So! Let's spend a bit talking about everyone's favorite forgotten rule that never goes away: Encumbrance! Yay! I promise there's a treasure waiting at the bottom of the article.
Get your calculators and E-5 encumbrance registration forms out. Have at least two pieces of government issued ID ready.
First off, what is the purpose of encumbrance?
1. To limit the quantity of treasure that can be extracted from a dungeon in a single trip. If you want to extract more weight than your bodies can carry, you need to start hiring retainers, buying carts, renting donkeys, etc. It forces the characters to handle the dungeon crawl and adventuring as a business and gives them problems to solve and things to spend a portion of their treasure on.
2. To alter movement speed in tactical combat, which D&D is born from and thrives upon, based on a character's gear loadout. Platemail guy can't carry as much before stumbling over his own toes, but the unarmored schmuck is going into a fight unarmored. It gives players difficult choices when managing their gear loadout. What matters more? Mobility or gear?
3. It gives players a weight budget to interact with and manipulate their environment. Whatever remainder of your encumbrance limit you have is how much you can move around the game environment in your inventory.
4. It controls what kinds of animals can actually act as a mount for you. It is absolutely possible that a heavy character with a light burden is, all together, a heavy burden for a single horse. Got a halfling carrying a lot of stuff? That mastiff he wanted as a steed might not be running so swift. This, too, is why the special travel pace rule is important: If your move speed is reduced, so is your overland travel pace, and a party only moves as fast as its slowest character.
5. Travelling in the wilderness is hard. Aside from needing all that camping gear, fire starting stuff, food provisions, and clean drinking water, you also need room for combat gear and medical equipment- and room to spare for treasure on the return trip! How far you can go without getting killed is limited only by your level and your inventory. Planning a trip becomes as important as the journey itself.
Basically, it intentionally complicates the game to force players to make decisions by giving them problems to solve.
Now that's all fine and dandy, but I can already hear people complaining, "what does any of that have to do with telling a story?" and the answer is nothing at all. We aren't talking about RP right now, we're talking about the G that so many GAMERS forget about. Encumbrance is a GAME element. Roleplaying is a part of the game, but not the basis or central purpose for it. If it was, we'd all be playing Polaris and nobody would remember what D&D even is.
So here's the problem with encumbrance rules:
1. All they get used for is arbitrarily penalizing the player and limiting what they can do. With the modern trend focusing on player autonomy, this is the antithesis of egocentric-autonomy-fun.
2. Tracking encumbrance is time consuming and fiddly, so it often falls to the players to track their own. (Red flag that there's a problem, right there. If the DM is too lazy to make use of a system, why should it fall to the players to manage it?)
3. In 5e, encumbrance limits are so high, they are positively unrealistic. Most characters never need to worry about it. Since it's so inconsequential, it seems a waste of effort to track. Even in editions where the numbers made some kind of sense, a weight limit doesn't actually account for the logistics of how you are carrying all of this stuff. It's just abstractly levitating in your invisible inventory pocket like this is some JRPG.
4. Nobody wants to work hard at penalizing themselves so everyone lies about their encumbrance. People feel justified, because they intuitively know that the encumbrance system is just a little bonkers anyways and that the DM doesn't like managing the system himself, so they know they won't get audited.
So long as tracking it is a pain in the ass and there is no reward in it, encumbrance will always be neglected.
So there's two parts to the solution:
1. Give a benefit to tracking encumbrance. The benefit should not be arbitrary or forced. Giving a random bonus for player buy-in is like bribing your players to so something they don't like. The benefit should be directly derived from the process.
2. The process must be streamlined and simplified so that it does not slow, interrupt, or interfere with play.
I don't have a house rule that does that. (I'm working on it.) In the meantime, here's a chart that calculates the encumbrance limits for every STR/Size combination, because you'll need it if you plan to roll with me as your DM. Don't worry, I track it for you. I have a chart for that.
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