{"id":290,"date":"2012-08-31T19:16:57","date_gmt":"2012-09-01T03:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/?p=290"},"modified":"2013-07-21T16:10:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-22T00:10:23","slug":"rethinking-encumbrance-with-an-alternative-abstraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/?p=290","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking encumbrance with an alternative abstraction"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’ve had this idea for a different way to do encumbrance kicking around in the old noggin for a while.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I read What’s in your backpack?\u00c2\u00a0 A healthy dose of reality<\/a> and started thinking about it again.<\/p>\n

What it comes down to is this.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t like weight as an abstraction for how encumbered you are.\u00c2\u00a0 It should be a factor for sure, but you shouldn’t be able to carry a dozen 10 foot poles without issue just because they’re light weight.<\/p>\n

What I do like as an inventory system is the grid based inventory CRPGs use.\u00c2\u00a0 I think the first one I saw was in Diablo.\u00c2\u00a0 Long items took up more space.\u00c2\u00a0 And that axe head protrudes down from the rest of the axe.\u00c2\u00a0 And you get to sort all that stuff to make it fit.<\/p>\n

Well, that’s great for computer games but not so great in pen and paper.\u00c2\u00a0 As a general rule, I’d like my mechanics to simplify things.\u00c2\u00a0 Fitting stuff in a grid simplifies nothing.\u00c2\u00a0 I haven’t found a way to satisfy the shape element of the grid inventory.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, lets use the size part.\u00c2\u00a0 Different items take up different amounts of space.\u00c2\u00a0 You have a limited number of slots to store things…<\/p>\n

Why not treat a line of text as a slot?\u00c2\u00a0 You get one item per line.\u00c2\u00a0 And you have a number of lines equal to the size of your backpack.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s just call a backpack 10 items.\u00c2\u00a0 Write backpack on your sheet, draw a box around the next 10 lines.\u00c2\u00a0 Done.<\/p>\n

Well, not quite.\u00c2\u00a0 Items need some level of size.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think D&D’s approach of weighing each item is any good.\u00c2\u00a0 Too much math for anyone to want to recalculate it.\u00c2\u00a0 But I also don’t want a backpack full of chainmail to encumber you the same as a backpack full of feathers.<\/p>\n

So items will need some sort of size.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s go with small, medium and large.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of item weights, you’ll just use their encumbrance value.\u00c2\u00a0 This is an abstraction of weight, size, unwieldiness, etc.<\/p>\n

Now let’s go back to the backpack.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of holding any 10 items, let’s say it’s a container that holds 10 medium items.\u00c2\u00a0 The backpack itself would have to be large.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe one of the medium items is a first aid kid, which itself is a container of small items.<\/p>\n

Basically you’re getting a number of slots to fill in with items of varying sizes.\u00c2\u00a0 This doesn’t seem as obnoxious as tallying object weights and looking up an encumbrance chart.<\/p>\n

But what about actually carrying these things?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, I think the way to do that is to give the body itself slots for carrying.\u00c2\u00a0 If a person has 3 large slots, that’s a backpack, armor, and weapon.\u00c2\u00a0 To give a bit of realism, lets make that number of slots a variable.\u00c2\u00a0 In D&D parlance, we’ll use the strength modifier.\u00c2\u00a0 Give each PC a number of large item slots equal to his strength mod plus one (with a minimum of one, or else the weaklings can’t carry anything).\u00c2\u00a0 Packs and weapons occupy large slots.\u00c2\u00a0 I imagine donning armor would occupy a slot as well (maybe more than one for certain types of armor?\u00c2\u00a0 If so, this would be the first system I saw that made you take off your backpack because it didn’t fit around your armor).\u00c2\u00a0 I might even introduce more types of containers, just so the strong characters get to carry more.\u00c2\u00a0 ie, the backpack\u00c2\u00a0 carries 10 medium items and occupies 1 large slot, but the hiking frame carries 16 medium items at the cost of 2 large slots.<\/p>\n

On paper this would look something like<\/p>\n

Body (L)<\/strong>
\nBackpack
\nArmor
\n________<\/div>\n
Backpack (M)<\/strong>
\nDagger
\nBook
\nMedkit
\nRope
\n___________
\n___________
\n___________
\n___________
\n___________
\n___________<\/div>\n
Medkit (S)<\/strong>
\nGauze
\nMorphine
\nNeedle\/Thread
\nScalpel
\n_______<\/div>\n

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

Anyway, if you find this usable please let me know. I’ve gone a year without RPGs and that’s not likely to change. Someone else will have to beta test this one for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’ve had this idea for a different way to do encumbrance kicking around in the old noggin for a while.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I read What’s in your backpack?\u00c2\u00a0 A healthy dose of reality and started thinking about it again. What it comes down to is this.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t like weight as an abstraction for how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,83],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homebrew","category-nodice","tag-encumbrance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}