Encumbrance

One of the least actually tracked things on a character sheet is encumbrance. In D&D, a character is limited to carry a certain amount of gear based on their strength. Carry too much gear and you start suffering from penalties. In practice what happens is this is largely ignored except for perhaps character creation or when the character wants to haul away something especially large. Eventually the players will acquire Bags of Holding and the whole encumbrance issue is ignored. Fourth edition is particularly good about this and allows bags of holding to be very easily created at low levels.

Encumbrance is a kind of book-keeping thing that computers are actually very good at. It is interesting to look at how computer games have handled this. Games basically use the idea of 'slots' or 'weight' with the majority seeming to lean towards slots. Some games do away with carrying limitations altogether and characters can carry as much as they want without limit. When 'weight' is used it magnifies the importance of strength and penalizes weak characters in often unplanned ways. For example, a strong character can carry plenty of magic potions while a weak wizardly type can't. Another way to model encumbrance was slots. Each item could take one or more slots. When items took multiple slots the effort of encumbrance also became one of moving items around to maximize space.

Inventory management is typically not one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game. So should you play with encumbrance at all? Should you make it so that your players quickly obtain magic items that nullify the issue of encumbrance? Or should you track every pound so that when a character loses strength from some effect then are also hindered in terms of movement?

The reason I was thinking about encumbrance is because it is can be greatly improved by a computer progam managing it. Otherwise it is too much a pain in the ass. Often what happens is that players don't even keep track of who is holding what. When character X is swept away by a river they all assume that he wasn't carrying any treasure at all. When Y is hit by a Ray of Enfeeblement you either spend a few minutes figureing out what they are actually carrying and how much it ways or you just skip it due to the hassle. Another hassle is figuring out how much stuff weighs. If you figure encumbrance precisely you have to put a weight to every objet the characters might pick up. How much does a silver crown weigh? How much does a platinum sceptre weigh?

But it is worth tracking at all? Or should you just give the players unlimited carrying capacity either by just ruling it or by letting them have bags of holding? What does encumbrance add?

One thing is that it limits what they carry. I have noticed that many players carry around two sets of armor. One as a set they can sleep in, their 'pajamas'. Also players will often gather the weapons of fallen foes. They just defeated 20 well-armed warriors and they will want to collect and sell their gear. Using encumbrance helps to limit this craziness. Encumbrance also comes into play with strength draining effects. If you can produce numbers easily it is cool to say that a character becomes encumbered, but can avoid a penalty by tossing away his bag of treasure. More precise encumbrance tracking also leads to knowing who carries what. Often in combat the players will suddenly want to pull outsome potion or scroll, but may not have divided stuff up. Or if a player if forced to abandon equipment you need to know what he had and what the others had. Encumbrance can also be a plot point. I remember in one adventure my party discovered a vast treasure trove in a hidden valley. It was so vast that we couldn't carry it away. We ended spending a great deal of it on teleports to get it all out. We ending up leaving the copper and silver since it just wasn't worth it.

Some day I would like to whip up some javascript to handle encumbrance easily. If I had this I would still want items like bags of holding in my game, but I would set it up so that item retrieval from such a bag was time consuming. That way the character could make choices about what was going to be available in battle without having to worry about total encumbrance so much. Without this though, I don't see too many problems with the 4th edition answer to encumbrance, easy to obtain bags of holding that let you draw out anything easily.