In a recent post I suggested letting a group of starting players pick their gear from a pool of cards. The miserly way I tailored the gear available made the whole experience pretty hardscrabble. Since then, I had the idea of flipping that on it's head and making the players wealthy, petty gentry.
They have as much stuff as their porters can carry. You would need to decide how many porters, beaters, link boys, personal assistants, personal guards and pack animals allowed to the group as a whole. And I think you would have to shift the whole delve from one of trying to find some valuables to a kind of difficult, big game hunt. So, for example, the party is trying to kill a cave bear, or leucrotta or something.
In this kind of scenario resource management would still be an issue-- nets might get torn, lots of food consumed by the hirelings, etc-- but it would be less about survival and more about problem solving. Should you dig some pit traps? Drive the beast into spikes or nets?
You would probably need to have lots of gear cards on hand, because money is not an issue; if the party wants 200' of rope then they can give that to their porters. I would also want to make cards for outrageously expensive stuff that you wouldn't consider normal dungeon gear, like fireworks, cages, and jugs of tranquilizer.
And what to do after the hunt? This could just be a fun one-off, or you can start tallying the hireling costs-- maybe the family has finally tired of the extravagance of this bunch of layabouts-- so players will have to sell off remaining equipment and decide whether to keep any hirelings and how many.
Here is a draft sheet of how you might handle beaters:
I figure they will be average strength and be focused of flushing and driving game, but can still carry a few things.
Here is a sheet for porters:
They're strong, or know how to balance loads well, and they all carry clubs for their own defense. The check boxes can be used to show hit points. Yep, this is basically treating them as beasts of burden (see here and here), but you are wealthy and and consider that their lot in life.
Of course you don't need cards to do this, you could have lists of gear printed out, index cards for each hireling, and have players write down what they want to take, but the cards would make the process more visible for everyone sitting at a table and also quicker, being able to shift gear from place to place without having to erase.
The idea is that players can load their elephant up with cargo or passengers. Each square is equal to one manifest sheet worth of cargo. Players can write the names of characters riding in those boxes, or they
can put an identifying manifest label for a portion of cargo like "provisions" or "caving gear."
Each manifest sheet has 60 slots at ~7.5 pounds a piece, or 450lbs. That means a rider is figured at an average 225 pounds. I'm okay with that figure for simplicity's sake. For every big armored knight, there might be a hobbit or practically naked mage. That also means old jumbo here can carry ~1800 pounds. An elephant might carry more but with the mahout and howdah I think it's a reasonable figure.
You'll need to print out four manifest sheets for every riderless pack elephant. I divided them into two halves for further convenience. I'm hoping that will make tracking supplies for a big expedition easier.
The four silhouettes are meant to show the normal limit of riders. Players could potentially double the number, but the pictures of tiger hunts I kept seeing didn't have very many riders per elephant. I think I would keep the limit four for un-impeded combat and such. More riders might have negatives to missile fire or be unable to cast spells because of the press of bodies and jostling.
Here is an attempt at a mammoth, as requested. It isn't quite as symmetrical because I was trying to avoid obscuring the silhouette:
I feel like the silhouettes should be scruffier-- prepared for ice age conditions. (Did I ever tell you that I loved the Dragon magazine article about Ice Age D&D? Makes me want to create a blizzard/Arctic travel mini-game.)
Every time you want to stow something on one of your many pack apes, just fill in a slot. Once the slots are all full, the poor thing can't carry any more.
The slots are meant to be roughly 7.5 pounds, or half a stone. There are 45 here which works out to ~337 lbs. This is based on someone with 18/00 strength in 1eAD&D being unencumbered, with the idea that the ape will be able to climb, swing, and move around freely with this much weight packed on. Thanks to Darnizhaan for that strength suggestion.
The grey checkboxes can be darkened when you determine the beasts hit points. Then if it happens to take some unfortunate damage, cross off a box for each point. There should be enough boxes for the hardier carnivorous apes (~5HD) if that's how you roll.
And here is a bonus simple pack Donkey:
Donkeys come in many breeds, but this is aimed at the smaller, burro types to distinguish it from the mules. With 12 slots they can hold ~90lbs. They should also be able to get by with very little food, though stubbornness might be an issue.
In talking about the possibilities making these pack animals less abstract could open up my buddy said "Man, I'd love to play a game where I had to eat my donkey." I'm working on it, haha.
I'd prefer to give you tools to make your own beasts of burden. But I can't think of an easy way to do it. I thought of just making up a sheet with slots on it that you could darken to the number you want but 1) that's essentially lined paper, and 2) it gets rid of the main point of these-- letting players tell easily what beast type it is documenting and how much it can carry in comparison to the others. So for now I guess I'll just keep making beasts that tickle my fancy or that you mention.
So I went back and added spots for name and owner as you can see. The checkboxes are for hitpoints. You darken the outlines of all the hitpoints a particular animal has. There was some variation between rule sets so I just put down 24 for mules and camels. That's enough for 3 eight sided hit dice and you can use less if your ruleset uses d6 hd or whatever. In combat you pencil off checkboxes as they take damage. You could even put little asterisks or colored marks between boxes to flag when an animal would try to flee or go berserk (thanks to Carjacked Seraphim Jim for that idea).
Here is an elephant with a mahout and howdah meant for tiger hunting. I couldn't find any pictures of elephants straight up carrying loads. It seems there were either used for transport like this or bulldozers moving logs around with their tusks. So I'm not sure what to do with them. I have some ideas-- maybe put silhouettes for how many armored adults they can carry, or insets that will blow up to full cargo sheets of 450 lbs each.
But I'm not sure how much Indian elephants can carry. Such a simple range to want to find and so hard to find online. Same with gorillas, I saw that they were anywhere from 6 to 13 times as strong as a man. That's arm strength though, doesn't mean you could even fit all that weight on their back. I'm thinking they might only be capable of carrying a smaller pack, something closer to the mule, but come with the extra capabilities of opening doors and bending iron bars like a beast.
If you have suggestions of carrying capacity for different creatures, or know a place that has them let me know. I keep looking at the AD&D Wilderness Survival guide, but they gave 500 pounds for a mule which made me doubt their judgement (some mules could do that, but I think the average mule was smaller). How about dinosaurs or mythical creatures?
Oh, and the elephant has enough boxes for 10.5 eight-sided hitdice. If that isn't enough for a particular ruleset let me know, but I wanted it to look aesthetically pleasing too.
_________
Late night addition: It's pretty cool learning how these different animals are good at different things maybe this is the first step to having these kinds of creatures more real in my world. For example, llamas carry less than all the others but eat less and are even better than mules on treacherous terrain. They are fine in the cold too.
I'm not really happy with the llama's silhouette, but that's the best I could do after hours of looking. Only 10 slots here which gives you ~75 pounds. Again, bigger individuals could probably carry more, but we're shooting for an average to take extra rough trails into account, etc. Not sure how many hit points they'd have. I just left the mule's checkboxes because they are symmetrical.
Here's an attempt at a simple list based encumbrance for dromedary camels. With 55 slots that are roughly 7.5 pounds you get a little over 400 pounds. This is an average-- bigger camels would carry more and most camels might carry more but for limited distances.
I like that is sort of in scale with the mules. Players should easily see that the camel can carry more. This will be harder to continue if we get a creature that needs more than a page for all its slots. I suppose I could do two sides of the page or something.
With the slots divided up into groups, players with lots of beasts of burden won't have to track every little thing, they could just have certain supplies in chests or bags that are kept track of and put on the beasts loaded, pretty much like a real expedition would.
I've had this in mind for a while and had some time to sit down and make it today. The idea uses list based encumbrance. Players write down things they store on the mule and once all the slots are filled the mule can't carry any more. I had to look back at my old encumbrance post to see that I settled on 7.5 pounds per slot-- a mid point between heavy weapons and lighter daggers. That means with 26 slots per mule they can hold ~195 pounds which is about right. You can assume 5-10 pounds for a pack saddle and harness etc.
I've long wanted to standardize how much sacks, bags, and chests can hold in my game. See The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms for some recent posts on this. If I do that, I can not only tell players how many coins they can stuff in a sack but know ahead of time how many slots a full sack would take up. (This is probably amusing to folks good at calculating in their heads, but I figure it will help players visualize their choices too).
I think I've been saying 30lbs of coins in a sack, so that would mean 4 slots and ol' Henry here could carry 6 and a half sacks of coins. Or, if you are using 10 coins to the pound, 1950 coins.
I want to do this for camels and dog sleds and maybe weird stuff like gorillas too. Also, it would probably be helpful to have a visual key showing how much various container can hold. I think for simplicity's sake I will make the slots they hold equivalent to the slots they contain. That way you can just toss your bags on the mule, or tie on a chest without worrying what the chest weighs.
I'm just realizing it would probably be good to put a line for names and characteristics of different mules and maybe even simple meters for wounds or exhaustion.
The thing about a list based system of encumbrance is that you can use any lined piece of paper, index card, or scrap of napkin you've scrawled some line across. Very DIY. But, if you want something a little ritzier to give your players I made another sheet that might be more generally useful.
I may be too conservative on my total weight. So, going with Swords & Wizardry's 75 pounds with no movement penalty, I've made a new encumbrance record sheet. Going with my previous post's 7.5 pounds per line, you have 10 lines. Going with the system of a new line for every 2 points above average Str, there are for dotted lines beneath that strong pcs can use and others ignore. I put one hireling on. Pdf here.
Looking over S&W's weapons list, most entries are either 5 or 10 pounds. So, it might be more convenient for you to make the lines represent 5 pounds each. That would mean this record sheet has too few lines. But I think 7.5 per line would probably work out better. Hopefully for every spear a character carries she'll have a dagger and they'll balance themselves out.
Choose How Many Lines You Want
I wouldn't worry about it too much, the point is to find a number of lines that feels about right to you as a DM. And, of course, there's always room for rulings if player's abuse the system. I remember back when I was an embryonic gamer, my DM's DM had a player that had so many magic swords they joked he wore them like a skirt. Yeah, that would be too much. Ten suits of chain or something would be crazy, but I want to be as hands off as possible and let the lines do the work where they can.
Coins As An Exception
So . . . is a backpack full of 300 gp one "item"? I would say, no. Everything is an item until you get to coins and then they slop across the lines. You fill all the containers you have, adding their weight to the total.
But if you are using that standard D&D 10 coins equal 1 pound, then every two of my lines is 150 coins. Pretty easy. You would probably want to have some standards worked out for container weights/capacities (does any one have a list of these already?). The max our poor hireling could carry is 750 gp. But hey, that's a good profit :)
Update: I think need more coffee. I probably should have put spots on the pdf for the chracter's max load possible and how far they can carry it. Maybe later.
So, I left off with the idea of a binary system of dealing with how much crap characters in adventure games can carry: little enough that it doesn't matter, or enough that they can barely carry it.
Again, this is an abstraction. If you don't have a problem calculating movement rates for all pcs/npcs, then that's cool. I personally don't want to deal with calculations if an abstracted system will give me similar results-- namely the feeling that people have limits to what they can carry, and that because of this they'll have to plan ahead if they expect to find heavy treasures, or else make hard decisions about what to leave behind.
A Full Pack Hinders
Now, I think a simple addition to the binary system would help along those lines and not cost much in complexity: if you have at least one slot left in your pack, it doesn't affect you in any way, if you have a full pack you can't run or jump.
I'd have to see how this works in play, but I think it might prevent the binary system from feeling overly simple. I'm guessing it would put pressure on players to always have a little room left in their packs.
If you wanted a little more grit you could give pcs with full packs a -1 to all combat rolls (thanks Dan), or require them to have to make the standard rest breaks twice as long / twice as often (thanks anarchist). Both are simple enough that you could probably get away with using them without confusing players or slowing down play.
Carrying, Just . . . One . . . More . . . Thing . . .
Okay, what if their packs are full and players still want to carry something? I don't have a brilliantly elegant idea for this, I was just thinking pcs could carry up to their Str in 10s of pounds for a distance of their Str divided by 2 in 10s of feet. So an average adventurer with a full pack finds a bag of coins and wants to carry it with her. She can carry up to 100 more pounds, but only 50 feet. So she could drag it or schlep it 50 ft and then have to rest, huffing and puffing.
Someone with exceptional Str would be able to carry an additional 180 pounds 90 feet. if that doesn't sound like a lot, remember that I was going with an average pack weight of 45 pounds + 4 x 7.5 for exceptional strength. Which put the total weight at 255 pounds. That isn't too far off of the Swords & Wizardry maximum limit of 300 pounds.
How many of these over-encumbered carries can a pc make? Again, something I'd have to try in-game to see how it goes, but I might just let them keep doing one after another, except the noise they make grunting and continually dropping the weight would call for a wandering monster check each time.
Character Sheets
The cool thing about having an inventory list based encumbrance is that you can tailor a character sheet to be ready for the assumptions of your campaign. If all your fighters start with leather armor you can cook that in to your sheet and have it ready to go. If all your mages have to carry extremely heavy spell-books, same thing.
Here is my workmanlike draft of how I might incorporate my starting equipment with this system:
What everyone gets by default is listed. I currently give them a choice of three other items which can be entered on the first 3 lines below the default gear. That leaves them three lines for junk they find in the dungeon, more if they're strong.
This could actually simplify my starting equipment down to "Here choose three things off this list."
Since most of my players like hirelings and end up with at least 2, it would probably be a good idea for me to work up a page similar to the draft in the last post. But it would have an inventory list for one pc and lists for 3 hirelings.
Bags of holding, mules, Tenser's floating discs, could all be easily worked up into sheets with a certain amount of available slots too.
Anyway, the details can be worked out. I'm more excited about the way ignoring encumbrance effect on movement rates could streamline play.
If you've followed my blog this summer, you know I've been struggling with the tangle that is movement rates/encumbrance. I came up with what I thought was a pretty streamlined system of checkboxes to keep track of these. But two things happened, 1) I realized that the whole idea of more weight slowing a person's pace is wrong and 2) James Raggi came up with a much more elegant way to track encumbrance.
Short Distances, Not Slow Speeds
So, 1 first. This is one of those things that seems so intuitive but just isn't right. First, yes, carrying weight can slow your pace, but the amount your pace slows is nowhere near that given in most rpg rules. Check out these world's strongest men carrying the Husafell stone:
That thing is 300 to 400 pounds. Notice how they are walking at about 3 mph, in other words, normal walking pace. You could do this experiment yourself: go to the local building supply store pick up an 80 pound bag of ready-mix concrete and carry it around the store. I'd wager, if you can pick it up, that your problem won't be how slow you're moving, but how far you can go before your tired muscles give out completely. At some point the weight we carry flips from "I don't really notice this" to "Just a few more steps, just a few more steps." So I'm proposing a binary encumbrance model:
you carry it with no effect on your movement rate
or, it's so heavy you can only carry it a limited distance.
A Normal Load
First, we need to know what is the weight that flips us over to too heavy. In real life this has all kinds of influencing factors including body weight, height, and genetics but we'll keep it simple. We'll only vary it by the Strength attribute, 18's like the guys in the video will carry more than the rest of us. But to start let's hold strength steady at 10. What weight can be carried with no penalty?
If you go by Swords & Wizardry, the most a character can carry without suffering movement rate penalties is 75 pounds (5 stone). If you use my revised starting equipment pack, all characters will start with ~25 pounds of gear (1.5 stone). That would leave them with ~3.5 stone leeway.
To complicate things, I actually think the 75 pounds is much too high. My vague recollection of backpacking into the sierras is of having ~60-70 pound packs, and those were heavy, and those were modern packs made with aluminum frames, plastics, and designed to put weight on your hips. I'd be much happier if we lowered the default weight carried to ~45 pounds (3 stone). You could easily make this higher or lower. I would keep it multiples of 15 to make conversion to stones simple, say 30, or 60 pounds if those feel more right to you.
But, after the fast pack, that only leaves 20 pounds, you might think. But remember my fast pack is giving them almost everything they need going in to the adventure. If they find treasure they can always ditch some rations, oil, etc. Also, don't forget those lovely non-combatant hirelings, what do you think they are being paid for exactly?
Encumbrance as a Limited List
Okay, now 2. Anyone who has played crpgs has probably wished for an encumbrance system as simple. The packs in, say, Baldur's Gate had a certain amount of room and items took up a certain amount of that room. If you're a freaking pack rat like me, you would spend a lot of time in that game juggling gear, trying to decide what to throw out, learning what had the most value per weight/size. Encumbrance was a real part of the game experience. But how to translate that to the non-computer world where calculations get in the way of time spent making quips about portable holes? James Raggi proposed slots on a character's sheet. Each line could have one piece of equipment written on it. As these slots are filled characters pass predetermined encumbrance levels affecting their movement rate.
Now, first, this is a genius idea of abstracting levels of weight to lines on a sheet of paper. It, like most elegant solutions, is a matter of granularity; yes a sword weighs more than a potion, but that is not the level of detail we want to mess with if it requires us to do math every time we pick up new gear. An item takes a slot. That's it. (okay, you can actually fudge a little here, and I might, making oil bottles and ammo come in standard sized bundles in your world, to allow for say 3 bottles of oil on a line).
But, if you combine this with my idea above I think we can make this even simpler while still giving a feeling of verisimilitude, about things in our worlds having weight and people having limits. So, I would limit the lines available for gear to total our flipping point weight of 3 stones.
A sticky decision to make is, roughly, what weight should each line on the encumbrance record sheet represent. Again, you could vary this to your taste, but I think 7.5 pounds (1/2 stone) is a good middle position between a heavy mace and a lighter dagger, averaging things out in the end.
So, 45 pounds divided into 7.5 pound chunks would give us 6 slots. Players in my games would only have 3 slots left. We can round these numbers off and be a little sloppy, it's supposed to be an abstraction.
Strength Differences
But what about characters of different strength? The easist solution would be to give pcs more slots or more stones according to their strength attribute modifier. This could probably work for Labyrinth Lord or Osric, but S&W and oe have more limited bonuses. I want to keep this simple, how about add a new slot for ever two points of strength over 10, remove a slot going down the other way. So, someone with 18 strength would have 10 slots.
I propose hirelings, unless a trait noted otherwise would be average 10. You could make them weaker than average if you wanted. Here is a draft of what a record sheet using this system might look like:
Pdf is here. Hirelings on the bottom. You can see the players have 6 lines available with 4 additional dotted lines for those lucky enough to have exceptional strength.
I think I'll stop here and post tomorrow about what to do when the weight goes over the normal load.
My brain is all afroth with ideas to post about and I'm trying to limit it to two posts a day, but I've been working on some revisions on my houseruled player handouts and wanted to post them in order to share.
I use Open Office and save to pdf, but I'm happy to post .docs, or .odfs if anyone is interested, the idea is to share something useful.
First, I mentioned going back over my fastpack-- the starting equipment I just give players in order to get play rolling. Because it added up to a lot of weight I trimmed amounts back and actually listed the weights. It should be much less likely for a normal strength human to start play partially encumbered after utilizing this list.
Get the pdf here. And, you'll need the weapon list for players to choose from . I've got all the blunts arranged together for easy cleric weapon choice and weapons listed in order of damage. Its pdf is here.
The other thing I finally accepted is that my hireling traits spur was difficult for people new to using it to read. I was seduced by symmetry. I loved having the progression from the smallest die to the largest in a nice triangle.
But you have to read the d4 with the d20 which are opposite ends of the chart, and without knowing that the chart can quickly confuse. So I've revised it. I moved dice that work together beside each other, I labeled what the rolls were for, and touched up a few other things.
I hope that will be clearer even if it looks a little more cluttered. Get it here.
I think the "remarkable" entry for physical features should probably be something else-- its too similar to "odd" and most of the other adjectives are remarkable anyway.
If you have any ideas for replacing that or how to make any of these handouts more legible or useful please feel free to share. Thanks.
First, here's an old character sheet I ran across while digging through old stuff.
That's my crude attempt at a backpack, bag, and figure from ~15 years ago. This was my buddies character. And you can see it doesn't really work, everything is sort of haphazardly jumbled in the backpack. But still an attempt at keeping track of gear encumbrance and location.
Also, I was tallying up the weight of the fastpack I give characters at start of play and ... arrgh, they would all be partially encumbered just by carrying the starting gear!
I don't want to get too hung up on the detail, but I don't want to just completely ignore what they're carrying either. I've been thinking/working on a simple record sheet. Thanks to Roger the GS of Roles, Rules,and Rolls, I looked to the Outdoor Survival counters as models to give players a easy graphic representation of how weight affects movement.
Here are the originals:
Here's what I did with them:
And here are a couple mock ups using the new silhouettes:
An encumbrance movement key.
And encumbrance checkboxes for average human strength (15 pounds per box).
One of the things that got me jazzed enough to start a blog was Delta's idea of using stones for encumbrance. I've mentioned it before, but it seemed like an elegant way to simplify and add detail to the game (the later because you could use encumbrance at all, with its complexity few people seem to).
But even tracking weight in 15 pound increments doesn't seem to make it easy enough to engage encumbrance at my table. I know it's easy enough for me to stop and explain, even tally up the player's gear for them, but I don't want to bog things down, and there's enough going on for new players to digest anyway. So encumbrance has pretty much been handwaved in my sessions so far.
But it seems encumbrance is essential for a resource management game and I want the drama of decisions players will have to make when they have to leave some treasure behind. So how to do it. Here's an idea: checkboxes.
The idea is, if you have something visual and simple enough, you might be able to tell players to track their own encumbrance. Basically check a box for every stone of gear your carrying (my equipment list already has weights in stone so they don't need to convert.) Also, players will clearly see when they click over into a slower movement rate.
To keep things simple you could abstract this enough so that you have one set of checkboxes for all characters, but that really short changes the exceptionally strong and sort of defeats the purpose of having a strength stat. I decided to split the difference and try five, average strength and two categories above and below.
Here's a pdf of what I mocked up. I wanted to put little silouhuettes of a figure stooping as it carried more and more weight, which I think would clearly communicate what the boxes meant- carry more, move slower-- but alas, artwork has been thwarting me today (I was looking for several other things with no luck).
If I use this it means I'll have to have several sheets of these ready and cut the appropriate one out for a player when a new character is made. Messes up the simplicity of just using blank index cards but maybe the price is worth it.
I 'll have to try it out and see if its still too cumbersome ;) for play.
