Knapsack Problems

[virgil]

This is for roleplaying in general. I am aware of the fact that with D&D specifically, once you get past the very low levels and have bags of holding, carrying capacity is no longer a concern.

Inventory management is a common question. Should it be largely left to fiat? I don't know of any circumstance where a player, in any game, has the thought "my play experience was markedly improved by that inventory limit."

However, there do exist reasons to instate some form of inventory management in your RPG. Some experience a loss of immersion when they realize that half the party essentially looks like Nodwick without restriction. Another is memory. It's been proven that memorization suffers once you try to keep more than 7 things in your head unless you categorize it, and creating 'slots' to store stuff can serve as a useful memory aid so after the fight the party is less likely to realize they forgot to use that sword of ogre decapitation.[/img]

[Prak]

This brings to mind magic item limits. The Tome "8 Items, Final Destination" limit seems a bit harsh, though I understand the point. I almost would suggest a "Have as many as you want, but bonus types are few and matter a lot." system in it's place.

[tussock]

I think encumbrance was initially an XP limiting mechanic, because treasure was incredibly heavy and also the source of most of your XP. Plus, encumbrance had nothing to do with strength or size, or even your equipment for the most part.


The stone-weight system a few of the OSR games use makes for playable weight limits on gear. Not sure it's a great idea, but it doesn't crush the game to use it.


Slot limits in CRPGs are a giant pain in the ass. Then they give you items that have extra slots, so the whole thing doesn't matter anyway and is harder to use because of all the clicks. Bah. Even the active slots are soon broken by items that work from the backpack.

Angband has a nice slot limit where you only ever have 8 body slots and 25 pack slots (which includes limits on spell books, potion types, and so on), that's interesting, but it used to be 7+26 and swapping one fucked up the game balance for about 10 years. There's no way RPG designers have the balls to say no to extra slots in some splatbook or another. *bands also have weight limits, and many of the best items are incredibly heavy, which is less interesting.

You could cap D&D's active slots on a per-stat basis. That might discourage extra slots appearing. The body slot system will never stop adding slots though, and nor will any abstract attachment points.


But really, we've tried limiting PCs. AD&D Paladins could only use ten magic items, including only one of each basic type. It didn't slow them down it the slightest, and ten items is still basically a christmas tree.

[violence in the media]

One of the other problems that crops up is (un)intentional item duplication. If you pass a magic item around a group of people often enough, pretty soon it winds up on two people's sheets. If it's something with charges, forget about tracking those accurately. Trading gold and gems around has this same problem.

Sometimes I think the game would be better if each creature were limited to 3 magic items total. But that would require items granting way more powers individually as you level up than they do now, eliminating or reworking charged items, and possibly being severly restricted on what effects can apply to what items, simply so there is a choice between wanting magic bracers vs. a magic cloak.

[hyzmarca]

I think encumbrance was initially an XP limiting mechanic, because treasure was incredibly heavy and also the source of most of your XP. Plus, encumbrance had nothing to do with strength or size, or even your equipment for the most part.

Encumberence isn't much of an XP limiting mechanic, because you can always buy a donkey and a cart. It's a realism mechanic that makes you buy a donkey and a cart.

Eventually you'll have to buy more donkeys and upgrade your carts to wagons, but low-level adventurers have no problem carrying huge amounts of treasure around.

On the other hand, you're not going to be able to take your wagons into every dungeon, so that sets up interesting logistical problems. You need to hire guards to watch your stuff while you're dungeon-diving.

Limited item space is really only limiting when you can't carry a beast of burden with you. Limited always-on magical effects is a different kettle of fish, though.

[Stubbazubba]

Sometimes I think the game would be better if each creature were limited to 3 magic items total. But that would require items granting way more powers individually as you level up than they do now, eliminating or reworking charged items, and possibly being severly restricted on what effects can apply to what items, simply so there is a choice between wanting magic bracers vs. a magic cloak.

I would support a move in this direction; a very low limit which means each magic item will be carefully thought over, and thus feel more "speshul." Honestly, I'd rather re-work the CR system to compensate for a loss in PC's magical item power, than make each magic item give you six different bonuses/abilities. That would just replicate the problems mentioned above.

I would make charged items work like mini-spellcasters; X charges per day, requires 8 hours of non-use to recharge (or divide that per total number of charges to find hours of non-use needed to charge single charge).

[HalcyonUmbra]

Inventory management is a common question. Should it be largely left to fiat? I don't know of any circumstance where a player, in any game, has the thought "my play experience was markedly improved by that inventory limit."

Regardless of whether a player consciously thought that, it's still true. Interesting gameplay is defined by what you can't do; by your limits. The problem arises when inventory management is more complex than it needs to be. Ideally, it'd be set up so that you only need to track stuff that you care about not having in the middle of an event; the event being combat or trap-finding or wooing the princess or whatever. If there's never going to be an event where you run out of food (see: every non-Dark Sun game of D&D), then you don't track food. If you're not planning on having what a player looks like matter, then don't track clothes.

As far as Magic Items in D&D goes, lowering the max items a player can carry isn't such a bad idea. I might not go as low as three, necessarily, but it is a good example. Losing your sword in that situation is a huge deal, because it's a full third of what you own. If there weren't a limit, then there's a decent chance that the player doesn't even care because he had a magic warhammer and two enchanted axes just cluttering up his portable hole.

[JonSetanta]

This is a feat I made for a classless adaptation of D&D. A Benchmark is "every 5 levels"

Dimensional Pocket
(multiple)
• You may store 1 size Medium weapon (2 Small, or 4 Tiny) or 1 Light suit of armor per Benchmark each time you acquire this feat. 2 Medium weapon spaces may be used to hide a Large, and 2 Light armor spaces may be used to hide up to a Heavy armor.
• Adding or removing an item to your Dimensional Pocket is a Free action. Swapping an item for a stored one places it in your hand or worn on your body as a Move action.
• Benchmark 3: You may exchange two items, one held or worn with one in storage, as a Swift action instead.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In my very biased opinion, people generally like two broad kinds of inventory management.

1.) What you can personally carry or what your signature vehicle can carry. Let's face it, most of Bond and Green Arrow's gadgets just aren't very impressive in net effect, even with in the confines of their universes. What makes the quiver and spy car cool is that they allow crap like gas pellets and jetpacks to be inserted in situations where you just can't fit things like artillery-fired chemical weapons or fighter jets.

This means of course for stuff you can find on Batman's utility belt to be cool at all you need to have some sort of limit as to what can be in the belt. Even if Batman has the ability of Schrodinger Gunning some kind of undeclared device, it needs to be a device that exists in the game and fits into sensible storage limits. Which is still a limit.

2.) Stuff that you can acquire while you're chilling in your stronghold. And for this I mean more macro crap like yachts, book collections, computer servers, and victory gardens. There's a reason why Sims sells so much. If you want to prevent it from derailing your game, you need to go a level higher than that for multiplayer groups, like an actual stronghold or castle.


Asking for any level of inventory management between these two levels is just asking for trouble in my opinion.

[Murtak]

For what it's worth, Exalted handles this fairly elegantly. Equipping items requires commiting motes which means you can't use them to power abilities. It still means everyone wants a fair amount of magic items, but not to the extend that you hunt for more stacking bonus types.

Of course you can also just get rid of numerical bonuses and suddenly your need for magic items plummets. Let's face it, a +1 sword or gloves of strength +4 or boots of sneaking +10 are boring as shit, but also required to not fall off the RNG. That sucks. Get rid of all of those and hand out more rings of the ram, carpets of flying and beads of force. Then limit each character to x items (3? 5?).

[HalcyonUmbra]

For what it's worth, Exalted handles this fairly elegantly. Equipping items requires commiting motes which means you can't use them to power abilities. It still means everyone wants a fair amount of magic items, but not to the extend that you hunt for more stacking bonus types.

Incarnum did something similar to that, only in reverse. Creating a Soulmeld prevented the use of the corresponding item, which, ostensibly, created a meaningful choice. In practice, of course, the abilities were all so underpowered (not to mention complicated) that no-one ever used them. But, yeah, if you build "abilities vs. items" directly into the system, it works pretty well.