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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9111640" data-attributes="member: 7030042">Yes, but what I'm getting at is:(1) To the best of my knowledge, the outstanding majority of D&D fans seem to find D&D spellcasting to be a mechanic that produces interesting, enjoyable, and engaging gameplay - or at least that produces satisfactory gameplay as regards compelling-ness, enjoyment, etc. - in a way that counting up encumbrance of gear by pounds simply does not.(2) Tying back to my earlier post in this thread, this is a case where the way in which D&D is designed to cater to different gameplay preferences creates mechanics that interfere with the kind of gameplay being sought by each disparate player base. The game makes you count up encumbrance of gear by pounds, annoying anyone who wants to play in a more heroic mode and not have to worry about how much they're carrying, but it also provides spells and magic items that make it easy to simply bypass or ignore those limits, annoying anyone who wants mundane resource management to actually matter in play.(3) Even some OSR or OSR-adjacent games that intend for mundane resource management to be a more central part of gameplay are also abandoning pound-weight encumbrance (or its OD&D/Basic D&D cousin, coin-weight encumbrance) for more abstract systems, such as slot-based encumbrance, because they're finding that pound-weight encumbrance isn't producing gameplay that their players are finding interesting, engaging or compelling. I expect that has to do with scale - e.g. it's tiresome and tedious to count up dozens or hundreds of pounds/coins, but much more accessible and, seemingly, immediately visceral to count up a half-dozen or dozen "slots/points" of encumbrance.(To my mind, this point about scale is not unlike how many players have found it tiresome to count up all the many circumstantial modifiers that could apply to attack rolls, damage rolls, or defences in 3.X or, to a lesser but still real extent, 4e.)To my mind, D&D would be better served with:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">An encumbrance mechanic that supports heroic adventure gameplay (mostly by getting out of the way of such gameplay);</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">An encumbrance mechanic that robustly supports survival gameplay and mundane resource management;</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">One of (1) or (2) is the core/standard rule and the other is an optional/variant rule - probably (1) if my guess about how most tables are playing the game is correct;</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Eschewing pound-weight as the encumbrance mechanic.</li> </ol></blockquote>

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