There are some formats where inventory management becomes interesting again. We tried doing a Hexcrawl earlier this year and there was a lot of interesting gameplay to be had in the risk/reward management of how many supplies they wanted to carry vs how much they wanted to invest in pack animals, limiting their ability to carry loot back, carrying this vs that, guessing how much they’ll use before they can resupply or where future resupplies might be, gambling on whether to press forward and risk running out or turn back, that kind of thing. It’s just the more currently popular adventure structures right now (eg linear or branching narratives) where inventory tracking is superfluous.
Arrow! Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true King under the Mountain, go now and speed well"
DM: “Okay, fine. But after this you can’t use it again.”
We play with the we don’t track arrows and encumbrance unless you start trying to steal all the doors in the dungeon. The stealing of doors did happen with a group before I joined. We keep the rule just in case
I keep track of ammo until it becomes clear it becomes a non issue (ie: when the party gets rich enough that it doesn’t matter.)
Then at this point I only keep track of special ammo.
I only do special ammo. I also make it one time use do make it simple to track. Gone on a hit but not on a miss
Stealing doors is easy, you just have to open it and then it becomes a jar. Jars are easier to carry away than doors.
But jars aren’t worth as much as doors
True but how many jars can you carry compared to doors?
Always climb to the highest point in a dungeon to surveil it. Then gather up all you saw, use that saw to cut through the damn doors.
Did reinstitution of the encoumbrance rules quell the door thieving, or just make them keep paperwork on it?
I have never had a door stolen. We have to do some paperwork to steal a stone statue that insulted you and then swung it’s arms to fight you. But they used it as the figurehead on their ship
As a Door Thief, mildly.
At a certain point encumbrance leads to a system of value density to prioritize overall loot carried; however loot goblins will also prioritize shenanigans such as stealing doorknobs or swapping doors or assigning high value to mundane items like stools for collection purposes.
I think my next character will specialize in some sort of loot golem.
Bows are OP until you have limited arrows
Any kind of inventory management like arrows and food is way too sweaty and has never engaged a single player ever unless the whole point of the campaign is this exact mechanic. It’s a waste of time and energy and I don’t play with anyone that insists on doing it.
I don’t ask characters to keep track of ammunition, but if they are using a crossbow or some type of gun, I will absolutely penalize them for not remembering to reload between combat. Or forgetting to retrieve thrown weapons. Its just always funny in an evil sort of way.
“I’m going to attack the troll!”
“Alright, how do you want to attack?”
“I’m going to throw my enchanted spear at it!”
“Your spear is a level down, back where you last threw it when fighting those goblins earlier.”
Shocked pickachu face
I’ve played with someone like this once. It is infuriating to have to halt the flow of the action just so that everyone can take their time and describe shitty little menial tasks they are doing and that should just be left to reasonable expectation so that they don’t give their petty DM the oppotunity to fuck them later.
There are so many ways to create fun challenges for players, being anally adversarial with the players is not one of them. They only person deriving joy from that is the shitty sadistic DM.
Sorry for the very personal attack, but bruh… I got triggerd just by reading your last two sentences.
Mostly, I agree. However, part of why it has a cost is to be a sink for gold. Sure, it’s not much, but it does add up. However, there are better ways to handle it than to track arrows.
Just make your players occasionally pay for upkeep of their gear when they’re in town. This could be themes as repairs for weapons an armor, more arrows, spellcasting supplies, food, etc. This does two things. You can give them more value in rewards and it makes them feel like they’re actually adventurers, not just game characters.
Alternatively, scale rewards down. They don’t have to know about it, but if they’re not paying for supplies then they’re going to get more value than is expected (by the rules).
Or, the final option, just ignore it. It theoretically adds up to a lot of value over the course of the game, especially for spellcasting, but who cares? If you notice they have enough money that they stop worrying about it then you can do something.
part of why it has a cost is to be a sink for gold. Sure, it’s not much, but it does add up. However, there are better ways to handle it than to track arrows.
Magical arrow subscription service, never run out as long as your payments are up to date
Battle is a fun time to discover your auto-renew didn’t work and your arrows will now only shoot 3 feet before disappearing.
…wait I think I’m ready to DM
There’s a moment when it can add tension. You find three silver arrows in an old fort, hole up for the night, and then hear the horrible howl of a werewolf ring out.
Or you’re lost in the desert, trying to ration your water until you can find an oasis.
I’ve played Westmarches games where you do a little pre-adventure “we need to go X hexes so we’re wanting Y supplies to get there and back”. But its more a cost of failure than a drama element.
Every group I’ve been in the archers just bought more than they could ever use and someone in the party could carry the extras. Like every time they go back to town they drop 5 gp for 100 arrows.
i like to borrow from other systems and treat quiver and gold as stats to be checked against. i can ask you to roll a stat check against quiver. if you fail, you are currently out of arrows and will need to perform some action to no longer be out of arrows (including long rest, just assuming part of long rest is fletching or whatever, it doesn’t need to be focused on too hard). on critical success or failure, the player’s stat can go up or down permanently, and a player can trade a wealth point for an inventory point in town.
generally it works really well at letting players focus on role play by not requiring them to maintain a running tally.
Or you could save on rolls and say you’re out of arrows on a natural 1.
the big thing is just that your inventory management can just be a number and you don’t have to think so hard about it if that’s not something you or your players find joy in while playing make believe together
It’s because D&D used to be a dungeon crawler but nobody does that anymore, yet tradition insists the dungeon crawler mechanics remain.
For a game with no attachment to tradition, try Draw Steel
I have an invisible mage hand that can pick the keys out of the jailers pocket. If you want me to roll for collecting every arrow… I will
One dice at a time
Im a forever DM. We play DND for fun not inventory management, anything tedious like that just isn’t what I want to spend time in a game on.
Yeah, it’s like encumberance in video games. Usually just makes things tedious and if there’s no work around it stops being fun.
I don’t mind encumberance that much. I think it’s necessary if you’re making any attempt at balancing the economy. Without it the player returns back to town with every bit of loot from the dungeon to sell, and the economy doesn’t matter anymore.
However, any game that has an encumberance mechanic absolutely has to have a weight/value sort and display. I don’t know why this is so hard for them to implement. Bethesda games never do, and I’m playing Tainted Grail (I’ve heard lots of good things, and it’s alright so far) and it doesn’t. With any amount of playtesting they’d get overencumbered, try to figure out what to drop and instantly realize they want to drop the highest weight/value items, and there’s no way to view this! How do you not add it?
Easy fix: Have more money as loot instead of otherwise nearly worthless items that sell for small amounts of money for flavor.
Well, for most games it isn’t useless items. Most of it just isn’t useful to you. Either your gear is better, or it’s for a combat style you don’t use, or it’s consumables like potions.
I’m talking about the things you can’t use, like bowls and trinkets and other stuff that games frequently include as ‘white’ items that literally cannot be used. Those things that exist to be sold to vendors.
They have been in many of the rpgs I have played. In the rpgs that don’t have them, there isn’t a vendor that buys stuff and no ‘economy’ that exists.
That’s almost exclusively a Bethesda thing, at least to the extent it’s an issue. Technically it’s in Tainted Grail some, and Larian games a very small amount, but never in enough quantity or weight to be an issue, nor are they ever worth enough to bother with.
Look, you started by saying Bethesda games don’t have encumbrance but Skyrim was the first game I thought of that had stuff you couldn’t use but had some kind of value and weight and encumbrance was a huge part of Skyrim when wearing heavy armor. There is even a whole strategy of figuring out value for the weight to increase the amount of value you get when selling. Baldur’s Gate 3 and I assume earlier ones have the same thing.
We are talking about the games that have those things when saying they are an issue. Of course it isn’t an issue in games that don’t have it, but when it exists it absolutely is an issue, especially when game mechanics include a ‘loot all’ option. There you need to drop what you don’t want.
Hell, inventory management by space and encumbrance have been a thing for all the years I have played rpgs. Not having either seems more like the exception to me.
In SP RPG games it’s stupid. I’m just going to make however many trips back and forth it takes to empty the dungeon anyway. Might as well let me do it in one shot so I can get on to the next thing. I get it in survival crafting type games (within reason) but no reason games like skyrim or fallout need an encumbrance mechanic when you need a fuckload of stuff to level your crafting skills.
Will you really go back? I suspect that 99.99% of players won’t. It’s more effective to go somewhere new, where you get XP, a fresh shot at better loot, and maybe different quests.
Sure, you can ruin the economy in many ways, such as hoovering up every bit of loot. It isn’t balanced around that though, and can’t be. It’s the correct assumption almost always that players won’t return for loot that was left, because it’s less valuable than doing a new dungeon.
Yes, I go back. Why would I say it’s annoying and wastes a ton of time if I didn’t have experience with it? I’ve had a lot of conversations with other people who are the same way so I think you are underestimating how annoying it is. As far as moving on to the next place, what do you get? One boss chest, with a single magic item that may or may not be good for you? You still have to pick up the incedental crap to sell for gold and crafting materials. If you just rely on the few decent items you get that would take even longer. Regardless, there’s no economy to ruin in games like skyrim or fallout. You’re the only one there with a bunch of mindless NPCs, they don’t trade with each other and their inventory resets after a few days. Selling them a ton of crap is completely meaningless to the world as a whole.
I don’t think you understand game design if you can’t understand what’s meant by “ruining the economy.” It means that the player gets so much money that there’s essentially no use for it anymore. They can buy anything that’s available without concern. For example, in Morrowind you can craft potions with ridiculous value, then use that to pay for levels from trainers and buy the best items, then pay for enchanting to make them even better. It trivializes the game.
The only option at that point is to just limit what can be purchased. That’s a much worse solution than balancing the game’s economy so the player has options to spend money on, but critically they can’t buy everything. Video games are about making decisions. If you don’t have to decide anything than why not just watch a movie? The game needs to present you with options, and you need to choose what you will and won’t do. The economy is a great place this can happen in a game that’s balanced well.
Morrowind you can craft potions with ridiculous value, then use that to pay for levels from trainers and buy the best items
Did you actually play Morrowind? I can’t think of a single one of the best items in Morrowind that was available for sale. You either had to steal them or they were loot. Also most of the vendors in that game were pretty broke. To sell anything of “ridiculous value” You had to find the mudcrab merchant out in the middle of nowhere. Gold didn’t trivialize that game at all. Exploiting alchemy did.
The first thing I disable in every RPG.
Going through a dungeon and having to stop every couple of rooms to throw away stuff really loses your immersion.
Bonus point is that it also accumulates wealth more easily.
I memorize which items have a good weight to value ratio and don’t pick up the junk. When I was young I would take everything in multiple trips, but I ain’t got time for that now.
You can keep ChatGPT on in the background so that she/he can keep inventory for you guys. Like a mystical miserable fuck.
How about you keep ChatGPT in the trash where it belongs?
I can tell by the downvotes that there aren’t many fans of the AI on here and that’s fine. To each their own. I’m too old to be hating on new technology like if I was born in the 1100s.
If it was just new tech, I’d be all over it. If you aren’t aware of all the issues then you haven’t been paying attention.
Also, why in the ever loving fuck would you use an AI just to track a number? Just use a calculator app, notes app, anything simpler than having “I have fired another arrow, how many are left now?” Lmao.
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The AI has rotted your brain man. Tracking arrows, what this entire post is about, doesn’t need a fucking LLM. It needs tally marks on a sheet of paper, at most.
Regarding inventory management in general: Why the fuck would you ever use an LLM for something you can do in Notepad? Want to be fancy? Use More Purple More Better’s editable PDF player sheet templates. You can load in sourcebook data from external sources easily and have everything from every sourcebook at your fingertips. And you can still enter custom shit like custom magical items easily.
Making fun of Luddites, as if they didn’t actually have a great fucking point, isn’t the cool flex you think it is.
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ChatGPT is a pedophile and a serial killer. It keeps abusing and murdering kids.
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And if it hallucinates a few more inventory items who are we to complain?
No complaints at all. Who are we to question the spirits?
Why would you use ChatGPT to emulate a word processor? You get all the functionality you need without ever hitting enter.
I’m wondering if they mean have ChatGPT reading the messages in Discord and automatically tracking it? It should be able to do that, but I’m not sure about the specifics. And it’s not something LLMs are good at, so you have to be able to work around it. It would basically need to notice whenever you use an item, then tell something else to remove that from you inventory.
If they’re talking discord specifically I’ve seen bots in servers that track inventory for you. Just click a button. If they can be arsed to do that then they’re truly beyond help.
Assuming it works, they are clearly not beyond help. If you find yourself constantly forgetting to click the button, there’s no shame in finding some workaround. And solving small problems is half the fun of being a programmer.
I just keep it on so there’s a recording of everything said that’s relevant for marketing purposes. I want the most personalized ads.
I just threw up a little
I’ve literally typed the exact parameters of the product I want into chatgpt and it still didn’t give me what I was looking for. It can’t even do advertising right.
AI doesn’t have gender
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That’s not how gender works.
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I mean, if we’re taking zeros and ones, yeah it’s definitely binary. If we’re talking gender, it’s absolutely non-binary.
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You can keep cyanide in your digestive tract so that she/he can make inventory tracking a complete non-issue for you specifically ☝️🤓
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thanks, I have my moments.
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Our rule was always that if you bought 50 of something like food or ammo, you don’t have to track how many you’ve used, we’ll just assume you’re well stocked and resupplying offscreen. The limit only comes back if the party is overtly cut off from resupply, like if they are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island.
This means you can easily have a limitless supply of normal arrows but still have to track your silver arrows, smoke bomb arrows, etc. Or you can invest the money to just have a limitless supply of whatever specialty item you think is worth the cost.
Converts my one electrum to 50 cp. Now I have infinite money!
And that’s how the party ends up on the run for counterfeiting.
One campaign I ran devolved into that. The players had formed an elaborate money laundering and counterfeit scheme involving illusions and extremely high rolls to sell lesser items as the more expensive versions. Was a lot of fun.
We just buy 50 rations and a barrel of booze session 1 and it some how never runs out unless there’s a crazy party. I think once we had some travel session that fast forward months of travel where he managed resources for a bit.
food and ammo are things i never keep track of, unless its magical foods or ammo.
Except in Call of Cthulhu, because i feel runming out of ammo in that game is more interesting than in DND.
Retrieving ammunition is one of those things that is, imo, similar to taking piss breaks. Like yeah, of course your character is doing it, you don’t need to track or talk about it. The only time it will ever come up is if there’s a reason it’s noteworthy. Like if you get ambushed by a dragon immediately after the fight. Okay, you lose some of your arrows because you don’t have time to pick them back up before hauling ass out of there.
Similarly, I’ve found that tracking rations and water supplies and such is usually a waste of time. If there’s a plot reason those would be serious challenges, like you’re trapped in the middle of the desert, then of course we’re going to need to get into the little details of how you’re getting food and water every day. But if you’re traveling through reasonably well populated countryside and haven’t gone more than a couple days without meeting people, you’ve got food. Even the most curmudgeonly old destitute farmer isn’t going to send a band of travelers down Completely Unpopulated Road without enough food to reach the next hub of civilization.
I sometimes detail the food people are offered to texture out a region.
You managed to hunt this, the inn serves that, a vendor sells this other thing.
I like to use Usage Dice for this. Instead of tracking your arrows individually, you start with, say, a d12. At the end of a fight you roll it, on a 1 or a 2 the die downgrades a step to a d10, then a d8 etc. After d4 youre empty.
I wanna say I got this from the Black Hack?
Fwiw I run an old-school style game. 5e is more about power fantasy
I like it! It neatly models the variability of arrows being recoverable and unbroken.
For sure! It simulates the sort of quantum uncertainty you want without bogging you down. It’s a handy mechanic for all kinds of things.
Yah, a few games do this, mostly in the OSR space. Macchiato Monsters and Stay Frosty are the ones that spring to mind.
Although there’s not much point in doing it unless you’re tracking travel etc.
My DM is kind and gave me “plot” arrows. It doesn’t hurt that I turn the bodies of my fallen enemies into ammo whenever I can
I was doing this so thoroughly with one DM once, and - on account of my enthusiasm, I think - it took him two or three sessions before he told me he just doesn’t give a shit if I count them.
