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I recently had a discussion about my high fantasy system's encumbrance rules and wanted to see what sort of preferences other people have.

I'd say that Runequest had the most usable. Items have a simple, one digit weight and you can pick up stuff equal to your Strength while you can carry stuff equal to the average of your Strength and Constitution.

I use a similar system, but instead of encumbrance making people move more slowly, I make them get tired faster. Normally, you can fight a number of rounds equal to your Con before getting tired. If encumbered, it is half that. Tired just means a -2 on all rolls involving physical activity. The end result of this in play is that characters will rotate in and out of the front line which means that more players get involved in the combat.

I made this change cause I found that not only were multiple movement rates annoying to track, but they had too much effect outside of combat (when character are supposed to be moving cautiously anyway) and too little effect in combat when movement doesn't happen much outside of the first couple rounds.

Prefer a hybrid of slot-based, only tracking big items, and some general GM hand-waving (i.e. not used).

Specifically, I want the encumbrance system to broadly get characters in the ball park of "reasonable" as simply as possible, while providing a framework for GM adjudication for the outliers. 

With that in mind, I make the default range and expectations somewhat generous, to encourage players to stay safely there.  That's the carrot.  Then the stick is that hitting "encumbered" is brutal, and only to be done when really necessary (e.g. haul unconscious party members around, or pull that heavy treasure out of the dungeon).  Then then "lack of carrot" is being lightly encumbered is mainly about overland travel and/or fleeing, not tactical, every adventure play.  Bottom line is that everyone sits safely in the middle and it doesn't impinge on regular play, but running out of arrows or food is still a mild concern, that can turn serious quick in some circumstances, without me having to make an ad hoc ruling on resources every time that happens.

So go in to the adventure medium encumbered.  Come out medium encumbered.  Since the base rules assume that, no mods to tactical movement rates or getting tired on anything else.  If it all turns pear-shaped, start slinging bodies on back and hope it works out or drop gear and flee like crazy, and then get out of that state as soon as possible.

When I GM, I trust the players to be realistic when it comes to encumbrance for everyday moving about. I don't spend much time discussing how they move back and forth between points A and B to transport a household's worth of gear from A to B. If it matters (like you can only go from A to B once, or there's a risk of ambush), then we discuss what they take and how. If something ends up mattering and it wasn't clear if it was carried, packed on the mule that just fell into the chasm, or in some pile somewhere, we decide what makes sense and there may be a roll. Hand-wavey? Yes, but also streamlined.

I picked bulk based; hopefully that means what I thought it did.  Basically everything has some type of encumbrance point rather than actual weight, based on difficulty to carry, which can include many factors.  Keep the numbers low enough that the arithmatic is not a burden, and ignore the really small stuff.

I want to be able to do survival treks in a game, and encumbrance is critical for making that interesting.

I was your one (so far) who picked coin based. It is btb in 0e and not difficult. I probably take more of an IRS approach—players are expected to keep track of it, and I audit when it might make sense.

But I also really like LotFP's system, which would probably fall under the slot based/bulk entry.

Personally, I like the slot/bulk style encumbrance rules a lot of games are using these days.  The rest of my group though, they prefer to not bother with any encumbrance rules at all.  It makes it easier for the Cleric to carry the rest of the party that way.  ;D

The slot-based one is the easiest.

Generally, though, I don't use encumbrance rules. But I don't let the characters take the piss.

In my games you're either Stripped, Normal, or Burdened.  Stripped is nothing more than light clothing, sneakers, and a one handed weapon.  Burdened is heavy armour and a shield or backpack.

I use fairly detailed encumbrance in GURPS because it's an important balancing factor in combat.

Stone system:

https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2010/09/stone-encumbrance-detail-example.html

I don't recall tracking encumbrance at all for the past campaign I've ran. The PCs had character sheets written up with the objects they carried, but none of this translated into action or skill penalties because they'd presumably drop bulky things before getting into a fight or other risky venture.

When I do track encumbrance and apply penalties, however, I do so at the resolution of 0.1 lbs.

Bulk, and only enforced if/when encumbrance comes up as a potential issue. "You're carrying how much again?"

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 11, 2022, 09:39:40 AM
What Encumbrance system do you prefer?

The TPS system.

Quote from: David Johansen on May 11, 2022, 07:39:29 PM
In my games you're either Stripped, Normal, or Burdened.  Stripped is nothing more than light clothing, sneakers, and a one handed weapon.  Burdened is heavy armour and a shield or backpack.

I use fairly detailed encumbrance in GURPS because it's an important balancing factor in combat.

Balance is one of the reasons to consider it. For instance in D&D if you don't use encumbrance, any Strength score between 8 and 15 is essentially the same, and you can easily use Strength as a dump stat. This is the same if you don't use Henchmen and NPC Reaction rolls where Charisma becomes a dump stat. So it's important to see if encumbrance is just an add-on or if it's tightly integrated into the system.

If it's the latter, you need to consider using a different system if you really don't want to track it.

I liked BX's system which had a flat carrying weight for everyone. But AD&D's system was a bit more realistic and so given a choice I usually port some or all of that over to BX. Star Frontiers had a simple and clean system as well. As did Dragon Storm where every item had a listed carrying capacity cost.

I generally like to track down to the last gold piece when I'm doing "realistic," historical, or modern games.  For D&D, I'm happy with slot based with a group stash.

I just wanted to thank everyone who responded to the poll so far. The results were not what I was expecting, but even at 33 and a margin of error floating around 20% the results were so dramatic (and surprisingly stable as the number of responses increased) for the two largest categories (and many of the "others" describing sounding like something of a hybrid of those) that at least some conclusions can be drawn from the data.

I'll keep checking in, but this has been quite illuminating.

I keep it simple.  Mostly I let characters carry a reasonable load of gear, but deal with the rest in a logical way.  In a fantasy world I ask the players to buy pack mules or horses, or give them one for free so we don't need to deal with this issue.  In higher tech settings, then cars or trucks, or in one case a VTOL thrust vector capable cargo plane. 

I like the idea of slot based, but it really breaks down when players try to actually cram in as much equipment as they can -- as they usually do with encumbrance.

You either have to make it general and abstract enough where they can't actually carry as much as they can in systems where you track weight normally, or you need to make it specific enough that it is basically the same thing as normal encumbrance anyway.

Same with bulk.

Does anyone have a good example of a slot system? I can only think of the Diablo cRPG but that requires a video game to work.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on May 16, 2022, 10:44:22 PM
I like the idea of slot based, but it really breaks down when players try to actually cram in as much equipment as they can -- as they usually do with encumbrance.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. But there are a couple things I do to help with what I think you are talking about.

First is the use a container items. For example, a Quiver uses one slot but holds 15 arrows. You just mark off arrows as you use them and it doesn't affect your encumbrance. Runequest also has the "Adventurers Pack" which uses two slots and has all the generic adventuring gear like rope, water skins, and a bedroll. Just assume it gets replenished between adventures.

However, typical adventuring gear isn't usually the main problem with encumbrance as you can usually recalculate it between sessions when you have time to do the math. The main problem is with treasure and other items found during the delve. To help with this, I started using treasure cards.

(https://i.imgur.com/NLIpurH.jpg)

Treasure cards have a value and a weight so they are easy to track. Not only are the easy to track for encumbrance but you can write on the card for charges and any cards I don't hand out stay in the treasure deck until the next session, so there's no wasted prep time. When you stat out a dungeon you can just say that this monster has 2 treasures, there is 1 treasure hidden behind this loose stone, or the chest contains 4 treasure cards.

I mean like how, with a slot system, it's nice and cut and dry, you have slots for your head, arm, leg, torso, backpack, etc.

But normally with encumbrance players try to do all sorts of crazy things to carry more weight, like hang things off the outside of the backpack or hang a ton of things off their belt or sling it over their shoulder, etc. But there's no slots for things like that right?

It sounds better honestly, since it removes that kind of silliness, but I imagine some players might feel like they're getting nerfed by the inability to do that.

Or mixing and matching small items, like you could have a bunch of coins in a slot, but what if you wanted to put some coins, some gems, a scroll, and some ink vials? In normal encumbrance you just count the weight, which is tedious but gives you a lot of micro managing ability.

I assume with slot based you can't do that? Or if you can, what's the difference at that point?

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on May 18, 2022, 04:12:26 AM
I mean like how, with a slot system, it's nice and cut and dry, you have slots for your head, arm, leg, torso, backpack, etc.

But normally with encumbrance players try to do all sorts of crazy things to carry more weight, like hang things off the outside of the backpack or hang a ton of things off their belt or sling it over their shoulder, etc. But there's no slots for things like that right?

It sounds better honestly, since it removes that kind of silliness, but I imagine some players might feel like they're getting nerfed by the inability to do that.

Or mixing and matching small items, like you could have a bunch of coins in a slot, but what if you wanted to put some coins, some gems, a scroll, and some ink vials? In normal encumbrance you just count the weight, which is tedious but gives you a lot of micro managing ability.

I assume with slot based you can't do that? Or if you can, what's the difference at that point?

I never understood "slot based" to necessarily mean "location based". That's one way to do slots. But slots can be entirely arbitrary as well: "You have 12 slots". Just a way to create units of encumbrance larger than "1 coin" or "1 pound". That's why I think "slots" and "bulk based" are conflated in the poll.

You may not call that "slot based", but other folks might be including it.