OSR What's your preferred encumbrance system?

[Celebrim]

I've never found an abstraction that works because abstractions seem to think that characters don't pick up things in the dungeon.

I suppose something like Darkest Dungeons slot system would work, but it's ultimately about as elaborate as tracking weight because it has all sorts of stack sizes. Ditto something like Diablo's little puzzle board, which is the system that made me realize all traditional cRPGs are defined by being inventory management simulators. So Mass Effect 1 is a cRPG, but Mass Effect 2 is just a third person shooter.

 

[UnplayedRanger]

None of them. I dislike tracking it as a player, and I certainly don’t have the time to do it as a GM.

Slots (Shadowdark/Vagabond) are close and simple, but still annoying to me personally.

 

[Gus L]

None of them. I dislike tracking it as a player, and I certainly don’t have the time to do it as a GM.

So I totally understand this ... I think enjoying encumbrance rules depends a lot on both the type of game one wants to run and the design of the adventures/dungeons one is using. It's not a simple thing of picking an encumbrance system and things working well.

It's a larger issue of having a game where:
a) What characters are carrying matters
b) There are meaningful decisions around dropping things to carry out treasure.
c) Turn/Timekeeping matters (because of light source/supply exhaustion and the risk of random encounters associated with encumbrance)
d) Encumbrance is limiting and requires player choice (so limit the number of henchmen, remove bags of holding etc).
e) There are rewards for carrying stuff out of the dungeon.
f) One is running a dungeon game where dungeons have enough rooms to get lost in/explore/run out of torches in (this also suggests making magical light have a cost ... e.g. not a cantrip).

If one isn't running that game there's little reason to use encumbrance.

 

[John Quixote]

The character sheet that I posted a while back has an inventory page that illustrates how I prefer to approach encumbrance.

I really dislike the level of abstraction one must swallow to use most slot-based systems. So I stick to the rules as written, use the weights in the book, and keep encumbrance exactly as detailed as the game-system does (tenth-pound coinweights).

But I strive to make encumbrance visual and unavoidable, because players really don't like tallying or tracking it, and I really don't want to be auditing it. Hence, my inventory sheet, which does the tallying and tracking for the player, and which lets me audit at a glance.

 

[touc]

I made the attached hybrid slot item sheet for our upcoming Hackmaster 5E (AD&D variant) campaign (graphic is from D&D 3E). This gives value to STR while accounting for the fact humanoids only have so much space on their body to carry stuff. Note: Hackmaster rules specifically exempt armor from encumbrance; each has their own effect on movement, etc. If this were adopted for OSR, etc., that would need to be remodeled.

I've playtested and used a variant in D&D 5E successfully as its weights and STR calculations have a linear relationship, increasing in increments of 15 pounds per STR point, making that system extremely easy for slots. It's a bit trickier for HM as encumbrance skews more strongly to the extremes, so there was some sacrifice of the specific rules to make this work. Still, tracking individual weight without a computer program is a nightmare, and a bit unrealistic (where's the 18 STR fighter carrying all that gold AND his two-handed weapon, and btw backpacks aren't friendly for fighting), making slots our preferred goto.

 

[conankeep]

The character sheet that I posted a while back has an inventory page that illustrates how I prefer to approach encumbrance.
...
But I strive to make encumbrance visual and unavoidable, because players really don't like tallying or tracking it, and I really don't want to be auditing it. Hence, my inventory sheet, which does the tallying and tracking for the player, and which lets me audit at a glance.

That's very interesting!
do players draw the items, cross the weight cells out, or just write the item over appropriate number of cells?
Would love to see an example of a "live" sheet.

Would you say it saves time by bypassing the arithmetics or adds an overhead due to actual note-taking procedures being more taxing?

 

[conankeep]

hybrid slot item sheet for our upcoming Hackmaster 5E (AD&D variant)

That looks very nice, and easy to understand. Could you elaborate why you call it a hybrid system? Do you mean that the number of available slots is not fixed and is a function of STR?

 

[John Quixote]

That's very interesting!
do players draw the items, cross the weight cells out, or just write the item over appropriate number of cells?
Would love to see an example of a "live" sheet.

Would you say it saves time by bypassing the arithmetics or adds an overhead due to actual note-taking procedures being more taxing?

Figure the right number of cells, mark out a box by putting little tick-marks ⌜⌝ ⌞⌟ in the four corners, and just write the name of the item (plus whatever other notes) normally. Keeps things easy to erase if need be, and I've never noticed any problematic "overhead." New players take to it fairly quickly, probably because the visual aspect is similar to a lot of video games' inventory systems.

 

[delericho]

You decide what level of encumbrance you're willing to accept (unburdened, encumbered, heavily encumbered), and then your chance of having any specific thing you need is equal to your Strength score plus 30%/50%/70%.

Kender gain a +15% bonus for anything small enough to fit in a single hand, but everyone around them suffers a -5% penalty.

Armour, weapons, and rations are tracked separately.

 

[conankeep]

You decide what level of encumbrance you're willing to accept (unburdened, encumbered, heavily encumbered), and then your chance of having any specific thing you need is equal to your Strength score plus 30%/50%/70%.

Kender gain a +15% bonus for anything small enough to fit in a single hand, but everyone around them suffers a -5% penalty.

Armour, weapons, and rations are tracked separately.

So like a "quantum inventory" system. That's interesting but doesn't it lead to frustration in OSR games specifically when PCs' survival might depend on prepping for the dungeon?