Simple encumbrance house rule

[Elestril]

My house rule for encumbrance and weight tracking,

The goals for the Heft Encumbrance system are:

• Inventory and encumbrance can be easily tracked on a piece of paper without any math, and without getting in the way of the game.
• Heavy and bulky items lead to a realistic encumbrance
• Encumbrance is not only a function of weight, but also of your equipments overall size and awkwardness
• You can’t run around with 7 melee weapons dangling from your belt, just because those are lightweight.
• Only a few large items really matter, there should be a sensible system to deal with all the small gadgets.

Here are my rules for the Heft Encumbrance System, what do you all think? Is there anything like it out there already?

[Culture20]

I remember the oldest versions of that other game used an encumbrance abstraction where weight and awkwardness of size where both considered. A ten foot poplar pole might weight less than a stack of equal diameter gold coins stacked the the same height, but the pole is much harder to carry assuming the coins are in a sack.

[mlangsdorf]

I'm not really sure what is complicated about tracking encumbrance by weight.

I'm not really sure how limiting people to 16 pieces of equipment, other than various exceptions, is simple in any way.

I'm not sure how the heft relates to slots. For instance, does a ST 17 barbarian wearing a leather loincloth and boots become immediately encumbered when he picks up a Heft 7 glaive? I honestly cannot tell.

How do visored helmets work? The visor doesn't weigh anything when it's up and is enormously encumbering when down? That makes some sense, it's just weird.

If one of the goals is to prevent people from running around with 7 lightweight weapons hanging from their belt*, it seems odd to to explicitly encourage a "custom blade harness" to allow the assassin to strap on 40 tiny blades.

This system seems like a total pain for the GM when creating NPCs. In standard GURPS rules, I can figure that Yo Random Orc #3 is wearing DR 2 leather armor (20 lbs) and wielding a small shield (8 lbs) and axe (4 lbs) for a total of 32 lbs. If that's over his BL, he's Lightly encumbered, and if not, he's at None. With the Heft system, I have to create a slot sheet and since which parts fit into which slots. Under the normal system, if I decide to upgrade his armor to full body mail, I up the armor weight to 53 lbs and recalculate against BL. With Heft, I have to reallocate the slots. Normally, I can eyeball changing a standard orc into an orc general or orc shaman, changing gear and ST. With Heft, that's a lot more complicated.

But hey, it's your game, do what you want.

* I don't think I've ever had this problem. Primary weapon, secondary weapon, maybe a ranged weapon and a backup knife. I think the swashbuckler in my current game carries a long knife, cloak, and a half-dozen throwing knives and that's the most individual weapons I've seen. Rather than come up with a system like this, I'd just say "no, you can't carry 6 swords on your belt".

[Elestril]

Heft is for paper character sheets, easy in this case means "easy to run without a computer recalculating your encumbrance from a very long list of individual item weights all the time".

Lot's of useful comments that helped to clarify the rules write up, thanks. Cleaned things up.

I don't run real encumbrance for simple NPCs, I just use their heftiest piece of gear, done. They never have so varied load outs that fitting them to slots is worth it.

E.g. for an ST14-16 NPC, which includes Yo Random orc: 4-heft is none, 5-heft is light, and 6-heft is medium.

Leather armor is 3-heft, mail is 5-heft, so there you go. And when he picks up a piece of 6-heft plate, or (more likely) a 6-heft two handed great axe: he's at medium now.

[Varyon]

I like the idea, but am wary of the implementation. It's also in serious need of an "Under the Hood" or similar, explaining how you came to your Heft values. First off, this will be necessary to be able to use the rules outside of a ~TL 4 fantasy setting - what's the Heft of a modern rifle (or an old musket for that matter), a modern ballistic carrier, or a UT heavy clamshell, for example? Secondly, it will give us a better starting point for making suggestions. As it stands, the encumbrance of large weapons seems grossly inappropriate - someone who is both strong enough and knows how to use a greatsword isn't going to be at Medium Encumbrance when wielding that in street clothing - and I suspect some other things are similarly marked far too high (sure, they might make sense at that encumbrance level if all/most of the lower slots are filled, but when you more or less have just that equipped, the result doesn't really work). I'm also curious as to why you've marked armor on the Face as so incredibly heavy (reduced hearing/vision aren't effects of Encumbrance; there are issues with heat dissipation that can make face armor problematic during heavy exercise, but that should really only have an impact on FP drain and the like, not on things like movement rate, using a rapier, etc).

[Flowergarden]

Hello there, just to give some feedback.

Weapons in your hands, that you can use efficiently (so everything except "need ready" weapons and weapons you don't have ST for) of reach 1 or less or reach 2 two handed don't really make you that much less nimble. I don't have any experience with "reach 3" weapons, can't say about that. But it's mostly leverage and point of balance plays a role here.
Of course wielding tip heavy weapons would give a bit of recovery time, but unbalanced property is enough for that, I suppose.

Damage resistance and encumbrance of different armor isn't connected at all. Steel plate that gives DR 3 (it's 1 to 2 millimetres, if I remember correctly, at least for medieval armor), is lighter and less thick than DR 3 leather armor. Weight distribution, weight and bulk are important, not DR.
And torso armor of the same weight wouldn't be worse than limb armor. Because weight is on your hips for torso. Weight on libs you need to move all the time.

Of course i never studied the subject, so can be wrong somewhere, if so, feel free to correct. Sorry for my not-so-fluent English.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Flowergarden

Damage resistance and encumbrance of different armor isn't connected at all. Steel plate that gives DR 3 (it's 1 to 2 millimetres, if I remember correctly, at least for medieval armor), is lighter and less thick than DR 3 leather armor. Weight distribution, weight and bulk are important, not DR.
And torso armor of the same weight wouldn't be worse than limb armor. Because weight is on your hips for torso. Weight on libs you need to move all the time.

Yeah, this is all part of why an "Under the Hood" for how the Heft values were calculated would be useful. When I was musing over modifying the GURPS encumbrance system, my own thought was for weight multipliers based on how the things were arranged. Well-fitting torso armor, and things properly packed into quality load-bearing gear, would functionally weigh less for purposes of encumbrance. Meanwhile, limb armor and things carried by hand (with some modifications - 10 lb held tight to your chest or partially resting on your shoulder is probably going to have a multiplier around the default x1, but 10 lb in hand armor is probably going to functionally weigh more). But that would ultimately be far too complicated to mess with at the table. But I could see something like that being incorporated behind-the-scenes for a system like this. Arguably, full leg armor should have around +1 Heft compared to torso armor (it's around the same weight, but the fact you have to constantly move it is going to be tiring), while arm armor might be justified at around -1 Heft (while it also has the problem that it needs to move around a lot - particularly in combat - arm armor starts out lighter than comparable torso armor). That's if worn alone, however - you could probably justify a full suit (perhaps minus Face, depending on why that gets such a huge Heft boost) being somewhere around +1 or +2 compared to torso armor alone.

I'll note the above (as well as your mention of DR 3 plate being lighter than DR 3 leather) assumes you're using the revised armor stats from Low Tech (and DFRPG, IIRC). The leather armor in Characters is actually more protective per pound, albeit not by a lot (DR 2 for 10 lb for torso+groin with leather, DR 5 for 30 lb for torso+groin with Steel Corselet, for 5 lb per DR in the first place, 6 lb per DR in the second), and coverage is different between the two (Characters Torso+Groin is equivalent to Low-Tech Torso, as the latter includes the Groin by default).

[Donny Brook]

GURPS "encumbrance" is based on weight because that's how it's defined for GURPS. In GURPS, "encumbrance" means weight carried.

Bothersomeness of items is not given a game mechanic but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. A TL8 camping tent can be very light, but if you're purporting to carry it around fully assembled, the GM should apply realistic problems.

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by Varyon

When I was musing over modifying the GURPS encumbrance system, my own thought was for weight multipliers based on how the things were arranged.

Maybe just make some table like:
Less than 1lbs - 0 heft; somewhere near 2 lbs - 1 heft; 5 lbs - 2 heft; etc
Than we have 10 lbs breastplate: Weight from table - 3 heft, -1 for being a breastplate, + 1 for bad fitted. Easy and fast.
Biggest problem is making modifiers that are logical and consistent.
Second thing. Size and awkwardness is relative to SM, one more modifier... Like if SM of the object is bigger than SM of the character - N, not sure about exact number. Than increase heft of the item by "Object SM" - ("Char SM" - N)
I hope it make sense.

[Elestril]

This is how I got here:

Inspriration comes from

• Pathfinder "Bulk" but since bulk is already a thing in GURPS, I ended up calling it "heft".
• Mausritter's slot based character sheets onto which you place pre-cut cardboard item chips of different physical sizes to manage equipment.
  There is also an interesting blog post on Mausritter's resource management.
• In my very first draft the heft values were just sqrt(weight-in-lbs) for armor, from there the "rules of thumb" for heft are derived. Heft being proportional to sqrt jibes well with GURPS basic lift formula.

I do like the Mausritter idea a lot for playability (Mausritter is surprisingly deep and well designed overall), so this whole thing is effectively a mapping of that into GURPS. Except it is not a hard "fits" or "doesn't" fit, but a gradual encumbrance curve.

The number and layout of slots is simply an abstraction of how many things a human can reasonably carry.

• I started with heft = sqrt(weight-in-lbs) for armor to get a baseline, then smoothed that into the "rules of thumb" table over time.
• A full set of armor consists of 6 items, and you need at least one weapon and one container, that's 8 items. Groups of 3 worked nicely.
• The center is ST 10, there 3*heft1+ 3*heft2 = enc0, 3*heft3=enc1, ... and encumbrance steps up uniformly with heft.
  • Then that column is shifted diagonally by 1 for each ST value.
  • Originally I had 21 slots. But nobody is bothering putting a full load-out together for that high encumbrance, so I just remove one row from enc3, and 2 rows from enc4 and enc5 levels.
  • Finally row 16: It's capacity always is that of the enc4 slot +1, so that characters can actually get a benefit. enc4 and enc5 are in practice only ever used for that one item, for that one exception, so slot 16 should have some point to exist.

None of that is tested for anything outside TL4, very true.

And yes, the Greatsword from my example is causing huge encumbrance with street clothing real issue. Didn't come up yet, so I hadn't spotted that bug yet. Good catch, balanced weapons need to have their heft reduced.