Encumbrance

[Amal Shukup]

Does anyone actually use these rules and carefully watch what is carried? Getting a light load with any kind of armor is very difficult.

Yes it is.

But we certaibly use the rules. Most of us use Excel based character sheets that do the totalling for us - which helps.

I think its really important to enforce though - Fighters can't handwave extra Skillpoints or anything because they elected to use Int as their dump stat. Mages et al shouldn't get to handwave their carrying capacity after using STR as theirs...

It does spawn some interesting behavior:

Extradimensional Luggage: Hew's Handy Haversacks and the ilk become exceedingly popular - I've seen a characters swap a PAIR of +1 Keen Shortswords for one once...

Beasts of Burden: My Sorcerer/Fighter divides gear between himself, his warhorse and a pack horse, such that all and sundry have but light loads. Even mounted. Other fun ones I've seen include the Halfling with three Riding Dogs, animated corpses pressed into service (ew!), and an animated object (a Chest on casters) that followed the party around. I think that idea was stolen from Pratchett, though

Followers/Hirelings: Labor is cheap. A 'Trained Hireling is only 3sp/day. Make it GP (bunch in advance, left with family), and throw in a 10th share of loot found and people will follow you ANYWHERE... Nothing like a crew of baggage handlers to bring real authority to area of effect attacks. I hardly ever play an Ironclad character (Fighter/Paladin) without at least a Squire to help with the armor. One guy had a Squire, two men-at-arms, a couple of servant types, the Warhorse (who never carried anything but the Fighter), and two packhorses in his 'train'...

The ONLY way to travel

'Droppable' Packs: Really important gear is carried in hand or in belt pouches, but heavy non-critical stuff is carried in a pack that gets dropped as soon as combat threatens. I've even had a player take ranks in Craft - Leatherworking so he could justify being able to modify the shoulder straps to release as a Free Action (he drew plans...). Sucks when the party has to flee.

Leaving Loot behind: I know... Weird... But players are reluctant to be the 'Treasure Mule' at the best of times, and sometimes they'd rather just 'leave it'. They usually intend to go back and get it later, but they seem to forget a lot...

A'Mal

 

[the Jester]

Recently we had a new character join the halfling party I run. He was a dwarven monk with an insane amount of equipment (matrerialistic monk?!) that he dragged around behind him in sacks. He had everything- I mean, firewood, food, extra clothes, rope, spikes, tons of junk. He eventually bought a cart to haul it all in and the party sorcerer ended up hitting it with a scorching ray and paying the monk for all the stuff he burned up, just to get things moving. It was really rather amusing.

 

[ThirdWizard]

We keep track, but mostly the party has turned the barbarian into their own "pack mule," to which he grudgingly agrees because he doesn't want to walk at less than half his speed just to stay with the others.

 

[Len]

Does anyone actually use these rules and carefully watch what is carried? Getting a light load with any kind of armor is very difficult.

Yes, we use these rules. Yes, it's hard to get a light load with armor. Yes, I'm making my second character in a row that's trying to do exactly that.

 

[PaulGreystoke]

Yes, if you actually use the encumbrance rules, STR is an important stat to a lot more character conceptions than just the melee tank. We learned this lesson in our 1st 3E campaign when the players of the human ranger & the halfling rogue actually toted up their encumbrance on the char gen demo the first time. Both players soon realized that they needed to bump up their STR in order to carry the gear that they considered to be standard, even after they had pared that list down quite a bit. And after being hit with a few STR drains, the players were reluctant to equip up right up to the Light load limit, worried that one STR drain would throw them over the encumbrance limit.

In a campaign that uses the RAW encumbrance rules, using STR as a dump stat is a dangerous gambit until character wealth makes encumbrance reducing equipment a viable option.

 

[Shin Okada]

Our play group use Encumbrance rules as written. HHH is a very populer magic item.

 

[thalmin]

Note that carrying limits increase with every STR point, this is a good place for those odd numbered stat scores to go.