T w e n t y S i d e d
Observing that the “pack” in D&D is a much-abused simplification is not going to result in forehead-slapping revelations on the part of anyone who has played the game. We know this, already.
Still, it is amusing to see how eagerly these compromises are embraced. Even “hardcore” gamers are happy to treat the average knapsack as a soundproof bag which will distribute the weight of the contents evenly over the body of the wearer. I guess it’s good that geeks don’t go outside very often, or someone would notice this and come up with a set of complex knapsack simulation rules that would make GURPS look like checkers.
And there’s another fun thing that never changes. Nothing like the old ‘fuck it, you all have a bag of holding’ approach. Recently though I learned about a fun alternative method for the backpack problem called the ‘cubeventory’. The idea comes from this video from Zee Bashew, where he explains the process of converting the inventory into a visual puzzle similar to Resident Evil or Diablos inventory systems.
It doesn’t entirely cover all of dads complaints here, he was theoretically right when he mentioned that packs would slow you down and make it harder to swordfight. But something he forgot to take into account is the kind of pack you use for long distance travel isn’t the same as the kind you sling over your should for the airport. The weight distribution is different, usually made to spread the weight out as opposed to making one shoulder do all the lifting. Not that it wouldn’t be bulky, but it definitely is made not to crush you if you need to carry it for a while. Those are definitely still pretty rough for super long distances, there’s a reason people use donkeys and horses. But it’s still possible a party would be able to hoof it without one as long as nobody comes up with mechanics for chronic back problems. As for the swordfighting issue, you can probably assume that half a surprise round is the party having to drop their bags and get their weapons. Or when they’re on the offensive it may be fun to make them stash their things somewhere. Which would also give them a better idea of what they actually need to carry on-hand versus what’s just random trash. Overall having a big heavy bag for your players to carry isn’t as far from the realm of realism as he thought.
Plus, you don’t get called a coward for telling them they can’t steal the couch.
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A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
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Trusting the System
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Third-last panel: the very first computer rpg I’ve played was “betrayal at krondor”. It’s the only game I’ve seen where food does spoil in your inventory.
For a while, in most games I played after it, I made sure to check regularly the state of food in my inventory, having no idea this was the exception and not the rule.
Betrayal at Krondor wasn’t my first, but it was an early computer rpg for me, and spoiled me. They handled several more advanced concepts in a very simple, easy to learn way. I think it made me consistently try to make all future computer and tabletop rpgs more complex than they were designed to be.
Food spoils in your inventory in Dragon’s Dogma 2. And herbs/flowers wither. I’m always emptying my packs of rotten fruit and meat.
It also has five tiers of encumbrance. I can barely carry more than my weapons and a few curatives without getting encumbered.
In Baten Kaitos, a JRPG on the Gamecube, food doesn’t just spoil in your inventory: it spoils in your deck, and can do so during active combat. Everything in the game is represented by cards, which is. . . diagetic (I think I have the word right), as in-universe magical cards are used for storing and moving stuff around. You have both a limited number of re-usable cards for what in most game would be “key items,” stuff for solving dungeon puzzles or fetch quests, and then also your main inventory of weapon and healing and misc cards that go in your combat decks.
Both types of card can have invisible expiration dates. There’s some really nice flame sword cards in the first shops of the game which you might load up on, which later will mysteriously vanish and your inventory is now full of garbage short swords (and also you spent all your money, sucker). If you load up your key items with bits of cloud on one route in case you need more for puzzles later, you’ll find them full of just water later, and that water will eventually become stagnant water. And so on.
But the big ones are your healing items, which for most of the game is food. Which will spoil. You’ll be halfway though a dungeon, or even just entering a boss fight, and suddenly all your bamboo shoots are bamboo sticks, bananas and strawberries and fish have turned into rotten food, grapes into wine (which is good!) and wine into vinegar. It’s not until late in the game that you can get tea and sacred wine that don’t have timers on them. So first playthroughs always tend to have at least one super hard mode moment where all your healing disappears- which can be followed by more as you buy a whole new pile of stuff, which then all rots at the same time.
The savvy player makes a point of spacing out their food purchases as much as possible to avoid catastrophic spoilage.
The Baten Kaitos speedrun for 100% completion takes over a week, because it takes a real-life week of game time to spoil an item until it turns into the last item needed for 100% completion.
Wow, and I thought the Twilight Princess low% was bad. That one takes 19 hours, and most of it is spent watching Link stare at rupees in order to abuse a glitch where the “staring at an item” animation doesn’t loop perfectly, causing Link to move backwards an infinitesimally small amount on every loop. Which causes him to (eventually) clip through a gate.
Nah, I still call nonsense, what with all the (apparently) collapsible halberds, unbreakable potions, non-squashable delicate items (and sometimes even living creatures). I think we’ve called on similar things in the past but personally I lean towards the storytelling side of tabletop and I don’t care about counting the amount of feed player horses need as long as the lack of it is not somehow contributing to the story.
Oh, this reminds me Outward actually has a button for you to drop your backpack to make combat easier.
The weird thing as a GM of urban fantasy games is that I never have that issue at all. My players always go on the field with a gun, maybe a melee weapon on top, and whatever nicknack they need for their powers. They never loot the weapons of their fallen foes to sell on the black market or even do their pockets. It’s a completely different mindset.
I suspect it depends on what other loot they get. If you have credsticks or wallets with cash, or even get paid to solve mysteries, then looting the corpses for stuff to sell becomes less important and more of a hassle.
The DM here is attempting an epic here, but is forgetting parts of it. Beowulf doesn’t get loot from the monsters, and as far as I can tell he doesn’t get better at fighting. But he does get more fame as a result, and is given lots of stuff by Hrothgar (the quest giver).
The outcome of this particular quest seems to be that Aragorn gets a lot of stuff (the kingdom). But it’s still a long way off, and the other players will likely be disappointed.
And there’s no intermediate quest resolution, so they don’t get that dopamine hit. There’s no progress bar. Are they levelling?
If you want a game where you have to worry about inventory minutiae like this try playing Torchbearer. Very limited inventory space, “cool you found a statuette that you could sell, but it takes up 2 inventory slots; your backpack is full so do you want to dump out your food or what?”. Items have limitations on where/how they can be carried, for instance a spear can be held/carried but not put inside a backpack. Non-preserved rations will spoil. And wearing a backpack can make fighting and navigating cramped dungeons more difficult.
I read through the comments section on the post linked in the original annotation, and after a certain point all I could think about was how people were arguing over the minutiae of exactly how many pounds a typical sword weighed, how long you could swing one for before getting tired, and in general whether things were “realistic” or not…while the party they’re playing likely included an elf, a dwarf, a half-orc(!), and at least two people capable of casually bending the forces of the universe around their little fingers on a whim. Like, if encumbrance is what’s breaking your suspension of disbelief, I don’t know what to tell yah…
At the end of the day, it’s a game, and the rules are there to provide a bit of structure and make things fun (in this case, by forcing decisions about what to carry). One trap I see players in all kinds of games fall into is arguing about how rule X could be made more realistic without stopping to ask if being more realistic would make the game more fun. It’s possible the answer is “yes,” but it’s also possible that the rule is the way it is because the designers playtested it the more realistic way and found it really wasn’t as fun as its proponents think. But then, house rules are a thing, so if tracking weight down to the gram and calculating the resulting calorie expenditure at 0.5 m/s increments of move speed floats your group’s boat, you do you (just leave me out of it please).
It’s definitely been a long running problem in the D&D-sphere. For the longest time, fighter types have been underpowered and uninteresting in comparison to the local wizard, since a fighters options often amounted to little more than “apply sword to face,” while a wizard can bend the laws of reality on a whim. And while there have been several efforts to spruce up the fighter types – 3.5’s Tome of Battle, and all of 4e for example – there’s often pushback on the grounds of “realism.”
Which really isn’t helped by the fact that the perception of realism when it comes to feats of strength is often limited to the realm of some guy at the gym. It’d be one thing if a high level fighter could perform feats of strength on par with olympic athletes, even if it falls short of the herculean strength you could see in myths, but even that gets pushback on the basis of “realism.”
It’s a frustrating hangup people keep having, with encumbrance just being one aspect of it.
A lot of the “packs are unrealistic” issues are really a “missing the point” complaint (as they are here) about a different issue – money is scarce, but high-level expensive gear inexplicably is not.
When the looted armor and weapons from your foes are worth far more than what they were otherwise carrying, you teach players that the gear is your “real” reward, and so you’ve incentivized them to carry that gear around and demand someone be around to buy it, no matter how unrealistic that might be.
In games where the 5 bandits in a cave have thousands in gold worth of weapons and armor, and are defending a chest with 50 go and a potion of heal minor wounds in it, something is broken. How are these bandits simultaneously rich enough for this gear and poor enough for this loot? In other words, “the Oblivion problem.”
They’re career bandits who invested in better tools of their trade.
The excessive loot problem is why I travel by wagon.
That and I hate being saddle-sore.
This Tumblr post has a good (and funny) suggestion for how to take all the party’s miscellaneous adventuring gear and replace it with an abstracted “giant pile of stuff in a wagon.”
Ah, another classic line: “Your heedless optimism is frightening to me.” I love these comics.
I love the phrase “Your heedless optimism is frightening to me.”