The Unbearable Lightness of Encumbrance

Encumbrance. Such a dirty, dirty word.

Some hate it, some ignore it, some even use it;

I doubt many actually love it.

It’s a pickle of a topic among RPGers, one that constitutes a redoubtable watchtower, among many others, in the great dividing border between simulationism and a more casual gaming style.

Me? Well, since you’ve asked, I, ahm… loathe it.

If we’re talking the classic encumbrance by weight that is, then yes, loathe is the word I’ll go with.

It is fiddly, requires abstruse math and doesn’t simulate much of anything all that well in the end.

I proposed to use it and was promptly shot down like a Mitsubishi Zero heading into autocannon fire.

The thing is, encumbrance feels to me a vital part of dungeon-delving and hexcrawling. It is a game structure that takes skill to master and is something that leads to interesting narrowing of options from which great gameplay can be derived.

So, I rolled up the sleeves, rolled out and dusted off the faithful Plagiarism’a’thron and went to town.

Here I’m standing on the shoulder of some giants, previous ideas that to a great extent informed my thoughts on this: The Alexandrian’s Encumbrance by Stone, James Raggi’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess’s own system and Last Gasp’s sundry inventory shenanigans.

My aim is simple, to concoct an inventory system that is:

- Simple to apprehend yet grounded in a measure of logic.

- Agile and light on the accounting, keeping things close to the ground as relates to gameplay decisions rather than number-crunching.

- Able to interface with other systems of the rules in use at the table, hacked or otherwise.

- Compatible with 5ed D&D (my trojan horse of choice).

All said and done, here’s the current - though by no means definitive - version of this:

I get bigger.

And so do I.

Unsightly and ungainly? Yes.

Does it work? I aim to find out.

Its features, at a glance:

- Both weight encumbrance and carrying space are simulated, to a limited extent. A compromise solution that I’m pleased with.

- Slots are semi-abstracted, the exact location of each item not mattering overmuch, other than the presumption that the lower numbers are more accessible than the higher ones.

- 3 “hands” worth of weapons/items are always at the ready, a concept I saw somewhere and that felt makes sense.

- Slots can be randomly targetted with ease through a d20 roll.

- Containers of all sort have to be purchased/acquired for a character to make full use of his inventory space. This was a late development and was the answer I arrived at after I started questioning myself about characters being bare-clothed and how much stuff could they be expected to hold.

(Come market time, I don’t intend to be too much a stickler about this. It ought to be abstracted into a flat “cost-per-slot”, with the player deciding how best to split his gear among whatever containers he purchases).

Concepts and gameplay effects that I attempt to introduce through this system:

- Resource depletion (breakage, consumption and spoilage of items) is to be a rather central gameplay feature, this simultaneously feeds upon and provides reinforcement back into the idea of a limited inventory/carrying capacity.

- Strength attribute score becomes a fair bit more important.

- Money takes up space. As anyone who has ever worked with coinage can attest, it is anything _but_ portable when in large amounts.

This is only a working version, for I understand that this elevates the charsheet onto the lofty perch of 2-sheets/3 pages in one fell swoop. I’m honestly not married to the idea of a 2-page inventory, but this version is the more cumbersome (heh) for reason of being rules-reference plus the actual deal, all rolled into one. I’ll be making sure that it is slimmed down into a single page later on.