some players, it's not always a negative for players.

I think negative and positive are being used in two different ways, here.

1) Encumbrance is only a negative for players - it never provides bonuses, it only provides penalties.
2) Encumbrance can be a positive for players - having to make encumbrance-related decisions can make a better play experience.

Yay, ambiguous language!

Oh, also, excellent posts earlier on the historic reason for encumbrance, and a great analysis. I'm a huge believer in understanding why the rules are what they are (especially when it comes to old D&D), so that you can know when to ignore them. I think there's a lot of D&D stuff that made sense in 1e with the assumptions of Gary's game at Gary's table, but are often less relevant today. Those things have been getting removed slowly, but it's still worth understanding the history.

And, as someone that's a fan of old-school D&D, I'd probably ignore encumbrance for most "modern" games.

[Deathtongue]

5E D&D's encounter assumptions are dissonant with how action-adventure fiction constructs its stories. Storytelling filler, even if it's action-packed, is generally a dirty word in television and paper media and is the Cain's Mark of unimaginative or pandering writers. And let's be honest, except in extraordinary once-in-a-campaign circumstances like storming the castle to save the planet combat past 2 or 3 encounters between the beginning of an act and its denouement is just filler. Which is okay and even necessary for a video game, but inappropriate for storytelling.

[Tanarii]

Which is okay and even necessary for a video game, but inappropriate for storytelling.Which is fine, because storytelling and TRPGs are like oil and water most of the time. They're both fine things by themselves but they don't mix well.

[LordCdrMilitant]

LEVEL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT XP
SESSION-BASED ADVANCEMENT
A good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level. This rate mirrors the standard rate of advancement, assuming sessions are about four hours long.

STORY-BASED ADVANCEMENT
When you let the story o f the campaign drive advancement, you award levels when adventurers accomplish significant goals in the campaign.

P263

Might as well quote the book at this point and get everyone on the same page. Using Level Advancement Without XP and the Session-Based Advancement option means advancing every 2-3 sessions! each 4 hours, after level 4.

Despite what it says this in no way mirrors standard advance,ent. That is actually much faster than rewarding creature XP, unless you make the mistake I did and reward encounter difficulty adjusted XP as a reward . The average pace of advancement based on adventuring days and creature XP for 3-6 creature encounters, and having all combat encounters, would be on average would be roughly 4-5 sessions per level. The only way to get 2-3 adventuring day sessions per level is for them all to be solo creature encounters or non-combat challenges.

Also note that in addition to not understanding their own adjust XP for encounter difficulty vs creature XP for adventuring days system (easy mistake IMO :smallamused:), the designers pretty clearly expect a 4 hour session to be roughly an adventuring day's worth of encounters, combat or non. Given how often people complain about that clearly it's a problem for a fair number of folks.

-------------------

Also in 5e "Milestone XP" is a way of awarding XP. Ya'll need to get yer terminology right. :smallamused:

I have had my terminology right. ;) I have consistently just said "award levels when I/we feel like it".


Anyway, wow that's uh, fast. I used assigned levels, and we don't go anywhere near that fast [as mentioned, we're like half the normal pace]

It takes 300 XP to go from level 1 to level 2.
A CR 1 enemy, approximately a at-CR encounter for 4 level 1 PC's, awards about 200XP. Split 4 ways, that's 50/player and 6 such encounters to level up.
That would be, for me, at least 3 sessions, potentially 6 or more if we aren't fighting continuously. I don't know how one would cram 6 encounters into one session, unless you played from dawn to dusk.

A CR 9 enemy would be approximately an at-CR encounter for my party, and awards like 5000XP. Split 4 ways, that's 1250/player out of 14000XP to level, meaning we'd have to fight 12 such encounters to level. That's definitely a solid 2 months of playtime.

Even tuning up to "deadly" encounters, we'd still wind up with a lot of encounters, like 6, to level up, which would still be like a month of game time.



I also want to get this out of the way. Because people get it wrong, including me.

Nowhere in the DMG does it say that 6-8 encounters is recommended for an adventuring day. 6-8 encounters is a hard maximum to what they believe players can handle before needing a long rest.

For 1st level players, they can only really handle 4 hard encounters between a short rest. The encounter difficulty threshold is continuous so it's possible to have a medium encounter without the adjusted xp being exactly 200 for a medium encounter. As long as it is lower than 300, it still counts as medium. This means that 6 encounters a day is a cap, not a baseline, unless you put in easy encounters in-between.

I believe LMoP's first fight is 4 cr1/4 creatures. It's interesting because that is definitely a "deadly" encounter for 1st level players and it's infamous for making the players seem weak at first level. It's actually funny that they claim the PC's defeat to be "unlikely" with such a deadly encounter. Especially with supposed newbies.

Despite the encounter being "deadly," it's not tpk-worthy since deadly encounters could be lethal enough to lead to 1-2 character deaths. The party does risk defeat, though.

I don't think an adventuring day is actually supposed to be 6-8 encounters. You're still playing "correctly" or RAW if you have less or don't even hit the XP threshold. Session-advancement is probably too fast even at first level but I can start to see it being reasonable past 3rd-4th level since it's generally the pace I go with adventuring day exp.

With adjusted exp, it usually does go roughly 2-3 adventuring days to get a level up and I can eek an adventuring day's worth of exp in a single day.

Huh? I'm confused by "I can eke out an adventuring day's worth of XP in a single day" do you mean "single session?" and what's "an adventuring day's worth of XP?"


XP is OOC, and governed by encounter and level, not by in-game adventuring days, which could include many encounters or include very few. And one session-day could include a fraction of one adventuring day, or many. In general, from my experience, a party can expect to complete between 1 and 3 encounters per session-day, generally on the side of 1 rather than 3.



Treasure, and thus your encumbrance, is based on level. Generally, one would assume that the party's wealth comes from loot whether in magic items or gold, and in a classical scenario all that loot would be carried out of the dungeons at the end of the dungeon delve [and then be converted into equipment and/or stored]. Over the course of X sessions from level A to level B, the party accumulates both the XP difference and WBL difference of those levels through a series of one or more "adventures".

In general, an "Adventure" includes one or two expeditions to a dungeon, where the party gets treasure and XP. A trip to the dungeon isn't necessarily one adventuring day [since establishing guarded camps in the AO are common problems], and definitely isn't one session-day. A medium-sized adventure for us is usually around 4 session-days, and I would guess this is "normal", since it seems congruent with almost everybody else and most modules I've read, which feel like they range from about 2 session-days to about 8 session-days in complexity depending on the module, though this can obviously vary with your table's efficiency.


Total accumulated wealth is a factor of your level, but the frequency that you get to extract treasure from the dungeon is based on how long adventures take to complete. The rate you have adventures is largely unrelated from the rate at which you level up. So if you level up "fast" [particularly if you level up mid-adventure], you will accumulate treasure quickly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and thus often find yourself at encumbrance. If you level up "slow", you will accumulate treasure slowly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and rarely carry much at all out of the dungeon.

If you follow standard XP-based progression for a 4-person party and distribute hoards evenly across the levels, it would generally line up like [The two red columns are Katherine's Estimation and subject to considerably variance by GM and campaign. I've also assumed that you actually spend your GP on stuff like Magic Items or castles or nice things like you're supposed to, or at least drop it off in your house/castle/airship/whatever so you can sit on it like a dragon, rather than carrying it around everywhere your go because I have in fact seen somebody who was new and didn't know what to do with gold and never spent it until he went "uh, I've got 400 pounds of gold on me" and we went "wait, what, why, how?"]:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EAefxSzj5ws/XtAhiNhz6oI/AAAAAAAAErc/gLFE16o0SdA_wtwAwqPRGtQi8_aEaYOHACK8BGAsYHg/s0/2020-05-28.png

If the number of encounters per session changes, or the number of sessions per adventure changes, then the amount of weight carried out per adventure would change.

I've estimated 4 sessions per adventure based kind of on dead reckoning and personal experience, and estimated 1.5 encounters per session because I've seen 1 encounter session, I've seen 2 encounter sessions, and I've even seen the exceedingly rare 3 encounters/5 hour session, but I've never seen anyone get through more than that in 5 hours.

But anyway, note how low your encumbrance-to-treasure is [until level 17, when the hoard size gets huge]. This leaves 60 pounds of gear for a S8 character to carry after treasure, which is a lot of space to work with and not really at risk of tripping the base carry limit.

[Zevox]

Anyway, this is kind of even further tangential to the topic of encumbrance. How we run our games and how our levelling pace and rate of adventures/level is intrinsically tied to treasure gain which is basically the purpose of encumberance and explains why you encounter encumbrance often and I never see it, because I just don't collect treasure at nearly the same rate because I don't level at nearly the same rate.
True. Collecting stuff isn't really a focus on my group's campaigns either. The only time I've ever seen my DM roll against a DMG table for loot was for some explicitly temporary magic items from a dungeon that would vanish once the villain we were after was slain. We don't really just find gold or valuables lying around, we mostly get money via quest reward from grateful NPCs, and magic items are rare and generally something that someone in the party will find useful and want to keep. Large hauls of items just aren't a thing for us - at most they build up over time in our inventories.

[Asisreo1]

Huh? I'm confused by "I can eke out an adventuring day's worth of XP in a single day" do you mean "single session?" and what's "an adventuring day's worth of XP?"


XP is OOC, and governed by encounter and level, not by in-game adventuring days, which could include many encounters or include very few. And one session-day could include a fraction of one adventuring day, or many. In general, from my experience, a party can expect to complete between 1 and 3 encounters per session-day, generally on the side of 1 rather than 3.



Treasure, and thus your encumbrance, is based on level. Generally, one would assume that the party's wealth comes from loot whether in magic items or gold, and in a classical scenario all that loot would be carried out of the dungeons at the end of the dungeon delve [and then be converted into equipment and/or stored]. Over the course of X sessions from level A to level B, the party accumulates both the XP difference and WBL difference of those levels through a series of one or more "adventures".

In general, an "Adventure" includes one or two expeditions to a dungeon, where the party gets treasure and XP. A trip to the dungeon isn't necessarily one adventuring day [since establishing guarded camps in the AO are common problems], and definitely isn't one session-day. A medium-sized adventure for us is usually around 4 session-days, and I would guess this is "normal", since it seems congruent with almost everybody else and most modules I've read, which feel like they range from about 2 session-days to about 8 session-days in complexity depending on the module, though this can obviously vary with your table's efficiency.


Total accumulated wealth is a factor of your level, but the frequency that you get to extract treasure from the dungeon is based on how long adventures take to complete. The rate you have adventures is largely unrelated from the rate at which you level up. So if you level up "fast" [particularly if you level up mid-adventure], you will accumulate treasure quickly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and thus often find yourself at encumbrance. If you level up "slow", you will accumulate treasure slowly relative to your opportunities to extract it, and rarely carry much at all out of the dungeon.

If you follow standard XP-based progression for a 4-person party and distribute hoards evenly across the levels, it would generally line up like [The two red columns are Katherine's Estimation and subject to considerably variance by GM and campaign. I've also assumed that you actually spend your GP on stuff like Magic Items or castles or nice things like you're supposed to, or at least drop it off in your house/castle/airship/whatever so you can sit on it like a dragon, rather than carrying it around everywhere your go because I have in fact seen somebody who was new and didn't know what to do with gold and never spent it until he went "uh, I've got 400 pounds of gold on me" and we went "wait, what, why, how?"]:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EAefxSzj5ws/XtAhiNhz6oI/AAAAAAAAErc/gLFE16o0SdA_wtwAwqPRGtQi8_aEaYOHACK8BGAsYHg/s0/2020-05-28.png

If the number of encounters per session changes, or the number of sessions per adventure changes, then the amount of weight carried out per adventure would change.

I've estimated 4 sessions per adventure based kind of on dead reckoning and personal experience, and estimated 1.5 encounters per session because I've seen 1 encounter session, I've seen 2 encounter sessions, and I've even seen the exceedingly rare 3 encounters/5 hour session, but I've never seen anyone get through more than that in 5 hours.

But anyway, note how low your encumbrance-to-treasure is [until level 17, when the hoard size gets huge]. This leaves 60 pounds of gear for a S8 character to carry after treasure, which is a lot of space to work with and not really at risk of tripping the base carry limit.
In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things. By "adventuring day exp," I mean the adjusted exp in the table for each level. For example, 4 1st-level characters will have 1200 adjusted exp between them. If I give characters the baseline for hard encounters, 300exp, it's only 4 encounters. I could actually throw the baseline for a deadly encounter and a couple slightly-harder-than-hard encounters and bring the encounters to hit the "adventuring day exp" in the table to 3 encounters. Since you're constantly changing the exp using adjusted exp, they won't actually level up in an adventure following this method unless the entire adventure day is made of solo encounters, which would probably suck.

But I'm also saying that there's no need to force yourself to hit that maximum. One or two encounters a day is perfectly valid, though it'll swing things in favor of Nova/LR classes.

I'm also not claiming it's better to cram these encounters into a session but it isn't that hard to get 5 combat encounters in my 4-hour games. Combat doesn't really take more than 30mins-1hr at most.



For Encumbrance, I've looked at my players inventory and stuff is actually comical. Why are they carrying 55 pounds of foraged food, 15 pounds of skinned hide, 8 spider gland sacks, 5 pounds of Vinegar, and 8 pounds of apples? I don't really know. Apparently they value these items, too, since they will drop torches and stuff to keep carrying these and gold.

So if your players are metaphorical goblins like mine, they might enjoy "filling" their carrying capacity by picking up useless crap until they have to drop their arms/legs.

They recently got a donkey but they instantly forgot about it and they're deep within the adventure's Jungle. It'll be rough for them since they also just recently lost 2 party members who were the "strong men" if the group. The new characters should be strong people as well, though, so I think it's fine.

[LordCdrMilitant]

In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things. By "adventuring day exp," I mean the adjusted exp in the table for each level. For example, 4 1st-level characters will have 1200 adjusted exp between them. If I give characters the baseline for hard encounters, 300exp, it's only 4 encounters. I could actually throw the baseline for a deadly encounter and a couple slightly-harder-than-hard encounters and bring the encounters to hit the "adventuring day exp" in the table to 3 encounters. Since you're constantly changing the exp using adjusted exp, they won't actually level up in an adventure following this method unless the entire adventure day is made of solo encounters, which would probably suck.

But I'm also saying that there's no need to force yourself to hit that maximum. One or two encounters a day is perfectly valid, though it'll swing things in favor of Nova/LR classes.

I'm also not claiming it's better to cram these encounters into a session but it isn't that hard to get 5 combat encounters in my 4-hour games. Combat doesn't really take more than 30mins-1hr at most.



For Encumbrance, I've looked at my players inventory and stuff is actually comical. Why are they carrying 55 pounds of foraged food, 15 pounds of skinned hide, 8 spider gland sacks, 5 pounds of Vinegar, and 8 pounds of apples? I don't really know. Apparently they value these items, too, since they will drop torches and stuff to keep carrying these and gold.

So if your players are metaphorical goblins like mine, they might enjoy "filling" their carrying capacity by picking up useless crap until they have to drop their arms/legs.

They recently got a donkey but they instantly forgot about it and they're deep within the adventure's Jungle. It'll be rough for them since they also just recently lost 2 party members who were the "strong men" if the group. The new characters should be strong people as well, though, so I think it's fine.

Why is there a quota of XP for an adventuring day? What does the adventuring day have to do with either XP gain rate or wealth gain rate/session and /adventure? I'm confused still. It matters for how stressed the party is in the encounters they have, but how many encounters per adventuring day isn't really a driver in how long it takes to level up and how much wealth you get per adventure.



Also, wow, how do you have 5 encounters in 4 hours? With 4 of us and the monsters to go, it takes like 30 minutes for every round of combat. So like a 5 hour session for us where there's a fight can easily just "be the session".

The most encounters I've had in a session was 5 encounters in a 9-and-a-half hour session from Noon to 9:30.


And that's kind of funny. 55 pounds of food. Why? Rations are like 2lb/day, so that's like a whole month of food they're carrying.

[Tanarii]

In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things.
5 is on the very low side for a 4 hour session for me. In four hours my players would usually fit in 1-1/3 to 1-2/3 adventuring days (with 3-4 short rests) then pull out and end the session (which was automatically a long rest IMC).

That was a mix of combat and non combat, but non-combat actually takes longer to resolve than combat for the same difficulty. Especially Easy non-combat (no significant resources required, I.e. just checks and player skill).

Easy combat takes less than 10 minutes. Even a Deadly combat doesn't take more than 40.

[Asisreo1]

Why is there a quota of XP for an adventuring day? What does the adventuring day have to do with either XP gain rate or wealth gain rate/session and /adventure? I'm confused still. It matters for how stressed the party is in the encounters they have, but how many encounters per adventuring day isn't really a driver in how long it takes to level up and how much wealth you get per adventure.


There isn't a quota per-se but the DMG has the adventuring day adjusted xp table. I being it up because many people believe that's what an adventuring day should be when there isn't really any proof that doing it another way is wrong.

As for the rate of level-ups, the rate is typically just based on how many encounters you can get through in a session. Not all combats are the same and depending on the DM and players, it could take longer to finish an encounter. The longer it takes to make an encounter, the less encounters you'll have in a session but there's also probably less encounters in an adventure, too. Because being in the same adventure 6-8 sessions might get stale when everyone wants to move-on. Still, it depends on the party.



Also, wow, how do you have 5 encounters in 4 hours? With 4 of us and the monsters to go, it takes like 30 minutes for every round of combat. So like a 5 hour session for us where there's a fight can easily just "be the session".

Less hp-meatsack monsters overall. When there's multiple creatures that get close, they'll get AoE'd. And people usually just go quickly with their turn when they both know the rules and know their character. It becomes quite fun watching the party work together to quickly end the battle as opposed to some parties I've played with where they have to stop and read/ask about a rule while it's their turn.

I've considered having unprepared players forgo their actions during combat. I'm not that cruel, though. It's fair game to look up/ask a very vague ruling. But if you're asking something like "Can I use charm person to make the guy jump off a bridge?" Nah, that get's old super fast and it just hurts the fun of everyone else who actually read their abilities. My current group is pretty good about that, though, so that's good.



The most encounters I've had in a session was 5 encounters in a 9-and-a-half hour session from Noon to 9:30.

I wouldn't have been patient enough for that. If combat takes longer than maybe an hour, I check out. I'm in a campaign that's 2 hours long and we've gotten to 3 combats per session. We mostly know exactly what ability is useful in which scenarios and how to use them. We also synchronize our abilities and do what's good for each.

I remember a spellcaster used hold person on a low-wisdom NPC. My Ranger capitalized by using ensaring strike. The creature was high strength and was large so normally the spell wouldn't be useful but because he was paralyzed, he was going to fail his strength save anyways. I hit him, eventually he got out of hold person but because ensnaring strike requires an action, he missed roughly the entire fight. He wasn't the only NPC, there was a second one but he was the priority. After the hold person, the spellcaster just ran and kept hiding because their concentration meant way more than any damage they'd have to put on the table. I'm proud of that moment and the combat took only 3 rounds and 45 minutes.



And that's kind of funny. 55 pounds of food. Why? Rations are like 2lb/day, so that's like a whole month of food they're carrying.
Apparently, "Real adventurers eat meat, not berries and nuts." Lol.

[Zevox]

My group would typically be able to fit about two fights into a session (average length 5-6 hours), if there's multiple fights in fairly quick succession to be fought. Maybe thee if one is on the easy/quick side.

[Tanarii]

My group would typically be able to fit about two fights into a session (average length 5-6 hours), if there's multiple fights in fairly quick succession to be fought. Maybe thee if one is on the easy/quick side.
Okay but how long would those two fights each be? And what difficulty? Because if you guys run two medium fights for thirty minutes and spend the rest of the time exploring and doing non-combat encounters, that's totally different from if a medium difficulty fight takes you an hour.

If the latter is happening the group probably needs to revisit why their combat is so excruciatingly slow.

[Zevox]

Okay but how long would those two fights each be? And what difficulty? Because if you guys run two medium fights for thirty minutes and spend the rest of the time exploring and doing non-combat encounters, that's totally different from if a medium difficulty fight takes you an hour.

If the latter is happening the group probably needs to revisit why their combat is so excruciatingly slow.
Anything besides an easy fight will likely be a couple of hours - a particularly hard one, like a final boss, might run as long as four. And why's pretty clear: we're not trying to go fast. We take our time considering and coordinating actions, talk with each other both in and out of character, RP dramatic moments in a fight, our DM will give elaborate descriptions of killing blows, etc. Nothing excruciating about it, it's just the pace we play at.

[LordCdrMilitant]

There isn't a quota per-se but the DMG has the adventuring day adjusted xp table. I being it up because many people believe that's what an adventuring day should be when there isn't really any proof that doing it another way is wrong.

As for the rate of level-ups, the rate is typically just based on how many encounters you can get through in a session. Not all combats are the same and depending on the DM and players, it could take longer to finish an encounter. The longer it takes to make an encounter, the less encounters you'll have in a session but there's also probably less encounters in an adventure, too. Because being in the same adventure 6-8 sessions might get stale when everyone wants to move-on. Still, it depends on the party.


Less hp-meatsack monsters overall. When there's multiple creatures that get close, they'll get AoE'd. And people usually just go quickly with their turn when they both know the rules and know their character. It becomes quite fun watching the party work together to quickly end the battle as opposed to some parties I've played with where they have to stop and read/ask about a rule while it's their turn.

I've considered having unprepared players forgo their actions during combat. I'm not that cruel, though. It's fair game to look up/ask a very vague ruling. But if you're asking something like "Can I use charm person to make the guy jump off a bridge?" Nah, that get's old super fast and it just hurts the fun of everyone else who actually read their abilities. My current group is pretty good about that, though, so that's good.

I wouldn't have been patient enough for that. If combat takes longer than maybe an hour, I check out. I'm in a campaign that's 2 hours long and we've gotten to 3 combats per session. We mostly know exactly what ability is useful in which scenarios and how to use them. We also synchronize our abilities and do what's good for each.

I remember a spellcaster used hold person on a low-wisdom NPC. My Ranger capitalized by using ensaring strike. The creature was high strength and was large so normally the spell wouldn't be useful but because he was paralyzed, he was going to fail his strength save anyways. I hit him, eventually he got out of hold person but because ensnaring strike requires an action, he missed roughly the entire fight. He wasn't the only NPC, there was a second one but he was the priority. After the hold person, the spellcaster just ran and kept hiding because their concentration meant way more than any damage they'd have to put on the table. I'm proud of that moment and the combat took only 3 rounds and 45 minutes.


Apparently, "Real adventurers eat meat, not berries and nuts." Lol.

Yeah, but what does the adventuring day with how many sessions per level and how much treasure per adventure? Unless you're confusing "session" with "adventuring day", but that seems unlikely. A single adventuring day's worth of encounters can last like 4 sessions., or you could blaze through many adventuring days that don't involve trespassing, robbery, and premeditated murder in a session. Adventures, governing how often you get to extract treasure, are usually a number of session affairs, not a number of adventuring days affairs, and the speed you get through encounters is the speed you gain XP and that's also session based, not adventuring day based.




Also, if each of your encounters is 45 minutes and 3 rounds, and you have 5 encounters per 4 hour session, you literally spend your entire session in combat! When do you like, get on with the rest of the game?


And as for efficiency, it's not like we're tactically inefficient [we can be very tactically efficient when we have to be]. We just have your average band of OOC players: the person who doesn't know how their character works after a year and a half ["uh, should I use sharpshooter on this? What's my damage?"], the person who had a plan for their turn but it was stupid ["I'mma cast Fireball! Oh everybody is in the blast radius."], the person who probably plays UBG in MTG and take a decade for their turn even though they had it all planned out in advance ["I'm going to cunning action dash to here, attack this guy twice, spend ki to attack again, grapple with that one, and then move-action move over here"], the person who was checked out for the last 30 minutes, the person who's obsessed with optimality and combat who starts each other player's turn by lecturing them on what they're going to be ignored [or confuse or cow the person they're lecturing], the person who's having a conversation with somebody else when it's not their turn that's distracting the person who's turn it is and/or the GM, and then 8 bad guys who all have to go on their own initiative steps instead of group initiative but somebody leaned on the initiative track 9 minutes ago and accidentally erased it with their sleeve and now nobody knows whose turn it is. [some of these people may actually be the same person]

Even if we were all prepped and ready to go, it takes like a minute or three per turn just moving pieces, measuring blast effects, and rolling dice so with like 4 players and 6 monsters or so that still works out to like 30 minute rounds.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I've had enormous trouble getting my players to properly record weights in my games. From what I've gathered, I'm having two separate problems.

The first is that a lot of my players come from video game stock. Inventory management is generally considered a chore that interferes with the action for these types of gamers, and it translates to a chore here. This problem isn't quite so serious, just some culture shock. It would resolve itself fairly quickly if it weren't for the second problem.

The second problem is that, for some ridiculous reason, D&D patently refuses to list weights alongside treasure. At all. Ever. You can't just get the stuff and then record the stuff if you're serious about encumbrance. You have to stop, break open the PHB, scan down for each item, realize that most of the treasure and art objects won't be listed, ask your DM about them, the DM scratches their head and opens up the DMG, the DM realizes that the DMG doesn't have weights for them either, the DM opens up Google on their phone, finds the average weight of the thing, and finally makes a decision based on that.

This could be solved so easily. So very, very easily. But adventures are never written with weights unless the point of the thing is that it's beyond normal carrying capacity, so here we are with something that should take no time to figure out taking ample table time, and making the whole deal a chore.

[Zhorn]

Zevox, ouch. I recall some of my early campaigns having long combats, but your's takes the cake.
When addressing that problem at my end, I (as DM) took to standing during combat, and presenting in a more high-energy fashion, giving a sense of urgency and tension. It helped the indecisive players make snappier choices and have their plans lined up before their turn started, with a backup in case the situation changed. The goal was to have each player's whole turn take less than 1 minute, so even a big fight of 5 rounds would only be about 20min tops. The dynamic of knowing your next turn was less than 3min away kept focus on the table and maintained a concentration on getting ready for that next turn.

[Zevox]

Zevox, ouch. I recall some of my early campaigns having long combats, but your's takes the cake.
When addressing that problem at my end, I (as DM) took to standing during combat, and presenting in a more high-energy fashion, giving a sense of urgency and tension. It helped the indecisive players make snappier choices and have their plans lined up before their turn started, with a backup in case the situation changed. The goal was to have each player's whole turn take less than 1 minute, so even a big fight of 5 rounds would only be about 20min tops. The dynamic of knowing your next turn was less than 3min away kept focus on the table and maintained a concentration on getting ready for that next turn.
It's not a problem, though, it's just our pace of play. Nobody's dissatisfied with it in any way.

[Tanarii]

It's not a problem, though, it's just our pace of play. Nobody's dissatisfied with it in any way.
Yes. But it does mean your game experience is quite far outside the norm. And that's accounting for plenty of people who say it takes a long time to run a fight.

And that may have bearing on other aspects of the game as well. Or maybe not. Norm is slow combat turns off players. Norm is players like XP. Norm is players pretty much hate encumbrance.

Your views are in sync on encumbrance and mine are out of sync. Probably because I didn't run a campaign that was in sync with the norm, we focused on hex-crawl and adventuring site exploring as best we could within the 5e rule set. It wasn't "heroic save the day" adventure paths, which is the modern norm. Encumbrance theoretically matters in the former, although 5e sure doesn't help much on that score. In the latter it doesn't really.

In short, I full recognize where my views are out of sync and why. And yet here we ar,e, with me going #grognardgrognard about it anyway. :smallamused:

[Zhorn]

It's not a problem, though, it's just our pace of play. Nobody's dissatisfied with it in any way.
Right, sorry. It was LordCdrMilitant who viewed combat as grinding the game to a halt (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24530984&postcount=44).
You do you, play the way you find the most fun.
Still, spending that long in combat does seem excessive.
Combat is the slowest part of play, with it taking minutes to establish what happens in a 6sec window, so if the enjoyment is more from story/plot interactions/developments and roleplay opportunities/character development, minimizing the time combat take goes a long way to giving more time for those other aspects of play. Just my 2 cp.

[Asisreo1]

Yeah, but what does the adventuring day with how many sessions per level and how much treasure per adventure? Unless you're confusing "session" with "adventuring day", but that seems unlikely. A single adventuring day's worth of encounters can last like 4 sessions., or you could blaze through many adventuring days that don't involve trespassing, robbery, and premeditated murder in a session. Adventures, governing how often you get to extract treasure, are usually a number of session affairs, not a number of adventuring days affairs, and the speed you get through encounters is the speed you gain XP and that's also session based, not adventuring day based.




Also, if each of your encounters is 45 minutes and 3 rounds, and you have 5 encounters per 4 hour session, you literally spend your entire session in combat! When do you like, get on with the rest of the game?

It was part of my other campaign, not my 4 hour one and it was a bit of an outlier. Most take roughly 30minutes, maybe 20 or 15 since it would probably have taken longer in combat than it did because some exploration and social stuff did take place.

Although, it's quite amusing that you've mentioned "the rest of the game" since combat is the majority of the game. Or rather, combat is our most important storytelling tool. We could have an NPC explain who was in the forest and how they live and whatever but we agreed it's better to actually experience it. How do the lizardfolk think? What do they eat? How do they hunt? The majority of these questions are answered in combat. In fact, most combat tells more about the overarching story than any NPC could actually say. The orcs are using the same type of weapon with the same design as the kobolds! Are they working together? Later we may find the orcs and kobolds fighting alongside each other. Then, we'll find the orcs killing a kobold and using it's body as a weapon. Now we know the relationship of the orcs and kobolds.




And as for efficiency, it's not like we're tactically inefficient [we can be very tactically efficient when we have to be]. We just have your average band of OOC players: the person who doesn't know how their character works after a year and a half ["uh, should I use sharpshooter on this? What's my damage?"], the person who had a plan for their turn but it was stupid ["I'mma cast Fireball! Oh everybody is in the blast radius."], the person who probably plays UBG in MTG and take a decade for their turn even though they had it all planned out in advance ["I'm going to cunning action dash to here, attack this guy twice, spend ki to attack again, grapple with that one, and then move-action move over here"], the person who was checked out for the last 30 minutes, the person who's obsessed with optimality and combat who starts each other player's turn by lecturing them on what they're going to be ignored [or confuse or cow the person they're lecturing], the person who's having a conversation with somebody else when it's not their turn that's distracting the person who's turn it is and/or the GM, and then 8 bad guys who all have to go on their own initiative steps instead of group initiative but somebody leaned on the initiative track 9 minutes ago and accidentally erased it with their sleeve and now nobody knows whose turn it is. [some of these people may actually be the same person]

Even if we were all prepped and ready to go, it takes like a minute or three per turn just moving pieces, measuring blast effects, and rolling dice so with like 4 players and 6 monsters or so that still works out to like 30 minute rounds.
Yeesh, I'm sure your players are nice people but I couldn't keep playing in that type of campaign. There's usually a flow to combat which I enjoy and it feels satisfying feeling like a single unit with my team. Sometimes we talk about good team strategies and spell combos out of session and they get really good in-session.

[LordCdrMilitant]

It was part of my other campaign, not my 4 hour one and it was a bit of an outlier. Most take roughly 30minutes, maybe 20 or 15 since it would probably have taken longer in combat than it did because some exploration and social stuff did take place.

Although, it's quite amusing that you've mentioned "the rest of the game" since combat is the majority of the game. Or rather, combat is our most important storytelling tool. We could have an NPC explain who was in the forest and how they live and whatever but we agreed it's better to actually experience it. How do the lizardfolk think? What do they eat? How do they hunt? The majority of these questions are answered in combat. In fact, most combat tells more about the overarching story than any NPC could actually say. The orcs are using the same type of weapon with the same design as the kobolds! Are they working together? Later we may find the orcs and kobolds fighting alongside each other. Then, we'll find the orcs killing a kobold and using it's body as a weapon. Now we know the relationship of the orcs and kobolds.

This us almost certainly untrue. How does combat of all things let you experience it. As opposed to I don't know, walking through the forest, checking the paths, analyzing the tracks, seeing what kinds of trees and undergrowth there are?

And also, how does combat answer what the lizardfolk think? Unless their thoughts spill out when you brain them, you find out how they think when you talk to them, what they eat when you see fish from the swamp roasting on spits over the fire in their village and their farmers tending their cornfields, and how they hunt when you meet their hunters returning from the forest with a dead boar.

Combat answers few things, except combat-related things their their preferred battle tactics and whether or not they hate you. It stands to provide a challenge between you and the things that actually give you the story. You must fight the skeletons to get the tablet that has the dead king's curse, you must fight the crystal monsters to clear the laboratory and find all the dead people inside and their audiologs, and you must capture the cultists to interrogate them on their master's objectives.


Yeesh, I'm sure your players are nice people but I couldn't keep playing in that type of campaign. There's usually a flow to combat which I enjoy and it feels satisfying feeling like a single unit with my team. Sometimes we talk about good team strategies and spell combos out of session and they get really good in-session.

As a GM and player I detest it when players start telling other players what to do "for optimum efficiency". Seriously. You have a character. Play your character, not mine. How my character thinks, how she act, how she respond to problems, and what she's going to do right now are my prerogative, not yours.

I hate this in combat, I hate this in social scenarios, and I hate this when dealing with encumbrance and somebody says "hey, <Katherine's Character> is going carry this thing". Carry the s*** your character thinks is important yourself, unless they're going to in-character ask nicely for me to carry their s***




Right, sorry. It was LordCdrMilitant who viewed combat as grinding the game to a halt (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24530984&postcount=44).
You do you, play the way you find the most fun.
Still, spending that long in combat does seem excessive.
Combat is the slowest part of play, with it taking minutes to establish what happens in a 6sec window, so if the enjoyment is more from story/plot interactions/developments and roleplay opportunities/character development, minimizing the time combat take goes a long way to giving more time for those other aspects of play. Just my 2 cp.

Yeah, that's me. Beyond just waiting for people to take their turns, D&D combat [i]mechanically sucks. Damage is low, HP is high, turn-to-turn tactical impact of individual actions are low, things like position and cover and suppression and fire lanes don't matter, and attrition is the name of the game. For me, entering combat in D&D is a way to turn a game that was a lot of fun while I talk about how AEthelwyn tests high temperature alloys for her jetpack or Castiel stands on a soapbox trying to inspire the commoners to overthrow the nobles or Innoetzia parties in high society arranging business contracts into a very slow fourth-rate wargame.
I have a lot of fun in other combat systems. I like play games with module damage, I like playing games where individual actions are decisive, and I like playing games that involve shooting and suppression [nobody else agrees with me on that last one though, as I found when we did a "design your ideal system" competition with my friends. They said that my system was "very Katherine", and people play RPG's to fulfill a power fantasy of storming the barricades and sweeping rooms while wading through fire, not to be pinned behind a HESCO barrier by a machinegun on a third story window trying to stop the bleeding of a party member who got shot.]

It's like someone took those computer RPG's where enemies have like octuple digit HP and you rotate through your party's abilities to find the damage type they're weak to so that you can do like 10000 damage repeatedly.


With D&D specifically, I have a lot more fun with the part of the game that develops our characters and develops the story than the part where we kill the orcs.




I am entirely off topic here. Though I'd rather deal with encumbrance than with combat, because choosing what our character brings with is a great way to give insight into what we value, and what we think we need. AEthelwyn carries notebooks, navigation tools, pens and pencils, glassware, and a polaroid camera when she goes out because recording and taking samples of the things she encounters for experimentation and for archiving are important to her. AEthelwyn's rations are top ramen because she's a overgrown college student. Castiel didn't carry these things, but she did have all kinds of survival gear, cigarettes, and political pamphlets to hand out, because she was a '60/70's South American insurgent fighter/European mercenary in Africa.

I like going through what my character is carrying. However, Encumbrance itself basically never comes up. The carry limits are so high [and nobody actually wants to figure out how much stuff weighs. It's even harder if you start banning computers and phones at the table.]

[Asisreo1]

This us almost certainly untrue. How does combat of all things let you experience it. As opposed to I don't know, walking through the forest, checking the paths, analyzing the tracks, seeing what kinds of trees and undergrowth there are?


It's more of a show-don't-tell sorta thing. If you like being told about the world, then these investigative things would be welcome to you. If you'd rather engage with it, combat is a great way to engage with it. It's a storytelling technique, though, and can be overused or just unwelcome in some games. There's nothing wrong with a more static experience.


And also, how does combat answer what the lizardfolk think? Unless their thoughts spill out when you brain them, you find out how they think when you talk to them, what they eat when you see fish from the swamp roasting on spits over the fire in their village and their farmers tending their cornfields, and how they hunt when you meet their hunters returning from the forest with a dead boar.

Yeah, but that tends to just tell us stuff that we aren't really engaging in. There's also the chance that the lizardfolk might be our enemies and the only engagement we have with them are in-combat.



Combat answers few things, except combat-related things their their preferred battle tactics and whether or not they hate you. It stands to provide a challenge between you and the things that actually give you the story. You must fight the skeletons to get the tablet that has the dead king's curse, you must fight the crystal monsters to clear the laboratory and find all the dead people inside and their audiologs, and you must capture the cultists to interrogate them on their master's objectives.

Maybe that's why combat isn't your favorite thing in the game. If you see it as only an obstacle that forces you to risk character death just to hear the next chapter, combat would certainly be something to avoid. We see it as just another opportunity to build the world and story. Combat tactics are one of the most insightful things you can learn about an enemy. The difference between a kobold and goblin has to do with their tactics and how those tactics may differ from the average example of each can show interesting lore.

For instance, goblins are typically skirmishers and snipers who hide in the shadows. So it's strange to find a gladiator goblin that attacks headfirst fearlessly, with the strength and health to back up his fighting style.

Kobolds are usually scared and run in defeat. So why are these guys sticking around? Are these particular ones stupid? Or maybe they're protecting something. Or maybe they feel like they still have a reasonable chance at victory. Why?

Again, we could get these answers from the DM answering directly or indirectly through what we see/hear but engaging with these answers and making quick decisions based on the newfound knowledge is fun.



As a GM and player I detest it when players start telling other players what to do "for optimum efficiency". Seriously. You have a character. Play your character, not mine. How my character thinks, how she act, how she respond to problems, and what she's going to do right now are my prerogative, not yours.

I feel the same way. But that's not what I mean. No one chooses the strategies for someone else, it's just talking about cool strategies and synergies based off of current spells. How your character plays is how she plays but it doesn't hurt playing combat as a team rather than as separate sources of damage. Nobody is puppeteering anyone else's character or being mad that they didn't choose the most optimal strategy.

I agree that nobody should tell you what to do, but coming up with strategies is part of being a team in any game you play. Imagine if a basketball player got mad because their teammate was discussing working on a screen together. Or if a football player got mad for practicing passing from their positions.



I hate this in combat, I hate this in social scenarios, and I hate this when dealing with encumbrance and somebody says "hey, <Katherine's Character> is going carry this thing". Carry the s*** your character thinks is important yourself, unless they're going to in-character ask nicely for me to carry their s***

See, that's not working together, that's bossing you around. Asking if you would mind carrying something is different than telling you that you're going to hold something. If you or your character doesn't want to, that's fine. They shouldn't force it on you. But what we do is just generally act like a party rather than individual characters. Do the characters all have to get along? Not completely. But many adventurers have died trying to solo things so it's best to be somewhat cordial to people who you might have to depend your life on.


Yeah, that's me. Beyond just waiting for people to take their turns, D&D combat [i]mechanically sucks. Damage is low, HP is high, turn-to-turn tactical impact of individual actions are low, things like position and cover and suppression and fire lanes don't matter, and attrition is the name of the game. For me, entering combat in D&D is a way to turn a game that was a lot of fun while I talk about how AEthelwyn tests high temperature alloys for her jetpack or Castiel stands on a soapbox trying to inspire the commoners to overthrow the nobles or Innoetzia parties in high society arranging business contracts into a very slow fourth-rate wargame.
I have a lot of fun in other combat systems. I like play games with module damage, I like playing games where individual actions are decisive, and I like playing games that involve shooting and suppression [nobody else agrees with me on that last one though, as I found when we did a "design your ideal system" competition with my friends. They said that my system was "very Katherine", and people play RPG's to fulfill a power fantasy of storming the barricades and sweeping rooms while wading through fire, not to be pinned behind a HESCO barrier by a machinegun on a third story window trying to stop the bleeding of a party member who got shot.]

It's like someone took those computer RPG's where enemies have like octuple digit HP and you rotate through your party's abilities to find the damage type they're weak to so that you can do like 10000 damage repeatedly.


With D&D specifically, I have a lot more fun with the part of the game that develops our characters and develops the story than the part where we kill the orcs.
I will admit that low level D&D can be quite dull with limited actions and monsters that hardly have anything interesting. Low level D&D is also the most common. But it's why I like to keep things going up, so that the party can start fighting 8 shadows and an Allip in the shadowfell on desecrated ground. Or an Efreeti and a Fire Giant working side-by-side. Or a lich and his death knight retainer. These are when even the third-casters have lists of options and the enemies can go ham on the pure martials and the martials are just fine.

So, I basically agree that fighting orc encampments after 3 weeks gets stale. Rather than avoid combat, expediting the leveling up process is my solution.

[Zevox]

Yes. But it does mean your game experience is quite far outside the norm. And that's accounting for plenty of people who say it takes a long time to run a fight.

And that may have bearing on other aspects of the game as well. Or maybe not. Norm is slow combat turns off players. Norm is players like XP. Norm is players pretty much hate encumbrance.

Your views are in sync on encumbrance and mine are out of sync. Probably because I didn't run a campaign that was in sync with the norm, we focused on hex-crawl and adventuring site exploring as best we could within the 5e rule set. It wasn't "heroic save the day" adventure paths, which is the modern norm. Encumbrance theoretically matters in the former, although 5e sure doesn't help much on that score. In the latter it doesn't really.

In short, I full recognize where my views are out of sync and why. And yet here we ar,e, with me going #grognardgrognard about it anyway. :smallamused:
I don't pretend to know what the norm is on any of this, only to present my own perspective.

I am curious though, what would a game focused on "hex-crawl and adventuring site exploring" be like? "Heroic save the day adventure" pretty accurately describes how my group plays (and my current Paladin would have it no other way), but I legitimately don't know what that other type of game would be in contrast, so I'm curious.


Right, sorry. It was LordCdrMilitant who viewed combat as grinding the game to a halt (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24530984&postcount=44).
You do you, play the way you find the most fun.
Still, spending that long in combat does seem excessive.
Combat is the slowest part of play, with it taking minutes to establish what happens in a 6sec window, so if the enjoyment is more from story/plot interactions/developments and roleplay opportunities/character development, minimizing the time combat take goes a long way to giving more time for those other aspects of play. Just my 2 cp.
My enjoyment of the game, and as far as I'm aware this goes for the rest of my group as well, comes from all of the above - combat, RP, and story alike. So no need to minimize any in favor of any other. Besides, they aren't mutually exclusive, either; as I mentioned, part of why we're slow at combat comes from RPing during it, too.

[LordCdrMilitant]

It's more of a show-don't-tell sorta thing. If you like being told about the world, then these investigative things would be welcome to you. If you'd rather engage with it, combat is a great way to engage with it. It's a storytelling technique, though, and can be overused or just unwelcome in some games. There's nothing wrong with a more static experience.

Yeah, but that tends to just tell us stuff that we aren't really engaging in. There's also the chance that the lizardfolk might be our enemies and the only engagement we have with them are in-combat.


Maybe that's why combat isn't your favorite thing in the game. If you see it as only an obstacle that forces you to risk character death just to hear the next chapter, combat would certainly be something to avoid. We see it as just another opportunity to build the world and story. Combat tactics are one of the most insightful things you can learn about an enemy. The difference between a kobold and goblin has to do with their tactics and how those tactics may differ from the average example of each can show interesting lore.

For instance, goblins are typically skirmishers and snipers who hide in the shadows. So it's strange to find a gladiator goblin that attacks headfirst fearlessly, with the strength and health to back up his fighting style.

Kobolds are usually scared and run in defeat. So why are these guys sticking around? Are these particular ones stupid? Or maybe they're protecting something. Or maybe they feel like they still have a reasonable chance at victory. Why?

Again, we could get these answers from the DM answering directly or indirectly through what we see/hear but engaging with these answers and making quick decisions based on the newfound knowledge is fun.


I would say we're "showing, not telling" but exploring the forest, speaking with the lizardmen elders, seeing their village, etc.

How are your going to get to know the fearless goblin gladiator if you only meet him for 20 minutes while you kill him?

If your only engagement with them is in combat, your information flow is weaker, their characterization is limited to their martial inclinations and relevance, and you don't get to see them as people and as a society and all the parts of the world that make it alive and deep.




I feel the same way. But that's not what I mean. No one chooses the strategies for someone else, it's just talking about cool strategies and synergies based off of current spells. How your character plays is how she plays but it doesn't hurt playing combat as a team rather than as separate sources of damage. Nobody is puppeteering anyone else's character or being mad that they didn't choose the most optimal strategy.

I agree that nobody should tell you what to do, but coming up with strategies is part of being a team in any game you play. Imagine if a basketball player got mad because their teammate was discussing working on a screen together. Or if a football player got mad for practicing passing from their positions.

See, that's not working together, that's bossing you around. Asking if you would mind carrying something is different than telling you that you're going to hold something. If you or your character doesn't want to, that's fine. They shouldn't force it on you. But what we do is just generally act like a party rather than individual characters. Do the characters all have to get along? Not completely. But many adventurers have died trying to solo things so it's best to be somewhat cordial to people who you might have to depend your life on.

A D&D party is not a well oiled fighting squad, unless it is. Even in Deathwatch a point of the game is comparing the tactical approaches and dogmas of characters from different background forced to work together under the pressure of special operations and slowly coming to appreciate what everybody brings to the table and what characters value [there's even mechanics built around this].

A D&D party is not like a basketball team, a D&D game is not like a basketball game. We're telling a story, there's arcs about our character and how we see and interact with the world and groups and ad individuals, how we deal with the problems we encounter, etc. It isn't important to achieve maximum tactical efficiency [or really, even "minimum tactical efficiency for victory conditions"] because this isn't a wargame. There are good wargames.


Now, and in character discussion of what to do now is a whole 'nother story. That might illustrate how your character is a planner or a strategist, or is ready for anything or etc. And other characters might participate in character or not care. It varies based on who they are. But out of character strategizing should be limited to "This is what I'm going to do on my turn", and should never involve "this is what you are going to do on your turn".


Combat is only part of the solution. Exploration [which encumbrance is a part of], and Social are the other two pieces. And the main point isn't so much mechanical victory conditions like "if Allies hold the bridge at D-AA-6 by turn 8, they win the game" so much as exploring your characters. Encumbrance and stuff carried plays a thematic role in illustrating who your character is. What they carry with them, what they find important, what they're willing to keep and drop are all ways to illustrate your character, their demeanor, their values, their outlooks, and their approaches and assets available for solving problems. [And how those differ from their peers]





I will admit that low level D&D can be quite dull with limited actions and monsters that hardly have anything interesting. Low level D&D is also the most common. But it's why I like to keep things going up, so that the party can start fighting 8 shadows and an Allip in the shadowfell on desecrated ground. Or an Efreeti and a Fire Giant working side-by-side. Or a lich and his death knight retainer. These are when even the third-casters have lists of options and the enemies can go ham on the pure martials and the martials are just fine.

So, I basically agree that fighting orc encampments after 3 weeks gets stale. Rather than avoid combat, expediting the leveling up process is my solution.

I play at level 9 right now. It's not low-level combat that's the problem. It's high levels, particularly those right before "extra attack" comes online. HP scales every level, damage scales in spikes but still at 1/5th the rate of HP for martials. For casters, maximum damage scales with spell slot, but your valid damage spell slot count drops as you go up in level too so you burst harder and then do less afterwords.

[Asisreo1]

I would say we're "showing, not telling" but exploring the forest, speaking with the lizardmen elders, seeing their village, etc.

How are your going to get to know the fearless goblin gladiator if you only meet him for 20 minutes while you kill him?

If your only engagement with them is in combat, your information flow is weaker, their characterization is limited to their martial inclinations and relevance, and you don't get to see them as people and as a society and all the parts of the world that make it alive and deep.


I don't know. The goblin wouldn't be interested in talking to trespassers, we'd be engaged with a fight. We could talk it out but they usually aren't interested until they're beat low enough. Depending on it's nature, it may beg, cry, or lie. It's not like there's only combat in my adventures. It's just that we save the social sessions for downtime. Downtime is a great place to actually flesh out what would otherwise be a walking statblock.


A D&D party is not a well oiled fighting squad, unless it is. Even in Deathwatch a point of the game is comparing the tactical approaches and dogmas of characters from different background forced to work together under the pressure of special operations and slowly coming to appreciate what everybody brings to the table and what characters value [there's even mechanics built around this].

They're quite well-oiled in my games. It isn't just tank-wizard-healer synergy at character creation but we discuss fully how we'd like to set up and support each other from the get-go. It's not at all forceful. It's like "Ooh, I think I'll take a support role" "ah, then I think I'll pick up sanctuary for my low level spell and when we level up, I'll replace it with spirit guardians" "ooh, then I'll grab entangle since I was eyeing it anyways, plus it can keep the enemies in your spirit guardians."

It's just a part of having friendly conversations as opposed to trying to boss others. At the end of the day, we're all friends.


A D&D party is not like a basketball team, a D&D game is not like a basketball game. We're telling a story, there's arcs about our character and how we see and interact with the world and groups and ad individuals, how we deal with the problems we encounter, etc. It isn't important to achieve maximum tactical efficiency [or really, even "minimum tactical efficiency for victory conditions"] because this isn't a wargame. There are good wargames.

I'm not worried about maximum efficiency in either basketball or D&D because we're just working together. We aren't really wargaming because some of the strategies aren't all that great under further scrutiny. But they're fun and we love to try them and see if they can succeed.


Now, and in character discussion of what to do now is a whole 'nother story. That might illustrate how your character is a planner or a strategist, or is ready for anything or etc. And other characters might participate in character or not care. It varies based on who they are. But out of character strategizing should be limited to "This is what I'm going to do on my turn", and should never involve "this is what you are going to do on your turn".

Yeah, I agree that out-of-character stuff during a game shouldn't control another player.


Combat is only part of the solution. Exploration [which encumbrance is a part of], and Social are the other two pieces. And the main point isn't so much mechanical victory conditions like "if Allies hold the bridge at D-AA-6 by turn 8, they win the game" so much as exploring your characters. Encumbrance and stuff carried plays a thematic role in illustrating who your character is. What they carry with them, what they find important, what they're willing to keep and drop are all ways to illustrate your character, their demeanor, their values, their outlooks, and their approaches and assets available for solving problems. [And how those differ from their peers]

I agree with this too, we're just a bit more combat-heavy because we enjoy the system's combat. Usually.



I play at level 9 right now. It's not low-level combat that's the problem. It's high levels, particularly those right before "extra attack" comes online. HP scales every level, damage scales in spikes but still at 1/5th the rate of HP for martials. For casters, maximum damage scales with spell slot, but your valid damage spell slot count drops as you go up in level too so you burst harder and then do less afterwords.
Level 9 is still a bit too low level for me. It's okay, I can work with it but it isn't like level 17+ where things really start to get fun and I can hit the players with my favorite monsters. Monsters with tons of legendary actions and reality-altering spells and terrain that mimics the epic nature of the fight. I have an encounter lined-up that's basically a death knight on a nightmare fighting the PC's on floating rocks connected by chains and the death knight teleports to the rock where a PC is and attacks and rides back into the Ethereal Plane. The death knight may start the battle by readying an upcast hold person and targets whichever failed the wisdom save or he may go for the wizard as soon as combat starts. (I mean that he uses his first action to ready the spell while in the ethereal plane, not that he takes the ready action before initiative starts.

[Aussiehams]

I haven't played at a table for years due to people living in different areas, but I find playing on a VTT speeds up a lot of things in combat, and makes things like encumbrance easier. I think it would be hard to go back to pen and paper and real dice.
That said, encumbrance still can feel adversarial and pointless.
Also, hour long combats and only having combats every few sessions sounds very different to our games. I would find that excruciatingly slow. I prefer when players are paying attention, and have their turns planned out before it comes up.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I don't know. The goblin wouldn't be interested in talking to trespassers, we'd be engaged with a fight. We could talk it out but they usually aren't interested until they're beat low enough. Depending on it's nature, it may beg, cry, or lie. It's not like there's only combat in my adventures. It's just that we save the social sessions for downtime. Downtime is a great place to actually flesh out what would otherwise be a walking statblock.

Downtime if for building your business, managing your estate, etc. for us. Things that don't matter to everybody else that only you participate in. Otherwise, it's part of a session.

Downtime is where you spend most of the crap you haul out of your dungeon. Between adventures, you have downtime, in which you invest the money you've gathered on the adventure into your castle/magic weapons/franchise business/whatever, so you also generally won't be carting around all your net wealth.

That said, I've seen a lot of more recent GM's not use downtime at all, which in the players also can't buy exactly the item they want in a shop window, means that players are unlikely to acquire magic items outside of dungeon loot and will never spend their own money until they're carrying their entire WBL as pocket change, which is another way to be at your encumbrance that winds up just being strange.

Like, you need something to spend money on.


They're quite well-oiled in my games. It isn't just tank-wizard-healer synergy at character creation but we discuss fully how we'd like to set up and support each other from the get-go. It's not at all forceful. It's like "Ooh, I think I'll take a support role" "ah, then I think I'll pick up sanctuary for my low level spell and when we level up, I'll replace it with spirit guardians" "ooh, then I'll grab entangle since I was eyeing it anyways, plus it can keep the enemies in your spirit guardians."

It's just a part of having friendly conversations as opposed to trying to boss others. At the end of the day, we're all friends.

I'm not worried about maximum efficiency in either basketball or D&D because we're just working together. We aren't really wargaming because some of the strategies aren't all that great under further scrutiny. But they're fun and we love to try them and see if they can succeed.

Yeah, I agree that out-of-character stuff during a game shouldn't control another player.

I agree with this too, we're just a bit more combat-heavy because we enjoy the system's combat. Usually.

We don't even go "I'm going to play a support role."

I went "I'm going to play a questionably sane/stable postdoc." "I'm going to play an anarcho-communist insurgent leader angel." "I'm going to play a callous 1880's capitalist-style businesswoman."

Whatever you're playing is whatever you're playing. I highly discourage players from picking classes to "fill a role" in the party. The party doesn't need a striker, controller, healer, and bag-'o-meat. It needs a questionably sane university researcher doing Science!, elven noblewoman on her first trip away from her home, a historian-monk who left his monastery due to philosophical differences with his mentor, and a homeless orphan peasant who's been avoiding the thieves guild and has nowhere to go but up.

This is really off topic though.


Level 9 is still a bit too low level for me. It's okay, I can work with it but it isn't like level 17+ where things really start to get fun and I can hit the players with my favorite monsters. Monsters with tons of legendary actions and reality-altering spells and terrain that mimics the epic nature of the fight. I have an encounter lined-up that's basically a death knight on a nightmare fighting the PC's on floating rocks connected by chains and the death knight teleports to the rock where a PC is and attacks and rides back into the Ethereal Plane. The death knight may start the battle by readying an upcast hold person and targets whichever failed the wisdom save or he may go for the wizard as soon as combat starts. (I mean that he uses his first action to ready the spell while in the ethereal plane, not that he takes the ready action before initiative starts.

I've played 1-20 and 15-20 and 20-20 a couple of times. Like, there's a charm to it, but 99% of the time we're just our own enemies and decide that the GM's plot is neither interesting or worthy of our powers.

After all, when you can destroy the moon, neither encumbrance nor combat are really useful challenges for you save the schemes your "friends" devise [and of course, the fallout from you destroying the moon as a display of power]

I'm not really keen on <5 level play, since level 5 is when all the features that really differentiate your character come into play, and I'm not really keen on >15 level play, since that's when things start getting silly. 5-15 is kind of a sweet spot where you have lots of cool abilities, ability to use them relevantly, but also aren't like hyper superheroes and can still largely be challenged thematically by mundane quests like "this laboratory is spilling dangerous mutants that are attacking the farmers"


I find you're all over the place though. Are you awarding level 1-4 hordes to level 17-20 players? If you're usually playing at level 17+, your hordes are ridiculously heavy but they're also basically all in platinum, and you have a ton of ways to get it out, the easiest of which is shovelling it into a Demiplane, which pretty much means that encumbrance isn't a problem for extracting treasure. [Demiplane becomes available at level 15, and basically solves treasure horde extraction as an encumbrance problem]



As a side note, I just got out of session. For some anecdotal discussion of encounter, treasure, encumbrance, and levelling pace:
During the session we fought two encounters, spanning the entire session from beginning to end. The first was with about 9 hostiles, the second was with one big hostile. There were three rounds between the two where we fought a mob and 10 artillery monsters that were upset about the 9 people we killed, until really big monsters attack and they had their own problems. The session was from 7 to 11:30, so 4 and a half hours. The second combat lasted 5 rounds, the first combat around 7 or 8.
We levelled up to level 10 [which is a little bit of an odd place, but we're also pretty overdue for a level since we didn't level before starting this adventure and we might have been overdue even then], and received some documents looting the area. We haven't finished the adventure, but this is our third, arguably fifth session on this particular adventure. The last 5 sessions have covered 2 adventuring days of time. Last session included 2 combat encounters which took most of the session, and no treasure, and was part of the current adventuring day. The session before that included 1 exploration scenario and 1 diplomatic scenarios, and no combat encounters and no treasure. To finish the adventure I'm expecting 1-2 more sessions, which should include pretty much no more combat, or at most one more encounter, but a significant amount of exploration and social activities.
We often have combat-free sessions, more often than we have combat-including sessions, which would also explain why we level at about half the expected pace of 1 level per 7-10 sessions at our level. We have not recieved any treasure and don't expect to receive much, though we may have to extract 1+ welded-shut-crates, which have an undefined weight but are "heavy", so encumbrance isn't likely to be a problem for us either. But we do have detailed listing of our possessions.
Currently, my character is carrying 63 pounds of crap [including 10 pounds of wands, a crossbow, a sword, a camera, and bunch of random junk that she might need]. I believe she is carrying more than the other three people, who are all carrying pretty stripped-down loadouts that are like under 50 pounds. I don't know what the ranger is carrying, though, she might have a lot, but I doubt it. At S13, she can carry 195 pounds, so she's around 1/3 encumbrance, but even if the box is less than 100 pounds it's also too bulky to carry conveniently without being hindered anyway, so encumbrance won't come into play unless we pick up like 500+ pounds of treasure between us all.

[Asisreo1]

I find you're all over the place though. Are you awarding level 1-4 hordes to level 17-20 players? If you're usually playing at level 17+, your hordes are ridiculously heavy but they're also basically all in platinum, and you have a ton of ways to get it out, the easiest of which is shovelling it into a Demiplane, which pretty much means that encumbrance isn't a problem for extracting treasure. [Demiplane becomes available at level 15, and basically solves treasure horde extraction as an encumbrance problem]

Nah, I don't usually play at that level, that's just when I can throw my favorite encounters. It just depends on the campaign but I've recently started a new one and they're roughly level 4, so I use the 0-4 treasure tables. When they get to 17+, I'll use the high level platinum table and hopefully they'll be decked out in magic items.

[Chaosmancer]

I've only been skimming the last few pages, but I also want to chime in with the fact that I've never seen a combat take less than 30 to 45 minutes, and an hour and a half is not unusual in the circles I've seen.

I constantly see people talking about 20 minute combats, and trying to give advice on all these ways to speed things up, but none of them seem to work at our tables. Sure, maybe I can pare down my current ranger's turn to less than a minute. Move hunter's mark, attack twice, here are my digital rolls. But the DM clearly has a lot to do with five to ten monsters on the board and that takes almost all the time people claim their combats would run by itself. Plus hp tracking? Sure, maybe everyone can do it all in their heads in seconds, but I'm the fastest calculator among my groups and even I can take a good ten to fifteen seconds doing the math sometimes.

[Segev]

The hit point/encumbrance analogy breaks down, I think, because hit points are always immediately important. Moreover, they're given clear numbers that take little to no lookup when they change. "I rolled 10 damage, so that's how much your hp goes down." "I rolled 8 healing, so that's how much your hp goes up."

Encumbrance involves trying to remember the distinct, disparate values of every little thing you're carrying, and tracking specifically who has it at any given point in time. It doesn't take changing a value on the monster's sheet every time he deals damage to a player, or vice-versa. It's just the target's hp that changes. But if the rogue pickpockets a sack at the belt of the kobold inventor, the DM has to adjust the kobold's encumbrance numbers and tell the rogue by how much to adjust his.

Additionally, with hp, because they "go back to full" after a while anyway (if you don't die), there's a reset point. If it comes to a point where you absolutely have to recalculate your hp, it's probably also been long enough since you last messed with them that you can just assume you've full-healed. Encumbrance isn't that way. You have to re-inventory every time you question whether you remembered something correctly, because all the numbers for what you're carrying are - ideally - there. It's not something you can hand-wave as forgotten, because it can come up again next week in game whether you have that 3-lb amulet of solydguld. Whereas by that point, if you've forgotten whether you got hit 3 or 4 times by the yuan-ti who dropped it, it doesn't really matter, because you've full healed - probably multiple times - since then.

Imagine if you had to track your hp by recording every hit you took: not just the damage, but what its source was, and what kind of damage it was. And you had to track every time you healed. Your hp doesn't have a point to which it naturally "rests" when you do nothing about it for a while, or which you can be assumed to have "dealt with" after a certain amount of time to restore it to its nominal condition. Heck, just imagine that you had to record each wound individually, along with its location, type, and hp cost, and then heal them each individually, with specific resources you had to track for that healing of each kind and location of wound. It stops being as easy to track.

That's the issue with the encumbrance/hp analogy: they just don't line up in complexity. Encumbrance doesn't provide a fire-and-forget value to add or subtract; it's associated with something specific in each addition and subtraction, and you have to track those sources independently.

This isn't to say encumbrance is bad, or should or should not be ignored. It's simply pointing out the flaw in the "nobody complains about tracking hp" analogy.

[Asisreo1]

I've only been skimming the last few pages, but I also want to chime in with the fact that I've never seen a combat take less than 30 to 45 minutes, and an hour and a half is not unusual in the circles I've seen.

I constantly see people talking about 20 minute combats, and trying to give advice on all these ways to speed things up, but none of them seem to work at our tables. Sure, maybe I can pare down my current ranger's turn to less than a minute. Move hunter's mark, attack twice, here are my digital rolls. But the DM clearly has a lot to do with five to ten monsters on the board and that takes almost all the time people claim their combats would run by itself. Plus hp tracking? Sure, maybe everyone can do it all in their heads in seconds, but I'm the fastest calculator among my groups and even I can take a good ten to fifteen seconds doing the math sometimes.
I'm actually one of the quickest in my game, even with multiple monsters. I do run "group initiative" which is just RAW. Identical monsters are grouped under the same initiative. I usually have a pretty clear idea what each monster will do in the majority of situations, too.

Maybe I should mention the majority of my combats end when the enemies feel routed. They'll protect themselves if the PC's keep fighting but it's rare that an enemy will risk their lives unless they're really dumb or have something they genuinely need to protect.

[Segev]

I'm actually one of the quickest in my game, even with multiple monsters. I do run "group initiative" which is just RAW. Identical monsters are grouped under the same initiative. I usually have a pretty clear idea what each monster will do in the majority of situations, too.

Maybe I should mention the majority of my combats end when the enemies feel routed. They'll protect themselves if the PC's keep fighting but it's rare that an enemy will risk their lives unless they're really dumb or have something they genuinely need to protect.

Heh. In my game, the players tend to keep taking pot-shots or even chasing down enemies that try to run away. I can't entirely blame them; if they're near the enemies' lair, the enemy will likely try again, or go back and hole up to prepare to defend the lair more vigorously.

[Chaosmancer]

I'm actually one of the quickest in my game, even with multiple monsters. I do run "group initiative" which is just RAW. Identical monsters are grouped under the same initiative. I usually have a pretty clear idea what each monster will do in the majority of situations, too.

I do the same when I run, it doesn't change the fact that I have to move each piece, roll each attack, add each damage, then wait for the player to subtract that damage individually (and remember it for about another 30 seconds in case they get confused about just how many times they were hit and for how much).

And if the monster is hit, I have to find which hp pool it is, check the Ac, and subtract the hp.

I'm not saying it is hard work, but it is work that takes a significant chunk of time.

[Asisreo1]

I do the same when I run, it doesn't change the fact that I have to move each piece, roll each attack, add each damage, then wait for the player to subtract that damage individually (and remember it for about another 30 seconds in case they get confused about just how many times they were hit and for how much).

And if the monster is hit, I have to find which hp pool it is, check the Ac, and subtract the hp.

I'm not saying it is hard work, but it is work that takes a significant chunk of time.
Oh, what I do is move all peices, declare who attacks who, then roll attack-damage together in order.

For instance, for 2 goblins, I'll say "one moves behind the trees and attacks perfesu and the other jumps from hiding and attacks wekilina" then I roll attack-damage for perfesu, if he has a reaction he speaks now, tell him the attack roll (I know the AC and I roll in the open but I want us all to be on the same page), then tell him the damage. Then the same process for wekilina. With this, my turn is usually under a minute.

If I have 5+ identical creatures, I'll mess around with mob combat until 1 or 2 are left or when the attacks are impossible to hit.

[Tanarii]

Imagine if you had to track your hp by recording every hit you took: not just the damage, but what its source was, and what kind of damage it was. And you had to track every time you healed.You don't do that? :smalleek:



I've actually had players that did that in previous editions where heal to full wasn't the rule. But I'd in no way categorize it as normal.

And it certainly makes less sense in 5es method of the players being one save from death 4 times in the day, then waking up the next morning and going: haha just kidding it was only a scratch.

[Segev]

You don't do that? :smalleek:



I've actually had players that did that in previous editions where heal to full wasn't the rule. But I'd in no way categorize it as normal.

And it certainly makes less sense in 5es method of the players being one save from death 4 times in the day, then waking up the next morning and going: haha just kidding it was only a scratch.

I just lean heavily into "hp isn't meat" for my interpretation of that. That last hp? That's "meat." That wound that put you on the ground, unless the attacker chose to make it just a knockout, is something that has you seriously bleeding. Cure spells and other magic are AMAZING in their ability to get that healed right up, but do have to work harder to get your energy, your luck, your je ne se qua that makes you able to go another 3 rounds with Doflamingo without taking another serious, life-threatening injury...back up to snuff.

If you made those death saves? Okay, no, it was just a flesh wound, worse than it looked, but it still laid you out.

Again, though, that's just how I personally rationalize it.


The reason I made the post on the analogy was that I was trying to figure out why the analogy bothered me. The I do track hp, obviously, in my games, but I do not track encumbrance very much. And I know the latter would be annoying bookkeeping to my players while the former doesn't bother them. So I was trying to figure out why that analogy broke down, and I shared the results of my ruminations.

[Nifft]

Is there an official Vitality / Wounds variant for 5e yet?

That distinction removes a lot of the mental gymnastics.

[Asisreo1]

Ok, it's funny. A player made a new character and straight from character creation, they were overencumbered. I checked the spreadsheet and everything was correct. They just started overencumbered. They had 8 str, a heavy, light, and hand crossbow, chainmail armor, 20 crossbow bolts, 10 rations, 10 torches, 10lbs of rope and some other things that I'll have to check again but he was overencumbered by 20lbs as soon as he made the character.

[Segev]

Is there an official Vitality / Wounds variant for 5e yet?

That distinction removes a lot of the mental gymnastics.

In my experience, it really doesn't. There are always too many wound points, and they still have the same issues in terms of how much meat is cleaved vs. healed.

You can even argue that 5e implements exactly that system, with 1 wound point and all the other hp being vitality.

[greenstone]

Ok, it's funny. A player made a new character and straight from character creation, they were overencumbered. … They had 8 str…
It's nice to see that the player's choice had a meaningful consequence.

[Pex]

Ok, it's funny. A player made a new character and straight from character creation, they were overencumbered. I checked the spreadsheet and everything was correct. They just started overencumbered. They had 8 str, a heavy, light, and hand crossbow, chainmail armor, 20 crossbow bolts, 10 rations, 10 torches, 10lbs of rope and some other things that I'll have to check again but he was overencumbered by 20lbs as soon as he made the character.

Chainmail is heavy armor. Heavy armor is for strong characters. I'm with you on this there's a disconnect. It falls under not worrying about minutiae but still have common sense with bulk. Perhaps the player meant chain shirt? I'm presuming his DX is high so medium armor will get the AC he wants or close enough. He also doesn't need all those crossbows. He only needs one unless he's taking Crossbow Expert feat then two hand crossbows are fine. I'm guessing the player is a newbie.

[Chaosmancer]

Yeah, I was wondering about them wearing armor that they don't match the strength requirement for. Their speed was reduced by 10 ft the moment they put it on. Plus encumbered? They probably have a speed of 10 right now.

Also, like Pex said, you don't need a heavy and a Light crossbow. Heavy is just an improvement. And since both require two hands, if they have a shield they might as well drop it, because they aren't going to be using it most of the time

[Osuniev]

I like Variant Encumbrance a lot. Using it in all my games.
Mostly because it makes Strength less of a dump-stat, but also, I felt it made for interesting decisions : many people are saying "it means players will have to put down equipment to carry the gold".

Well, not really : this happens with Carry Capacity rules.

In games with Variant Encumbrance, you have instead a trade off where "carry the gold" means reduced speed. It also means players will start looking for a place to stash their gold, which I also like a lot. And then it creates a good money sink where they hire people to guard their stash.

Of course, we also like tracking rations, torches, etc... Which may mean we are weird.

But suddenly "Light" becomes a useful cantrip when it means you sacrifice Firebolt so you don't have to carry torches.

My Ranger player loves the fact that on his own, he's saving the party from having to carry all these rations and water. He loves his survival checks. My Cleric suddenly cares about the spell "Create Food and Water". Even my Druid is using Druidcraft to check the weather because if it's going to rain, then they can afford not taking too much water.

Carry Capacity means you're just fine with 15 times your STR, but can't move when you pick up 1 pound and suddenly you can't move.
Variant Encumbrance means you'll never reach that point, because you'll try to stop at 5 times your STR. And when you go over that, it's a minor problem, so you won't HATE it, but you'll try to fix it quickly.

It also means interesting decisions : do we leave the Mule outside the Dungeon ? What happens to the mule afterwards ?
I have players "drop their backpack on the floor" at the beginning of a fight, then run back to it if they need rope. Etc.

Not everyone cup of tea, but I like it, and so do my players.

[Democratus]

It also means interesting decisions : do we leave the Mule outside the Dungeon ? What happens to the mule afterwards ?
I have players "drop their backpack on the floor" at the beginning of a fight, then run back to it if they need rope. Etc.

Not everyone cup of tea, but I like it, and so do my players.

Great stuff here. Sounds a lot like our game table. :smallsmile:

My players also have a "drop backpack" at the beginning of most combats to give them the needed freedom of movement.

When the party is going light (just the PCs) this does risk losing the pack and its contents sometimes. But often the party will be traveling with porters, torchbearers, etc. They will look after the dropped packs till the fight is over.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Ok, it's funny. A player made a new character and straight from character creation, they were overencumbered. I checked the spreadsheet and everything was correct. They just started overencumbered. They had 8 str, a heavy, light, and hand crossbow, chainmail armor, 20 crossbow bolts, 10 rations, 10 torches, 10lbs of rope and some other things that I'll have to check again but he was overencumbered by 20lbs as soon as he made the character.

You're right. Your players are little hoarders. Why do they have three crossbows?

Also, given that they're using chain at S8, they might have other issues, since chain is min S13 otherwise you get penalties, IIRC.


As for pack weights, a Dungeoneers pack is the heaviest at 61.5lbs [most are lighter like 30lbs], which leaves 60 pounds of space for even a S8 character to work with for weapons and for treasure.

[Chaosmancer]

I like Variant Encumbrance a lot. Using it in all my games.
Mostly because it makes Strength less of a dump-stat, but also, I felt it made for interesting decisions : many people are saying "it means players will have to put down equipment to carry the gold".

Well, not really : this happens with Carry Capacity rules.

In games with Variant Encumbrance, you have instead a trade off where "carry the gold" means reduced speed. It also means players will start looking for a place to stash their gold, which I also like a lot. And then it creates a good money sink where they hire people to guard their stash.

Of course, we also like tracking rations, torches, etc... Which may mean we are weird.

But suddenly "Light" becomes a useful cantrip when it means you sacrifice Firebolt so you don't have to carry torches.

My Ranger player loves the fact that on his own, he's saving the party from having to carry all these rations and water. He loves his survival checks. My Cleric suddenly cares about the spell "Create Food and Water". Even my Druid is using Druidcraft to check the weather because if it's going to rain, then they can afford not taking too much water.

Carry Capacity means you're just fine with 15 times your STR, but can't move when you pick up 1 pound and suddenly you can't move.
Variant Encumbrance means you'll never reach that point, because you'll try to stop at 5 times your STR. And when you go over that, it's a minor problem, so you won't HATE it, but you'll try to fix it quickly.

It also means interesting decisions : do we leave the Mule outside the Dungeon ? What happens to the mule afterwards ?
I have players "drop their backpack on the floor" at the beginning of a fight, then run back to it if they need rope. Etc.

Not everyone cup of tea, but I like it, and so do my players.


I'm curious, do the monsters every have their speed reduced by what they are carrying? Especially if they looted the player's stash of gold? Are humanoids carrying torches, rations and water as well?

I am glad you and your players are having fun, I'm just curious if you extend that movement penalty to anyone else.

[Democratus]

I'm curious, do the monsters every have their speed reduced by what they are carrying? Especially if they looted the player's stash of gold? Are humanoids carrying torches, rations and water as well?

I am glad you and your players are having fun, I'm just curious if you extend that movement penalty to anyone else.

These are important considerations when the humanoids come out and raid civilization. How much can they reasonably take from the village? Odds are that they loot what can be easily carried away and burn the rest.

Adventurers often encounter these humanoids where they live; kicking down doors and storming tunnels. In which case the monster treasure is laying about rather than in their pockets.

If the players are lugging about 400 lbs of gold and are waylaid (and somehow bested) by 3 weak goblins, seems fair that they would have a heck of a time dragging the loot back home.

[greenstone]

I'm curious, do the monsters every have their speed reduced by what they are carrying? Especially if they looted the player's stash of gold? Are humanoids carrying torches, rations and water as well?
The ones in my game do. Some of them hold torches or lanterns instead of shields, dropping their AC. The ones returning from raids are laden with goods; they do travel at a slower pace, allowing PCs to catch up.

[Osuniev]

Also, given that they're using chain at S8, they might have other issues, since chain is min S13 otherwise you get penalties, IIRC.

Yeah, I was wondering about them wearing armor that they don't match the strength requirement for. Their speed was reduced by 10 ft the moment they put it on.


RAW says : "When you use this variant [Encumbrance], ignore the Strength column of the Armor table.", since the rule already takes the weight of the Armor in consideration.

[Osuniev]

I'm curious, do the monsters every have their speed reduced by what they are carrying? Especially if they looted the player's stash of gold? Are humanoids carrying torches, rations and water as well?

I am glad you and your players are having fun, I'm just curious if you extend that movement penalty to anyone else.

Humans often carry torches. Goblins and other darkvision monsters, no, unless they need light for some reason (drows have lanterns when they need to read, for example). But their homes often have an area that is lit if it makes sense for it to be.

My monsters sometimes have their speed reduced if they are heavily armoured AND have many weapons , but they often don't carry nearly as much stuff as my players, because they are often encounterd in their lairs.

But last time they raided a villain's lair, the enemy carrying black powder kegs were definitely encumbered. Of course, they dropped it at the beginning of combat, just like my players would have done (and the kegs became an interesting tactical target, just like my players backpacks sometimes are).

And if my PCs encounter humanoid enemies in the wilderness, the first thing they find when looting them is waterskins and food, unless the monsters are foragers. I even had one game where my players attacked a troop of half-orcs to steal their food ! (a rare event, I'll admit). It made for great RP moments when I asked a Nature or Cook's Tools check to know WHAT meat this was...

The stash of gold of my players was only attacked once, by a mage who wanted a magical artifact, so he didn't take the gold. But if he had, sure, he would have been encumbered.

[NoxMiasma]

Okay, so the reason the 5e team decided to simplify encumbrance is that for most parties, it was an annoying distraction that resulted in a lot of fiddly bookkeeping. However, the reason the system for encumbrance was first invented was because early D&D was a heist game - and that meant that getting the loot back out of the dungeon was literally half the point. If you're doing a gritty, high-bookkeeping game, or an old-style heist campaign, variant encumbrance is great, but if your players find it difficult to keep track of, or the campaign is more of an epic fantasy romp, there's nothing wrong with using the simplified encumbrance instead.

Also, my one nitpick with encumbrance - armor only counts for weight when you aren't wearing it. I've - IRL - worn a set of plate armor which I cannot physically lift when its packed away, but once the set is on, I can job basically fine, and have even managed a cartwheel!

[Osuniev]

Simplifying away encumbrance and other stuff such as light, eating and drinking, etc... Makes sense in most campaigns, but it does make any kind of challenge with the wilderness much harder to set up. I believe the Rangers would get much more love if people really NEEDED that food and water because packing it was not an option.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

I like Variant Encumbrance a lot. Using it in all my games.
Mostly because it makes Strength less of a dump-stat, but also, I felt it made for interesting decisions : many people are saying "it means players will have to put down equipment to carry the gold".

Well, not really : this happens with Carry Capacity rules.

In games with Variant Encumbrance, you have instead a trade off where "carry the gold" means reduced speed. It also means players will start looking for a place to stash their gold, which I also like a lot. And then it creates a good money sink where they hire people to guard their stash.

Of course, we also like tracking rations, torches, etc... Which may mean we are weird.

But suddenly "Light" becomes a useful cantrip when it means you sacrifice Firebolt so you don't have to carry torches.

My Ranger player loves the fact that on his own, he's saving the party from having to carry all these rations and water. He loves his survival checks. My Cleric suddenly cares about the spell "Create Food and Water". Even my Druid is using Druidcraft to check the weather because if it's going to rain, then they can afford not taking too much water.

Carry Capacity means you're just fine with 15 times your STR, but can't move when you pick up 1 pound and suddenly you can't move.
Variant Encumbrance means you'll never reach that point, because you'll try to stop at 5 times your STR. And when you go over that, it's a minor problem, so you won't HATE it, but you'll try to fix it quickly.

It also means interesting decisions : do we leave the Mule outside the Dungeon ? What happens to the mule afterwards ?
I have players "drop their backpack on the floor" at the beginning of a fight, then run back to it if they need rope. Etc.

Not everyone cup of tea, but I like it, and so do my players.

We are also using (a slightly more generous version of) variant encumbrance, for some of the same reasons. There will be consequences for min/maxing your character, and Dex got plenty of love RAW. 150 lbs for an average strength character to move and act 100% just seemed silly.

[Necroanswer]

Simplifying away encumbrance and other stuff such as light, eating and drinking, etc... Makes sense in most campaigns, but it does make any kind of challenge with the wilderness much harder to set up. I believe the Rangers would get much more love if people really NEEDED that food and water because packing it was not an option.

Also

Even if you are tracking encumbrance for food, water, and lighting low level spells can do away with it without a Ranger. Goodberry, Create Water and Light cast when needed can basically negate the need to carry or find stuff to cover these needs.

[Tanarii]

Also, my one nitpick with encumbrance - armor only counts for weight when you aren't wearing it. I've - IRL - worn a set of plate armor which I cannot physically lift when its packed away, but once the set is on, I can job basically fine, and have even managed a cartwheel!
What makes you think that?

[Osuniev]

Even if you are tracking encumbrance for food, water, and lighting low level spells can do away with it without a Ranger. Goodberry, Create Water and Light cast when needed can basically negate the need to carry or find stuff to cover these needs.

Yes, it's part of what bothers me with these, but at least they represent a cost (either in spell slots or in spells known/prepared). (And since I play with Gritty Realism, it can be a significant cost).

SO you can play without a Ranger, but if there's one in your party, the Cleric will be glad he doesn't have to prepare Create Water and Purify Food, and the Ranger will feel useful and enjoy being good at survival.

[Chaosmancer]

Yes, it's part of what bothers me with these, but at least they represent a cost (either in spell slots or in spells known/prepared). (And since I play with Gritty Realism, it can be a significant cost).

SO you can play without a Ranger, but if there's one in your party, the Cleric will be glad he doesn't have to prepare Create Water and Purify Food, and the Ranger will feel useful and enjoy being good at survival.

I don't want to pile on, but there is also the outlander background which can provide food and water at no cost and no roll.

And that is assuming they don't forage for food and water, which is a relatively easy survival check in most environments.

[Tanarii]

I don't want to pile on, but there is also the outlander background which can provide food and water at no cost and no roll.

And that is assuming they don't forage for food and water, which is a relatively easy survival check in most environments.Foraging with the Wanderer background doesn't remove the major penalty for Foraging: you don't get passive perception to detect threats. If you're attacked and there is a check for surprise you'll automatically be surprised.

[Zhorn]

Foraging with the Wanderer background doesn't remove the major penalty for Foraging: you don't get passive perception to detect threats. If you're attacked and there is a check for surprise you'll automatically be surprised.
In before some clever response to this commenting about "But they could just offset that easily by taking the Alert feat" because now you're not only spending a background but also a spending a feat/ASI that may have been preferred for a different character improvement. The workarounds that exist that help avoid dependencies or interactions with mechanics are not free. Limited spell slots, cantrip selections, dedicated background builds, finite ASI and feat opportunities.
I'm just not a fan of the insistence that a mechanic should be cut/ignored on the grounds you can have a build that negates it.

[Nifft]

What makes you think that?

It looks like he has IRL experience doing the thing personally. That's probably why he thinks his opinion is valid.

Honestly having personal IRL experience with armor is a pretty good justification for an opinion about armor.

[Doug Lampert]

It looks like he has IRL experience doing the thing personally. That's probably why he thinks his opinion is valid.

Honestly having personal IRL experience with armor is a pretty good justification for an opinion about armor.

How you are carrying something often matters a lot more than the simple weight. Backpacks are a lot easier than most other ways to carry something, well designed plate armor is even better weight distribution than a backpack.

Pick up 45 pounds of lead weight in your hands and carrying it around, awkward, it probably slows you down. You don't want to carry it all that far and certainly don't want to go on a five mile hike.

Put the same 45 pounds in a backpack, no problem, as an older couch potato I probably don't want to go on a long hike with it, but a soldier in decent shape would consider it a light load.

Now pick up a 45 pound twin mattress and trying to carry it around. Odds are you need two people, it's just too bulky, awkward, and just a bit too flexible to be easily moved.

A pike isn't that heavy, but carrying one should, by itself noticeably encumber you because there's no way to stow that weight where it isn't horribly awkward. Classical shields were awkward and carried in hand, that's one reason that routing troops always threw away their shield, a heavy shield slows you down far more than the weight would suggest it should.

A simplification to abstract "bulk points" or "item slots" or something similar can easily be more realistic than simply adding weights if you assign the points partly on how awkward or well distributed the weight is.

[Pex]

In before some clever response to this commenting about "But they could just offset that easily by taking the Alert feat" because now you're not only spending a background but also a spending a feat/ASI that may have been preferred for a different character improvement. The workarounds that exist that help avoid dependencies or interactions with mechanics are not free. Limited spell slots, cantrip selections, dedicated background builds, finite ASI and feat opportunities.
I'm just not a fan of the insistence that a mechanic should be cut/ignored on the grounds you can have a build that negates it.

On the other hand some might view it as a tax. They have to take it just to get rid of the annoying stuff. The players ask themselves who will make the sacrifice as it used to be asked who will have to play the healbot. There is a difference between wanting to take a feat or cast a spell and the game/DM making you do it.

[Chaosmancer]

Foraging with the Wanderer background doesn't remove the major penalty for Foraging: you don't get passive perception to detect threats. If you're attacked and there is a check for surprise you'll automatically be surprised.

Sure, but that only applies if you are foraging while on the march. I have never heard a good argument for why players can't forage after setting up camp.

And, if a DM wanted to get pendantic about the foraging option only being mentioned in the context of doing it on the march, then I would have to respond that the Outlander background feature actually doesn't specify you take the foraging action anyways, it just says you find the food. Which means it should be automatic and not a penalty on my passive perception.

It also bears mentioning that this specific penalty only applies if your DM is making wandering monster checks. And the official 5e rules on those are pretty limited. They have intervals anywhere between 1 hour, every 8 hours, or once a day, and you roll a d20 needing to get an 18 or higher. So, officially, a 15% chance per day is not unreasonable, and if you have had one encounter, there is a decent chance you might not have another.

[Democratus]

Sure, but that only applies if you are foraging while on the march. I have never heard a good argument for why players can't forage after setting up camp.

And, if a DM wanted to get pendantic about the foraging option only being mentioned in the context of doing it on the march, then I would have to respond that the Outlander background feature actually doesn't specify you take the foraging action anyways, it just says you find the food. Which means it should be automatic and not a penalty on my passive perception.

It also bears mentioning that this specific penalty only applies if your DM is making wandering monster checks. And the official 5e rules on those are pretty limited. They have intervals anywhere between 1 hour, every 8 hours, or once a day, and you roll a d20 needing to get an 18 or higher. So, officially, a 15% chance per day is not unreasonable, and if you have had one encounter, there is a decent chance you might not have another.

Sounds like a conversation is needed at Session 0 to set expectations.

What kind of campaign is it going to be? Will resource availability be an issue? How will the various wilderness features of classes and background behave?

If you don't have conversations like this, it could easily lead to mismatched expectations and disappointment.

[LordCdrMilitant]

We are also using (a slightly more generous version of) variant encumbrance, for some of the same reasons. There will be consequences for min/maxing your character, and Dex got plenty of love RAW. 150 lbs for an average strength character to move and act 100% just seemed silly.

150lbs carry weight is pretty silly. I don't think I can carry 75 pounds in a backpack IRL, much less 150 pounds.

This just goes with "the base game rules for carry weight are just absurdly high"

[Tanarii]

It looks like he has IRL experience doing the thing personally. That's probably why he thinks his opinion is valid.

Honestly having personal IRL experience with armor is a pretty good justification for an opinion about armor.
Thanks. I missed it was an IRL opinion. I thought it was a statement about the rules. :smallredface: