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General Query

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2017 4:12 pm
by Caelestis
Hi,

I saw the release of 3rd Edition and buckled under my own self pressure and got the floppy back book. I'd read the PDF previously so that's all good. Anyways on to my actual question. I was just wondering whether people usually take into account all the encumbrance/weight etc. when playing or do people tend to skip over that part?

I realise there is no actual right or wrong answer to this as a question, I was just curious as to how people are using the rules.

Re: General Query

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2017 5:09 pm
by SmootRK
I tend to gloss over those rules except when there are blatant misuses. On a few occasions I have had to tell my young players, "no people don't just walk around with a couple of chests of coins on their person".

Re: General Query

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2017 5:48 pm
by Solomoriah
Once in a while I make my players account for their encumbrance; most of the time, I take their word for it.

Re: General Query

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2017 10:55 pm
by Hywaywolf
As a player I don't like to fiddle with encumbrances, but I do expect a DM to make it super hard for me if I try to drag a 6' tall golden statue home or I'm stuffing every suit of armor I find into my backpack.

Re: General Query

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2017 8:17 am
by Caelestis
Cool thanks for the feedback. Really looking forward to our first run out.

I apologise if there are 2 replies from me my phone app is acting up.

Re: General Query

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2017 12:40 pm
by Ant McEwan
When I DM I will be keeping a track of it, but not so excessively that it breaks gameplay.

As a player I like to know where all my stuff is, what it weighs etc too, so I'm generally in favour of it on both sides of the table.

Re: General Query

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2017 4:27 pm
by Maliki
Normally we just eyeballed it, as long as nothing looked to out of hand we pretty much ignored encumbrance.

Re: General Query

Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2017 8:01 pm
by Longman
The big one is armour.

Human light load with Strength 15 is only 66 pounds. If someone's wearing plate mail, they have only 16 pounds left to play with. If they say they have a great axe, they have 1 pound of encumbrance left. They can't really carry most other things except at a snail's pace.

I hand-wave this in a light-hearted game. For a more serious game, I'd check during character creation and have any carrying capacity noted down. Then I'd check again every time the character leveled up to make sure things didn't get out of hand.

Re: General Query

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2017 11:07 am
by Fasafan
I would like to account for it more than I do, but it's like herding cats. I just finished my second game last night, so I hope to do more of this in the future.

I may literally make a "playmat" that is sectioned off to represent sacks, backpacks, saddlebags, etc., then use small index cards to represent equipment. The player would then place what equipment is in what location on their playmat. The equipment cards could even have the gp value and, of course, weight of the item, as well as any combat stats.

I've done equipment cards for other games, but never married them with the "playmat" to represent storage. This would make moving equipment around really easy, and save a lot of erasing - not to mention "accidental" fudging!

I'm more prone to account for ammunition. A good way for this is to give anyone with bows, slings, etc. toothpicks or chits to represent the ammo and just have them automatically toss one to me (or a container) when they shoot.

Item weights really do make for interesting games, though. Gems, in particular, become very handy for trade and barter because they are worth so much compared to their weight. A modest 10 gp gem would way much less than 100 sp, or 1000 cp!

Lee

Re: General Query

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2017 3:55 pm
by Caelestis
Awesome feedback thank you everyone.

I think I may spend some more time working out how to handle it in my games but it is likely to be a light touch. We are starting with a basic dungeon crawl Thursday to see how it all hangs together for us!

Thanks