How strict is your DM with mundane equipment?

[Valdur]

What is your experience on the DM's handling of ordinary equipment like rope, crowbars and stuff? Do the players have to buy it to have it, and do you enforece encumbrance?

When the players say to you "okay we tie a rope around each other before crossing the ledge" and you know they don't have rope listed on their equipment list, do you call them on it? As much as I would like to, it seems to me to be getting into too much detail for most player's likes. But at the same time it seems like I'm giving them a free pass. After all, they can spend all their money on expensive armor and weapons if they don't have to worry about equipment. It also means encumbrance isn't a big deal and makes the tough decision of what equipment to bring or whether to use a pack animal easy.

How is this handled in your game?

 

[el-remmen]

If its not on your sheet you don't have it.

I expect players to keep decent track of encumbrance, but only remind people to check it when they either pick up a bunch of potentially heavy stuff, I know they have been weakened (e.g. by a shadow or the like) or when they level up.

 

[briac]

If its not on your sheet you don't have it.

I expect players to keep decent track of encumbrance, but only remind people to check it when they either pick up a bunch of potentially heavy stuff, I know they have been weakened (e.g. by a shadow or the like) or when they level up.

This is pretty much how we do things. We don't have to necessarily write down mundane items, but if we want to use them we have to. We don't keep track of encumbrance unless there is something obviously going to weigh us down or we are weakened somehow. We also don't keep track of basic items if we are doing a one-shot game, to much of a waste of time for something we are only playing once.

 

[der_kluge]

If its not on your sheet you don't have it.

Ditto.

Even goes for magic items and such.


I am a bit anal about mundane equipment, but even the mundane stuff can cover a lot of ground. Last campaign, one of the guys use PCGen to build his character, and he went all crazy with his equipment. He bought the absolute maximum amount of stuff he could buy without encumbering himself. And he spent most of the money he had. So, he actually min-maxed his equipment! I'd never seen anyone do that.

But, he'd bought things like disappearing ink, dice, locks, lockpicks and stuff that might not be all that easy to acquire under normal circumstances.

Some of that stuff, I didn't actually allow him to have. I mean, they were in a tech level 4 town, so a "long sword" and "chainmail" were actually hard to come by in this town, let alone things like locks and disappearing ink.

 

[The Shaman]

If its not on your sheet you don't have it.

Same here.

And if it's on your sheet, it has a weight that counts toward encumbrance.

 

[Kurotowa]

If its not on your sheet you don't have it.

Always. Of course, that's why every group I've been in, we end up with a spare Bag of Holding we just fill with every bit of mundane equipment we might ever need. 3000gp is a small investment if you take it out of the party warchest, and you'll never have to worry about having enough rope or a spare blanket again.

 

[genshou]

I really like the Wealth system because of the rule about items on hand. It makes players worry less about "min-maxing their equipment".

I mostly play online, so we use an Excel spreadsheet I designed to track encumbrance. Updates to weight carried can be done in real time at the press of a few buttons on the keyboard.

And if all else fails, get a wagon!

 

[Herobizkit]

Having mundane equipment on our character sheets is more of a running joke with us than something that needs to be enforced. It all started when one of our players from way back wrote "Enough Food" on his rations portion of his character sheet. Made us laugh a lot.

Same for Encumbrance. In my history of 15+ years of gaming I've not once tracked encumbrance. If you're carrying a crapload of money, sure, or something really big and/or awkward, otherwise it's a moot point.

 

[Bront]

I prefer to keep track of it, but I'm not too picky about it. As long as it's not too unreasonable, I'm not worried about encumberance, but if you start picking up lots of things...

 

[Ruined]

Well just to chime in from the opposite crowd, my groups tend to handwave a lot of the mundane equipment. We don't do as much dungeon-crawling as the typical campaigns I've seen, and we really don't load down unless we know we're going in for heavy forays underground. Even then, we just spend X amount for 'tools'. No 10' poles, a reasonable amount of rope, etc. Our players tend to have more fun working on the other facets of their character than encumberance.