Welcome to this week’s blog book club. This week we are discussing Making Encumbrance Work by Nick L.S. of Papers & Pencils.
Next week we’ll be reading a post from Johann Out for Blood: My Trinity of Old School Gaming (Part 3). I will likely reference other posts in this series as well.
We’ve made it to 40 famous blog posts and have many more to go! You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
This post spun out of some other ideas Nick was noodling on such as travel and tinkering with Pathfinder RPG systems he was dissatisfied with. I don’t have the mental energy to look up rules from Pathfinder, which is why I don’t play Pathfinder. But Nick briefly summarizes how carrying things work in that game.
I would say the question of how much stuff we can carry does sort of cut to the core of how simulationist a game we are playing. Somewhere between extensive catalogue of inventory and weight, and entirely handwaving what PCs carry there exists game play mechanics that present players with choices and trade offs without all the hassle of realism. This post explores one way of handling encumbrance.
Photo: The Crucible (1996)
Like the majority of people who start their RPG journeys I did not always see the value in encumbrance rules. By playing in some of Gus L playtest dungeons and hitting the blogs to learn, I have come to appreciate that logistics is a very important part of an old school dungeon crawl. Figuring out which life saving items must go into the dungeon while allowing room to carry out that precious precious level raising loot is a satisfying gameplay loop.
I would add as an aside here that I have a personal hatred of bags of holding. They just seem like throwing up our hands and admitting to having encumbrance rules too poorly designed to bother with. When every party deems this object as necessary, that means the magic is dead and it ceases to be something special. I would rank them lower than +1 swords which I can at least reflavor in interesting ways. But they likely proliferated in D&D as a way of at least explaining how adventurers always had the exact item nobody was tracking that they needed on hand. Some jerk like me likely invented its antithesis, the bag of devouring.
Back in the original post, Nick examines the major reasons why we should have an encumbrance system:
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It determines the speed of when players arrive at a destination. This is true, but I feel like this doesn’t usually matters much. In most OSR systems I have seen the optimal choice leaning toward loading up and players forming a caravan when they have the wealth to do so. Part of this is the amount of gold in these games makes slots valuable but items largely replaceable. Changing assumptions about resources or competition in the wider world would likely make travel speed more or less important.
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Nick notes that “Returning to a dungeon to retrieve the piles of gold they were unable to carry can be an adventure in itself, requiring them to face unique challenges such as getting a large cart through the wilderness." I have recent experience as player to share! In one of my games the party hired goons to pull vast sums of currency from a sunken library only for our mule trian to be ambushed by rival adventurers on the road back to town. The incident wiped out the PCs present during this session. Now the remaining characters are recruiting new PCs and planning a revenge mission. This saga would not have happened had we simply been able to carry all of the treasure out of the dungeon with us the first time. As a result the game world feels more satisfying and lived in.
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Base building grows organically out of encumbrance needs. Once gear is important having a secure place for it becomes essential. I don’t have much experience in this vein, but I have always wanted to test out the base building rules in Free League’s forbidden lands.
Later, we get Nick’s Encumbrance house rule:
- Items are judged to be significant by asking whether the item in question should count toward the total number of permitted items. “a significant item is any item which is heavy enough, or large enough, for the character to take notice of its addition to their equipment.” Insignificant items are bundled together to form 1
*Scores of 1 are assigned to regular items and 2 for bulky items. - The encumbrance number is tallied and compared to the PCs strength ability score. I am rusty on pathfinder so I assume it will be typically in the teens and can be raised into the twenties.
- Carrying items that double the strength attribute drop a characters speed by a quarter and impose physical penalties, carrying items that are triple the strength score reduce speed by halve and increase the physical penalty to rolls made.
I appreciate that Nick mentioned that realism is not the goal of these rules, instead they are about getting players to make choices that will impact the game.
photo credit: toyhaven blogspot
While the word “slot” does not explicitly appear in this post, I would contend that this is a slot based encumbrance system. And by OSR standards it appears to be a fairly generous one at that! (you likely need more stuff in Pathfinder). Through my sampling of the OSR I would say the primary difference between such slot based encumbrance systems is how many slots you have to work with and whether your attributes (typically strength) affect this score. Occasionally the speed at which you can retrieve stowed items also matters.
A brief Survey of Slot Based Encumbrance in Popular OSR Systems
- Into the ODD: Items are bulky or minor. Overall encumbrance is handwaved but characters speed and hit protection drops to nothing if they are carrying more than 3 bulky items.
- Cairn: 10 slots (6 of which are stowed in backpack)
- Knave 2nd ed: 10 Slot + CON Modifier.
- Vaults of Vaarn: Slots Equal to Con defense score (min 11)
- OSE / Dolmenwood 3-9 equipped, 10-16 stowed (sliding scale of penalties for encumbered PCs)
- Shadowdark: Equal to Strength Score w/ a 10 slot Minimum. Fighter characters can typically carry more by also adding their con modifiers (Also: this system is more generous than it first appears because many class specific items are handwaved.)
photo credit: Chentzzilla design on Teepublic
For people who do not have a good slot based system and would like to look at a published example for a BX adjacent game, I would point them to Old School Essentials Zine ‘Carcass Crawler Issue 2’ (pg 28-29) or Dolmenwood Players Book (p 149).
Final thoughts:
- Enforcing encumbrance systems makes the prospect of hirings more attractive.
- The existence of slots makes GMs want to design items good enough to take up a regular slot without becoming a ‘go to’ or game breaking solution. I enjoy mechanics that throw down the gauntlet to designers.
- The weight of treasure vs its value becomes an important factor. Gems are light! Art is heavy. This adds texture to a game.
- There will likely always be some amount of awkwardness that is dissatisfying with encumbrance that cannot be remedied. But if we can get to a place that supports player choice with minimal friction in the majority of instances I think you have a working inventory system.
How do you and your players carry your stuff?
