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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9112346" data-attributes="member: 42582">Another, more serious, though about this.Over the past 18 months or so I've GMed around a dozen sessions of Torchbearer. This game has a strong survival element - the PC equipment lists include food, and cloaks, and woollen sweaters, and shoes - except 3 of the 4 PCs in the game don't have shoes, because they wore them out trudging through the wilds and haven't been able to afford to replace them.Part of how the game works is that it uses slots for inventory (head, neck, 3 torso slots, hands, feet, 3 belt slots, 2 carried slots), and has simple but effective mechanics for overloading (the Labourer skill).It also has a uniform resolution system, and it's easy for gear to factor into that (having appropriate gear adds +1D to your pool).Its weather rules take up half-a-dozen or so pages: you roll on a season-appropriate chart, and then look up the effects of the result. In our last session there was rain, and as per the rules for rain I required the players to roll Health checks for their PCs. One got +1D because his PC was wearing his sweater (1 torso slot).Journey generate easily-calculated "toll", which has to be bought off (a little like 4e D&D Dark Sun's "survival days") - that's why three PCs have no shoes, because they sacrificed their shoes to buy off toll last time they went hiking, rather than take debilitating conditions instead. And they have not been able to replace them since (there is no cobbler in the village about the Wizard's Tower to sell them shoes, and they haven't tried to buy any direct from a peasant or villager).Another thing that happened in our last session was that the sweater-wearing PC preserved 5 portions of fresh rations (mechanically, the player succeeded on a fairly challenging Cook test). This reduces the number of inventory slots they take up, and means they do not spoil and require discarding when the PCs return to town.The Cook PC is also the toughest fighter in the group (a Dwarven Outcast, for anyone who knows the system). Generally fighting is more exciting than cooking, but the system doesn't make the latter inherently less interesting or mechanically weightier than the former. They both sit within a consistent, more-or-less uniform system of PC build and action resolution.I've set all this out in a bit of detail to make the point that it is perfectly possible to have a wonderful RPG that makes exploration, inventory, trekking, and the like key to play (though Torchbearer doesn't track ammunition - the quiver is just another piece of gear that takes up a belt or torso slot, and running out of arrows/bolts/stones is something the GM would narrate as an equipment-related complication, like having your tinderbox spill out of your satchel and fall through an upper-storey window during a struggle, which is also a thing that happened in our last session). And I do think Torchbearer is a wonderful, brilliant RPG.But it's not the only one. I love Agon 2nd ed too, and Agon is at absolutely the other end of the spectrum. PCs have a "look", but no equipment list.And there are great systems that use gear, but not equipment lists - eg Marvel Heroic RP. And systems that have equipment lists but don't really care about personal logistics at all, like Prince Valiant.The issue for WotC, with 5e and its revision, is not a shortage of possible approaches to RPG design in this space. I agree with [USER=7030042]@Composer99[/USER] that the problems for WotC are reconciling D&D tradition (which has used weight rather than "slots" to handle inventory) with the fact that most people don't want logistics to matter, but do want magical equipment to matter, while there are a small handful who want something more low-level-Gygaxian.It's a customer satisfaction problem rather than a design problem in the abstract sense.</blockquote>

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