This simplified method for handling encumbrance will be used in Legends & Labyrinths, but it can also be easily dropped into any 3rd Edition game. (The rules for encumbrance by armor and the effects of encumbrance can be found in the core rulebooks.) The design is indebted to Delta’s D&D Hotspot and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
Encumbrance, measured in stones carried, determines the load a character is currently carrying. Loads are either light, medium, or heavy and a character with Strength 10 follows an encumbrance rule of 10-5-3: At 3 stones they are carrying a medium load, at 5 stones they are carrying a heavy load, and their maximum load is 10 stones.
Characters with lower to higher Strength scores adjust this rule by 2-1-½ per point of Strength. Partial stones can be rounded up. The minimum possible rule, regardless of Strength score, is 2-1-½. (For example, a character with Strength 8 would have an encumbrance rule of 6-3-2. A character with Strength 18 would have an encumbrance rule of 26-13-7.) These adjustments are summarized for convenience on the table at the end of this post.
Lifting and Pulling: The character can lift and carry the amount indicated on the table above their head. They can lift twice this amount and stagger around with it (moving only 5 feet per round as a full action and losing their Dexterity bonus to AC). They can generally drag or pull five times this amount along the ground (favorable conditions can double this; bad circumstances can reduce the amount to one-half or less at the DM’s discretion).
Tremendous Strength: For scores higher than 29, find the Strength score between 20 and 29 with the same final digit and multiply the listed lift score by 4 for every ten points the creature’s strength is above that score. (For example, a creature with Strength 38 would be able to lift 1,200 x 4 = 4,800 lbs.)
Adjusting for Size: The encumbrance rule for a creature is doubled for each size category above Medium and reduced by ½ for each size category below Medium (to a minimum of 1-½-¼). The encumbrance of armor, however, is also adjusted by the same factor (to a minimum of a half stone).
Quadrupeds: Quadrupeds can carry heavier loads, equal to 150% of a biped.
WEIGHT BY STONE
To determine the number of stones carried by a character, simply consult the table below.
| Item | Weight in Stones |
|---|---|
| Heavy Armor | 5 stones |
| Medium Armor | 3 stones |
| Light Armor | 1 stone |
| Shield | 1 stone |
| Weapon | 1 stone |
| Weapon, light | Misc. Equipment |
| Ammunition | Misc. Equipment |
| Miscellaneous Equipment | 1 stone per 5 bundles |
| Stowed Weapons | 1 bundle |
| Heavy Items | 1 or more stones |
| Light Clothing / Worn Items | 0 stones |
| 500 coins or gems | 1 stone |
Miscellaneous Equipment: Up to twenty items of the same type (scrolls, arrows, potions, rope) can be bundled together for the purposes of encumbrance. Items of different types aren’t bundled when determining encumbrance.
Stowed Weapons: Stowed weapons have been compactly stored in a way which makes them more difficult to draw (but easier to carry). Stowed weapons must be retrieved before they can be used, but they only count as 1 stone per 5 weapons.
Heavy Items: Anything weighing more than roughly 10 pounds can’t be effectively bundled. Estimate a weight in stones (about 10-20 pounds to the stone). When in doubt, call it a stone.
Clothing / Worn Items: Worn items don’t count for encumbrance, unless the individual items would qualify as heavy items.
CONTAINERS
Weapons are assumed to be in sheaths, armor is worn, and you might have a wineskin or two strapped to your belt. But since there’s a limit to how much you can hold in your hands, everything else you’re carrying needs a place to live. As a rule of thumb, containers can carry:
| Container | Capacity |
|---|---|
| Belt, Pouch | 1/2 stone |
| Sack, Small | 1 stone |
| Sack, Large | 2 stones |
| Backpack | 3 stones |
| Backpack, Large | 5 stones |
Empty containers count as miscellaneous equipment. Containers being used to carry items don’t count towards encumbrance.
Larger sacks (often referred to as “loot sacks”) are also possible, but these cannot generally be stored on the body. They must be carried in both hands.
CREATURE WEIGHT BY SIZE
Your own weight does not count against your encumbrance, but these figures are important for mounts. (They’ll also come in handy if you need to carry a corpse or prisoner.)
| Creature Size | Weight in Stones |
|---|---|
| Diminutve or smaller | Misc. Equipment |
| Tiny | 1 stone |
| Small | 2 stones |
| Medium | 12 stones |
| Large | 100 stones |
| Huge | 800 stones |
| Gargantuan | 6,400 stones |
| Colossal | 50,000 stones |
These figures are meant to serve as a useful rule of thumb, being roughly accurate for creatures similar in build and type to humans (i.e. fleshy humanoids). There will, however, be significant variance within each size category. Even typical animals of Huge size, for example, can easily range anywhere from 400 stones to 3,000 stones. Creatures of unusual material can obviously shatter these assumptions entirely (ranging from light-as-air ether cloud fairies to impossibly dense neutronium golems).
ENCUMBRANCE RULES
Go to Part 2: Encumbrance Sheet
This material is covered by the Open Game License.
I rather like the LotFP encumbrance rules as well. I’ve been seriously considering stoning my own campaign. Are there going to be playtest reports or -based comments coming out on this?
Edits:
Bottom chart needs fixing… especially Str 6 (2-1-2) and 7 (missing an element). On that note, I have to ask why you first discuss carrying capacities from Heavy to Light (“10-5-3” etc.) but then present it the other way around in the chart.
Finally, the apparently copy-pasted rule on “tremendous strength” is still in lbs. Are you just going to translate that to stones?
Chart should be fixed. The tremendous strength guidelines should only be applied to the lift column. The stone values should be increased using the 2-1-1/2 guideline.
Um, Justin, your chart is mess up. the 10 strength line is 10-5-4, not the standard 10-5-3.
I see the problem, 8 str is 6-3-3 (should be 6-3-2), and the chart skewed from there.
Blasted farkle dings… WordPress tables are going to be the death of me.
Thanks nobodez. The chart should now be corrected.
Pretty good, but I must confess I prefer Stars Without Number’s system. Simply put : you can have Strenght/2 readied items, Strenght stowed item (retrieving a stowed item is an action); pretty much everything count as one item, but super small stuff just does not count unless in great number (like coins), some small things can be bundled (countning as only one item; unbundling is an action) and big stuff count as more (i.e. 1-h weapon is 1, 2-h is 2); you’re lightly encumbered up to +2 readied and +4 stowed item, highly up to twice those numbers. Simple and efficient.
A little bit of this math doesn’t seem to hold up to me.
Colossal creatures with this math are doomed?
For creatures with Strength 10:
Medium creatures have 3_5_10 and increase by 1/2_1_2.
Large creatures have 6_10_20 and increase by 1_2_4?
Huge creatures have 12_20_40 and increase by 2_4_8?
Gargantuan creatures have 24_40_80 and increase by 4_8_16?
Colossal creatures have 48_80_160 and increase by 8_16_32?
A colossal creature at Strength 35 would be able to carry: 248_448_960
With a maximum heavy load of 960 stones, a colossal creature would barely be able to move a huge creature?
If the colossal creature was a quadruped, with the +150% modifier, it would be 372_672_1440.
The 5x multiplier for dragging still only brings it up to 7200 stones; this barely covers the ability to drag a gargantuan creature.
This is the strength score for Great Wyrm Red Dragons in the Monster Manual (which I believe is the highest strength score listed in the Monster Manual for any Colossal creature).
This system definitely seems to work for small, medium, and large creatures, but the larger creatures carrying capacity seems to be too small.
I think I understand the ~8x multiplier per size category for “creature weight by size”, but the 8x multiplier for size definitely defeats the 2x carrying capacity for size.
Were Colossal and Gargantuan creatures meant to be nigh-impossible to move?
Were Gargantuan and Huge creatures not meant to have mounts?
For the max lift:
Strength 25 = 800lb; Strength 35 = 1600lb; Colossal 16x (2*2*2*2) = 25600lbs…
50000 stones for a Colossal creature is 500k to 1m lbs assuming a stone is between 10 and 20lbs which is almost twice
Am I doing the math incorrectly?
Am I misunderstanding something?
Please let me know!
The weight scaling factor of 8x per size category is probably a bit too high. Years ago I was doing some research on this topic, and ISTR that based on looking at real-world creatures the exponential factor should be closer to 1.6 than 2. (That is, doubling the height of a creature should increase the mass by 1.6×1.6×1.6, or roughly a factor of 4, and not by 2x2x2 a factor of 8.) Maybe the factor was 1.8, I don’t remember for certain any more. But basically, when you scale up living creatures, they tend to get more “spindly” – they don’t stay entirely in proportion to their smaller brethren.
Of course we’re talking about fantastic and magical creatures here, so YMMV. But I think the key takeaway here is that the game rules were built around human-sized creatures; the designers wanted to get THOSE numbers to feel right, and they came up with scaling factors that worked “well enough” for very large and very small creatures. The farther you get from the baseline Medium size, the more things tend to break down.
Oh, I remembered/found some of the reading that set me off down this topic, and it looks like the exponential factor is closer to 1.8. So mass should increase roughly 6x per size step. Here’s a blog post with some discussion and links: https://explorebeneathandbeyond.blogspot.com/2015/04/sizing-things-up.html
Follow-up: I started down that allometry rabbit-hole again and this page https://explorebeneathandbeyond.blogspot.com/2015/05/squaring-cube.html actually goes deeper into what I was talking about. He argues that weight should go as roughly the 2.6 power of length/height and not the cube, with some real-world data to back that up. And 2^2.6 is a smidge over 6, so once again we have an argument that weight should increase 6-fold per doubling of length/height. There is variance between different creature types, but that’s the average across several animal families.
Good to know the 6x instead of 8x for size adjustment is reasonable.
That measures with the small to medium difference that’s on the table already; that’s convenient.
72 is close to the 100 for Large listed on the table; it might be worth rounding that up to 100 just for ease of math, for colossal creatures would still be ≈22,000 stones.
7200 stones for a Strength 35 quadruped still doesn’t quite reach being able to have a gargantuan rider, but that means colossal creatures of similar strength can at least drag other colossal creatures.
I get that DnD takes a LOT of simplifications for its physics – thankfully – but this system, as written, had those two points that bothered me.
Gargantuan and Colossal creatures not being able to serve as mounts, or move creatures or their size.
Multiplying creature weight by 6 per size category largely addresses both of them.
I don’t imagine it’s easy for anything to serve as the mount for a Titan, but now at least a dragon can, as opposed to barely being able to drag it.
I’ve learned a lot from reading this blog, and interesting insights from the comments too.
Thank you!