But the magic window has been bringing me evil tidings for the last couple of days, by which I mean the internet has shown a lot of crappy shit going on in the wide world
(The black rhino is now extinct in the wild. Good job humanity. How fucking hard is it to keep a whole species alive? The rhinos were doing just fine for millions of years. Think of how much poaching it took to reduce the population so drastically. Somehow, for some reason, large numbers of people have been motivated to go to Africa, to the Serengeti to kill these animals. African people are starving and dying of disease and ignorance and we can't mobilize the resources to help them. Yet there are sufficient foreign interests and markets to wipe out a whole damn species. How does this even happen?
Also, the grisly murder of Walter Scott in Charleston, SC. Another case of police brutality marked by racial overtone. Hurray America. Walter Scott was unarmed, gunned down like an animal (not even a clean kill, though) Then, a second pig planted a taser on the victim's corpse. Fortunately in this case, the officer was charged with murder and there was no pussyfooting about the issue like in Ferguson or the Trayvon Martin case. Now every officer in Charleston gets to wear a body camera. Progress.
So not only is the world raping Africa, but we re-enact it in our streets. Wherefore this madness? It makes me wonder. Is world-culture is experiencing some massive collective Oedipus Complex? Compelling us to rape our mother-continent?)
Anyways, this sort of thinking had me in a serious funk. So bad that I really didn't feel like writing about games. But a nice evening at home helped get my head straight, and I'm back to working on the problems I have a reasonable chance of solving.
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What do you take with you? What do you leave behind?
This is an important question for many roleplaying adventures.
Practically speaking, it a tactical concern. It is a choice players can make, the consequences of which can be very enriching for gameplay.
If your scenario resembles a backpacking trip into Mordor, then resources and their limitations become quite important. Having the right gear is essential to not only success, but survival. On the other hand, if you carry too much weight you will never get there in the first place.
If a character can provide whatever tool or item they need on whim, they don't have any need to innovate or use problem-solving. It's just not fun. This sort of thing should only be allowed in scenarios where resource management is really not a concern. Think of the difference between creative mode and survival mode in Minecraft: When the resource restriction and things like mortal needs are removed, the point of the game shifts to wild creativity rather than survival.
A person's possessions also have significance to character. In D&D, characters gain a lot of their definition from their equipment and the treasure they accumulate. It defines their appearance, compliments their skillset and shows where the character has been. Magical treasures especially represent not only new abilities for a character, but their past achievements as well.
Uh. Nice log-raft and 3' ladder. Perhaps there should be some limitation on this?
Encumbrance rules are the means of tracking what a character is carrying, and adjudicating how much it restricts their motion.
I will assume that my readers are familiar with how inventory and encumbrance are managed in D&D. The system works in fairly well in general. What I want to do now is look at some different inventory and encumbrance systems from some popular games, to get some perspective on what makes for a good or a bad encumbrance system.
Skyrim is awesome. We love Skyrim. Its beautiful and bleak tundra landscape is a great place to live out our dearest murder-hobo escapist fantasy. Up until the point that we hit out weight-limit and are introduced into an inventory-management nightmare.
The Dragonborn starts out with the ability to carry up to 200 units of weight. This "unit" is undefined and its value shifts mysteriously. Tanning a 1-unit hide results in a piece of leather which weighs 2 units. Very mysterious.
So you go about your adventure. If it's your first playthrough, you may not know what items are and are not important, so you pick up whatever you might think will be useful, then WHAM you've collected over 200 units and you can no longer run. You character goes from total freedom of motion to creeping at a snail's pace. Your adventuring career is on hold until you can drop some weight.
To make matters worse, if you want to develop your characters skill's, you need to collect materials; as much as possible since you get experience for producing items. As a result, you will adventure for maybe an hour until you hit your limit, then have to dump items on your pack-mule NPC, go to town, and craft and sell stuff for another hour of real time. This is not an ideal ratio of game to inventory management.
Just shut up and carry my burdens already!
The problem is that Skyrim is trying to have it two ways: Encumbrance limitations make sense for a footloose adventurer in hostile territory. But when your character buys a house in Whiterun and starts gaining most of her experience through smithing and enchanting, it doesn't make sense to punish the player for having a full inventory.
The Skyrim inventory system splits the difference between these two styles, and the result is a set of limitations so arbitrary, you might as well just not have them.
Dragon's Dogma is another recent epic fantasy game. There is a lot to say about Dragon's Dogma. Very early in the game, you have the option of picking up your willowy, nubile girl-cousin in a fireman's carry and throwing her onto a bed. Then she shrugs at you indignantly.
The remainder of the game doesn't quite live up to that standard of richness though, and I lost interest.
Dragon's Dogma also makes the mistake of confusing a highly mobile adventurer-hero with some sort of shopkeeper. Instead of piling on encumbrance all at once after a certain point, Dogma defines levels of encumbrance, and these levels are noticeably difference in terms of how quickly your character moves and how long they can keep their energy up. This is good.
But your character is still expected to pick up every bit of junk and search every chest if you want to have half decent gear or enough restorative items.
Theoretically, you could use your NPC helpers as pack mules, or assign them to scour the environment for you, but they are utterly useless. Managing inventory in the field is cumbersome and awkward. You have to ADD the OIL to the LAMP and EQUIP the LAMP. This is done in the INVENTORY screen, and not the EQUIPMENT screen. You can view your arms and armor in the INVENTORY screen, but have to flip to the EQUIPMENT screen to change your loadout. Your followers are of course entirely incapable of managing their own inventories. How is that supposed to be enjoyable?
The encumbrance system is particularly punishing if you wear heavy armor, which seems justifiable. Except in real life, people who wear heavy armor don't wear it on a cross-country hike, and they generally had squires and horses to do the inventory management for them.
Mass Effect 3 is actually an example of a good encumbrance system, though it may seem a little obscure for this discussion. While the game is full of colorful items and upgrades, the vast majority of them apply automatically and require no further effort on the part of the player. Shepard is not expected to be a shopkeeper; s/he has sexy secretaries to take care of that shit for him/her.
Armor can be customized, but I found the effect to be mostly cosmetic. Weapons may be upgraded, but the attachments add weight. In the end, ME3 encumbrance comes down to a simple, elegant and meaningful mechanic:
Carrying more, heavier weapons makes your powers recharge more slowly. All the rest of your crap is back on the Normandy. Don't worry about it. The choice of encumbrance boils down to whether you want to rely more on firepower and ammo, or on your special abilities.
What game designers need to keep in mind is the difference between Equipment and Inventory. The words get used interchangeably, but they carry very different shades of meaning.
Inventory is what you keep in a store, or in a pantry, or in your armory.
Equipment is the things that you are carrying on you; wearing, in your bags, or in your pockets.
Inventory is for crafting, trading and storing. Equipment is what you carry into Mordor.
The rules for encumbrance as written in AD&D and 3E are functional and easy enough, so long as the character sheet is well laid-out. In my experience, players are good about recording their weight-carried with reasonable accuracy. The burden lies on the DM to remember if anyone is encumbered and have it added to the appropriate checks.
But as always, it would be nice to simplify.
Once, I had players draw their inventory on graph paper. A sword took 6 squares, a bow and arrow set took 16, a potion took one. So much area was light-encumbrance, so much more area meant heavy encumbrance.
It was basically a pen-and-paper version of the inventory system from Diablo, or the attache case from Resident Evil 4.
This method didn't get extensive playtesting. But the players who did try it, found it fun and tactile. They enjoyed drawing little pictures of their stuff.
Practically speaking though,
Being encumbered is not a matter of mass and weight, but a matter of volume and placement.
According to D&D rules, you might carry a longbow, arrows, a glaive, a greatsword, a shield, 50' of rope, chainmail and a backpack full of potions and the weight would only take you up to light encumbrance. But anyone who actually attempted this would be tripping over all themselves! They would definitely not be making jump, swim or climb checks.
In military history, a soldier's role in battle was defined by the weapon they were holding in their hands. almost always a weapon-system that requires both hands.
If you had a bow, that made you an archer.
If you had a long spear, you were a pikeman.
If you had a flag, you were a standard-bearer
If you had a shield, you were a shield-man and belonged in a phalanx or shield wall.
You might carry a sidearm; a long dagger, or single-handed weapon or a handgun. That would be a very good idea. But it is nearly impossible to be effective in a combat role if you have the gear for a whole other role strapped on your back!
Camping or dungeoneering gear would have been right out. Unless setting up camp is your tactical role:
Really, when running game, I find it is more relevant to know the placement of an item than how much it weighs. Because we know players are always trying to get items out in the middle of combat, and that item is almost always in their pack.
Also, what if a character falls or suffers an Area of Effect spell or is targeted by a thief? knowing the location of their gear will do a lot to tell us what happens next.
A Thing to Try:
I am going to include a diagram like this with the character sheet. This will be for Characters to draw and/or point to where their items are being kept, as well as any pockets, pouches, backpacks or weapon holsters. This will be the Equipment sheet, representing the things a character is carrying on their person.
Finding a diagram like this that isn't really creepy is kind of hard to do.
A character's other possessions, kept at home or elsewhere, will be listed on a separate sheet of paper. This will be the Inventory sheet.
We will forget about weights of items, and find new standards for determining encumbrance. It will be brutally interesting.
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