Taking it Easy with Encumbrance in D&D
Jan. 25th, 2024 04:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerWhen I posted What's Your Role-Playing Game About? a few days ago I ended with a dangling question, "How do we spend more time doing [the fun stuff] and less time on bookkeeping things like counting coins and encumbrance?"
The simplest answer is you just ignore the bookkeeping stuff. That's what we did in the first D&D game I played. It was decades ago, we were teens and pre-teens, and my cousin was GMing. Or DMing, as it was called back in the day. It was a total dungeon crawl. We had sacks of gear, sacks of loot... heck, I'm not even sure we had sacks to put it all in... and It. Didn't. Matter. We had a great time regardless.
As I got older I got more into the system rules of D&D. As I've noted before it's one of the "crunchier" (rules-heavy) games in the roleplaying spectrum. Maturing me loved the simulation aspect of all the mechanics. One of them is the system of encumbrance. You count up the weight your character is carrying, in pounds or in "coins" in really old versions, and look up on a table that indexes your carrying capacity by your strength score, and see how that impacts your movement rate. Even better, various versions of D&D had optional extra mechanics for even more precise movement rates. Every pound counted!
After several years of that I realized an obvious truth: Encumbrance is a drag. It's a drag on the players' effort and the pace of the game. Yes, it's simulation-ist, and it does matter if you're moving at a 60' rate vs., say, half that, but how often does the difference between 60 and 55 really matter? Fortunately D&D also has rules to keep it simpler, and I've embraced those in my current game:
Related: Instead of spending time selling loot, "I know a guy, Tony."
The simplest answer is you just ignore the bookkeeping stuff. That's what we did in the first D&D game I played. It was decades ago, we were teens and pre-teens, and my cousin was GMing. Or DMing, as it was called back in the day. It was a total dungeon crawl. We had sacks of gear, sacks of loot... heck, I'm not even sure we had sacks to put it all in... and It. Didn't. Matter. We had a great time regardless.
As I got older I got more into the system rules of D&D. As I've noted before it's one of the "crunchier" (rules-heavy) games in the roleplaying spectrum. Maturing me loved the simulation aspect of all the mechanics. One of them is the system of encumbrance. You count up the weight your character is carrying, in pounds or in "coins" in really old versions, and look up on a table that indexes your carrying capacity by your strength score, and see how that impacts your movement rate. Even better, various versions of D&D had optional extra mechanics for even more precise movement rates. Every pound counted!
After several years of that I realized an obvious truth: Encumbrance is a drag. It's a drag on the players' effort and the pace of the game. Yes, it's simulation-ist, and it does matter if you're moving at a 60' rate vs., say, half that, but how often does the difference between 60 and 55 really matter? Fortunately D&D also has rules to keep it simpler, and I've embraced those in my current game:
- Wearing light armor or no armor? You walk at normal speed.
- Wearing medium armor? You walk slower.
- Wearing heavy armor? You walk slower and you can't run.
Related: Instead of spending time selling loot, "I know a guy, Tony."
