I had some thoughts about the Strength ability score and how much it matters. One of the key things that strength is useful for is to be able to carry more stuff. This is really important because if you're a 7 strength wizard you can't carry two fat cats before your AC and speed take a hit. Despite this being a pretty vital thing for an adventurer in every single game I've been in does one of two things;
1) They don't track capacity at all because that is not fun. Seriously it's not. The consequence of this is the same as when bullets are not counted. A huge balancing factor is just ignored.
2) They use 'common sense'. I say that in parenthesis because in these situations the rough estimate of how much a 7 strength character can carry is way higher than the actual number. Mostly this is because a lot of people don't worry about what 7 strength means and treat it like its 13 strength.
My solution: Use video game logic.
Imagine this. You have your carrying capacity chart to know how much you can carry. Lets just assume that each slot you can write in is about 10 pounds and in the case of consumables and things that obviously don't weigh more than 1 pound (give or take) you can put in up to x5 or x10 next to the item. This has problems, if we go by 5 lbs slots with up to x5 items per slot for small items a 7 strength character can carry up to 20 cure light wounds potions, or carry 4 potions of different types. This also does not take into account Armor and Weapons treating them as if their weight just kinda vanishes when equipped. But they have their own penalties so I did not think to ignore it. However in order to track your carrying capacity all you have to do is shade the edge of how many 5lbs slots you can carry on the edge of your character sheet and the GM arbitrarily estimates whether something takes 1,2 or 3 slots when it's handed to you. So basically I want to turn something fiddly into a game abstraction that makes less sense but doesn't outright ignore what it was supposed to do.
Does this work? Does this make sense to you? Would you do this? Ideas?
I have not tried this yet but I'm thinking of making this a house rule for my next game.
I don't often worry about it, unless I want it to be a central focus/theme of my game.
That said, it helps that I play with PCs who don't cheese ("Yeah, I've totally been carrying around a 10-foot ladder, 3 iron pots, and two full sets of plate mail ... why do you ask?"), so I know that what they're carrying is relatively consistent with what I should expect a character their size to be carrying.
I don't often worry about it, unless I want it to be a central focus/theme of my game.
That said, it helps that I play with PCs who don't cheese ("Yeah, I've totally been carrying around a 10-foot ladder, 3 iron pots, and two full sets of plate mail ... why do you ask?"), so I know that what they're carrying is relatively consistent with what I should expect a character their size to be carrying.
The first time I GMed I said I wasn't expecting anyone to track encumberance and they literally tried to steal iron doors from a dungeon and put boulders in their pockets.
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I go simpler still. You can carry a number of heavy items equal to your strength.
Ex: Strength 10 = carry ten things.
If something is small, then just group them together. No one is going to become encumbered because they picked up an arrow. But an additional quiver of arrows, that's +1 item.
I count light armor as 1, medium as 2, heavy as 3, and two handed weapons count as two items.
You can even make the magic items work this way: the bag of holding carries 10 heavy things, but only counts as 1.
Our GM just said, You can carry as much as you like and I'll only check if you start carrying something ridiculous. (Mostly that was because we bought a donkey, and he didn't want to have anyone add up all of the gear we stowed on it.)
I'm working on something similar to this for a campaign I'll be running in a month or so. In fact, it's very similar to what Anonymous posted.
I've yet to work out all the specific numbers, but the general idea is that weight becomes "units" and each slot on your character can hold so many units. Containers take up so many units, but can hold many more. An example might be that your back slot can handle 2 units. A backpack is 1 unit, but can contain say 5 units. "Slots" would be things like back, chest, waist, etc. similar to the Magic Items system.
You are limited by two things, one being the aforementioned slot system and the other that you can only carry a number of units equal to your Strength score.
In general, weapons would be 1 unit, and armor 2 (though I like Anonymous' breakdown of light/medium/heavy). Small items would stack within one unit.
Again, I've yet to work out the details...but that was my thought process.
May I suggest the Alexandrians encumbrance by stone
How about the 'units' be something called pounds and we create a simple chart of how many of these 'units' a character can have based upon their strength. That would greatly simplify all of this
oh wait.....
May I suggest the Alexandrians encumbrance by stone
I will have to read that in full later, thanks.
How about the 'units' be something called pounds and we create a simple chart of how many of these 'units' a character can have based upon their strength. That would greatly simplify all of this
oh wait.....
If you just want to worry about weight, by all means...use weight, everything you need is already there.
However, weight doesn't address the issue of quantity of items beyond how much they weigh. A person with an 18 strength can carry 25 long swords and still be considered a light load. Something about that doesn't seem right.
What the above systems appear to be trying to do is determine how many of an item you can reasonably carry, regardless of weight.
The idea of a "Unit" as I proposed attempts to accomplish quantity and weight within a single system...it's not trying to be any more simple than weight alone, but rather adding to the meaning without (overly) adding to the complexity. It also does it in a way that many people are familiar with, even if it is videogamish.
If you dislike this idea, this rule is not for you. You'd also probably hate my ideas for hunger and thirst. But that is the great thing about the game that we play, we can all choose to make it ours. This is the homebrew forum right?
A spreadsheet on Google Drive can both calculate encumbrance and be accessed from your phone/tablet/laptop.
I generally find that encumbrance only matters a very low levels. Almost every character I've ever seen grabs at least a haversack at the earliest oppertunity. After that, encumbrance becomes pretty meaningless except for special cases.
And interestingly enough, the levels where you can't afford haversack are generally the same levels where you're too poor to carry that much anyway. ;)
I once made an elf druid archer, and since shortbows are so expensive, I had enough gold leftover to either buy a backpack and nothing to put in it, or just have 2 gp. :-P
There are character sheets that autocalculate the weight if you input the numbers.