After 4 sessions of my new campaign, Ravonn’s Tower, I’ve grown dissatisfied with the Encumbrance system and how it relates to this specific campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, the slot system is good. It scratches the part of my brain that wants to have organization matter and does a good job of rewarding characters who optimize for carrying gear and restricts people who want to carry everything. Supposedly. The characters are all still low level, poor, and I don’t see any pressure being put on their inventories.

At the moment, encumbrance and inventory don’t matter. And when I project to the future, I don’t see that being different, for the particular style of campaign I’m running. Making sure your pack is optimized for a trip matters if you’ll be out for months. But when you get back to town in a day, then it’s not satisfying.

And as another consideration, I’ve been onboarding a lot of people to this campaign, and the current system is a lot. This problem gets better the longer I spend training players, but what if I replaced the system with a better, simpler system? Less mental load, faster onboarding, more smiles all around.

What’s worth carrying?

What is an encumbrance system trying to do? I see two things to talk about, although there could certainly be more.

First, Verisimilitude and Simulation. As part of the ongoing quest to make the fictional experience that we spin up seem as real as possible, we want there to be some restriction on what people can carry. You can’t carry it all, IRL. We also recognize that characters with a high Strength should carry more. There’s a lot of Verisimilitude that informs how Encumbrance is implemented and it’s hard to pin down all the ways it effects it.

Second, like all mechanics, we want there to be interesting choices for the players. The problem with the current encumbrance system is that it has choices, but they aren’t interesting. Without pressure, players aren’t having to choose to leave things behind. Nor are they having to decide what they take. And that’s not the desired outcome.

What is interesting to track? Food, Ammunition, certainly. Amount of rope, number of healing potions? Maybe. Which weapon to take? Ehh… Does my character have a bedroll? Of course, why wouldn’t they?

There’s a lot of equipment that feels strange to care about. The basic, everyday carry items that a character in this world would have but don’t really have an effect mechanically. Armor polish, soap, toilet paper, a tinderbox. None of these niceties change the game, but the only difference if you have them or not is in the roleplay of the situation. And it feels weird to have these be included in encumbrance. If I’m not asking characters who are sleeping if they have a bedroll on their inventory list, then tracking such an item with an encumbrance system is a tax on roleplay, and that’s not the desired outcome. (also, it makes the species that don’t sleep, like Elves and Warforged even better, and that is not on.)

What if our encumbrance system ignored tracking all of the stuff we didn’t care about, and only tracked the things we did? What does that look like?

The Loot Slot System

Each character has a number of slots, called Loot Slots. They have a number of these equal to their Strength Modifier (minimum 1). A feature like Powerful Build gives you an extra slot.

Characters also have certain items that is assumed they carry with them:

• A Light source, aka a Lantern full of Oil or 3 Torches or 2 pints of Oil
• A Quiver of 20 Arrows (or similar container for their specific ammunition)
• A Rope
• 5 days of Rations
• 1 Waterskin

If you carry more than the assumed amounts of the above items, it takes one of your Loot Slots. All other bits of gear, assuming that you have sensible amounts of them, don’t have a need to be counted.

As the name indicates, picking up something “valuable” takes a Loot Slot. The number of slots an item takes depends on the size, weight, and fragility of the item.

You can choose to strain yourself, carrying more than is comfortable. Carrying 1 Loot Slot more than you’re able makes you Lightly Encumbered, which drops your speed by 10, your AC by 2, and slows the party down when taking the Travel Expedition action. Carrying two Slots worth of extra items makes you heavily encumbered, which drops your speed by 20 ft, your AC by 5, and slows the party even more when Traveling.

This is the basics of the rule. There are more edge cases for me to find, I’m sure. Thinking about my players, I know I need to decide where a Healer’s Kit would need to go. I think it’s something extra, so into a Loot slot it would go. The list above are items that I think all characters would have, but are things I don’t want players to have a limitless supply without sacrifice.

The one exception to that is the quiver. I don’t think that every character would have a quiver, but I don’t want to penalize archers by making a part of their basic kit cost a slot. Yeah, that’s a better way to describe the list. The basic kit of sorta consumable items.

It took me a bit of back and forth to decide, but Spell scrolls would go into a Loot slot. A scroll case allows you 5 scrolls for the singular slot, iirc. If scrolls matter, then potions have to matter as well. A Loot slot can hold 3 potions of mixed types.

No clue if there’s other things I need to add, but I reserve the right to detail things later.

Conclusions and Reflections

I don’t think this is a perfect Encumbrance system, but I think it’s better. I think this gets me what I want without being too much of a cognitive burden on the GM or players. I won’t know how it plays out, until I run it a few times. Might as well start today.