DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26B: A Disposition of Treasure
There were three main problems to overcome: The sheer weight of the arcane equipment and precious metals. The pit of chaos warping the hallway. And the difficulty of lifting the material out of the basement here at Greyson House.
Out of everything, the “Drill of the Banewarrens” was going to prove the most difficult: Everything else could be mostly parceled up into smaller bundles, but the drill was both bulky and weighed several thousand pounds all by itself.
“Could we just sell the location of the drill to somebody?” Elestra asked.
“Like House Erthuo?” Tee said. “I doubt they’d be all that interested considering what just happened.”
“How can you make encumbrance fun?”
You can’t.
But you also can’t make hit points fun, and for much the same reason.
Hit points are just a number: It goes up. It goes down. At a certain value you might suffer penalties. At another you fall unconscious.
So, too, with encumbrance: The number goes up. The number goes down. At a certain value you suffer penalties. At another you can’t carry any more.
Hit points and encumbrance are simple gauges, and you can’t make them “fun” for the same reason you can’t make the gas gauge on your car fun.
But driving a car? That can be fun. And so is combat in D&D and a lot of other roleplaying games that use hit points.
The gauge isn’t fun. It’s just a gauge. But the system in which that gauge is used – for which, in fact, that gauge may be an essential part – can be all kinds of fun.
So the better question is:
“Why do we want to track encumbrance?”
Encumbrance is often most useful in expedition-based play: You put together the resources for an expedition, then expend those resources on the expedition to maximize your returns.
Encumbrance is, in large part, a budget. Without a budget, the solution is always “bring everything,” which is kind of like playing 52-card draw poker: Without limited resources, there is no challenge.
(Tangentially, one interesting facet of such play in 1974 D&D, because it had a system for resolving characters fleeing from combat, is jettisoning equipment in order to pick up speed in flight-pursuit situations. It became a unique way for bulk resource management to impact combat-based play.)
This kind of gameplay does become obfuscated if the encumbrance system is unwieldy and difficult or fiddly to use. (Imagine if hit points, for example, could only be tracked by keeping an exhaustive list of forty or fifty different individual entries on your character sheet. Combat would almost certainly become a slog.) Unfortunately, a lot of encumbrance systems are unwieldy and difficult to use, with the result that many groups simply ignore it (either decisively or by default through “close enough” fudging).
What you want, of course, is an encumbrance system that’s easy to use so that encumbrance-based play will effortlessly integrate into your play. Correctly designed slot-based systems, like Encumbrance By Stone, for example, can make tracking nitty gritty encumbrance as easy as writing down your equipment list.
THE OTHER HALF OF THE EXPEDITION
Prepping the resource pool for an expedition and then expending those resources efficiently in order to maximize your success is the front half of an adventure.
The other half of the adventure is returning home with what you’ve gained, which, in the case of D&D, is usually treasure.
We’ve talked about this a bit before, but creating bulky, difficult-to-transport treasure (and/or putting it in places where it’s difficult to extract it) can create its own unique challenges. We’ve seen the players here come up with a creative solution for disposing of the orrery, and now they’re being challenged once again with the Drill of the Banewarrens and some of the other treasure.
(And this stuff is all just a few hundred feet under a major city. Stick it in the middle of a jungle and watch what happens!)
“But, Justin, challenge isn’t really a big focus for my group! We’re much more interested in narrative, storytelling, and roleplaying!”
Drama is born of adversity.
And I don’t mean that you’re wrong or that you should value challenge-based gameplay more, I mean that in expedition-type stories encumbrance-based challenges are a fundamental part of the drama you’re looking for. (Look at, say, Indiana Jones trying to get the Ark of the Covenant out of Egypt.)
For example, a scene in which the players are roleplaying through the crushing guilt their characters are feeling because their decisions resulted in the deaths of innocent people that they feel responsible for? Grappling with the difficult dilemmas created by balancing expediency of liquidating their treasure against the responsibility of who’s benefiting from that treasure? This stuff is pure gold for dramatic play!
NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26C – Running the Campaign: Running With Background Events
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
With its kickstarter recently fulfilled, I (and I’m guessing many others) are preparing to run Ptolus campaigns, so we’d love to see your journal series complete. It’d also be great if you could do some articles (or even better video / video series) on how you’d tackle it if you were to run it today… How would you connect your pcs to the setting? How would you handle all that wealth in 5e? How would you start? What would you use/discard? What would you change? A remix maybe? ;p etc. Would be awesome!
Regardless, thank you for all your contributions to the RPG community.
@Justin — I love where you went with this article. Especially once you got to the section addressing the question you asked: “Why do we want to track encumbrance?”
Thanks for the interesting food for thought. I think it would be worthwhile to reverse direction link your other Encumbrance articles to this one so other readers get an idea on why they should think about Encumbrance for their games if they end up at those articles first.
(My apologies if that is slightly incoherent. It’s been a very long work day for me.)
Funny seeing this article right after the section where an NPC shows up to magically resolve their treasure logistics for them. But I’m guessing it seemed repetitive when they’d just gone through the whole orrery business?
@Paul: Being able to call on allies to help you out is a legitimate way of dealing with the logistics.
There’s also setting logic and dramatic logic to Zavere having an intense interest in a reference to the”Banewarrens.”
Plus, when the PCs later have reason to suspect that the Banewarrens Drill has been used to do something terrible, you get such delightful paranoia about their ally. So you win coming and going. 😉