The Gaming Den

How DO you handle carrying capacity in your game when your characters can reasonably be expected to have the strength of and perform feats like those of Hercules? It is, of course, non-automatic.. so you have to be able to handle people who AREN'T super-strong as well, and who can't even draw Odysseus' bow.

The idea I'm bouncing around is that every object's weight is one word and one small number.

The word is just a size category. This might be different (one up or down, usually) from the object's actual size category, but it usually isn't.

The number, within a size category, is linear. One Small 2 object weighs as much as two Small 1 objects. A Small 4 and a Small 3 total to a Small 7. Since size categories are powers of two, and two cubed is eight, Small 8 would be equivalent to Medium 1; Small 9 and higher either wouldn't exist or would only exist for granularity (maybe you can have up to 12 on one size category before rounding up; Medium 13 would round up to Large 2, even though Large 2 is actually Medium 16).

Collections of objects count as one, of the collection's size. Arrows in a quiver don't have weight for carrying capacity, but the quiver-arrows combination counts.

As for what these numbers mean, probably do something like
1 Floats easily on water (cork, maybe even ice)
2 Is full of water (people would probably be here)
3
4 Stone statue
5
6
7
8 Solid Iron Statue

except with a more filled-out table.

The Strength -> carrying capacity table would be a size category modifier (Your Size +/- something) and a number.

Then, D&D doesn't handle truly big things at all. You'd need a few size categories above Colossal to fit the sky, unless it's really light for its size.

So you might have The Sky as weight Colossal+++++++++ 1. Any character who can carry Colossal+++++++++ 1 objects as twice their heavy load (Colossal++++++++ 4 objects as a heavy load) can hold the sky.

Alternately, you could use a system where you just roll strength checks to carry important things, like this one. Not my work, but it breaks down a lot less when you need to do truly fantastic things.

The whole sky, apparently, at least for a short time.

well... there was that one time for Hercules....

The home rules system kind of made my head hurt. Might just be because it should never take a page to describe how much a character can carry on his back.

Okay, Hercules. I don't think I'd personally care about how much weight he can carry, I'd concern myself that point at how much the character can carry before over-bristling with inventory.

So instead of weight, perhaps the character in question can carry 100 "spaces" of inventory. A longsword might be 5 spaces let's say. A 200 pound sack of gold might only be 2 spaces. Weight is not relevant, but encumbrance is.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Portable Hole

Except that that doesn't answer the question at all. Having a portable hole does not give your character the ability to be Atlas and lift a mountain, it just lets you stuff some arbitrarily heavy object in a pocket dimension and cart it around with you because you've reduced its effective real-world weight to zero.

I think the issue is not "what can I carry, gear-wise" but "what can I lift and carry around with me?"

Maybe items should have both a space and weight. Characters past a certain strength just ignore the weight - the only limit is how many spaces they have before the bulkyness encumbers them. Characters with more normal strength would pay attention to the weight as normal.

For lifting something big like a mountain / the sky / your mum, that you don't intend to carry around, that could just be a Strength check. Maybe one that you can take average on, so that Atlas doesn't periodically drop the world when he rolls low.

Make them draw an approximately to scale stick figure diagram of where they are carrying all their junk. Then apply a completely arbitrary ruling as to whether that "looks right" for their strength.

It makes about as much sense as tracking encumbrance with a complex accounting scheme.

Really it's a secondary rule of secondary importance, it should be seriously downplayed if it exists in any form at all.

TheFlatline wrote:So instead of weight, perhaps the character in question can carry 100 "spaces" of inventory. A longsword might be 5 spaces let's say. A 200 pound sack of gold might only be 2 spaces. Weight is not relevant, but encumbrance is.

I'm sorry, but a 200 pound sack of gold doesn't exist. 200 pounds of gold is enough to snap a horse's spine if you tried to get it to carry that much. And a longsword should not be a difficult to carry as 500 pounds of gold.

In most DnD campaigns, the point is moot. Handy Haversacks pop up around level 2, so the actual mechanics of carrying an amount of gold that would tear through any normal sack gets averted pretty quickly.

The fact that DnD characters never get Hercules STR is also a mitigating factor. I mean, a 32 STR is around what a DnD fighter caps out at and that's actually pretty pathetic when compared to something like breaking open doors or something.

I mean, a 32 is a +11 mod. Breaking a 1' masonry wall is DC 35, so you can't even succeed on a nat 20. You may have to hit a good wood door four or five times before you bust in on it (DC 23).

Ice9 wrote:Maybe items should have both a space and weight. Characters past a certain strength just ignore the weight - the only limit is how many spaces they have before the bulkyness encumbers them. Characters with more normal strength would pay attention to the weight as normal.

For lifting something big like a mountain / the sky / your mum, that you don't intend to carry around, that could just be a Strength check. Maybe one that you can take average on, so that Atlas doesn't periodically drop the world when he rolls low.

No Atlas totally drops the world every now and then. That's the sudden falling/ground fell out from below you feet feeling you get every now and then.

Grek wrote:

TheFlatline wrote:So instead of weight, perhaps the character in question can carry 100 "spaces" of inventory. A longsword might be 5 spaces let's say. A 200 pound sack of gold might only be 2 spaces. Weight is not relevant, but encumbrance is.

I'm sorry, but a 200 pound sack of gold doesn't exist. 200 pounds of gold is enough to snap a horse's spine if you tried to get it to carry that much. And a longsword should not be a difficult to carry as 500 pounds of gold.

With tack, the average rider puts around 200 lbs of weight on a horse's back. A serious European knight in full armor is that much by himself. Horses' spines do not snap from carrying 500 lbs of gold.

500 lbs of gold is roughly .4 cubic feet - a cube 9" on a side. That's pretty bulk, but it's something that could stuffed into a large backpack with some difficulty.

I don't think the ratios there are right, but it's not a bad way to deal with bulk. If a longsword is 5 spaces, then 200 lbs of gold might be 40 spaces or so - there's a bit more volume, but the gold compacts better and doesn't hit your knees while hanging off your belt.

Grek wrote:

TheFlatline wrote:So instead of weight, perhaps the character in question can carry 100 "spaces" of inventory. A longsword might be 5 spaces let's say. A 200 pound sack of gold might only be 2 spaces. Weight is not relevant, but encumbrance is.

I'm sorry, but a 200 pound sack of gold doesn't exist. 200 pounds of gold is enough to snap a horse's spine if you tried to get it to carry that much. And a longsword should not be a difficult to carry as 500 pounds of gold.

200 pound sacks of gold don't exist? Okay... neither do men who can pick up an entire mountain or lift the entire sky. We're talking about fantasy here.

A horse can't carry 200 pounds? I got a bridge I want to sell you.

Dude I weigh 280 and went riding a week ago. Granted it was a draft horse, but seeing that he normally carries a 220 pound guy wearing 120 pounds of plate armor (historical jousting), it's entirely doable. Shit. The horse I rode was a dead weight dragging champion. He could drag 6,000 pounds of dead weight by himself. Did you think I meant 200 kilos? That makes a little more sense. 450 pounds on a horses back would probably injure most horses.

You missed my original point anyway entirely. The idea here is that if you're strong enough to lift the sky, pick up a mountain, or something else in the vein of Hercules, a 9 inch cube in a sack on your back isn't a big deal to lift, be it 2, 200, or 2000 pounds. The problem is that you can only physically carry so much volume before it becomes awkward. And while a 9 inch cube is bigger than a longsword, if you have open access to your longsword, that means it's taking up a place on your belt/back that is open enough to allow access, which takes up space as opposed to simply stowing it somewhere on you where you don't need to get to it.

Prak_Anima wrote:No Atlas totally drops the world every now and then. That's the sudden falling/ground fell out from below you feet feeling you get every now and then.

Atlas doesn't hold up the world, he holds up the sky. The sphere he was originally depicted as carrying was the celestial sphere of astronomy.

I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question.

It's a simple design goal really. A rule that can handle some people being schmucks, some people being Odysseus, and some people being Hercules, with reasonable efficiency such that we aren't being reduced to playing Excel & Exponential Graphs.

Granted that "eyeball it and agree if it looks right" is probably the correct rule, but.

I'm going to have to go with Phone Lobster on this one, carrying capacity just isn't at all important unless you're going for a super gritty game where your actual success/survival may rely on your ability to carry half a hardware store in your pockets.

TavishArtair wrote:I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question.

It's a simple design goal really. A rule that can handle some people being schmucks, some people being Odysseus, and some people being Hercules, with reasonable efficiency such that we aren't being reduced to playing Excel & Exponential Graphs.

Granted that "eyeball it and agree if it looks right" is probably the correct rule, but.

This is DnD. No one has great Strength, even Fighters and giants, so your question is nonsense.

Any heroic myth you can name has no equal in DnD. DnD characters have at best above-average human, but not superhuman, strength.

This is DnD, and fighting characters don't get nice things.

K wrote:

TavishArtair wrote:I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question.

It's a simple design goal really. A rule that can handle some people being schmucks, some people being Odysseus, and some people being Hercules, with reasonable efficiency such that we aren't being reduced to playing Excel & Exponential Graphs.

Granted that "eyeball it and agree if it looks right" is probably the correct rule, but.

This is DnD. No one has great Strength, even Fighters and giants, so your question is nonsense.

Any heroic myth you can name has no equal in DnD. DnD characters have at best above-average human, but not superhuman, strength.

This is DnD, and fighting characters don't get nice things.

Don't be a dick. He never asked about D&D in the first place. He asked from a "How do I design a game like this" perspective.

Well, first you have to define how strength works. If strength is a stat, then it works one way. If strength is a passive ability you can buy, that's another.

You can do a series of abilities:
Strength 0: Free. You can carry anything an ordinary human soldier might be expected to carry.
Strength 1: You can bend Odysseus's bow and carry lots of stuff
Strength 2: You can lift a sailing ship and carry a boatload of stuff
Strength 3: You can push mountains around and throw small islands
Strength 4: You can hold up the celestial sphere and carry anything under it

You can also do a dicepool or a modified die roll, and just give things lift DCs.

At this stage in design, you still haven't decided whether lifting capacity is constant, or if you make lifting checks.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:No Atlas totally drops the world every now and then. That's the sudden falling/ground fell out from below you feet feeling you get every now and then.

Atlas doesn't hold up the world, he holds up the sky. The sphere he was originally depicted as carrying was the celestial sphere of astronomy.

damn. that's what I get for having not read greek myth too recently...

ubernoob wrote:

K wrote:

TavishArtair wrote:I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question.

It's a simple design goal really. A rule that can handle some people being schmucks, some people being Odysseus, and some people being Hercules, with reasonable efficiency such that we aren't being reduced to playing Excel & Exponential Graphs.

Granted that "eyeball it and agree if it looks right" is probably the correct rule, but.

This is DnD. No one has great Strength, even Fighters and giants, so your question is nonsense.

Any heroic myth you can name has no equal in DnD. DnD characters have at best above-average human, but not superhuman, strength.

This is DnD, and fighting characters don't get nice things.

Don't be a dick. He never asked about D&D in the first place. He asked from a "How do I design a game like this" perspective.

Sorry, but he wasn't clear that he was asking for someone to design for him. A simple preface of "I'm trying to design a game and...." then this whole thread would have been full of useful replies and not people talking about DnD.

K wrote:

ubernoob wrote:

K wrote:
This is DnD. No one has great Strength, even Fighters and giants, so your question is nonsense.

Any heroic myth you can name has no equal in DnD. DnD characters have at best above-average human, but not superhuman, strength.

This is DnD, and fighting characters don't get nice things.

Don't be a dick. He never asked about D&D in the first place. He asked from a "How do I design a game like this" perspective.

Sorry, but he wasn't clear that he was asking for someone to design for him. A simple preface of "I'm trying to design a game and...." then this whole thread would have been full of useful replies and not people talking about DnD.

You fucking quoted him saying that. Here, let me requote it for you:

K wrote:

TavishArtair wrote:I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question.

IGTN wrote:

K wrote:

ubernoob wrote:Don't be a dick. He never asked about D&D in the first place. He asked from a "How do I design a game like this" perspective.

Sorry, but he wasn't clear that he was asking for someone to design for him. A simple preface of "I'm trying to design a game and...." then this whole thread would have been full of useful replies and not people talking about DnD.

You fucking quoted him saying that. Here, let me requote it for you:

K wrote:

TavishArtair wrote:I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question.

I thought he was saying "I don't care what people do in DnD like Portable holes that avoid this problem", because that's one interpretation of that bitchy little sentence.

Now go fuck yourself. If people want help on some game they are designing, they don't have to be fucking coy about it. Spend a little time framing your goddamn question so that five people don't attempt to help you and end up failing because you've confused them.

I can only figure out what people actually say, not what they actually meant to say but couldn't express properly.

And remember that when asking for help, don't be a douchebag. It makes people not want to help you.

Bullshit. D&D is applicable. Look, I'll quote his first post, bolding the applicable.

TavishArtair wrote:How DO you handle carrying capacity in your game when your characters can reasonably be expected to have the strength of and perform feats like those of Hercules?

Not how would you, or how could you, or what are some methods of doing so, but how do you currently handle carrying capacity. If the threads now changed thats different, but the original question included D&D for whoever plays it.