Long items are Bulkier than their weight because they are harder to carry.
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Bulk is not the same as weight.
Bulk includes an "awkwardness" factor. Something that only weighs a few pounds but is long and narrow is more awkward to carry around on your shoulder than a compact cube of the same weight.
So armor might weigh the same as some other item, but because of its shape and size might be more "bulky"
The math makes no sense because its not just adding up weights.
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As for why the change: weight based encumbrance has been the norm for 45 years... and encumbrance tracking has widely been entirely ignored. So the Paizo folks have decided to try a new thing and see if it means people will actually use encumbrance tracking rules when they used to not. In some cases (my group, for example) that has worked.
Yeah, the classic weight-based system wasn't working out in practice. Variants of Bulk have been used in a lot of third party products over the years that tried to replace it with a better system. It's not a surprising new innovation by Paizo.
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What do you mean "heavier"? Medium size creatures are only 6 Bulk, making the buggest, burliest hulk of a man you might play in this game 60 pounds at most.
In the meantime, I am IRL 5'9" and weigh three times that. Even turning such a hulking man to stone wouldn't make him as heavy as me.
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Here I thought this was a joke about the size of the new core rules.
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I honestly wish Paizo didn't even given the "general rule" of 1 Bulk = 5 to 10 pounds.
It's not very useful since anything can diverge from it, yet encourages people to think of Bulk as different "unit" of weight.
...Despite the OP's examples including water which is now MUCH "lighter", weeks or even months of water rations now carried with ease,
which I think makes clear the "general rule" isn't a solid rule at all, therefore considering it solid re: swords is ridiculous.
To point out the obvious (or not), swords are long objects so reasonably have higher Bulk ratio than an ingot of same amount of steel.
I really can't understand the confusion myself, clearly a "unit" influenced by size/dimensions and ease of carrying CAN'T be consistently convertible to weight because those factors are irrelevant to actual weight. But I guess some people WANT so hard to convert it to weight unit in order to continue "thinking" in same way, that they ignore those problems so they can have their neat direct weight conversion... only to find that yield other problems for the game, because Bulk ISN'T just another unit of weight that can be consistently converted to pounds or kilograms. How amazing.
I always thought the best explanation is a trucking or shipping company. While their trucks and ships may have maximum weight capacity, they are just as likely to be limited by another factor, whether it is total volume or single dimension of size, or some difficulty in loading/packing that prevents maximizing weight capacity. So they aren't going to "charge" just by weight, their prices will be some compound of all relevant factors. Bulk amounts to the same thing, just used for player characters.
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I honestly wish Paizo didn't even given the "general rule" of 1 Bulk = 5 to 10 pounds.
Agreed.
That line alone is what makes Bulk such a mess to try and grasp. Bulk works great as a vague abstraction of weight and other measurements but then they needlessly threw out the abstraction and hardcoded the weight, which if you try to apply doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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Paizo folks themselves don't use the bulk rules - eg see the pregen characters.
Every pregen sheet has a line for bulk. It's the first line in the Equipment section.
The initial sheets only showed total bulk, but the revised sheets show both Worn and Stowed values.
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one thing i am having a hard time raping my head around is bulk.
Don't even try: at it's core in an unknowable 'unwieldiness' factor that is applied in no comprehensible manner. You'll drive yourself mad trying to make sense of an inherently nonsensical rule. They worked very hard to make a system to get people that used weight/encumbrance in the past to stop using any system to measure carry anymore...
I really can't understand the confusion myself
It's actually REALLY simple: you can put to piles of things next to each other that have the same bulk and it's 100% clear they aren't equal. The game is trying to tell me it's as easy to carry a knocked out person as it is 3 bo staffs. Whatever unit it is, it's clearly wrong...
I honestly wish Paizo didn't even given the "general rule" of 1 Bulk = 5 to 10 pounds.
They HAD to as people have to be able to figure out the bulk of unlisted items: that's were confusion comes in as people have to be able to PICTURE what a unit represents. People should be able to imaging how hard it is to lift a 1 bulk bag like they can imagine a 10 pound one. Given an unknown item of 10 bulk, how do you know how much of that bulk is weight? Unwieldiness? Size? Who knows? Can you use 2 people to move it? Is it the same bulk [as unwieldly] if 2 people carry it? Again, who knows.
Bulk works great as a vague abstraction of weight
I'd disagree. If I wanted it "vague", I'd just handwave the whole thing and eyeball it. If I wanted to track things, an actual tangible measurement works best. Bulk is a middleground that satisfies neither desire [tracking minutia or skipping small stuff] for [tracking vague stuff].
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I've seen bulk being easier abstraction to track for most people than weight, at worst bulk just causes funny images in head.
So this is probably wrong, but I get feeling that bulk seems to assume specific ways of carrying stuff(e.g. how would you carry stuff while walking normally and still having hands free to do whatever). Like in case of staffs, it wouldn't assume having all three bundled up in your hands or under armpit and more like having them vertically strapped on your back or something which would be somewhat awkward way to carry them. In case of corpse you probably would rather put it in wagon or something, but if you were to carry it and have hands free, you'd either have to put it over shoulder or piggy back it.
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"Weight" never made sense as the thing which limits what you can carry anyway. A strength 25 PF1 character (so a 12th level character who started with an 18 and has a +4 belt) has a max heavy load of 800 lbs- which means they can carry three 225 lb banquet tables. To get down to a medium load- put down one table, and if you are only carrying one banquet table you're down to a light load.
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The rule is to sum up the bulk value given in the equipment chapter, not to chose some lower than the encumbrance threshold - and yet some pregen like Fumbus use the former rule instead of the official rule.
Have you actually looked at the revised pregen sheets?
They corrected a lot of errors.
It wasn't that they weren't using the rules. It was that there were mistakes on the sheets. Mistakes on a lot more things than just bulk. Mistakes that have been corrected.
Paizo uses the bulk rules on every single pregen. To say that "even its creator doesn't use it" is simply wrong. They've used it on every pregen since PF2 was released.
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Paizo folks themselves don't use the bulk rules - eg see the pregen characters.Every pregen sheet has a line for bulk. It's the first line in the Equipment section.Yes, I can as well write "4B 7L no encumbrance" or some other random value on my character sheet. But this is not the rule. The rule is to sum up the bulk value given in the equipment chapter, not to chose some lower than the encumbrance threshold - and yet some pregen like Fumbus use the former rule instead of the official rule.
Check the errata for the Core Rulebook, they fixed some of the discrepancies.
Edit: ninjaed by CrystalSeas
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I find it works better if you just think of it as inventory slots rather than encumberance.
Agreed, I think that should work for most people, and demonstrates abstract mechanics actually pose no problem at all when approached as such.
It's actually REALLY simple: you can put to piles of things next to each other that have the same bulk and it's 100% clear they aren't equal. The game is trying to tell me it's as easy to carry a knocked out person as it is 3 bo staffs.
So what? You can put two piles of things next to each other with the same weight, yet they can have other characteristics important to ease of carrying.
A weight based system tells you two objects are equally easy to carry simply because they have identical weight, when that clearly isn't realistic in the end.In a game full of abstact mechanics, why is it problematic to use another abstract unit focused on player character functionality?
They don't have to, they can just have examples of range of objects as reference. Why isn't this a problem for video games with "inventory units"?I honestly wish Paizo didn't even given the "general rule" of 1 Bulk = 5 to 10 pounds.They HAD to as people have to be able to figure out the bulk of unlisted items: that's were confusion comes in as people have to be able to PICTURE what a unit represents. People should be able to imaging how hard it is to lift a 1 bulk bag like they can imagine a 10 pound one.
Given an unknown item of 10 bulk, how do you know how much of that bulk is weight? Unwieldiness? Size? Who knows?
Can you use 2 people to move it? Is it the same bulk [as unwieldly] if 2 people carry it? Again, who knows.
You don't need to know it's weight, it told you all that matters re: how your abstract character mechanics will interact with it: it's bulk.
If it has conditionally variable bulk, it will explicitly state that, otherwise it has the same Bulk ease of carrying.A weight based system is no more clarifying of those range of factors, in fact it's less clarifying.
You're just fixated on this one factor despite lacking inherent relation to other abstract game mechanics, because it feels "concrete".
But this "concreteness" isn't actually relevant to game mechanics, or even real world carryability/impact from "encumbrance".
You scream that it doesn't conform to "realistic" units, despite a pound-based mechanic being no more "realistic".
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It kinda reminds me of how HP is abstract system, but people don't really care about how realistic it is that you can get hit 100 times by by sword and survive if strength 10 character keeps rolling 1 on d8.
Or how you die instantly if you are beheaded or your heart is stabbed, but you can somehow survive coup de grace in 1e if you are really lucky :p
But yeah, lbs always bothered me especially when it came to stuff like figuring out "How DO you carry super heavy water clock treasure item" in otherwords players starting to argue with gm that mechanics say they can do so without being encumbered while gm is like that makes no sense because of how strangely shaped the item is(that is real example from one ap :P).
I'm not a huge fan of bulk really. It seems just as abstract as previous editions just going by weight and not taking into account size and shape. That said eh It's fine for general purposes you just have to not take it to seriously. It's not to hard to use regular weight if you want just use the same weight as pf1 had.
(and yes darn colonizers but we've had that thread many a time before already.)
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Play Death Stranding (aka Norman Reedus & His Amazing Foetus) and you will instantly understand bulk.
It is probably the only thing you will actually gain understanding of from playing that game though.
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It can't be both.
Of course it can. Rysky and I can both be correct.
There were errors on the pregen sheets. There were errors in the CRB. Both things happened. Both things got corrections.
And the corrections made to the CRB were reflected in the corrected pregen sheets. The unrelated errors on the pregen sheets were also corrected.
What do you mean "heavier"? Medium size creatures are only 6 Bulk, making the buggest, burliest hulk of a man you might play in this game 60 pounds at most.
In the meantime, I am IRL 5'9" and weigh three times that. Even turning such a hulking man to stone wouldn't make him as heavy as me.
I think there might be a gaming purpose behind Bulk as applied to creatures. The game presumably wants to encourage PCs to haul unconscious allies out of combat, so the Bulk of a creature is less than the Bulk of equipment of similar weight might be. Realism is not a factor here.
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This thread increasingly feels like a living throwback to the circa 2010 days when some folks genuinely believed that the more you insult people and the more you paint yourself as the biggest smartypants in the room (bonus points for the use of phrases "<something> fallacy", "ivory tower game design" and "you're no longer part of this conversation, dismissed") the higher are the chances that developers will send you a personalized letter thanking you for your insightful contributions and offering you credits in the next book.
I thought that the long line of forum gravestones would have taught any newcomers that there's only one way this ends but alas, it is indeed human to try and step into the same river twice.
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I am not about to calculate the volume of the items I want to put in my backpack vs my backpack.
Ooh, then you're gonna hate my hyper-realistic RPG called How Much Can You Carry. We take into account the weight and volume of every object, plus its location in a backpack, to calculate the amount of torque it exerts on your shoulders and lower back. Everyone is required to keep a detailed sheet of what order everything was put in, to prevent people cheating by only taking 6 seconds to remove an item from the bottom of the backpack.
Each collapsable item like flasks has its hardness and hit points tracked separately, and each round you have to roll a jostling check to see if items had shifted around and crushed other items based on the weight of items around it in the backpack.
I mean, the saving grace of bulk is that the part of it that doesn't make sense is easy enough to handwave away as it generally lies outside of the "expected heroic story" where characters carry things they think they will need, and not 70 bucklers in order to prove a point.
The game rules are not meant to be a universal simulation of the reality of the diagesis, such a system would be extremely cumbersome if not impossible, they're designed to streamline the sorts of situations the game is likely to produce. It's entirely possible for natives of Golarion to walk exactly 7 feet, even though the game rules only allow for increments of 5, after all.
Specifically, you never actually need to calculate the bulk of that sofa the PCs are hauling up the stairs- it's enough to say that carrying the sofa makes you encumbered until you put down the sofa.
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I think a better option than Bulk would have been to list out weights and volumes for each item, and impose limits on both instead of only weight. They sort of did this previously with e.g. bags of holding.
That way, everything would still be in logical, easy to use units, and the need to have something other than weight represented could have been met.
Bulk as a system is unusable for me and the games I run since it's excessively abstract for very large objects and the values for big creatures are nonsensical.
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I can pretty much guarantee that if a game asked me to track volume AND weight I'd never use that system with even greater ferocity than I discard weight alone when measured in some abstract illogical rollerocaster of silly units. Pounds are bad, cubic feet are borderline ridiculous.
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People talking about the bulk to weight ratio, it is clearly for quick estimations rather than a hard world building rule -laughs- (hence the estimated bulk heading). There for GMs to have some guidance for coming up with answers on the fly (which is inherrently less intuitive, as sherlock points out in the quote below).
Me, I have been using both styles of equipment tracking for years between various systems and rule options.
I like running games with abstractions as in my experience players are either not reliable enough at tracking smaller details or just don't want to. Abstracted systems generally fare better and I loath hand waving encumberance.
As a player. I generally rather detailed encumberance and item tracking (including item damage/wear and in depth travel logistics). But only if the GM is enforcing it, which generally runs into issues from why I like running abstract.
3.X style equipment tracking (and weight values for that matter) always bothered me anyway, like a half measure. Not realistic enough to make me happy, granular enough to not be used by many.
I think a better option than Bulk would have been to list out weights and volumes for each item, and impose limits on both instead of only weight. They sort of did this previously with e.g. bags of holding.
That way, everything would still be in logical, easy to use units, and the need to have something other than weight represented could have been met.
Bulk as a system is unusable for me and the games I run since it's excessively abstract for very large objects and the values for big creatures are nonsensical.
I get it, and I would even be happy for it to exist as a future variant rule. But that hits the same wall paizo hit with the old system, too fiddly for most groups and will get handwaved. There was never a world where a system that made it more complex to track would end up in this game baseline.
I guarantee if the designers used kilo-gerbils per meter per hour as unit no errors would ever occur at any level.
Societies who use that unit have much less need for editors. Actually only professors of editing have jobs teaching editing science.
Some think their trade is useless. But if their society collapsed and all knowledge was lost of the kilo-gerbil per meter per hour,
the ancient art of editing would once again become critical to finding and correcting the unending chain of regrettable errors.
I can pretty much guarantee that if a game asked me to track volume AND weight I'd never use that system with even greater ferocity than I discard weight alone when measured in some abstract illogical rollerocaster of silly units. Pounds are bad, cubic feet are borderline ridiculous.
Please... Cubic inches. 1728 per cubic foot. Thank you very much.
I think there might be a gaming purpose behind Bulk as applied to creatures. The game presumably wants to encourage PCs to haul unconscious allies out of combat, so the Bulk of a creature is less than the Bulk of equipment of similar weight might be. Realism is not a factor here.
Absolutely, and I believe the same applies for food and water, the latter especially is particularly heavy per volume and carrying more than 2 days supply is a significant burden in reality. Making them so light even a relatively weak character can carry a week's supply obviously services a perceived game need or convenience. Anyways, enough of this subject...
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Absolutely, and I believe the same applies for food and water, the latter especially is particularly heavy per volume and carrying more than 2 days supply is a significant burden in reality. Making them so light even a relatively weak character can carry a week's supply obviously services a perceived game need or convenience. Anyways, enough of this subject...I think there might be a gaming purpose behind Bulk as applied to creatures. The game presumably wants to encourage PCs to haul unconscious allies out of combat, so the Bulk of a creature is less than the Bulk of equipment of similar weight might be. Realism is not a factor here.
I get why they did it, but I am likely to change rations to L per day. Rations for a week sound like an easy thing to track until people start splitting up ration use with subsistence rolls and trips to town.
Talking about weird unnecessary niggles... I am somewhat excited to see them errata torches/candles and stipulate how long they last for officially. :)
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you never actually need to calculate the bulk of that sofa the PCs are hauling up the stairs- it's enough to say that carrying the sofa makes you encumbered until you put down the sofa.
How Much Can You Carry Society Scenario #1-01
Fed up with the constant death and destruction caused by artifacts at the Blakros Museum, the Absalom City Council has ordered the museum condemned and its owners evicted. Pursuant to ACC Code 2.7.18(e), the council must solicit competitive bids for the hauling and disposal of Non-Qualified Mixed-Magic Artifacts. Can the PCs estimate the aggregate Bulk of the NQMMAs in 10 business days or less?
Primary success criterion: NQMMA bid cost ratio of less than 1.5 gp per standard human workhour using floating disk, or less than 2.5 gp per standard human workhour without floating disk.
Secondary success criteria: one or more of the following:
- NQMMA bulk estimation error does not exceed 20% of values listed in Table 1.
- No more than 10% inclusion of Qualified Mixed Magic Artifacts in bid.