D&D General Weapons should break left and right

[Micah Sweet]

Sorry @Hussar I don't want 'more interesting supply tracking', I want no supply tracking period.

No worries. There are plenty of games that don't bother with it, and it's easy to remove such rules at your own table.

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of the most compelling inventory management systems I've seen comes in the computer game Darkest Dungeon - for those unfamiliar it's a cosmic horror dungeon crawling game where the player manages a roster of heroes, choosing 4 each week to traverse procedurally generated dungeons to recover loot which they need to upgrade their home base, unlocking upgrades for the heroes which are then needed to challenge more difficult dungeons until they are ready to face the eponymous Darkest Dungeon itself. They begin each traversal by purchasing supplies and end each with (hopefully!) bags full of loot. It's a model we can recognise in structure if not detail from a fairly stereotypical D&D-like RPG.

The inventory system has a few major factors

• Slot based - every item stacks to a different amount (so food stacks to 12 units, torches to 8, firewood for camping to 1, loot gems to 5, "permanent magic items" (trinkets) to 1 and so on) and is unique in a slot
• Limited slots - you have 16 total slots to hold both provisions and loot
• Any inventory item discarded is lost
• Any loot obtained must be picked up before moving on from an encounter is lost (there's a slight exception to this with camping, but it's quite minor)
• All provisions have defined and useful mechanical effects
• Running out of provisions leaves the party very vulnerable
• Provisions are (fairly) expensive and cannot be stockpiled between runs - any left at the end are sold at a fraction of their cost
• Obtaining more provision in a dungeon is possible but unreliable - plus it often relies on additional provision usage (medicinal herbs to make safe tainted food, for example)
• Possibly most importantly, It is not possible to significantly escape the confines of the system (there's a couple of minor things that allow you to increase the stack sizes, but that's it) No bags of holding, no hirelings carrying loot, no mules or carts.

These together are largely utterly unrealistic - purely gamist constructs. Why shouldn't I be able to put a ruby and emerald in the same pocket? Why can't I hang on to my unused torches and shovels? Why can't I leave caches of supplies or loot behind and pick them up later (we might posit wandering monsters clearing them up, the game has them, but it happens immediately with no chance of failure)?

Taken together however, they produce an experience that I think evokes the thoughts and behaviours that we'd like to experience with an inventory system

• Preparation is important - too few supplies is dangerous, too many is wasteful. The right mix of supplies is also of critical importance.
• Rationing of supplies is important - it's often possible to obtain extra loot by non-critical use of a provision but doing so may lead to danger later when the provision is needed. Conversely, not taking advantage of opportunities risks the provision being wasted
• Choosing what loot to take and what to leave is important - because of the stacking rules picking up a ruby might prevent you from picking up a jade, but if you never find another ruby and find several jades, you'll have missed out on an opportunity for more value
• Choosing when to discard provisions in favour of loot is a continual battle - there's typically more loot in a dungeon than you can carry out, but if you wait until your provisions run out naturally then you risk leaving behind valuable or rare pieces that you might not find again.
• You are incentivised to use provisions - any left over are lost so there's no hanging onto a potion forever for "just the right time"

Overall, this results in an experience where the player can learn and exhibit skill at play and where they are continually faced with weighty and fairly difficult choices. It also invokes what we might feel is a fairly "realistic" set of pressures - our heroes, in a treacherous and deadly environment scrabbling for what resources they can, leaving dead weight behind for the valuables they seek.

To bring it to the topic of the actual thread, it's worth noting that weapon degradation and ammunition tracking are not part of this at all, but in theory could be.

The question is therefore - could we develop an inventory system that's of fairly low overhead at the table (so the cost of using it is fairly low) that produces the same kind of compelling questions for the player and evokes the similar "realistic" concerns for the characters?

I love that game! Not realistic in specifics, but the overall effect feels pretty verisimilitudinous.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I would say, for Inventory managment, the system by the Alexandrian - the inventory by Stonehenge 5E Encumbrance by Stone – Part 2: The Sheet is a good starting point for simplicity and Upkeep. It could be improved (and I have some mock ups for improve inventory sheets that are this slot based), but the Idea that the action of writing down your item also informs you visually immediately of how much "encumbrance" is left, is quite good in comparison to the current system, where you always have to add up the weight of all the stuff.

But even that will fall flat in current D&D, because tracking inventory and encumbrance doesn't do anything.

If you really track encumbrance dutyfully, it will not impact gameplay at all in 95% of the time and in the last 5% it just gives you a penalty for being over encumbred.

So tracking encumbrance is mostly just busy work.
It is meaningless.
To change that there need to be benefits of tracking encumbrance. Like ... if you wear less than 1/4 of you carry capacity, you gain 5ft of movement speed and gain advantage on dex saving throws or something.

You need different boni/malu at different %ages of carrying capacity, so tracking the difference of carrying 20% and 30% or 90% of you max. capacity does impact game play.

Because right now, tracking encumbrance has no impact, unless you carry more than 100%.

If you have to make choices about what to carry and how much, it has impact.

 

[M_Natas]

If you have to make choices about what to carry and how much, it has impact.

But in 5e you don't need to.make that choice, because your carrying capacity is usually so high that it doesn't matter in most campaigns. A strength 10 character can carry 150 pounds.
A strength 16 character 240 pounds.

Starting equipment weighs from 37 pounds (for wizards) up to 134 pounds (fighter with heaviest things).
Backgrounds give additional things ranging from.10 to 20 pounds.
That leaves most characters with about at least 100 pounds kf carrying capacity left at the start of the game.

So a level 1 character can carry and additional ... 100 arrows (10 pounds) 20 days of ration (20 pounds), 4 full waterskins (2 days of water, 20 pounds) and still have 50 pounds to spare for ... 2500 coins.

Like, unless you force a party to carry all the water it needs, you usually will only run into encumbrance limits when you find a treasure hoard.

 

[Gimby]

If you have to make choices about what to carry and how much, it has impact.

This is generally true, but as the DD example shows it can rely on how strict those requirements are to determine the scale of the impact compared to other things in the game. If I'm limited in what I can carry, but that capacity is large enough that I'll be able to cover all largely foreseeable challenges then the impact is low. If in DD I had 100 inventory slots but the game was otherwise the same, it'd be very different in practice.

Let's imagine I have two games where I am attempting to cross a desert in a 10 day trip. In game 1 I can carry 10 days of rations without penalty, in game 2 I can carry 100 days of rations without penalty.

In game 1 I need to carefully husband my resources, think very carefully about taking a detour to that ruined temple, will struggle if I use food to distract predators. In game 2, I can do all this fairly blithely. In both cases I won't be able to feed the group of escaped slaves who need 200 days of provisions unless I accepted the penalty, so the choices have had an impact on both games, but they are decidedly less impactful on most cases of play in game 2 rather than game 1.

I love that game! Not realistic in specifics, but the overall effect feels pretty verisimilitudinous.

Absolutely, which is why I think the versimilitude of a game is not reliant on any specific rule or feature, but the emergent effect of them all together.

 

[GobHag]

Couldn't you just play a game that operates in your preferred approach already, or play D&D that way at your own table? Why does D&D have to change for everybody to suit your desires?

Lanefan also wants to change modern D&D by making it return to old D&D, I have the right and desire to want it to change too.

 

[GrimCo]

And for paltry sum of 51gp you can buy wagon with pair of mules and don't bother with weight at all. They can pull some weight, you don't need to lug everything on your back, don't need to walk either.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But in 5e you don't need to.make that choice, because your carrying capacity is usually so high that it doesn't matter in most campaigns. A strength 10 character can carry 150 pounds.
A strength 16 character 240 pounds.

Starting equipment weighs from 37 pounds (for wizards) up to 134 pounds (fighter with heaviest things).
Backgrounds give additional things ranging from.10 to 20 pounds.
That leaves most characters with about at least 100 pounds kf carrying capacity left at the start of the game.

So a level 1 character can carry and additional ... 100 arrows (10 pounds) 20 days of ration (20 pounds), 4 full waterskins (2 days of water, 20 pounds) and still have 50 pounds to spare for ... 2500 coins.

Like, unless you force a party to carry all the water it needs, you usually will only run into encumbrance limits when you find a treasure hoard.

To me that just sounds like a poor encumbrance system.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Lanefan also wants to change modern D&D by making it return to old D&D, I have the right and desire to want it to change too.

Perhaps neither of you (none of us, really) have the right to force their preferences onto others, whether we agree with those preferences or not.

 

[GobHag]

Exactly, so my wishes and dislikes will continue to be spew out by me--one of them is to advocate for D&D to shed more of it's legacy systems.